I like it and want it, so you appear to be wrong.

@robincitin23

the experience system is unnecessary and doesn't add anything to the game

You're suffering from a severe case of, "everybody else likes what I like, and only what I like." It really should not be that hard to understand that other people like different things from you; can you not see the evidence of this right in front of your face in every facet of your life?

I like the Experience system in general, though I do have some qualms about the implementation of certain parts of it (the upgrades, essentially). Others seem to as well. So you're clearly incorrect that everybody thinks it adds nothing to the game. Perhaps you can think about this insight for a while and come up with some better game design ideas that are likely to appeal to more than the narrow group of people who have very nearly your exact same preferences.

the essence of the division is the dark zone

Again, if taken as a general statement, incorrect, no matter how often you repeat it. The essence of Division for you may be the dark zone, because you ignore other parts of the game, but I am not a fan of the dark zone and hardly ever go in there. (I didn't enter it at all in my first year of playing.) For me the essence of Division is the excellent game mechanics combined with an extremely sophisticated equipment system.

Again, you're going to be completely unable to give useful suggestions if you can't even imagine that other people have preferences different to yours, much less take them into account. You're basically doing the opposite of what a good game designer does.

I can actually go on like this for over a week, writing and giving ideas to make this game better, but why waste my time?

No, you can give game ideas to make this game more like you want it, while making it worse for many other players. You have the right suggestion here: please don't waste our time with that.

@n3mb0t For me just having another place to "level up" something and spend some resources is carrot enough. I'm easy that way; just seeing the numbers go up, even if I get little else from it, makes me feel all warm inside.

(I'm at Shepherd level 30 right now, too.)

@latenitedelight Your points about the external issues that make the current development team much less effective than the original one are dead on. The current team almost certainly much smaller, with a lot of detailed knowledge lost in original members who've been moved to other games.

Given what they have, I don't think they've done a bad job at all in the general direction. The Expertise system adds a whole lot of new stuff to progress via looting and shooting, and the new game mode seems to add an easier and more friendly way to pull people into 8-player sessions, which I hope will lead to more people doing raids once they get used to building 8-player groups.

Some of the things that change the design and balance are pretty worrisome, such as all that extra armour
and seemingly OP pulse. This makes me wonder if they've lost some critical knowledge about the current balance in the meta.

The armour thing is particularly difficult to deal with because it looks hard to test how new or inexperienced players deal with the massive change in the meta from the lv.1-30 campaign to lv.40 endgame.

• In the level 1-30 campaign the obvious way to go is to stack on as much armour as possible, with a somewhat less obvious choice being to go heavy on skill cores and use offensive skills. Damage buffs at the lower levels (excepting those from Brand gear) are so small relative to armour and skills that it's correct to ignore them.
• In the level 30 end game you can finally attempt with some success to do "red" builds, but they're still not nearly as powerful as they get later.
• In the level 40 endgame this all changes and red builds become something like 70% more effective in doing damage than the best ones from World Tier 5. (You go from +70% weapon damage to +115% weapon damage, with even more relative increase in critical hit damage etc.)

This makes playtesting pretty difficult, since ideally you want be using players who've got a reasonable amount of level 30 experience but are new to level 40. That's not just gamers off the street, who will be both overwhelmed by the breadth of options at level 40 and not be stuck with now-incorrect preconceptions and instincts from many hours in the lower levels. I don't see any obvious way around this.

Perhaps one thing that could be done would be to introduce some missions that train players by forcing them towards a particular meta, such as by making armour ineffective. (I've dealt with some new players reaching level 30 and 40 recently and, unsurprisingly, many of them simply do not know how to make good use of cover and avoid taking damage. I have to tell them to do a minimum-armour build, dial down the difficulty until they're at least barely surviving most of the time, and then practice from there.)

I'm sure that over the years there's been a million requests already for more loadout slots, but I wanted to point out that an apparent design goal of of the Expertise system is to get people to use a wider variety of gear, and the limited number of loadout slots works directly against this goal. I have a couple of suggestions for mitigating this.

One that looks fairly cheap is to move any of the character-specific stats involving interaction with other players to account-global stats. In particular, I'm thinking of Shepherd Rank, as that's the main thing that keeps me playing most of the time on my main character, rather than one of the alts. If I bumped an account-wide Shepherd Rank when responding to a call for backup I would feel free to use my alt characters a lot more often and that would effectively give me more loadouts to play with. (This would also make collecting resources easier since you could collect equipment on an unmerged character directly rather than transferring it through the stash for deconstruction. For me that's a good thing; you may have different opinions about that.)

The more obvious (and possibly more expensive) option is to increase the number of loadouts. There are obvious UI issues with just making that list longer which is possibly one reason it's not been done to date. I see two sub-options here, one of which might be cheaper than the other.

Moving to a hierarchical system where you have eight loadout groups (with names and icons selected by the user, as we do for loadouts now) each of which has eight loadouts associated with it, would allow expansion from 16 to 64 loadouts while making it even easier than it is currently to select a loadout slot to load or to which to save. This requires a decent bit of UI programming work, but seems to be the most flexible and have few if any side effects otherwise.

Another option would simply be to add more loadout slots in the current UI but sort them differently. A good start (even if no new slots are added) would be to have newly created loadout slots added to the top of the listing rather than the bottom; I reckon that most players are like me and tend to use their more recently created loadouts more often. Better I think would be to have any loadout slot moved to the top of the list when it's written; this would allow players even to easily move existing loadouts to the top of the list by loading it and immediately saving it again to the same slot. This allows user sorting of the loadout list in a somewhat awkward but still usable way. And I think having even just that would make a 32- or 64-slot loadout list somewhat usable, even if it were only single-level instead of hierarchical.

@robincitin23
I have no idea what you're talking about in your point 1.

Does it bother you that the dark area is what sets this lottery shooter apart from the rest?

How could it bother me when that's not what sets it apart? Plenty of other games have similar PvEvP systems.

If you're asking if the inclusion of the Dark Zone itself bothers me, no it doesn't. I approve of having it in the game, in fact, because clearly a reasonable number of players like it. (Unlike you, I don't want to deny players things they like just because I'm not particularly fond of them.)

the game is dead or you don't see it? , the ideas are not my personal tastes , it is reality

No, it's just dead to you. You are so disconnected from reality that when a bunch of people stand in front of you and say, "we like this feature," you refuse to believe that they exist. (Or imagine that they're lying about their own preferences. Or whatever.) Your "reality" is apparently not the real world.

Having now actually used this a bit, I prefer the old layout too, but mainly because it's just a lot less busy and so one can more easily read the text. Here there's the background image, other images and icons all over the place, lots of different fonts and sizes, etc. etc. and all this just distracts from what this site is supposed to be doing, letting you read what others write. It looks like the usual case of some people valuing how things look "in the shop" more than how it works when you actually take it home and use it.

BTW, your post is very difficult to read because for some reason you've put it into a scrolling box with each paragraph on a single line that must be scrolled left and right.

@oatiecrumble

my point is exotics are RNG based...

Well that point is wrong.

There are three projects a week that each guarantee you an Exotic, and each these can be done up to four times (once on each character). Season events also regularly hand out Exotics: getting just 60 stars for the current Reanimated event gives you two Exotics from the track plus five more from the store, and as long as you care to keep earning stars you can buy more. (It's not hard to reach 100-120 stars; a friend of mine who's a relatively new player had 110 by mid-week.)

Combine all that with the additional exotics you get from random drops and even a moderate player can probably be averaging a half dozen or more Exotics per week. If you get serious about it you can do a lot more.

It's nice that the game is offering something to serious Exotic collectors, and not just a little smidgen that's going to quickly run out. I don't chase after Exotics myself (I usually do just 3-6 of the above projects per week), yet I have over 100 Exotic components right now after spending a couple of hundred components to re-roll all my Exotic items to get near-perfect versions. I had no idea what I was going to do with all of them; now I've actually got something to spend them on and a reason to keep doing those projects.

@oatiecrumble I am not nitpicking, and if my interpretation of what I read ("it's entirely up to chance how many Exotic items you get") is wrong, then no, I don't know what you meant.

Yes there is the projects but i choose not to do them...

Well it's hardly the developers fault when they provide you with a way to get several Exotics a week and you won't do it.

i play open world as that is my playstyle, never been a fan of linear missions.

And yet you refuse even to do projects that can be done entirely in the open world.

To this day since launch of TD1 & TD2 i have been 99% solo....so summit and the new zombie mode is not for me.

The Summit works perfectly fine solo. I'm not a big fan of The Summit myself, but I've done many dozens of floors solo without any problems beyond my own skill at playing. (And those are easily solved by turning down the difficulty level if I just want to clear floors.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "new zombie mode." Perhaps you're referring to the current (and not at all new) Global Event, Reanimate? That, in particular, works fine both solo and in the open world (in fact, I've done most of my Reanimate play solo in open world), so I don't see why it's such a problem for you.

You seem to be fairly ignorant of and uninterested in large swaths of the game. There's nothing wrong with playing only a small part of what game offers, but there is something wrong with complaining you can't do something in the game when you can, but just won't bother to learn how. And anyway, you ignore so much of the game that ignoring one tiny bit more (the very highest levels of Expertise upgrades) ought not be a big problem for you.

Incidentally, you can quite easily craft several Chatterbox Exotic SMGs per week with little time investment (easily more than twenty if you're willing to put in a few hours per day), and do this entirely solo in the open world. But given that you've rejected every possibility I've given you so far, I'd imagine you're going to reject that too, and rest unhappy until the developers just give you 250 Exotic components per week without even logging in to the game.

Thanks to the mod who moved this post to the correct place. I'd looked around to try to find a "forum feedback" section, but didn't see it.

This is actually another demonstration of the poor design. On the front page of Ubisoft General literally half the page I see in my browser is non-content bling, and half the content area is devoted to showing two massive boxes (each of which is about 40% empty space) for two of the six sub-forums. The eye is not guided to the dots and arrows that indicate you need click a scroll arrow twice to see the remaining four sub-forums. The six short hyperlinked sub-forum names could easily fit in half the area you devote to just two; what on earth is the advantage of hiding behind buttons the most important information on that page when it could be easily out front?

You want to grab the game's Standard Edition for $9 and the Warlords of New York Expansion for another $9. That will give you everything that's in the Warlords of New York Edition, which for some reason is not on sale and is $59.

I do not recommend going for the base game alone; the vast majority of the end game content is in WoNY and the base game endgame is rather dull in comparison.

Yeah, the new WYSIWYG (supposedly, it's not quite) editor certainly has its downsides. Formatting is more fiddly and difficult to get right; for an example of how the editor can work against you, try starting a paragraph with "1." without making it an indented list. There's no help or instructions for formatting or the somtimes mysterious icons. But the worst is that it does not react well to pasting in text from other sources, doing strange things with the formatting and so on. I generally edit larger posts in a external editor, and with no markup I have to go through and manually reformat the whole thing (adding bold, etc.) in a tedious and error-prone way after copying it from my editor to this one, and do it all again if I make enough changes that I need to copy again.

And the whole "overlay window" thing for the editor within the browser window is just annoying. I used to be able simply to scroll to go back and reference the posts in the thread, now I need to do both that and editing each in a half-size area or open and close or resize the silly window every time I move back and forth between editing and checking other replies.

This new forum really is showing all the signs of "we added lots of flashy graphical stuff; isn't that totally worth it being harder to use?"

@latenitedelight

add...Discovery Mode, that drops both the timer and the currency.

Yes please! I very much like to be able to explore something on my own and gain some reasonable understanding of how the thing works before jumping in with other players, particularly when the other players are randoms. When exploring a mission or mode I want to be able to take as much time as I need to understand what's going on, and I hate the feeling of burdening others with my desire for huge delays. Also, you often don't learn much in grouped play about certain aspects of a mission because others just speed through and do things for you before you even understand that there's something to be done.

Though I can already get this to some degree from the way discovery is currently done by soloing it and exploring just some part of the mission, restarting when the time runs out. But the end-of-mission stuff is harder to explore this way.

("As much time as I need" is what most people would consider a long time. I played both campaigns exclusively solo the first time through to learn the missions in a way comfortable for me, and I'd generally spend more than an hour on each mission the first time through, and replay solo it at least once or twice before joining others. )

I've played the mode hardly at all (one solo session to understand just the nerfs and how to disable them and one of the three objectives, and one group session where I was basically just carried through it), but from what I see of it it looks quite good.

When looking at the details of an item in order to determine its "quality" and usefulness in a loadout, the main things of interest are the attributes and talent (if any), followed by buffs from the brand if you don't already remember them. Division 2 has never been good at getting these on the screen in the initial display; Gear Sets normally make you scroll to see the attributes (and then you have to scroll back again when you arrow over to a different, non-Gear Set item).

The Proficiency Rank display has now made this worse; it's now separating the core attribute from the other attributes, as if one might be somehow considering the core attribute separately from the others in most situations, or core and Proficiency Rank together more often than core and other attributes together.

I understand that Proficiency Rank might be considered important enough that it's one of the first things you want to see about an item (though I'm not sure I agree with that, especially after you've ranked up a lot of items to 10), but can it be moved somewhere where it's not splitting up the attributes that determine the quality of that individual item?

For me, ideally, you'd always be able to see the brand name, the values of the core and other attributes and the talent name without having to scroll so you could rapidly evaluate an item you're about to pick up. (This is how I decide if an item gets picked up, picked up as junk, deconstructed right there, or just left on the ground, and this is probably my most frequent operation on items in the game.) From this point of view it might make the most sense to move proficiency rank to the bottom, along with any long Gear Set explanations (leaving just a short Gear Set summary near the top, about the size of the regular brand summary).

I'm open to other ideas and other opinions, of course. Or even just an explanation of what's prioritised over the evaluation one wants to make on an item when picking it up.

(I tried to include a picture of the problem here, but according to Askimet.com that makes this post spam. Have a look at Door-Kicker's Knock and you'll notice that in the current production system you can see all three attributes; in the PTS the third attribute is now hidden until you scroll to see it.)

EDIT: You can see the image here: https://imgur.com/a/hRac0IM

@infl3xible There's no need to check loot before picking it up, nor even any need to stop moving. Simply hold the interact key (F for me) as you run over the loot and most of the time it will be picked up on the go. (This doesn't always work, which feels like a bug to me, and I'd certainly be good with fixing that.)

This isn't helpful if your inventory is usually almost full, since it will bring you to full very quickly. There is a simple solution to that: free up some inventory space. Even with a half dozen very different loadouts (including DPS, skill, armor, and a few gear sets) and a small pile of alternative and prospective-use items, in my inventory I'm generally in the 90-110 item range, leaving enough room to pick up everything in 1-2 regular-length missions and go considerably longer if from time to time I have a minute or two to bring up the inventory and deconstruct things.

(That's not to say I don't check stuff on the fly: if I have time I'll examine and mark as junk or deconstruct on pick-up. But I generally keep my character in a state where that's an option, not required.)

If the reason for keeping character inventories almost full is lack of storage space, well, that strikes me as a personal choice in how much equipment you decide to keep. I am a collector myself, so I know well just how much struggle it is to pare down inventories, but I like that the game gives you the option of keeping more, at the expense of slightly more difficult management, or keeping less and making management easier. And I certainly wouldn't object to a larger stash.

@gt-hades writes:

youre saying there would be hybrid because of those armor bonuses from expertise yet thinking that if a red build with enough armor, do you think they would put blue core for more? 

I'm not totally clear that's what @Infl3xible is saying, but that's a very nice TLDR of my post above!

@au_nexus691

We are talking about new and returning players to the game , do you know how long it takes to go from shd 1 to 1000 

Returning players will still be at their previous SHD level. Further, it's an attribute of the account, not of a particular character, so a new character will immediately be at the account's SHD level as soon as you finish the final mission in the NY campaign. So I don't see any issue there, unless the returning player has lost his account for some reason. (I have met a player to whom that happened. But his skills were worth far more than the SHD Watch buffs anyway.)

For new players, having to allocate points in the watch, forcing them to decide their priorities, is part of the whole point. Asking them to skip that is asking them to skip part of the game. I suppose points could be earned faster without compromising the learning experience, but that's then also more quickly removing one of the reasons to play. And the watch is not adding all that much boost, anyway, as others have pointed out.

As far as how long it takes to get to SHD 1000: about 1193 resource convoys done on Heroic with four directives. \:-)

@noxious81 @Macs1209

I initially agreed that buffing just base armour would be fair, but on further thought I think that's still breaking the game too much.

There are two forces involved here. The first is that, at least at higher difficulty levels, armor does not give tanking ability, it gives only increased survivability measured in seconds. (Avoiding damage, via cover or other means,¹ is the mechanic that lets you survive long term.) The second is that a core mechanic of the game is deciding your trade-off between having more armour (blue cores/attributes/mods, brands with armour buffs, etc.) and more damage or other things that help you offensively (red or yellow cores/attributes/mods, etc.) Even the Crusader shield has this trade-off: merely using it means you're not using another skill to help offence and it doesn't absorb all that much damage until you start replacing red cores with blue or yellow cores.

In short, you choose some balance of red, yellow and blue that in turn determines your play style, and whether you can max out offensive skills depends on whether you're a good enough player in the style required for that at the difficulty level you choose.

Increasing amour without having to make this trade-off breaks the system; for builds that were not quite maxing out offensive abilities (say, four red cores) it lets you now avoid the trade-off: if you currently have a build with gear giving you more than base armour, you can replace the that with offensive support gear at no penalty to your armour by adding Expertise buffs. This essentially removes some of the extreme ranges of builds: an all-red build is no longer as weak as it used to be and no longer requires as much skill to play.

So how can we fix this?

One approach that I've thought of is to change the Expertise buff to: "+1% Armor from Attributes":

• On an all-red build this does nothing, since you have no attributes providing amour, keeping the current extreme end in place and changing the balance of that not at all.
• On a build with one (perfect) blue core, +60% Armor from Attributes would increase your amour by about 12% from 913 k to 1025 k, which is a noticeable buff but does not significantly change the game balance or how the game is played.
• On a Foundry Bulwark build with one piece Gila and six blue cores, +60% Armor from Attributes would increase armour by 36% from 2.10 M to 2.87 M. That's a pretty substantial difference, significantly increasing survivability, while still avoiding breaking the game by allowing armour to start to tank damage. It's also only only about 8% less armour than you'd have if the Expertise buff was on Total Armor rather than just Armor from Attributes.

The thing I really like about this is that it preserves the extreme builds in the game, and continues to make additional armour have a cost, rather than saying "here's free armour at no cost to your damage or anything else."

As noxious81 has a pointed out, it's also annoying that gear Expertise can buff only armour and provides nothing for players that want to buff the red part of their build. This could be fixed by having similar red and yellow buffs, say "+1% Weapon Damage per red core attribute" or "+1% Skill Efficiency per yellow core attribute" or something like that. This, again, would maintain the extreme-ness of the extreme builds and players would continue to have to make the trade-offs between red/yellow/blue. Probably we'd want to allow just one of these three buffs on a piece of gear, thus meaning more thought yet needs to go into the loadout and how you do upgrades. Its likely that some people will want to upgrade two similar items differently for different purposes, thus giving more to do in game.²

__________
¹ E.g., a well buffed eats damage that would otherwise quickly destroy your character, but that requires trading off at least one skill, usually two, and also weapon damage cores for skill and/or armour cores.

²This already exists in the game, actually. I use Fox's Prayer in a lot of builds, and I have both a standard red-core version and a recalibrated yellow-core version to allow me to change the balance of weapon damage vs. skill damage/support in those builds.

@gnarlyatol1793

A lot people seem to play the game because of loot and grind and technical stuff when reading here in the forum. When I consider the views of my division friends in both games, have quite some after playing both games that much, I have a totally different impression what the players want

That's not surprising to me; it stands to reason that people who just want to run around shooting things (and there's nothing wrong with that!) won't be attracted to the forums and extensive discussion of the game to the same degree as people who like to sit around analysing the details of their builds. That doesn't mean we should leave out one group or the other.

Expertise system: I hope we can simply ignore.

Absolutely you can do that, and it's a perfectly reasonable approach. You'll still be building up proficiency on the gear you're using and will eventually end up with upgrades available if you want them, but you can certainly just ignore that if you wish. It should do you no more harm than ignoring the watch upgrades (assuming they fix a few major balance issues in some of the rewards they're handing out).

@gt-hades I don't think you've thought through all the implications of your proposal. As just one example of many that I could come up with:

Backpack...1d. Active bonus armor 2.5% to 25% (like sharpshooter but active all the time)
Kneepads...8f. Bonus armor on kill 1% to 10% (+1% to +10% on headshot kills)
Sub-machine Gun...1b. Gain bonus armor per crit 0.2% to 2% from total max armor, 5 sec refresh

These all would proc Intimidate, and the first or third alone might be enough to free up an entire talent slot were they added to the current Intimidate design. In the new Intimidate design proposed by the developers, they'd add even more power. Particularly the backpack talent could probably be used to keep Intimidate permanently charged up and thus immediately available at full strength, which is exactly what the developers were (rightly or wrongly) wanting to prevent with their proposed to change to Intimidate.

Huge changes like this that affect a lot of systems (the way new sources of bonus armour affect Intimidate) require both extensive analysis and a good deal of playtesting if you're going to avoid massively breaking the game balance.