Hey Agents,
 
I've been thinking about this ever since the beginning of the year, but I believe it's time for me to retire from the forums. Now that the new forums are pretty much spam bot free , my services as a volunteer mod are no longer needed. Plus, as life naturally progresses, I'd like to honor that progress. Although I am not an official Ubisoft employee, and although this hurts to post, I'd like to still give my respect.
 
From the beginning of the original Division forums back in 2016, this place allowed me to become an expert at a game I was so deeply impressed by and invested in. It was a home away from home. From greatly heated debates about the dark zone and PVP, to penning lengthy passionate threads in hopes to influence change, my time here has been fruitful. Division 2 going quiet has greatly affected my attachment to the forums. It also came at the time between college graduation and depression, so I was at a crossroad and felt a need to move on.
 
My last feedback thread is my last feedback thread. It was a final attempt at getting Division 2 to incorporate some missing Division 1 elements, and to improve other aspects of end game, if this game is meant to be played for several more years. But, I'm tired, you know? Tired of typing them. So, hopefully we'll see some things in that thread come to fruition within the next year with the new content . If you're on PC, you may see me in-game whenever the new content drops, however I will be absent around here during that time. I'll sit back and simply be a player. To just enjoy what Massive will have cooked up for us.

Lucipus, I'd like to thank you for the volunteer mod opportunity. It was my first attempt at any sort of mod role and my ultimate goal from the beginning was to separate player from moderator. Not sure if I was successful, though . It was a joyous experience nonetheless!

Anyways, take care Dagro, Yodaman, Oatiecrumble (or whatever your new username will eventually be ), DeMize, Seven (Although we’re Discord friends), moesuvious, Zathras23, Sock_Monkey, Xcel, N3mbot, TimesLostArc, RedSaberSam, LateNiteDelight, MutantCowboy x, SuspiciousPixel, Dynamo (Will likely see you in Conflict if it ever improves lol), Metal_Greg, Lucipus, Realdude, and SirCowDog.

o7,

Merph

Builds play a part, but Legendary is mainly knowing where enemies, particularly the most deadly, are and when they spawn.

But, learning encounters require dying to them first. A lot.

@xcel30 I think you'll want Battlefield then. You can do well and have fun in it while not having a need to tryhard.

This game is clearly going after a Call of Duty audience and CoD is not exactly a game where you can just turn your brain off and play, let alone play while staying dry.

I don't mean to offend the OP, but it was this kind of rhetoric that made me realize how much of a fool I was for humoring PVP. I can't speak for the Regulus, but I can definitely speak about the Liberty / Bulwark, as that was my PVP build before I stopped playing.

The Liberty is a desert eagle, the weapon with the worst recoil in the game, even with the nerf and then rebuff to pistols. It's high risk (poor recoil, small mag size, it being a pistol) high reward (base damage + headshot multiplier). So for a player to have an issue with another player trying and landing headshots with the gun that has the worst recoil in the game was such a wake up call to me. You always hear about how headshots (on PC at least) in PVP shooters should be praised. It's like such praise does not exist when it comes to this weapon. And considering the Crusader meta, the complaints about Liberty, losing crit to stack headshot damage, and Bulwark was even more bizarre having being a direct counter to it.

And when players started complaining about being countered, the true integrity of the PVP became questionable to me.

Some players here (or at least with the old forum layout) are age 60+.

At any rate, I'm gonna recommend Eclipse Protocol, as it's one of the best builds in the game. You don't have to main it, but it's good to have one in your pocket. For survivability + killing, maybe something with Momento. Or an Intimidate + Adrenaline Rush combo

I have 5 builds, each with 8 items that need a percent or two or three to max them out. That’s something like 40 pieces of gear and maybe 100 rolls that need optimizing. I can maybe collect enough SHD to optimize one roll, one percent… every week I play. At this rate, it will take me about 2 years to optimize my gear. Sorry, but this game ain’t that good.
The quality of loot dropping is just demoralizing and the lack of one single resource to optimize what I do have is sucking all the wind out of me. I don’t see the point in carrying on. Getting my gear optimized is onubtanium… so what’s the point?

The journey is, ultimately, personal, but there is nothing wrong with not having max rolled stuff, provided the difference between what you have and max is, as you said, a couple percentages off. Sure, it's comforting, but won't make a difference in the end.

There's this fixation on having stat bars glow orange; orange bars provided a sense of completion, but because Division isn't necessarily balanced around having everything max in order to complete content, something like the optimization station, considering the amount of resources needed to optimize one or two percent, could drive one crazy. I think the game becomes much more enjoyable once you let go of that fixation.

But then another problem arises. You could play for fun, as others have said, but the problem with that is, relevant to the current state of the game, the lack of new content will eventually hit you. You will eventually master all the missions, all the leagues, all the difficulties, etc., leading you to crave something new and different.

One could write threads about the different areas of the game. However, if there was one thing you would want most in the upcoming content, what would it be?

There is no convenient way to debuff weapon damage compared to how easy it is to equip a skill to completely destroy a skill. You'll have to throw on an entire gear set in order to apply a damage debuff onto an enemy.

People asked for fire to be nerfed in PVP, I was like "why not just buff the hazard protection percentage?" Look at who won, though.

I have two level 100 Conflict characters and I pretty much lost respect for PVP once I realized people were complaining about the Liberty. Might as well throw on Claws out and make a fist build.

I saw dagro once in the white house public area, and xcel joined one of my groups via matchmaking one time. There was a point in time where me and redsabersam would always be in the same randomly matchmade group.

Wasn't the ability to inspect agents helpful in spotting those who were using the damage glitch?

Generally speaking, inspecting can be used when things don't seem to add up.

Give the source code to community, we can do much better

Mmmm... probably not, given how often Massive is praised for the amount of detail they've put into both Division 1 and Division 2's world.

And even if the community could, we wouldn't see substantial community created content, like the map expansions you are mentioning, until years later, well after Massive's upcoming content is released. I mean, think about it: free content made by volunteers with varying schedules and actual responsibilities who aren't getting paid to spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours creating content for the game, vs actual employees who get paid to make content for this game. Who would you prefer to wait on?

Not to mention this game being on consoles. If you’re writing this from a PC perspective, you've pretty much ruled consoles out, by foregoing what process that developers go through to get content on third party consoles. Course, we can look at Skyrim and Fallout on PC, but Division is a live service game that still has players on console, not so much a single player game. Console players deserve new content, too, no? Would Massive / Ubisoft go through the trouble of trying to pull a Bethesda and get mods on console? It took them a minute to get the PTS on there.

As for the potential, yeah.... Though, it's probably not as simple as it seems. Are we pointing the finger at Massive or Ubisoft? What's influencing their decisions?: gaming trends, other games, money, technology, etc.

Your frustration is understandable, but you still gotta be practical.

@racdavies Would probably be an apparel event at most.

@dagrommit ...Well this is awkward.

But, I mean, increasing the NPC vitality and damage across the entire game in response to what we will gain from Expertise would be strange, because it would be like we never gained power in the first place.

If the new game mode simply featured difficulties up to legendary, then that would also be strange because legendary can be steamrolled. Expertise only makes us stronger, though it will take some time before we hit max Expertise. To me, it doesn't make sense to only have the new game mode be balanced around the current difficulties, since we will become much stronger than the current maximum difficulty that checks DPS and vitality.

The 1% is a placeholder. That could become 1.5% or even 2%.

If Expertise has a cap and is not infinite (I don't believe they've specified), then yeah, it would be easy to balance the game mode around Expertise since you know the parameters. It would be the one end game activity that is meant to be difficult and to "check" your Expertise. Everything else would stay the same to not cause a riot. Would that difficulty revolve around increased NPC vitality and damage? IDK, it's the easy route .

Hey Agents,
 
I've been thinking about this ever since the beginning of the year, but I believe it's time for me to retire from the forums. Now that the new forums are pretty much spam bot free , my services as a volunteer mod are no longer needed. Plus, as life naturally progresses, I'd like to honor that progress. Although I am not an official Ubisoft employee, and although this hurts to post, I'd like to still give my respect.
 
From the beginning of the original Division forums back in 2016, this place allowed me to become an expert at a game I was so deeply impressed by and invested in. It was a home away from home. From greatly heated debates about the dark zone and PVP, to penning lengthy passionate threads in hopes to influence change, my time here has been fruitful. Division 2 going quiet has greatly affected my attachment to the forums. It also came at the time between college graduation and depression, so I was at a crossroad and felt a need to move on.
 
My last feedback thread is my last feedback thread. It was a final attempt at getting Division 2 to incorporate some missing Division 1 elements, and to improve other aspects of end game, if this game is meant to be played for several more years. But, I'm tired, you know? Tired of typing them. So, hopefully we'll see some things in that thread come to fruition within the next year with the new content . If you're on PC, you may see me in-game whenever the new content drops, however I will be absent around here during that time. I'll sit back and simply be a player. To just enjoy what Massive will have cooked up for us.

Lucipus, I'd like to thank you for the volunteer mod opportunity. It was my first attempt at any sort of mod role and my ultimate goal from the beginning was to separate player from moderator. Not sure if I was successful, though . It was a joyous experience nonetheless!

Anyways, take care Dagro, Yodaman, Oatiecrumble (or whatever your new username will eventually be ), DeMize, Seven (Although we’re Discord friends), moesuvious, Zathras23, Sock_Monkey, Xcel, N3mbot, TimesLostArc, RedSaberSam, LateNiteDelight, MutantCowboy x, SuspiciousPixel, Dynamo (Will likely see you in Conflict if it ever improves lol), Metal_Greg, Lucipus, Realdude, and SirCowDog.

o7,

Merph

The loot from daily / weekly projects.

I'm confident they'll do a quality check on all the gear sets in the upcoming content. I imagine Eclipse getting nerfed, though.

This could be an unforeseen awkward situation. If the content isn't paid, then we should expect one, but considering the amount of time being taken to create the content signals the opposite. Therefore, if the upcoming content is paid, then there wouldn't be a PTS, i.e., Warlords. So, player input before the official release wouldn't be an option, despite how value it is (in most cases).

Made me realize how much Massive is, non-verbally, asking us to trust them.

It's as good a chance as a reconfigure AFAIK.
Also bear in mind that new players will still have the novelty factor of an existing exotic dropping randomly. I don't know if that novelty is as important to long-term players.

Then it would be a matter of time and efficiency, but of course I'm looking at this as a veteran player. I could just stand at the reconfigure station and reroll multiple times without needing to go out in the game world, so long as I have exotic components. But, if I do need them, I would obtain components from dismantling exotics that I would get from the open world, opening the opportunity to land a better version of the exotic I'm re-rolling. Thing is, I wouldn't be guaranteed the exotic I'm re-rolling on a random drop, but I'm guaranteed an exotic component. Even before this, we are guaranteed two free exotics each week.

Now, that doesn't take away from the orange glow, just changes its purpose. I'm no longer using it to find a better version of something I already have, per the original response. Veteran players, in my opinion, need to know that something new exists within the loot pool of the orange glow. Putting all of the new behind projects will change the purpose of the orange glow for veteran players. That being good or bad depends on who you ask, I guess.

Nothing would change with optimization and recalibration, so yes.

I should clarify. I'm thinking the exotic reconfigure option. If I could just go there, even though it's RNG, would an orange glow really give me a chance to get something better than what I'd already have, if all future exotics were only obtainable via project?

That's a good point, but you'd still have a chance of getting something better than what you have now. To be clear, I am not suggesting exotics drop already god rolled.

If I'm understanding this correctly, we can also optimize exotics without intently grinding for a second or third copy.