@ivcatenshu

My experience has been that Side Missions are the easiest, Encounters next and Story Missions are the hardest.

Also that if you completely clear an area before moving on to the next your level will stay ahead of the level of the areas you encounter.

Also, I believe that replaying earlier missions will give you extra XP that you can use to raise your level. (I have not tried nor needed this yet to stay ahead of the area level)

I typically try to be 2 levels ahead of Encounters and 5 levels ahead of Story Missions to ensure being able to complete them. Usually when I fail a mission it is because of the stupid "sticky cover" mechanics of the game or because my strategy was bad.

BTW, if you are having trouble killing a particularly hard boss, try locating something large you can run around and block the boss' fire. Then poke and nibble at it before taking cover. It might take a long time to kill it, but the technique works. Also, make sure to focus your abilities on something that lets you get health every so often and don't use your medkits (save those for emergencies).

Hopefully these hints help.

TBH, issues like these is why I don't bother with PvP in many games including this one. I keep my PvP gor games that not only manage to control hackers but also have a very good gameplay balance instead of being skewed to making it easy for long-time players or P2W players to abuse those that have lesser gear.

Having said that, I love the PvE aspects of The Division 1 dark zone. Unfortunately the redesign of the DZ in The Division 2 makes it too much of a flawed PvP place to be worth playing it.

I didn't use to have problems, but this week both The Division 1 and 2 (that are heavily dependent on the servers) are frequently crashing. And today is uniquely bad.

It stays out for a few seconds but of course it takes a long time to re-enter the game. It quite ruins the game experience, especially if you are playing solo when there is no real need to depend on *constant* server functionality.

I completely agree. The vast majority of my deaths are caused by funky game mechanics instead of my own actions, and of those getting stuck when I am trying to move is by far the most common reason.

Being a cover shooter is a great design choice, but you don't need to get glued to the cover to play in cover shooter mode. Cover shooting is what I always did in Far Cry and most other games I play, without getting glued to the cover.


For a close second as the worst feature I nominate the network coding and servers. Frequent crashes due to connection issues that are not on your end but a factor of the path between your location and the servers or server overload are not cool. But I have hopes that this will improve, Ubisoft tends to listen if you can explain the issues properly.

From the point of view of a fairly new player I would add that it would be good if they made it more obvious what you are getting into before you join. I know that the information is probably somewhere on the screen but it doesn't jump at you and you often end up joining people that ask for help only to leave quickly because you are not interested in what they are doing.

For example, my gear is not very good yet so I usually play in challeging mode when solo, but do fine in Heroic with another person. So I love it when I join someone doing Heroic missions or other "good drops" activities. On the other hand I have zero interest joining people that playing challenging or randomly running around through the streets.

Also, it is kind of silly and annoying to be 3/4 of the way in a solo mission and receiving a request for help. I often happily drop my mission to join someone if it happens when I am free roaming or at the start of a mission, but there is no chance in hell I will do it when I am almost at the end, so why even offer it?

Or better yet, what if there was a setting where you could indicate what kinds of requests for help you are willing to respond to, so that only those requests get presented to you?

At one point I found the text chat settings and changed something that I thought would let me see chat outside of safehouses, but instead it seems that it enabled some kind of worldwide chat across servers so I now get mostly ideogram symbols that are meaningless to me instead of letters. And I can't find the setting again to turn it off.

Also I have several questions:

CHAT

• My ideal settings would be to see anything posted in the area I am in, or at least "just the server I am in", but more than just the safehouse and team. Is that possible?
• What settings (full path through the settings menus) should I set to get as close as feasible to my goal?

CALL FOR BACKUP

• At my current stage of gear and skill I normally play solo on Challenging (often boosting control points to Heroic) and love Heroic missions when playing with a partner. I would love to receive calls for backup ONLY for Heroic (even better if it is Heroic Missions). But lately most calls for backup are for Story missions or worse... from people still at the White House or safehouses... which I promptly ignore.
• Are there settings to specify what kinds of calls for backups I want to be notified about? If yes, where?

At one point I found the text chat settings and changed something that I thought would let me see chat outside of safehouses, but instead it seems that it enabled some kind of worldwide chat across servers so I now get mostly ideogram symbols that are meaningless to me instead of letters. And I can't find the setting again to turn it off.

Also I have several questions:

CHAT

• My ideal settings would be to see anything posted in the area I am in, or at least "just the server I am in", but more than just the safehouse and team. Is that possible?
• What settings (full path through the settings menus) should I set to get as close as feasible to my goal?

CALL FOR BACKUP

• At my current stage of gear and skill I normally play solo on Challenging (often boosting control points to Heroic) and love Heroic missions when playing with a partner. I would love to receive calls for backup ONLY for Heroic (even better if it is Heroic Missions). But lately most calls for backup are for Story missions or worse... from people still at the White House or safehouses... which I promptly ignore.
• Are there settings to specify what kinds of calls for backups I want to be notified about? If yes, where?

So it sounds like I did it the right way then, kept the DC-only character around for when I feel like playing the old way "just for fun" and probably solo because the gameplay feels more enjoyable, but spend time building my gear on the new NY+DC character. When I need a well built character use the NY+DC.

I just noticed that even on US East server more than 90% of the chat is in asian characters.

This might be a different issue than being placed in asian servers

I am fairly new to D2 and I must admit that a lot still confuses me. One of the the things that I find most confusing is the difference between my DC-only and my NY+DC characters. It almost feels like they are completely different games.

• I massively enjoyed the experience of starting from zero in DC and moving gradually up to level 30, then world tiers and eventually to tier 5 level 500. Still a long way to 1000. Also, I quite enjoy the variety of daily and weekly projects, plus the guidance I get as to "what is important to do next" to progress toward completion. On the other hand my experienced friends kept telling me to not waste time doing that since all of the gear I get will be trash once I take the character to NY. And yet, I still find this character's gameplay better so I don't want to ruin it by taking it to NY for juat a day or two worth of added content.
• So, to check it out I made a new character for NY, got done with the NY story in a day or two and returned to DC expecting the same kind of experience but with better gear. Nope, there is a ton of stuff on my map but zero guidance. Even the simple "priority %" is missing and the variety of projects is far more limited. On the other hand, it seems that there is some point in trying to collect gear and work towards good gear.

So, on to the questions:

• How do the two types of character fit together?
• Is there any point to play DC-only past level 30 (world tiers and level 1000) if you plan to eventually take the character to NY? Or is it better to keep it as a DC-only character with its own gear?
• Can a world tier 5 DC-only character use any of the gear from the NY/DC character?
• Can a world tier 5 DC-only character matchmake for heroic and legendary missions like in NY/DC characters as a way to get worthwhile gear without going to NY?

From the point of view of a fairly new player I would add that it would be good if they made it more obvious what you are getting into before you join. I know that the information is probably somewhere on the screen but it doesn't jump at you and you often end up joining people that ask for help only to leave quickly because you are not interested in what they are doing.

For example, my gear is not very good yet so I usually play in challeging mode when solo, but do fine in Heroic with another person. So I love it when I join someone doing Heroic missions or other "good drops" activities. On the other hand I have zero interest joining people that playing challenging or randomly running around through the streets.

Also, it is kind of silly and annoying to be 3/4 of the way in a solo mission and receiving a request for help. I often happily drop my mission to join someone if it happens when I am free roaming or at the start of a mission, but there is no chance in hell I will do it when I am almost at the end, so why even offer it?

Or better yet, what if there was a setting where you could indicate what kinds of requests for help you are willing to respond to, so that only those requests get presented to you?

It's not just in Asian servers either, I see the same thing in EU servers. There's a fairly simple solution though:
You can just mute the 'local area' chat channels so you don't see any of it, you'll still be able to see messages from your group and clan (unless you mute those channels as well).

Unfortunately that defeats a large part of the purpose of text chat. It is an important part of how solo players like me interact with other players. Sometimes to chat with people to decide whether you want to join their group, or even to just say thank you.

So I guess the answer is no. TBH I am surprised that we don't see people in chat complaining about all the scribbles.

Frankly it is horribly annoying that 90% is in ideographs that mean nothing to me. I could even stand languages I don't understand but use letters. At least those I could guess at what they are saying. But scribbles... no, those are jusy too much.

If they aren't going to translate, they need to at least silence stuff that isn't even using the letters of your registered language.

Even though I am nowhere even close to asia, I seem to get placed on a Chinese server most of the time. Ignoring the pointless latency and disconnect issues, my biggest problem is the language in Chat. Is there a way to turn on translation so that I see the chat in English?

@imagine_brata Thank you.

So basically an exotic once you do all 4 expeditions.

A couple follow-up questions:

• Can you do the old expeditions for the first time at any time?
• If no, can you do the old expeditions for the first time when the new expedition time window opens?

I am clear about the most important things to do each day in Division 1:
- You do GE events daily missions for GE credits. 
- You can do Lexington Challenging over and over for more Div Tech and GE credits.
- You do boss runs for classified gear and top weapon drops, phoenix credits Div Tech and GE credits.
- You do daily and weekly missions mainly for Div Tech and phoenix credits.

Of those rare resources Div Tech is the most important and you use them all to buy/upgrade your classified gear and weapons. And there are listings of "when" Global Events are scheduled for the year so that you can make sure to participate those days.

So far so good.

For Division 2 I am nowhere as clear as what is important to do every day.
- What are the key ***rare*** resources to accumulate?
- What are the key things to do every day?
- I found "Global Events" in the settings, where you presumably get details about them once they are running. But I didn't find a schedule, can someone give me a link to it?
- I see there is something called Finley College expeditions. What are they, something similar to Global Events or completely different? Are they PvE or PvP activities? What key ***rare*** resources do you get from them, if any?