The Division 2’s Title Update 3 will release next week, with the public test server shutting down tomorrow.
The news of the release of this latest update was broken during the weekly State of the Game stream. For those unfamiliar, The Division community gets treated to a weekly stream from the developers, who openly discuss the direction the game is heading and respond to any concerns or issues within the current build of the game.
Title Update 3 will see quite a few changes to The Division 2, as well as the addition of the much anticipated 8-man Raid, which will be included in the update but won’t open until “shortly after”
Some of the major changes include how gear is looted and at what gear score, although plans to increase the gear score cap to 515 have been put on the back burner for a while.
One of the major complaints about the end game in World Tier 5 – The Division 2’s highest level and where the best gear drops – was that unlike the tiers before it, items of a lower gear score could still drop. For example, a character at gear score 500 often loots items lower than that level, meaning upgrades are harder to come by.
Thankfully, this is being reworked slightly, with certain activities now dropping guaranteed GS 500 items. The Daily Mission, Contaminated Loot in the Dark Zone, Heroic Difficulty Mission Bosses, Stronghold Bosses, Bounty Bosses and Control Points Level 4 clears will all now guarantee max score gear, providing you are at GS 500 already.
As well as the guaranteed high gear score loot, a change will be implemented to reduce the chances of receiving loot drops with lower gear score than the average gear score of the player. This is great news for players who aren’t yet at the level to complete some of the harder content listed above.
The mostly awful gear sets will be getting a buff with much better defensive rolls planned, as well small changes to to the individual set bonus that should improve the use of these in PvE. Exotic weapons, like the gear sets, are mostly underwhelming in the current game, and will also be receiving a buff, with an increase to their damage output across the board.
My favorite inclusion in this update, however, will be the Post Mission Summary Screen. Here, players can view a summary of how well they performed after completing a mission, evaluating how useful they were based on a variety of statistics.
One of the most popular changes with the PvP community will no doubt be how normalization works. Players will now be normalized to GS 500, eliminating the need for separate PvP and PvE pieces of the same build.
I’ll leave a link HERE to a fantastic post on The Division 2 Reddit that lists all the changes mentioned in today’s stream, as well as going in to a little more detail with the developers update notes.
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