This article hits on how alot of people feel. While I am enjoying the game I do agree with some of what’s said. @DivisionPlayers
I’ve been trying to figure out which current issue of The Division 2 I wanted to write about, but I feel like there are so many that the game is currently dealing with, I can’t pick just one.
The Division 2 launched with what appeared to be a solid endgame in mind. It was awesome when you beat the main campaign and opened up a whole new world of possibilities with the map being invaded by an entirely new force and new skill trees opening up for specializations for the first time.
But that was the initial endgame. Now we’re deep into the “real” endgame of The Division 2 and it feels like it’s starting to destabilize. Not just for one reason, but many, and I’m going to try to lay them all out in a row here so the grand scope of the problem can be seen.
The Raid
The biggest new addition to the game since launch is simply not something the vast majority of players either can or want to participate in, particularly on console. Manually finding an eight person group is bad enough, but Dark Hours has other issues outside of pure difficulty, which Massive has said they have no interest in adjusting. Its rewards are not worth the effort, as you’re mostly beating the raid for bragging rights rather than it being an actual efficient source of getting solid loot. And forget about build diversity, as it is mandatory that you stack DPS and damage against elites as much as possible for its massively tanky bosses, meaning that everyone is racing toward almost identical builds. Massive wanted a really hard piece of content, and they got it, but most players who wanted new stuff to do in the endgame are not finding the raid to be the kind of thing they were asking for.
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Loot Probability
It can feel nearly impossible to find the piece of loot you want when farming The Division’s various activities. To get that “perfect” build you’re looking for, finding one piece of gear with the talents and perks you want on it can be, quite literally, a 1 in 75,000 shot, according to players who have done the math. Worse than that, even, depending on the item. There are very, very few ways to hunt for specific items or rolls, and with a restrictive calibration system and borderline useless crafting, the loot hunt is more exhausting than exhilarating once you get to a certain point.
Gear Sets
The gear sets that currently exist in the game are just…not good. They’re overly complicated and convoluted, and for the most part, less effective that simply stacking gold gear. The Division 1 ’s gear sets were a staple of endgame farming and builds, and yet nearly all the sets that exist in the sequel are inferior versions of those, and they do not seem worth farming for outside of one or two exceptions.
Specializations
These were a good idea in theory, but in practice people are picking entire specializations just because they boost your AR damage or reload speed in one perk, or give you fire grenades in another. Signature weapons are an almost total whiff with their extremely limited ammo and even more limited impact in firefights. It was a novel concept in theory that simply doesn’t work very well in practice.
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Skills
Watching the loadouts of raid teams in The Division 2 is comical, since everyone is running Reviver Hive and some sort of healing in the other slot. The entire skill system is totally borked in The Division 2 . Practically every single skill is underpowered, which is not helped by the horrible skill mod system, and some are useless to the point of utter hilarity (Firefly). You can spend a hundred hours building say, the perfect ballistic shield build and you will still be miles less effective than someone just spraying an LMG using healing skills. For me personally, it’s the lack of useful skills combined with the lack of useful gearsets that are most of the reason The Division 2 doesn’t feel worth playing right now.
There’s a lot of work to be done here. Things started out strong, but Massive has missed the mark on so many different things here, it’s hard to keep track. At this point, I don’t even care if the raid is clearly not for me, I’d be happy chasing different sets and builds and such, but with the current state of the game, farming is more draining than fun and the builds you can make aren’t good enough to be enjoyable or useful. Something has to change. Or rather, a lot of things have to change, and I’m not sure how long that will take. Simply adding another specialization to the mix (which is happening soon) isn’t going to improve much, and Massive needs to go back to the drawing board on a number of core mechanics of the game if they want to keep players engaged or entice them into returning.