In The Division 2, the update on Friday ruined some players’ playstyles. The tricky part: The nerfs weren’t really announced. What sounded like “fixes” turns out, on closer inspection, to be a weakening of skills and weapon mods.
The update on Friday brought a lot of new content to The Division 2, the new stronghold Tidal Basin and World Tier 5.
But a lot was also changed in the fine print of The Division 2 – in the tuning and balance. Some were surprised by that.
Because what initially sounded like a welcome problem-solving was actually a nudge with the nerf hammer.
The problem with skills: In The Division 2, players not only deal damage with their weapons, but also through 8 abilities, of which they can equip 2 at the same time.
These skills can be significantly enhanced or expanded through mods.
However, some skill mods had absurdly high requirements for skill strength. If you wanted to use certain high-level mods, you almost had to go completely for “yellow stat”. But then the skills became powerful.
Massive announced they were going to “solve the problem” by adjusting the required skill strength of the skill mods. They were also supposed to scale better.
This is what players expected: They thought they would now have more flexibility with their builds and would no longer need to invest everything into skill strength.
They could still use the strong mods and play like combat engineers.
But this has happened now: The changes to the skill mods have hit hard:
- While the requirements have gone down
- the effectiveness of the mods has also been considerably reduced.
Players are complaining about the mods for the Chem Launcher: It has already been changed in a way that players don’t like. Moreover, the mods have been significantly reduced – an agent writes that he now gets only +17.7% radius instead of +140%. (via reddit)
This completely changes the playstyle.
This was the thing with weapon mods: Before the patch, weapon mods in The Division 2 usually had a positive and a negative trait.
A weapon, for example, dealt more critical damage but became less accurate with the mod.
This was not really a big issue that was discussed. But it seems a few complained about the downsides in The Division 2.
This is what players expected: Massive announced to change things significantly.In the future, there would be mods with only positive attributes.
The players thought: Great, only advantages, no more disadvantages. That sounded clearly like a buff.
But this has happened now: The benefits have also been significantly reduced. Instead of 30 additional shots in the magazine, the new magazine extensions now only provide 10 extra bullets (without restriction) or 20 (with 10% slower reload).
This again restricts the playstyle and makes some weapons useless or at least worse from the players’ perspective.
The exact details of the new weapon mods can be found here in a table from Ubisoft.
Players are saying:
- My crit chance has dropped by 20%. (via Reddit).
- Thanks to everyone who complained about it, now all mods are useless.
Major update also brings many nerfs to The Division 2
This is what it’s about: Apparently, a lot was too strong in “Vanilla The Division 2” and has now been nerfed retroactively. Because for example, upgrading an assault rifle from 30 rounds to 60 while only taking minimal downsides was very strong.
The “fixes” that Massive announced turn out in some cases to be clear nerfs that players did not expect.
Officially, Massive only announced to nerf two weapons.
Surely the “greatest outrage” about the nerfs will subside once players have adjusted their gear and gotten used to it. The problem seems to be rather the strange communication: Players simply did not expect the nerfs.
This is what players are now demanding: To protect themselves from such surprises in the future, players are calling for a test server for The Division 2 to be started. Because some fear that patches could lead the game in the wrong direction and want to provide feedback here.
They are also willing to wait longer for a patch.
Overall, there seem to be some difficulties with the first patch and it will be interesting to see how Massive reacts:
