In The Division, we take a look at weapon stability and summarize the information you need to know about it.
How “stable” your weapons feel in your hands depends on several complex factors in Ubisoft’s MMO shooter.
There are three types of stability:
- Stability: This value exclusively determines how much your weapon recoils upward when shooting. This refers to vertical recoil. High stability values are particularly useful for assault rifles and rapidly firing precision rifles, but almost all weapon categories benefit from it.
- Horizontal Stability: This value determines the horizontal recoil of your weapon, how strongly the weapon pulls to the left or right. Increase horizontal stability to minimize this unwanted weapon movement. If your weapon doesn’t pull to the side at all, as is often the case with submachine guns, you don’t need to increase this value.
- Initial Stability: This value reduces vertical and horizontal instability with the first shot fired (and once the weapon is stabilized again). Additionally, the crosshair converges faster, allowing you to fire accurately at a higher rate. For rapidly firing weapons like assault rifles or submachine guns, this value can be disregarded.
These values, by the way, have nothing to do with the size of the crosshair. That is determined by precision.
Total Stability in The Division
If you take a look at your character data, “Stability” is displayed for the weapons. This is not just the aforementioned (vertical) stability, but a calculated value from all three stability values. However, not all three values count equally towards “Stability”:
Initial stability counts the least, followed by (vertical) stability, and then horizontal stability. The latter thus has the greatest influence on the “total stability” of your weapons.
Now, YouTuber Skill Up has made an interesting discovery: as soon as the “total stability” is around 50, this value increases significantly slower. So if you continue to focus on stability, you will receive less return.
Therefore, if you have already reached about 50 in total stability, it is now more worthwhile to increase other values with mods, as you will not gain much more from weapon stability.
Attention: To increase total stability, the weapon talent Stable is actually also effective. About +50% is possible here. However, the effect of this talent is quite arbitrary: sometimes it only provides 15%, other times 25%. On every weapon that Skill Up examined, the talent worked differently.
This raises the question: Is Stable bugged, or are complicated calculations running in the background that are far from transparent?
For this, the YouTuber spoke with the developers, who explained to him that the talent is only responsible for vertical stability. However, since horizontal stability is more significant for total stability and handling of weapons in The Division, this talent turns out to be weaker than expected.
Therefore, he recommends re-rolling this one and rather focusing on other talents. With the appropriate mods, you can improve the desired stability more targeted and effectively.
What is The Showstopper in The Division? Find out here.
