In The Division, there is a way to protect yourself from destructive sticky bombs and flame-wielding Cleaners.
In the Dark Zone, you can make life difficult for your enemies in various ways: you can eliminate them with raw firepower and a high DPS value, you can crank up your toughness to the point where you can’t be taken down, or you can go in with brutal skill strength: A well-placed sticky bomb, and it sends other agents flying. We have already presented a sticky bomb build in The Division here.
How to protect yourself from devastating sticky bomb attacks
The sticky bomb can be modified in three ways:
- Monster Grenade: Greater damage and blast radius. Can inflict bleeding wounds on targets.
- Blinding Effect: The grenade explodes with non-lethal effect, blinding and disorienting all targets in range.
- Proximity Fuse: The grenade explodes automatically when an enemy target is within range.
Especially the Monster Grenade can hit you hard and even defeat you with a single explosion.
If you want to protect yourself from it, you need to pay special attention to one value: Resistance to Exotic Damage in The Division. Exotic damage refers to any damage in the game that is not dealt by weapons or melee attacks. This includes damage from fire, bleeding, or explosions.
Therefore: Increase this value to stand up to sticky bomb enemies. It is also extremely useful against the flamethrowers in the Dark Zone. YouTuber Daryus P now shows in a new video that reducing Exotic Damage against sticky bombs is significantly more important than toughness.
In a self-experiment, he compares a build with extremely high toughness (over 600k!) to a build with lower toughness (379k), but with a focus on Exotic Damage Reduction. He raises this value to 78%.
While he loses more than half of his health with the toughness build, thanks to the 78% Exotic Damage Resilience, only a fraction of the first health bar is deducted:
His counterpart didn’t even deal enough damage to be marked as rogue. You can see the entire attempt in the following video:
This shows: Toughness is not everything to be prepared for all the dangers in the Dark Zone. Especially the flamethrowers currently pose a problem for many agents. If you want to become a serious tank that can withstand both sticky bombs and flamethrowers, you need to focus on toughness and resistance to Exotic Damage.
How can I influence Exotic Damage?
Your armor pieces occasionally provide Exotic Damage Reduction. Keep an eye out for these. Furthermore, you can influence this with mods: Some modifications offer corresponding bonuses.
Refined agents also visit the Upgrade Station in the Operations Base in the Tech Wing. With this, you can change a bonus per item for credits. Occasionally, Exotic Damage Reduction is available as a potential upgrade.
In this article, we present a build with high toughness and Exotic Damage Reduction in The Division.
