The Division is struggling with serious balance issues. How can these be fixed?
The Division launched in March 2016 with problems. The Division received further issues with future updates. And many problems have been removed from The Division over time. For 15 months, Massive has been chasing all the annoyances.
Currently, after the Update 1.6.2, The Division is on a fairly solid foundation. The biggest exploits have been addressed, Massive repeatedly emphasizes that the build diversity is greater than ever, and forums often hear that players are positively surprised after all the criticism of The Division.
However, this is only one side of the coin. The Division is still far from being a flawless game. Serious issues remain in this shared-world shooter. Whether frustrating bugs, lags, or major balance problems.
Three balance issues that Massive needs to fix
The YouTuber and Division expert MarcoStyle has revealed what he believes to be the three biggest balance issues and has created suggestions for solutions so that Massive can address these problems directly. Via Twitter, community developer Hamish Bode already showed that he liked the video.
Stamina and health scaling
The first problem concerns the stamina in The Division. This attribute has lost significant importance with Update 1.6. MarcoStyle now sees it as nearly useless – stamina is only good for unlocking weapon talents.
Once there were 30 health points per stamina point. Now there are only 15. So if you currently invest fully in stamina, you won’t be nearly as “tanky” as before.
To become “tanky,” it is now much more worthwhile to invest in skill power. Skills are now significantly weaker than before, and if you want to heal effectively, you need high skill power. This way, you will stay alive longer in combat than if you invest in high stamina values.
In other words, the difference when fully investing in stamina or not is significantly smaller than the difference when fully investing in electronics or not.
MarcoStyle’s solution: Since it currently hardly pays off to invest in high stamina values, the scaling of stamina to health points should be adjusted. Instead of 15 health points per stamina point, one could easily increase it to over 40, so that stamina becomes worthwhile again. He even recommends 45. Then stamina would be as effective as it was in The Division 1.5.
He also includes the changes to armor values. Armor could reach up to 75% in the days of Update 1.3, but now the maximum is 35%. Back then, the change would have made sense to reduce the impact of stamina to limit the massive toughness. But currently, stamina is simply too weak when calculated with the armor value.
Healing in The Division
The second issue is related to healing, healing. This is an “old” problem in The Division that the developers haven’t really managed to get under control. There are extremely many things that one can use to heal, as well as many ways to reduce the cooldowns of healing skills – or to exploit various bugs.
One example is the Triage character talent. When you heal a teammate with a skill, the skill cooldown is reduced by 15%. Especially with “First Aid,” this bonus is overpowering, as you get a cooldown reduction for every teammate who runs into the green circle. That is probably a bug.
In combat, all agents just need to shoot their healing skills on the ground and then run in a circle to recharge each other’s skills, thus creating an endless healing effect.
A solution proposal: Fix the Triage talent so that it only activates once per skill activation. Additionally, Triage should only reduce the cooldowns for the user and not for everyone who is healed by the skill. As this is currently an unintended effect.
Further changes to healing:
- The aid station provides too large an initial healing boost. This should be adjusted to depend more on skill power: Those with low skill power should receive almost no instant heal.
- Skill Haste: This stat is currently too strong and too important for many builds. The maximum is 50% and many character setups are designed to get as close to this maximum as possible. This reduces the skill cooldowns. Currently, skills can be used far too often.
With the stats on the armor pieces alone, one can reach up to 40% skill haste. MarcoStyle recommends reducing this maximum to a good 20%. The Tactician set, which grants additional skill haste, could also be adjusted.
The new maximum that one can achieve overall should be 40% (instead of 50%).
In short: It is currently too easy to quickly get healing (and other skills like the seeker mine). There should be adjustments so that only pure skill builds can achieve such high values – and not every hybrid build.
Grenades
The third issue concerns grenades and the Shortbow kneepads. With this exotic, grenades explode extremely quickly, and enemy agents have no time to dodge the grenade. In other words, you just need to throw a grenade and you already have an advantage (be it damage, stagger, shock, etc.) over other agents before the battle actually begins (or during the battle).
In the “Last Stand” mode, you respawn after every death with new grenades, which is why grenades are flying around you.
MarcoStyle believes the best solution is to revise the Shortbow kneepads. Agents should at least be given a chance to dodge grenades.
Ultimately, The Division should primarily be a shooter and not a game where one solely relies on grenades and various skills.
Which balance issues do you think Massive needs to address urgently?
Interesting: The Division 1.7: Classified Gear – New items with the best stats
