Tom Clancy's The Division v1.2 Patch Detailed
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After watching Ubisoft and Massive's recent "State of the Game" Twitch stream for Tom Clancy's The Division, Forbes has "dissected" the video and summarized the primary highlights of what's to come to the shooter/RPG in a set of header-laden paragraphs. A few of those paragraphs and their headers:
(Be generous) with loot, in terms of source, quality and quantity of loot. They want the loot to be the (main source of upgrades.)
This is the most Diablo 3-ish thing I've heard them say so far. This is the key that they've been missing this entire time. They are stingy with loot because they want it to theoretically take weeks and months to get the best gear, but at a certain point, you're driving players away who feel overwhelmingly frustrated with the grind, which is exactly what's happening now.
There is a new Dark Zone bracket, 200 GS+. It provides opportunity to face tougher NPCs in the DZ, with better rewards. It will have the best quality of loot possible from drops, from 204 to 240, and there will be less mod drops and more weapon drops.
I'm mixed about this. A 200+ GS bracket for the Dark Zone is almost necessary at this point, given how far ahead some players are compared to others, and 200+ players murdering 160-180 players is no fun. With that said, if this new DZ bracket is where all the best gear drops are, this kind of seems like the rich will get richer. Once us 170-190 people graduate to the 200 bracket, we'll be met with a bunch of players who have been farming maxed gear for weeks, and all the same problems will emerge.
All activities receive increased rewards: quality and quantity. Incursions will drop more loot in 1.2. All DZ brackets receive increased loot quantity and quality, in order to allow players progression through DZ to the 200+ bracket through DZ loot.
I need more details about this to understand if this solves the potential problem I'm talking about above. Fundamentally, I just dislike the idea that certain activities have a hard cap on the GS items they can drop. It's like only two activities in Diablo 3 could drop max gear, and everywhere else you were getting stuff that was forever level 65-69 instead of the max of 70. I have talked previously about how if The Division is going to use a Diablo 3 style loot system, that gearscore is fundamentally broken, and the focus should be on drop rates, not having like seven different tiers of endgame gear you have to slog through. Lower difficulty activities have lower drop rates, higher difficulty activities have higher rates, but it's all the same level of endgame gear. This is one of these major structural problems with The Division that I'm not sure can be fixed by treating the symptoms alone, but we'll see.
"Once us 170-190 people graduate to the 200 bracket, we'll be met with a bunch of players who have been farming maxed gear for weeks, and all the same problems will emerge." Precisely.
