In the latest "State of the Game" Stream, The Division 2 developers ran over what has hit the Public Test Realm, and what's set to arrive in the next update. It's a lengthy list, but absolutely worth reading. Changes to Gear Score, Recalibration, Blue Prints, Crafting and more. 

Gear Score Drop Changes

• They changed the way how the Gear Score of endgame items is calculated.

• Before you could get items that are lower than your current Gear Score – but with the new system you get items that are at your current average Gear Score and higher.

• They also rebalanced how you acquire these items and the speed of it, so if you have a character on PTS that is not GS 500, please test that out.

• Once you hit GS 500, all high end drops you see will be on GS 500, purple items will be GS 490 (that is their cap).

• 490 gear score items can still be valuable for recalibration, deconstructing, and selling.

Recalibration Changes

• The team is introducing new changes to recalibrations. Previously, recalibrating a high-end item with a superior could cause your gear score to lower because high-end gear allows for more stats, but at a lower level.

• For example, a 10% buff to assault rifle damage on a superior piece of gear could drop to only a 6% buff when placed on a High-end item. This won't happen anymore.

• Now each item has 100 “recalibration score” and the chance of you hitting that budget cap is a lot lower. Basically, when you move an attribute with the new recalibration, you retain what you see on the source-item.

• That also means, that you can’t recalibrate a GS500 item to go above GS500 (for example).

• On PTS you can get Crafting Material Caches that should help you to test out the new recalibration system.

• Currently in the PTS, Dark Zone gear can still reach gear score 515 and a recalibration score of 100.

High-End vs. Blue Mods

• In general, better quality mods have more power and also more stats. (But the stat budget is also more spread out)

• In general, players should go for high-end mods and then enhance them with maybe purple mods that provide very specific stats.

• The reason why blue and purple mods have higher numbers than high-end is, that lower quality items invest the entire budget into one stat, while the high-end items distribute the budget over three stats.

• Blue and Purple skill mods will now also be craftable (but blue and purple mods will not be craftable at GS 500)

New Blueprint Vendor

• You can buy blueprints from Inaya al-Khaliq (the crafting NPC) – she has been promoted to be a vendor where you can buy these blueprints.

• The blueprints from other vendors (as well as the weekly vendor) has been moved to Inaya.

New Blueprint Sources

• The Blueprints are assigned to specific sources – so when you no longer get blueprints for finishing a Control Point, you have all the blueprints that were assigned to that source.

• These are the main Blueprint Sources in the live-game

  • Control Points

  • Vendors

  • Projects

• To improve that experience, there will now be two new weekly blueprint projects (one per settlement) – so in total, you can earn 3 blueprints per week from those.

• There is also a new Daily Project in the Base of Operations, where you can donate Crafting Materials and then you can get a blueprint from that.

Skill Mods – New Auxiliary Battery Mods

• High-end Skill-Mods have of course a high Skill Power requirement, but you can also fall back to lower quality skill-mods that have a lower Skill Power requirement.

• When you are not going specifically for a Skill Power build, they are introducing a new “AUX Battery” mod for specific skills. (Turret Aux Battery for example)

• AUX Batteries can be equipped in the Skill Mod Slots and they provide you with Skill Power for that specific Skill.

• This should allow you to get higher Skill Mods in the remaining slots working.

• This way you are sacrificing 1 Mod-Slot for the battery, but you can get the high-end mods working that you would not have been able to use otherwise.

• You can find AUX Batteries as drops or if you craft a random Skill Mod, you can also get it from there.

GS 515 Drops

• GS 515 items will not be exclusive to the Dark Zone, there will be other sources to get them.

• More details about that will follow.

More Ammo Drops

• It has been reported that there is an ammo problem in longer fights.

• To counter that – you will get more ammo drops from enemies when you are low on ammo.

More Basic Crafting Materials

• You can now carry 600 basic crafting materials. (the grey ones)

Hardwired Gear Set

• This is the Gear Set that you need to craft

• As of now, the Gear Score ranged from 450 – 500, that has been increased to 480-500. So the chances that you get a GS500 Gear Set has been increased.