by Lewis Burnell on Apr 25, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 items will not be exclusive to the Dark Zone, there will be other sources to get them.
More details about that will follow.
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.
You can now carry 600 basic crafting materials. (the grey ones)
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.