This week, The Division 2 State of the Game livestream took a look at some more of the big changes coming to the game sometime after the release of Episode 3. Following last week’s reveal of the new gear system coming after Episode 3, Lead 3C Designer Fredrik Thylander and Game Designer Bruce Kelly joined this week’s stream to talk about recalibration stat storing and Skill Tier, both of which will introduce big changes to recalibrating gear and buffing Skills in the future. A few highlights:
- Recalibration stat storing will let players extract Talents, attributes, and more from weapons and gear, and save them in a library to apply to like items.
- A new Skill Tier system replaces Skill Power, letting players buff their Skills by wearing gear pieces with the Skill Tier core attribute.
- The stream also included brief video Q&As with Senior Game Designer Trick Dempsey and Senior Game Designer Nikki Kuppens.
State of the Game streams on Twitch, Mixer and YouTube. (To find out what was covered in the last episode, make sure to check out the previous State of the Game Recap.)
PRIORITY ALERTS
Maintenance was performed yesterday.
- Fixed a bug in the Dark Zones that allowed players to shoot from behind walls.
RECALIBRATION STAT STORING
- Currently, recalibration requires players to keep a stash of gear pieces to potentially recalibrate other gear in the future.
- The overhaul aims to make the process more intuitive and fun, while still allowing players to customize items.
- When players find gear with a high roll, they will be able extract it and save it in a Recalibration Library to apply to other gear later – essentially “learning” it.
- The new gear system will let players recalibrate Talents, stats, core stats, and mod slots.
- The new direction with brand-set bonuses, in addition to the attribute rolls, is that the brand sets match a profile that is either offensive, defensive, utility, or skill-based, with a few hybrid exceptions.
- The Recalibration Library will display stored Talents and attributes by weapon or gear type, letting players quickly find improvements for specific items.
- The library will also let players know when gear in their inventory has a better attribute than what they’ve stored. This gives players a chance to extract the new attribute (destroying the original gear in the process) and apply it repeatedly to any future gear of the same type.
- The developers are still deciding whether to limit the Recalibration Library to a per-character basis, or to make it account-wide.
- Finding all the “god rolls” to max out each gear item will add a new collection metagame aspect to recalibration.
SKILL POWER REFACTORIZATION
- Skill Tier will replace Skill Power, and Skills scale directly with it.
- Skill Tier is available only as a core attribute on gear, and will improve Skills directly.
- There are six Skill Tiers; each item with the Skill Tier core attribute will add one tier to your Agent. Players who wear six pieces of gear with Skill Tier will attain max Skill Tier.
- Each Skill Tier will boost Skill stats and abilities, and each Skill has a different setup for how it scales with higher Skill Tiers.
- Deployed Skills will display their Tiers, giving players a clearer understanding of what they can do.
- Skill mods will still be available, and will work similarly to weapon mods, adding percentage modifiers to Skills.
- Using certain Exotic or gear-set Talents, players can temporarily enter an Overcharge state, which ramps up Skill stats to super-powerful levels.
The Division 2 is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4, and is included in a UPLAY+ subscription. For more The Division 2, check out our previous coverage.
