I am happy to announce I made some progress on figuring out the problem with the Foundry Bulwark 4p talent not working in PVE.

In the following videos, I have the same 4p Foundry build with 1,8M amor and 80k armor regen/s. Mathematically, It takes exactly 23 seconds to go from 0 to full armor without activating the talent. Remember, this 23s is the base regen time without the help of the 4p talent.

In PVE the regen time stays the exact same no matter how much damage I take and how fast I take it. The regen rate stays slow, constant (even when I take huge instant grenade hits) as if the talent is not making any difference.

In PVP though! Thats what Im talking about. Yes I take damage a bit quicker in PVP, but the difference is night and day. In the DZ, the second my shield starts taking damange, we clearly see the regen rate accelerating considerably to a point where my regen time drops from 23s to 16s. THIS is more in line with how the talent shoud work and this has nothing to do with what we see in PVE.

If it was working in PVE, we would see a time to fully regen somewhere between 23s, which is the base time without the talent, and 16s which is the absolute most damage I could take. I'd be happy with a 19-20s in PVE with the damage I take. But this is not the case. There was no difference at all.

IN PVE:

No matter how much damage I take:

• 1.8M armor depleted in less than 2s by legendary NPCs and robot tanks.
• 13M shield depleted and broken in 8s
• Grenade hits that do millions of instant damage

Realistically, I think it is difficult to take more damage than that without dying (Took me many attempts to pull this off as I instantly died multiple times when my armor broke)

The time to regen never drops below 23s, ever. Exact same time as when the 4 piece is not equiped (See link to my previous post at the end)

Amor and shield break at 0:15 and armor fully repairs at 0:38 = 23s (Base regen time, as if the talent made no difference)

I agree in the video above, I did not take damage as fast as in the PVP footage below. But this was close and probably the most amount of damage one can take against NPCs, including the grenade hits. Again, that means that the results should be somewhere between 23s and 16s. The fact that this amount of damage did not drop the regen time by even 0.5s is problematic.

In other words, if the damage I took in the video above is not enough to produce a minimum noticable difference, Then what is? I mean, if we must push the damage intake THAT far and we can't even remove 0.5s from the regen time it might be safe to say the talent is not working as intended. Not to make Foundry " the premiere gear set choice for tanks, or players looking to maximize their survivability " according to Massive.

Edit: Respectfully, I predict somebody will respond that I did not take damage quick enough for the talent to be noticable. This has been the main argument in favor of the talent working as intended in my previous posts. It's not a challenge but if so I might just go back and spend more time testing.

I might be able to get my armor depleted in 1.2s instead of 1.8. I might me able to get my shield destroyed in 3.7s instead of 7.65 if enough grenades hit it without killing me. But guess what the results will be? I would bet a lot that it will still take me 23s to fully repair.

Another example showing the same results:

Amor breaks at 0:04 and fully repais at 0:27 = 23s (Base regen time again, as if the talent made no difference)

The build I used is displayed at the end of the video above.

IN PVP:

We can clearly see the armor regen accelerating significantly the second my shield starts taking damage. It is so obvious the talent works as intended here compared to PVE that it took us 2 min to figure it out and get some footage. So that's it, it works. There's noting more to add here.

The time to regen drops from 23s to 16s, as expected from the talent.

Armor breaks at 0:7 and fully repairs at 0:23 = 16s

So in conclusion, however Massive phrases that talent and what is the obscure math behind it, I think that it's reasonnable to say that the amount of damage I took in PVE should make a difference, even the slightest. But It always takes me 23s to fully repair, no more, no less, which is the base regen time without the talent. It leaves me with the impression that the talent makes no difference in PVE.

At this point, either the talent is bugged and it needs fixing, or the talent is working perfectly but is so weak in PVE somehow compared to PVP that it can not even drop the regen time by 0.5s in the most extreme conditions. And so it would still need fixing.

u/CCloak (Im tagging you here so you can respond to my new footage because you made compelling arguments on my last comment and pushed me to do more testing so your input is valuable to this discussion)

What are your thoughts on that?

Can anyone provide us with footage of the set clearly working in PVE?

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Edit 1: I really want this set to work in PVE. I want to be convinced the talent works fine just like in PVP so I can move on. In other words, I hope I'm wrong but I keep testing and testing and I cant find a single situation where the talent makes the slightest difference in PVE.

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Edit 2: The latest response from Chris Gansler is this: "We have identified the visual bug and will have a fix for it in the next client update. We haven't been able to reproduce any cases where the effects are actually not working"

The "visual bug" refers to the buff symbol in the UI section not showing anymore when we take damage compared to the PTS.

It also means they insist the talent is working perfectly and they have no plan to fix it.

u/ChrisGansler, any way to know if the devs were able to reproduce this situation by now? Can anybody confirm the message I received from Ubisoft support below stating "the issue with the talent should be fixed" is legit? Can the new footage and details I provided here be transmitted to the devs? Thank you.

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Edit 3: Just received this from Ubisoft support about the bug report I submitted 2 weeks ago. They say it is fixed now. When is "now"? TU10.1, TU11? Can anybody at Ubi-Massive confirm this?

2020-07-07

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Edit 4: Here is my previous post comparing the same build but with the 3 piece vs the 4 piece.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/hefxlo/bug_foundry_bulwark_4p_makeshift_repair_not/

They were performing equally and the results were the same. The same 23s I can't improve for the life of me.

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