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Hey, everyone!
The team has been hard at work post-Invasion update, collecting everyone's feedback as more players share their thoughts with us. There have been plenty of conversations about the changes made with TU2, and we want to keep those conversations going. As the first of a series of updates we would like to provide after major content drops, our goal is to share not only updates on present issues but also contextualize some of our design decisions as well. With all that being said, let's get started.
Maintenance was completed this morning and patch notes are available here.
Project exploit:
- Projects were deactivated over the weekend in response to issues.
- We applied a fix on Monday, April 8th and re-activated the projects without the need of a maintenance!
We will have an additional patch next week, Patch 2.1 which will include the following changes:
Crafting Bench
- We have a fix for the bench not upgrading to World Tier 5 in the works.
Characters getting stuck
- We are trying to reproduce this internally. If you have more information on the topic, please share it with us (e.g. if you’re experiencing high latency).
- We have one fix for players getting stuck in the revive animation.
Revive Hive
- Made first improvements with TU2.
- Another fix incoming to reduce more occurrences in 2.1.
- We'll apply more fixes in the future as needed.
True Patriot
- Fix coming to address the two piece gear set bonus of True Patriot not working.
In addition, we'd like to provide everyone with insight into some of the larger conversations happening across all social channels:
Henry Hayes
- We re-escalated Henry Hayes not being available for some players. This has been hard to fix for us and while some occurrences have been resolved, we continue to work on this
Worksite Community
- We made a mistake in communication, this will be fixed with TU3. Sorry for the confusion
Scarce Specialization ammo:
- We have deployed a fix for this issue during today's maintenance.
T-Poses
- We’re working on a fix for this, both for the bounty screen as well as the NPC's remaining in this position when you kill them, occurring more often since TU2.
Gear dropping below 500 gear score:
- This was intentional but after hearing player feedback, we will look into potential changes in the future.
- We understand that this concept is not working for everyone, and that the expectation is to always get max level gear score.
- We know there are some things that are especially disappointing (e.g. crafted exotics or brand items).
Underperforming Gear Sets:
- We appreciate the feedback on the green gear sets, but we want to give everyone more time to play with their rolls and discuss build opportunities.
- If the trend towards not using them continues, we can make changes to them.
- We do like the idea of gear-set-less builds to allow more build variety.
Underperforming Exotic Weapons:
We want exotic weapons to feel strong and powerful, and we feel that some non-exotic weapons overshadow them. That being said, we would also like to hear more feedback about the exotic weapons:
- Which exotics feel weak / not as powerful?
- Why do they feel weak? (shooting, damage, etc)
- Are there specific activities they feel weak in? (co-op, open world, pvp, missions)
Talents:
- We want to give you a heads up that we're looking at the performance of talents and have identified some that are too strong and some that are not popular because they are too weak. We will provide nerfs and buffs to talents in an upcoming patch. The goal here is also to allow you to choose the talents you want to play, without heavily increasing your time to kill. The changes to NPCs we're talking about below will help with this, too.
Game difficulty:
- There’s currently a bug with enemy AI being too aggressive, due to them not acknowledging player hit points correctly. We are currently investigating this as a top priority issue.
- We’re looking into balancing armor and survivability a bit. Expect these tweaks to be included in the PTS testing, starting next week.
- We want to increase protection for players sprinting and going cover to cover so they take less damage in a future patch. Here, the goal is to make re-positioning a viable tactical option.
- We agree that hard, challenging and heroic mission NPCs can feel too spongy. We want to improve this and decrease the time to kill. We want to test this on the PTS next week, but are still talking about the exact changes.
- We agree that Control Points on higher levels can feel too hard and that the NPCs can also feel too spongy. We're talking about possible changes right now and will have more news on that soon.
PvP Balance:
- We’ll have Red Storm on State of the Game next week to discuss PvP balance and upcoming changes.
- Some of these changes can be tested on the PTS next week.
Inventory management:
- We know it’s currently very difficult to keep track of all your items and want to add more filtering options in the future.
- We want to allow you to recalibrate items from your stash.
- We don’t think that salvaging talents will actually improve the situation, but rather move some of the pain points to other parts of the UI.
Blueprints:
- We want to make them account-wide in the future.
Reset Timers:
- We plan to consolidate everything to one timer, unless there are specific reasons otherwise.
Projects that require high-end items and not providing high-end rewards:
- We’re looking into this and agree that it doesn't seem to be working correctly.
Character appearance:
- We will be working on an improvement for the barber (perhaps a different NPC) that will allow you to customize your character further. While we do want to talk about this we also want to let you know that this is further out and is not something coming to the game anytime soon!
- Will allow you to change your Agent’s sex.
- Bald hairstyle is planned.
- Red hair color is planned.
Unable to leave Dark Zone:
- This seems to be happening if you join a DZ session of a player that has not finished the DZ intro mission.
- We had a fix for this go live with Invasion: Battle for D.C., which helped in some occurrences.
- We’re working on another fix that should resolve this problem.
PC Performance:
-
We’re having difficulties reproducing some of the issues players are reporting so please send us more information:
- Always send us DXdiag of your system.
- Be precise with details when the performance issue is appearing.
- NVIDIA will be providing new drivers that should help with the DX12 crashes.
Lastly, we want to address some balancing concerns from the community with insight from the development team:
Skill builds are underwhelming and require too much of an investment into Skill Power:
A: Skills innately scale with level and world tier to always be relevant. Boosts to skills from skill power come in the form of mods, where the player can pick their own improvements to the skills. We recently revamped the skill mods so that high end and purple mods have reasonable requirements for mid-level to all-in skill power builds.
What we will provide in the next patch is ways to craft blue skill mods to provide options for low Skill Power level builds. Further, the recent re-balance was somewhat conservative in terms of power level of the mods, and we recognize that currently, they don’t represent enough impact for the sacrifice made in other stats. We will be enhancing the effects of mods across the board in this next update. Our hope is that these further adjustments will make both full on and hybrid skill power builds more viable.
Tank builds do not feel viable as armor and health don't seem to provide enough benefit and sustain:
A: We agree. It’s a complex issue to solve, but in the interest of transparency, here’s our thought process. The way to take the least damage in the game is to kill everything that could do damage to you. So the players damage output ends up also mitigating a lot of incoming damage in that indirect way. Further, the faster you burst an enemy down, the less time you have to spend popped up from cover. Added to that, we didn’t want to scale enemy health as much as their damage in harder content always to avoid as much of the “bullet sponge” syndrome as we could, and so damage output again gets another advantage over defensive stats when moving up in difficulty.
In the upcoming patch we will overhaul a large amount of talents. Further, we plan to increase the scale of defensive stats when they roll on gear, making each picked defensive roll much more impactful. Finally, we are looking at balancing, especially in higher difficulties across the board to adjust both lethality and TTK on the enemies for a better experience with more viable build options. The changes to defensive stats and the further adjustment to skill mods, we hope, will also contribute to healing being a more valuable and efficient thing to do for your team.
Thank you,
/The Division Team
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