The Division 2 Title Update 3 adds The Dark Hours raid

Published May 14, 2019 12:05 PM, by Chris Jarrard

Ubisoft Massive did a wonderful job earlier this spring when they launched the newest entry in Tom Clancy’s The Division franchise. The Division 2 successfully transported the action from the icy streets of New York City to the warm, tattered neighborhoods that make up Washington D.C. After a few hiccups with post launch updates, the development team has pushed out Title Update 3, which includes numerous balance changes, UI improvements, loot modifications, and more. Additionally, this update includes the content for the upcoming raid, known as Operation Dark Hours. The raid will officially go live on The Division 2 servers May 16 at 12 PM EST.

The Division 2 arguably had one of the smoothest launches in looter shooter history back in March. Aside from some annoying bugs and glitches, the initial experience was very polished and offered players an excellent introduction to the streets of the nation’s capital. As the development team began to roll out new World Tiers as part of the endgame roadmap, some changes were made to the game in an attempt to balance PvP and PvE concurrently that left many players dissatisfied.

Item talents and build requirements saw several fundamental changes that either destroyed or neutered certain builds and the much-hyped 6-piece gear sets were largely ignored by endgame players. Title Update 3 aims to correct changes made in the last few updates and attempts to balance various skills, talents, and gear to allow players access to a larger variety of build types. Changes to the gear score system have also been made to allow Division agents to get more chances at better loot drops across all modes of play.

A summary of additions and changes in Title Update 3 is listed below:

The Division 2 Title Update 3 patch notes

Content

Update 3 will add the first 8 player raid to The Division 2 plus the first Classified Assignment that is exclusive to Year 1 Pass owners.

PVP & Normalization Changes

These changes are ONLY for PVP content and it will apply to Conflict, Normalized Dark Zone and Occupied Dark Zone.

Normalizing mechanics

• The Equipment and weapons will be normalized to GS 500 (even if your GS is higher)
• They are respecting the rolls on your gear and that means when you had an item with a very high crit chance roll, it will be like that in normalized content.
• Skill Power will also be respected and when the mods are active in PVE, they will also be active in normalized content.

Global PVP Modifiers

• The PVP damage modifier will be tuned down and that will bring the Time to Kill more in line to what you experience in PVE. In essence, you have more time to react.
• The Skill Damage modifier will be increased so that they do more damage in PVP.
• Overall the encounters should last longer and the skills should be more useful.

Occupied Dark Zone PVP Modifiers

• They have also added a specific ODZ PVP damage modifier.
• This way, they have the ability to specifically fine-tune the ODZ modifier depending on how things develop.
• That should also help to lower the Time To Kill in the ODZ

PVP Modifiers for Weapon Archetypes

• They will add specific PVP modifiers for specific weapon types.
• For example, they can specifically buff the Assault Rifle in PVP, as of now it sits at 1.25
• That also enables for specific PVP balancing, because the damage of the weapon is overwritten by the PVP Modifiers when you enter PVP content.

Hip fire Changes

• In PVP content you will not be able to crit when you hip-fire
• PVE is not affected by this change.

Dark Zone

Loot Changes

• NDZ and ODZ will drop less clean loot and more contaminated loot, they want players to engage in the Loot Extraction – loop.
• Named bosses guarantee contaminated loot and higher leveled landmark bosses have the ability to drop multiple items.

Landmark Cooldown

• Landmarks got a cooldown once they are cleared before they become activate again (about a minute)
• That should also encourage more player movement and not just farming the same Landmark.

Dark Zone NPC Balancing

• The NPCs in the Dark Zone will be less lethal, but they will also have more armor.

Rogue Loop Changes

• They removed the Rogue Cooldown when you die
• The Rogue-Toggle cooldown will stay, so you will not be able to spam that.
• Dark Zone Perk was also changed that it will no longer reduce the Rogue Timer cooldown, but you will lose less XP when you die as a rogue agent.

Dark Zone Pouch increased

• You will be able to carry more Contaminated items.
• Default is 6 items per bag
• The Character Perks were also changed and the Tier 1 Perk will increase the bag-size to 8
• The Dark Zone Perk will increase the bag-size to 10 in total.

Preventing Empty Dark Zones

• They plan multiple changes to “guarantee” that you encounter 12 players in a Dark Zone instance.
• They are reducing the amount of Dark Zone Brackets to 2.
• Everyone below Character Level 30
• Everybody in Endgame.

Occupied Dark Zone changes

• They also lowered the XP loss when you die in the ODZ to players or NPCs.

Thieves Den Changes

• Players can weapon swap in Thieves Den to earn Special Ammo for the weapon of their choice.

Conflict

UI Change

• The UI will now display the real value of the armor and not a standard value. So when a player has a ton of armor, you will see that displayed accordingly.

Boost Change

• The Boosts (damage and armor) that become active over the course of a match will be lowered by 50%. They should have an impact but not that big as it is now.

Synchronizing Team Spawns

• The chance that you spawn with a teammate is increased so that you don’t just spawn alone and die

Skill Cooldown Respected

• The Skill cooldown will be respected now after you die.
• So when the skill was on cooldown, it will stay on cooldown when you respawn.
• That should also lower the skill-spam

NPC Changes

The NPCs also got a general Health and Damage balance pass to make them less spongy in the higher difficulties and some popular Gear Talents less a requirement.

Other quality of life changes

• Text chat will now lose focus after sending a message
• Group tab will be populated with all raid members
• Added a Neutral Lighting setting to all platforms.

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.

Gear Score Drop Changes

• Loot now skews more towards the top end of its allowed Gear Score, resulting in fewer items below a player’s average Gear Score, and items that do drop below it will be closer to that average more often.
• Purple items will be GS 490 (that is their cap).
• GS490 items can still be valuable for recalibration, deconstructing, and selling.

GS 500 Farm locations

With Title Update 3 you have a clear structure of how to obtain guaranteed GS 500 items.

• The rewards for daily Priority Hard and Challenging missions have increased. Once you reach gear score 500, those activities will guarantee gear score 500 drops.
• Heroic Mission bosses, Stronghold bosses, and Bounty bosses, as well as Control Point Alert Level 4 reward containers, guarantee gear score 500 items if your average gear score is at 500.
• Dark Zone contaminated loot does not drop below player's average gear score. When you reach an average gear score of 500, contaminated loot will guarantee gear score 500 items.
• Loot has been balanced across the board to reduce the chances of items dropping at a lower gear score than that of your character.

Recalibration Changes

• Recalibration has been changed to allow for the majority of stats to be moved as they are, from one item to another, while making it less likely to reach the cap of the stat moved.
• To achieve this goal, the recalibrated power is a separate number, next to the gear score. As such, the recalibration will no longer increase the gear score of the item. All existing recalibrated items will have their recalibrated additional gear score converted to the new format.
• This should also help you to retain the values you want to recalibrate.

New Blueprint Sources

• You can buy blueprints from Inaya al-Khaliq (the crafting NPC)
• The blueprints from other vendors (as well as the weekly vendor) has been moved to Inaya.
• 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.

Crafting

• Increased the base cap for Receiver Components and Protective Fabric crafting materials by 200, meaning that their caps now start at 350 and end at 600 with all material capacity perks.
• Crafted Exotic weapons will now always upgrade to the maximum Gear Score of the World Tier they are crafted in when the Upgrade Blueprint is used.

Skill Mods – New Auxiliary Battery Mods

• 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.

Commendation Update

• The following Commendations have been removed:
• 28 Days Distinction: Record 672 hours (28 days) of time in-game.
• Distinguished Service Ribbon: For 30 consecutive days, on each day play for at least one hour and complete one mission.
• Supreme Response Distinction: For seven consecutive days, on each day complete four main missions and rescue five civilians.
• Year One Merit: Play on 14 days per month, on a total of 12 months.
• Division Service Merit: For a total of 100 days, on each day play for at least one hour and deliver 20 resources to control points.
• Vanity patch will be added for those that have already earned the removed Commendations.
• The following Commendations will be added for Operation Dark Hours:
• Full Deck Distinction: Acquire all Snitch Cards.
• Distinguished Service Distinction: Complete 30 hours of service.
• Supreme Response Distinction: Complete all main missions and Strongholds on Hard difficulty (or above).
• Control Point Takeover Merit: Take over 50 Level 4 Control Points.
• Invasion Service Merit: Complete 10 Invaded Strongholds.

Exotics

• Exotics are having their damage increased across the board.

A full list of changes introduced in The Division 2 Title Update 3 can be found in the full patch notes.