The Division 2 Gear Score Will Not Go Beyond 500 in Title Update 3

Eric Garrett

05/08/2019 06:21 pm EDT

Players have been enjoying Tom Clancy's The Division 2 since it launched earlier this year, despite a few bumps along the road. That said, the team at Massive Entertainment has been busy getting everything ready for the game's first raid, which was delayed due to more work needing to be completed and tested. Luckily, they offered players the opportunity to jump into the PTS and test out some of the features coming along with Title Update 3 later this month, including some Gear Score tweaks. After all of the testing, the devs decided it would be best not to increase the Gear Score beyond 500 with the inbound update.

"With all your feedback and data gathered thanks to the Public Test Server and after intense internal discussions, we wanted to provide you with more information on what to expect when Title Update hits the Live servers later in May 2019," Massive said. "For TU3, we've made a lot of changes to the PvE experience by adjusting the time to kill, NPCs, player survivability and the difficulty of missions and Control Points, to name a few. We've also made changes to gear, talents, mods, Recalibration and more. After reviewing these elements and results from the first week of the PTS, we decided to not increase Gear Score beyond 500 with Title Update 3."

They then went on to say how they want to improve the Dark Zone experience, but it needs to be rewarding and it definitely has to be fun. This is why they will introduce an increased Gear Score later on when it "feels completely natural" and works with the flow of the game. "Our intention, as always, is for players to enjoy the content they love and continue to make progress with their Agent," they continued. "After talking about loot and Gear Score in a lot of meetings, chats and video calls and many white boards being filled with thoughts, notes and graphs, we decided that with all the changes coming with TU3, increasing the Gear Score at this point would have created a couple of issues."

Those issues are as follows:

Gear Score 500 items would have been outdated immediately, and all the effort you put into min/maxing and farming your builds would have been wasted just as the Raid goes live. We don't want to invalidate your progression and we heard that feedback loud and clear from our community. Your gear and your builds are important to you and to us.
The statistical increase in stats would have made gear better but we don't want the focus to be on constantly chasing a higher Gear Score, when it should be about finding a playstyle and build that you enjoy.

The devs also outlined what has been changed in regards to Title Update 2 for The Division 2, especially when it comes to Gear Score 500 items and how to obtain them. Here is what will be noticably different when update arrives later this month:

We have increased the rewards for daily Priority Hard and Challenging missions. Once you've reached 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.
DZ contaminated loot does not drop below player's average Gear Score. When you've reached an average Gear Score of 500, Contaminated loot will guarantee Gear Score 500 items.
We've balanced loot across the board to reduce the chances of items dropping at a lower Gear Score than that of your character.

The Division 2 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Title Update 3 is set to arrive at some point later this month and will bring Operation Dark Hours along with it. You can find out more in our previous coverage.

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