Overview

The Division 2 Warlords of New York expansion will take you to Lower Manhattan, New York City in the hunt for Aaron Keener and his posse of rogue agents. The expansion was created with three main goals in mind, expand the narrative of The Division 2, strive to incorporate community feedback and the creation of a cohesive end-game experience. Warlords of New York will also see a large number of new exotics, named items and gear be introduced to the game. There is a lot of new content, features and improvements to talk about before release and today’s article is meant to serve as a high-level overview. You can expect a series of streams, articles and videos in the coming weeks detailing all the exciting new additions and changes coming when the Expansion is released on March 3rd.

Campaign

SHD Agents are being sent to Lower Manhattan in response to a recent biological attack resulting in the death of numerous civilians and SHD Agents. Your job will be to hunt down Aaron Keener who orchestrated the attack and who we believe is planning to launch future attacks. Your mission is to stop Aaron Keener at all costs.

• New Max Level: 40
• Map Expansion: Lower Manhattan
  • 4 Named Zones
  • Fog of War – Explore the map to identify points of interest and activities.
  • Wide range of Open World activities as well as new secrets and collectibles to find.
• Open Ended Campaign
  • Enemies now scale to your level
  • Explore Lower Manhattan without level restrictions
• Five distinct investigation threads, each linking the main and side missions together and leading you through the narrative.
  • 5 Main Missions
  • 8 Side Missions
  • Main missions and side missions are now linked together.
  • Improved Boss fight mechanics
  • Unique Skill Mod rewards

NOTE: Once you’ve started your journey through the narrative campaign in Lower Manhattan, you will be unable to return to Washington D.C. until the campaign is completed.

Factions of NYC

While the Rikers and Cleaners may be familiar names to the veterans of the first game, they are not quite the same factions as you might remember. In the months passed between the two games, the factions have re-organized themselves after the loss of their leaders, grown more battle hardened and are now more tactically minded in combat. In addition to these, you will also find the occasional Last Man Battalion soldier together with the Black Tusk, as the remnants of the once powerful mercenary group are now under Black Tusk command.

• Rikers – Escaped inmates from Rikers Island Prison.
• Cleaners – Former sanitation workers who believe the way to stop the virus is to burn it out.
• Peacekeepers – Civilian group made up from battle-hardened survivors and former JTF members.

A New Cohesive End-game Experience

A major focus during the development of Warlords of New York was to create a compressive, cohesive end-game experience with clear goals after having reached Level 40. A number of features will come together to shape this new end-game experience, including Seasons, SHD Levels, Legendary difficulty and more.

Seasons

Seasons is a key aspect of the new end-game experience. Each 12 weeks long, a season will task you to hunt down manhunt targets and earn unique rewards in the process. Seasons will become available for all players when reaching Level 40, allowing you to earn a new skill mod and unique seasonal gear and cosmetics by progressing through the seasonal level system. While participating in Seasonal events will yield additional Season XP, all in-game activities will reward Seasonal XP, allowing you to progress through the seasonal track while engaging in the activities of your choosing. In addition, an optional purchase will be available in the in-game store, that increases the overall rewards gained per season. As a top-level overview, a season is a calendar of in-game activities that ensures that you will have new activities to participate in on a weekly basis. In a nutshell, these activities can be categorised into:

• Seasonal Manhunt Targets
• Reimagined Global Events
• Leagues
• Apparel Events
• Season Events

There is a ton of exciting aspects of Seasons that this article doesn’t touch upon. If you’re hungry for more details, we put together this dedicated article deep-diving into the feature.

SHD Levels

The new infinite progression system, replacing the Field Proficiency Cache system for all players having reached Level 40. SHD Levels allows you to invest points into one of four distinct Core Attribute categories upon reaching your next SHD Level, as well as a scavenging category granting you credits or crafting materials.

• The Core Attribute categories upgrades are finite. Once maxed out, the SHD level points can be spend into the fifth, scavenging category – yielding credits and crafting materials.
  • Offense
    • Weapon Damage
    • Headshot Damage
    • Critical Hit Chance
    • Critical Hit Damage
  • Defence
    • Armor
    • Health
    • Explosive Resistance
    • Hazard Protection
  • Utility
    • Skill Damage
    • Skill Haste
    • Skill Duration
    • Skill Repair
  • Misc.
    • Accuracy
    • Stability
    • Reload Speed
    • Ammo Capacity
  • Scavenging
    • Credits
    • Steel
    • Ceramics
    • Polycarbonate
    • Carbon Fiber
    • Electronics
    • Titanium
    • Printer Filament
• In addition, your SHD levels visuals will become increasingly-impressive over time, signifying reached significant milestones to other agents.

Legendary Difficulty

The new Legendary difficulty will become available to Level 40 agents in select Strongholds, offering the most challenging PvE experience in The Division 2 outside of the raids. A new, elite sub-faction of the Black Tusk will be sure to keep you on your toes through a new legendary AI.

• Roosevelt Island
• Capitol Building
• District Union Arena

Global Difficulty

You will now have the ability to set the Global Difficulty of your game up to Heroic, affecting the difficulty of the Open World, including Control points and Bounties as well as missions. In addition, you will also be able to reset the map once it is fully cleared, allowing you to take it back once more.

Directives

Independently from Global Difficulty, directives allow you to activate gameplay modifiers on main missions, side missions and open world activities; increasing the overall difficulty and granting you additional XP. You will be able to activate up to 5 directives, scaling up the XP reward multiplier for each active directive. As seasonal XP is gained by all activities that yield XP, activating directives will also boost your seasonal XP gain.

Title Update 8

Warlords of New York expansion will be accompanied with the FREE Title Update 8 for all The Division 2 players on March 3rd. We have been hard at work reworking a number of core areas of the game while also keeping both Washington D.C’s end-game and the new, level 40 New York City end-game in mind. A lot of these changes have been heavily influenced by community feedback we’ve received since launch.

• New Level 30 Power Level
  • Gear Score 515
• Gear 2.0
  • Reworked brand set bonuses to better fit common playstyles
  • Return of the so called” God Roll”, allowing items to potentially drop with maxed out attributes in all areas
  • Core attributes for all items
  • Improved UI to at a glance identify the quality of an item
  • More powerful, build-defining talents
    • Talent requirement has been removed
  • Gear sets and Exotics revamp
  • Mod slots have been redistributed and are now linked to specific gear slots
  • & more…
• Recalibration Changes
  • Extract item talents and attributes and store them permanently in your recalibration library
  • If you find a higher roll of a stored attribute, you can replace the old stored attribute at any time
  • The UI will seamlessly indicate that you have a better roll available to store in the library
  • Stored attributes can be used indefinitely and are not used up in the recalibration process
  • Talents, stats, core stats and mod slots will be recalibratable
  • The 1 recalibration per item limit will remain
  • & more…
• Skill Power Changes
  • Skill Tier is replacing skill power
  • 6 Skill Tiers; each item with the Skill Tier core attribute will add one tier
  • Each tier boosts the skill’s effectiveness
  • Overcharge mechanic – Paired with gear and exotic talents, skills can now Overcharge, greatly increasing the skill’s effectiveness for a short duration
  • Skill Mods no longer have skill power requirements
  • & more…
• Dark Zone Improvements
  • Dark Zone XP is now only obtainable through player-to-player interactions, successful extractions and the collection of supply drops
  • All Dark Zone loot is now contaminated and needs to be extracted
  • Rolls on items are now visible before extraction
  • VOIP will now default to open mic, with the option to set it to Team only or turn it off entirely
  • New Dark Zone Currency, obtained by stealing and killing other agents
  • The ability to see all players within a 100-meter radius in the social menu
  • Signature weapons and their ammo is now removed from the Dark Zone
  • Removed the Grey Rogue status
  • Added an extra extraction site per Washington D.C. Dark Zone
  • & more

Warlords of New York patch notes will become available on March 2nd on our official forum.

That’s all for this one. Keep an eye out for additional deep-dives into the expansion’s extensive feature set in the coming weeks, and we hope to see you all in Lower Manhattan on March 3rd.

/ The Division 2 Team