This Week in The Division 2 - March 13th

Season 1 – Shadow Tide has begun for The Division 2: Warlords of New York! Once you reach Level 40 and complete the New York campaign the Season feature becomes available, revealing new activities, new progression paths, and new rewards for your Agent! This first week also features a Double XP event to give everyone head starts on their SHD Levels and Seasonal Tacks.

The first Manhunt Target, Neptune, is out now, with the first League coming on Tuesday, March 17th. Neptune will remain active and available throughout the entire 12-week Season, but you’ll need to take him down before you can go after the Prime Target. The Westside League, however, will only be open for 2 weeks – so make sure you try your hand at those challenges to see if you can earn some of the exclusive rewards!

Priority Alerts:
After the maintenances this week, the following issues have been addressed:

• Gear-Set Blueprints not dropping from Control Points.
• Restorer Hive not healing for every charge consumed.
• NPCs not dropping crafting materials.
• Several issues with clans and friend lists.
• Progression blocker that was keeping the ‘Secure the Area’ objective from being completed on Roosevelt Island.

Other topics and problems that are still under investigation:

• Dark Zone infinite loading screen.
• Long matchmaking queues.
• Gear-Set Talents not working properly.
• Sound issues.
• Issues reviving group members.
• Some Bounties in inaccessible locations.
• Bloodsucker talent working in an unintended way.
• Prime Target manhunt progress resetting despite defeating the first target.
• Season Caches being contaminated if earned in the Dark Zone.
• Issues with Seasonal XP not being earned in the DZ.

Community Updates:
We’re closely following different feedback on several major topics like Seasonal Manhunt progression resets, gameplay Difficulty and NPC scaling, and different issues with Control Points.
We have more detailed breakdowns on each of these topics available in our State of the Game Recap and forums posts about Control Points and Enemy Difficulty. To briefly summarize:

Game Difficulty

• Hard Mode – Not likely to be adjusted as this is in line with the developer’s desires for the game.
• Challenging Mode – A little bit overtuned for player performance and a bit too limiting on the playstyles and builds. This mode will be adjusted down slightly in order to make the mode less strict in its expectations.
• Heroic Mode – The team is open to adjustments, but ultimately wants it to be a tough fight for all players. Though efforts to improve co-op scaling will also impact co-op Heroic difficulty.
• General Difficulty – The team is looking at specific factors that can impact the difficulty curve of the game, such as particular NPCs that can cause unintended and unique difficulty spikes. Overall though, the team is hoping to make more incremental changes to fine-tune the difficulty rather than making large-scale and wide-ranging changes. The team is also looking into loot drops that don’t scale correctly for higher difficulties and encourage players to submit screenshots if they encounter them.

Seasonal Manhunt Progression

• The team is planning on simplifying and streamlining the process for resetting progress on a Manhunt through a specific option, rather than having it tied to other things in the world.
• For now, make sure that you start the Manhunt on a difficulty that you can tackle, and be sure to play with others on that same difficulty to ensure that all players are gaining equal progress.
• The team is working on addressing several bugs both with the UI and the overall function of the Manhunt Progression system. But know that if you fully complete the Manhunt once and take down the target, that your progress is saved and will persist when the Prime Target is accessible.

Control Points

• As we talked about these topics yesterday on State of the Game #151 we wanted to also update you on the forums about Control Points and the Seasonal Manhunt and how these features interact with the Global Difficulty change. We previously stated that the Control Points should reset when changing the Global Difficulty and this will be our intent moving forward. Currently Control Points don’t get taken over unless an Invasion is happening, or a Manhunt Target takes over a zone. In an upcoming patch you will be able to reset Control Points when you change Global Difficulty, so that you can choose to reset your map and replay the Control Points if you wish.
• For the Seasonal Manhunt we will enable a separate interaction to reset the targets and be able to replay the Named Zones connected to them. You currently can reset the progress by changing the Global Difficulty, but it also means that you can reset your ongoing progress by accident. When the feature has been implemented you will have the option to just reset the Zones that are connected to the Manhunt and we currently plan to add this option in the Seasonal Manhunt UI to clearly separate it from the Global Difficulty change.
• We are aware that Directives are currently not staying active consistently and are also resetting the Manhunt progress. Both are not intended and in a future update Directives will stay active regardless of you changing the area you are currently playing in and they will no longer reset Seasonal Manhunt Progress.

That’s it for this week!
Until next time,
/The Division 2 Development Team