I’ve been playing a lot of The Division’s Underground DLC, the game’s new stab at randomized missions for PvE farming. It’s the first paid content pack for the game, one that does a lot of things right. But, the more I play it, the more I can see that it also does a lot of things wrong.
I know, surprise, surprise, I’m criticizing The Division, but some of these are pretty pressing issues that have the ability to derail the potential of this DLC if they’re not rectified. I’ve narrowed it down to five essential fixes for the Underground DLC, that would help to make the new content live up to its promise of being the most fun, most substantive addition to the game since launch. Because right now it’s only about halfway there.
1. Put All Gear Sets In The Loot Pool
It’s time to address this once and for all. When The Division introduced Gear Sets, they had what appeared to be a kind of good idea where to find each one, you could farm specific activities that would be more likely to drop whatever set you were looking for. Back when there were only four sets and fewer activities, this didn’t seem like a bad move. Now, however, with 12+ gear sets and counting, it has kind of ruined most of the new activities that the game has introduced, including Underground.
The problem is that some activities are so heavily weighted toward mostly giving out one or two sets, that you will end up with mountains of them, and almost nothing else. If you find an activity you enjoy playing, good luck trying to collect a set other than the one or two designed to drop most often from there. We saw this before Underground where people would drown in Lone Star gear if they were running HVT missions, and now in Underground itself, people are quickly realizing that they are amassing piles of Firecrest and BLIND sets with only a tiny likelihood of getting anything else. Caches, the most rewarding part of Underground, seem only able to drop those two sets and like, four new weapons. It’s why I have four of the same kneepads and six 204 pistols already. It also does not help matters that Firecrest and BLIND are not very good sets, and almost everything pales in comparison to the old Striker, Sentry and Tactician sets, which are mainly tied to the excruciatingly dull Falcon Lost Incursion. Some sets need to be either buffed, or killed entirely (looking at you, Nomad).
There are a few solutions to this. Some have suggested a weekly rotation where different sets drop in different activities. Others just want to open up the loot pool entirely. Probably the best suggestion has been a WoW-like “token” system where tokens can be earned to be exchanged for a specific piece of set gear, rather than having to reduce your sixth Firecrest backpack to scrap. But right now, all this system does is force people to run activities they don’t want to play in order to get a wider variety of gear, and it makes them avoid stuff they may enjoy like HVTs and now, Underground Operations.
2. Gearscore Requirements/Drops Are Mismatched
This is not necessarily a problem specific to Underground, but The Division has made kind of a mess of this for ages now, and it is indeed infecting the new DLC. Take Hard mode in Underground. The activity says that you should be 160 to do it, and the drops are 182/214. Great, right? Theoretically, but in practice, 100% of my matchmade teams for the mode have been 180 GS or higher. I would say 95% of them are 200 GS or higher. If someone shows up at GS 161, they’re probably going to be kicked, because people don’t want to carry them (even if they would probably be fine).
So we have a group of 200+ GS players running through an activity that will almost always given them nothing but 182 gear, aka. scrap metal. This creates farming runs where you’re not farming anything at all, given that drops have close to a zero percent chance to be useful. The idea is to encourage people to move up to Challenging and Heroic difficulties, but the difficulty leap, especially in Underground, is enormous, and Hard is very clearly a “comfortable” farming spot for a huge portion of players, given that this is an activity where if you wipe, you start over with nothing.
But the recommended gear score confuses new players, and the drops are absolutely useless for most of the people playing, meaning XP is the only thing that matters. And that leads me to…
3. Experience Rewards Are Skewed Toward Speed Farming Easy Difficulties
Right now, there is very, very little incentive to slog through Challenging and Heroic difficulties for those who are trying to rank up in Underground. Other than the difficulty being much harder than Hard, the XP rewards for completing higher tier missions just seem…off. A Hard mission gives you 750 XP as a base. A Challenging mission gives you 1000 XP. But I just don’t know how anyone would have played through a Challenging mission and thought that the much harder, much riskier mode was only worth a mere 250 XP extra, especially when the drops there still aren’t great much of the time.
Right now, the “smart” thing to do in Underground is to simply run Hard missions with 2-3 modifiers for about 1000 XP. A good team can blaze through these in a way that would take three times as long if they were doing it on Challenging, if they could do it without wiping (which is far from a sure thing). Once you jump to Heroic the XP does start to increase quite a bit (3,500 XP), but if you have the gear to run that mode at all, I don’t even know what you could potentially be grinding for in the first place. At that point, XP for caches doesn’t really matter considering you’ll mostly be getting Firecrest and BLIND gear you won’t want to use.
4. Cache Farming Should Not Slow To A Crawl Over Time
It’s no secret that for most players who are working their way through Normal, Hard or Challenging, the biggest prize at the end of the tunnel for Underground is the cache you get for leveling up. But, like the Dark Zone, the experience system is exponential. Each level increases the total you need for the next level.
Obviously, this is how experience works in most games, but either the rewards players get for leveling up are not that essential (one paragon point in Diablo 3) or there’s a hard cap at some point to avoid it going on forever (Overwatch, Destiny). But I’m pretty sure this just increases indefinitely until the cap of 40, and after that, I’m not sure you can even get more caches, but no one has gotten to that point to confirm that yet, I don’t believe.
I know, surprise, surprise, I’m criticizing The Division, but some of these are pretty pressing issues that have the ability to derail the potential of this DLC if they’re not rectified. I’ve narrowed it down to five essential fixes for the Underground DLC, that would help to make the new content live up to its promise of being the most fun, most substantive addition to the game since launch. Because right now it’s only about halfway there.
1. Put All Gear Sets In The Loot Pool
It’s time to address this once and for all. When The Division introduced Gear Sets, they had what appeared to be a kind of good idea where to find each one, you could farm specific activities that would be more likely to drop whatever set you were looking for. Back when there were only four sets and fewer activities, this didn’t seem like a bad move. Now, however, with 12+ gear sets and counting, it has kind of ruined most of the new activities that the game has introduced, including Underground.
The problem is that some activities are so heavily weighted toward mostly giving out one or two sets, that you will end up with mountains of them, and almost nothing else. If you find an activity you enjoy playing, good luck trying to collect a set other than the one or two designed to drop most often from there. We saw this before Underground where people would drown in Lone Star gear if they were running HVT missions, and now in Underground itself, people are quickly realizing that they are amassing piles of Firecrest and BLIND sets with only a tiny likelihood of getting anything else. Caches, the most rewarding part of Underground, seem only able to drop those two sets and like, four new weapons. It’s why I have four of the same kneepads and six 204 pistols already. It also does not help matters that Firecrest and BLIND are not very good sets, and almost everything pales in comparison to the old Striker, Sentry and Tactician sets, which are mainly tied to the excruciatingly dull Falcon Lost Incursion. Some sets need to be either buffed, or killed entirely (looking at you, Nomad).
There are a few solutions to this. Some have suggested a weekly rotation where different sets drop in different activities. Others just want to open up the loot pool entirely. Probably the best suggestion has been a WoW-like “token” system where tokens can be earned to be exchanged for a specific piece of set gear, rather than having to reduce your sixth Firecrest backpack to scrap. But right now, all this system does is force people to run activities they don’t want to play in order to get a wider variety of gear, and it makes them avoid stuff they may enjoy like HVTs and now, Underground Operations.
2. Gearscore Requirements/Drops Are Mismatched
This is not necessarily a problem specific to Underground, but The Division has made kind of a mess of this for ages now, and it is indeed infecting the new DLC. Take Hard mode in Underground. The activity says that you should be 160 to do it, and the drops are 182/214. Great, right? Theoretically, but in practice, 100% of my matchmade teams for the mode have been 180 GS or higher. I would say 95% of them are 200 GS or higher. If someone shows up at GS 161, they’re probably going to be kicked, because people don’t want to carry them (even if they would probably be fine).
So we have a group of 200+ GS players running through an activity that will almost always given them nothing but 182 gear, aka. scrap metal. This creates farming runs where you’re not farming anything at all, given that drops have close to a zero percent chance to be useful. The idea is to encourage people to move up to Challenging and Heroic difficulties, but the difficulty leap, especially in Underground, is enormous, and Hard is very clearly a “comfortable” farming spot for a huge portion of players, given that this is an activity where if you wipe, you start over with nothing.
But the recommended gear score confuses new players, and the drops are absolutely useless for most of the people playing, meaning XP is the only thing that matters. And that leads me to…
3. Experience Rewards Are Skewed Toward Speed Farming Easy Difficulties
Right now, there is very, very little incentive to slog through Challenging and Heroic difficulties for those who are trying to rank up in Underground. Other than the difficulty being much harder than Hard, the XP rewards for completing higher tier missions just seem…off. A Hard mission gives you 750 XP as a base. A Challenging mission gives you 1000 XP. But I just don’t know how anyone would have played through a Challenging mission and thought that the much harder, much riskier mode was only worth a mere 250 XP extra, especially when the drops there still aren’t great much of the time.
Right now, the “smart” thing to do in Underground is to simply run Hard missions with 2-3 modifiers for about 1000 XP. A good team can blaze through these in a way that would take three times as long if they were doing it on Challenging, if they could do it without wiping (which is far from a sure thing). Once you jump to Heroic the XP does start to increase quite a bit (3,500 XP), but if you have the gear to run that mode at all, I don’t even know what you could potentially be grinding for in the first place. At that point, XP for caches doesn’t really matter considering you’ll mostly be getting Firecrest and BLIND gear you won’t want to use.
4. Cache Farming Should Not Slow To A Crawl Over Time
It’s no secret that for most players who are working their way through Normal, Hard or Challenging, the biggest prize at the end of the tunnel for Underground is the cache you get for leveling up. But, like the Dark Zone, the experience system is exponential. Each level increases the total you need for the next level.
Obviously, this is how experience works in most games, but either the rewards players get for leveling up are not that essential (one paragon point in Diablo 3) or there’s a hard cap at some point to avoid it going on forever (Overwatch, Destiny). But I’m pretty sure this just increases indefinitely until the cap of 40, and after that, I’m not sure you can even get more caches, but no one has gotten to that point to confirm that yet, I don’t believe.
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