The Division 2 - Make Washington D.C. Great Again

I wanted to hit 30 before I left for a week of visiting colleges with my kids over spring break, but no such luck. It’s probably a good thing - this game has it hooks in deep right now; maybe taking a break will help reduce my obsession.

Here’s hoping I won’t miss whatever D2’s version of the Bullet King loot explosion turns out to be.

While that’s true, you can’t donate non-project materials like that. Only projects.

For regular donations to get the loot visibility buff, you need to be at the control points requesting the donations.

Right, of course. But you can donate kneepads and ceramics from anywhere.

Kneepads, heh.

One of the little touches I like is finding groups of friendly NPCs out in the world trying to fix things. Plus we can get rewards for donating trinkets like a wrench or whatever. I stopped selling those once I realized they could be used out in the world. I haven’t found NPCs that need kids socks yet, but I’m holding out hope.

I have yet to find a wrench, but tape measures, I have 9 of them!

Menu screen before loading the game says I’ve looted over 1800 things!

I’m in a weird place with Division 2 right now. I love the game, but I’ve also hit a brick wall. I’m at GS 451, and I’ve got an inventory that is filled with GS 450 loot in every slot. There’s really no reason for me to keep farming gear any more, knowing the cap will increase to 500 soon with WT5.

This leaves me with no real reason to do anything else right now, aside from collecting the masks and grinding out specialization points. And it’s a bummer, because I want a reason to keep playing!

I think the game’s major balance flaw (especially once you hit endgame), is that it throws way too much gear at you constantly. There’s gear crates all over the world that are highly likely to contain high-end stuff in them, which are just as good as any boss loot drop. It seems like you’re running into loot every thirty feet just walking around the map. There’s no point to really craft anything in the endgame, because it’ll be obsolete in 15 minutes anyway.

It’s less of an issue from lvl 1-30, because leveling up takes a little while. But once you switch to gear score, it gets ridiculous. I managed to hit lvl 30 and get to World Tier 3 in a single play session - that shouldn’t be possible.

How many hours do you have played? D:

MarcoStyle is, of course, at the same place. He’s grinding additional characters to 30, largely under the assumption that the raid will have a lockout. There are also some benefits to having characters with different-level crafting tables (a blue table will produce skill mods with much lower requirements).

That’s farther than I want to take this game :) But it’s a direction you can go!

Under 50 I’m sure. I have long play sessions, but I also don’t play every day

I really suck at this game, 30h played and just hit level 10, haha. Though I do spend time just wandering around with civilians and starting up fights all over the place. I’m a bit worried I’m going to hit a wall soloing, some missions already pretty hard.

I do that, too. It’s fun!

I’m not exactly a 180-noscope FPS god, either. In games like this, I just solo cautiously. I also make sure my gear is always top-notch for my level. That’s pretty easy, given that DC is strewn with thousands of respawning containers.

If you play solo, use the turret (just the standard one). Having something to both a) draw some attention, and b) suppress enemies, is invaluable if you’re alone. And unlike the drone, you don’t have to keep telling it what to do.

I do find TD2’s AI more difficult than TD1, to some extent. Enemies seem to move around CONSTANTLY, and also aggressively flank you, to the point of occasionally being frustrating - especially in the end-game, when lots of enemies can effectively one-shot you, but also sponge up an absurd amount of damage themselves. I can’t count the number of times enemies just wander right amongst my party taking everyone out in a move that would be strategically ridiculous in “real life”, but works because they simply take SO long to whittle down.

This only becomes a really big issue when you’re playing missions/strongholds on “Challenging” difficulty though.

Hot Tip: If you’re looking for gear, visit a control point you own - all of the supply crates in the rewards rooms respawn and can be looted repeatedly, except for the gigantic yellow one.

Here’s a question for anyone who has crafted an exotic: Does anyone know if it consumes the unique components that you had to get from Hyena chests and whatnot? So, like, if I make the Chatterbox SMG, would I then have to go and collect those components from the various missions again?

I’ve got all of the stuff to make the exotics, but I won’t bother until WT5 if making them now means I have to go collect all of those things again.

Yep… every 24 hours! :) Then I hit the sewers for keys.

I’m also still loving the game after 17 hours. Still only level 14. Having so much fun doing random encounters, main/side missions very rarely, venturing through the dark zone, liberating checkpoints, finding the SHD caches, and so forth. It’s just a super satisfying gameplay loop.

It just seems like there are endless fun things to do. I just found the part of the map UI where I can retry bounties I previously failed, so I’m looking forward to that too.

And then to think that the end game is already so thorough, and Ubisoft will only add more stuff from here.

What an impressive technical and design achievement!

I don’t have much time currently to sit through a long session and so I wander around and just do these random encounters and some side missions. These are equally fun and pretty nicely pace for a quickie. I’m glad there’s so much variety around to cater to all sort of players.

I’m still very early on in the game. I think I might’ve dinged lvl 3 in my last play session. But I did run one of the story missions and I noticed that there are a few Hyena chests that are locked. I’m guessing at some point these Hyena keys start dropping? Or is there something that I’ve missed that I need to do to open these chests?

You’ll want to go into the underground, keys for the faction chests drop there in things that look like breaker boxes on the walls. Go during the day…

That’s good to know. Thanks.