@shivoa: Given the information we have it doesn't look like it's going away, it looks like it's being made even more tedious than it already was. We don't know if there is even going to be a new loot loop. If there is going to be a new one they haven't announced anything about it yet.

So combine the nerf of the most reliable way to get top-spec gear with not announcing any sort of buff to the loot loop and there you go: pissed off people.

@bane: Well they did announce the rough loot loop for the Gear Sets (Incursions plus other activity types dropping various items, 4/6 to get the set bonus so for them to be viable new loot options then at most you'll be wearing 2 high-end items). So we do know that much.

Personally, I'll be really happy if the new end-game for this patch is buying a new named high end weapon with Phoenix Credits, and then getting onto the various end-game activities (including new incursion and dailies/weeklies to direct some other rewards into subsets of those activities) looking for the Gear Set drops for my spec while also keeping an eye on the new loot sources to round out those final two gear slots (and mods, can't forget the mods and looking for those upgrades).

I've been playing it solo on PS4. Been enjoying it alot, but I'm a different sort of player of games.

My main issue is that as a casual/mostly solo player the changes make endgame content less obtainable. Crafting/farming mats as it is now is the the only/best way to get HE gear (even if the rolls are bad its better than nothing) for a casual/solo player. Forcing people to play Challenge missions which currently is the best way to get HE gear alienates people like me who don't have a group to play with. Rando CM missions usually end in most the original group leaving partway and a 1-2 hour slog through missions that should only take 15 minutes. Dark Zone ganking/cheating is so bad that unless you have super good gear, its pointless to go solo.

They have said on twitch recently that we don't know half the story and we will be surprised when we find out. If that is the case, why not just say it now to extinguish the fire they started. Unless they increase the drop rate on HE gear/weapons, endgame is nearly impossible without a group of friends. Which is why I can't recommend this game anymore unless you only care about the campaign which is worth about $20 in the bargain bin.

@puchiko: I'm not sure how the Division matchmakes (pre-release the devs certainly said stuff about looking for gear, achieved dps, and even general activity of the players to give them similar players to group up with but no idea what made it in - matchmaking feels real fast and so I have to assume some of that is just "first open slot/new group of 4 and go") but so far my experience of Challenging missions has been real good recently. Shortly after release: ye, anything more than Hard was not going well for me and randos.

Was away for Easter so no gaming, came back and other than the Russian Consulate (which was just terrible for getting randos who couldn't even coordinate the opening lobby fight - tried a few times a few days when it was the daily and then gave up until this last week where I had a good run and feel confident I can poke people in chat to keep them alive to get through it now I've seen how randos can manage it with very little communication/coordination) everything was in trivial mode. Keep it together, heal up, focus fire, missions are 30 minutes or less (even with a wipe possibly thrown in at some point and reset to checkpoint - get people who know which packs you can skip and do decent damage and it's always easily under).

I'm doing the daily CM always on rando matchmaking (when I find a spare half hour each day rather than organising a time for friends - many have moved off the game after getting enough out of it). I keep getting high-end kneepads but other than that: going great. Hell, the random & final boss drops mean I'm not sure if I've still got any ilvl30 purple gear left and my stockpile of unused ilvl31 purple weapons means I can swap up weapon types if I ever feel like it.

Grinding through endless mats to craft high ends (most of which random rolling will mean are a trash collection of disparate stats) via grinding Phoenix credits to get the blueprints to start with sounds terrible as a solo game. That sounds like something to be fixed, even if the fix currently sounds bad. Endless solo hours doesn't sound like it's working as intended, I can see this getting better (also as more people move up gear to the new end-game then the average speed of those CMs will go down).

@shivoa: @puchiko: I think one of the major problems is that Challenge mode isn't one of the best ways to get optimal gear in the game right now, especially considering it is currently the most difficult end game activity at the moment. It's primarily used as a source for Phoenix Credits to buy blueprints. The actual gear drops from Challenge Mode are pretty piss poor with the Armor being iLevel 30. It's also rare that the boss or bosses will drop any high end gear at iLevel 31 because the drop rates are so abysmal right now. Crafting has been the only saving grace to those bad drop rates. People are getting upset because those crafted items that had a 1/100 chance of being useful for a build took dismantling 20 Superior Purples each to craft. Now you are talking about 75 Superiors to craft that exact same piece of gear with a 1/100 (armor, weapons are closer to 1/20) chance of being optimal or close enough to it. That's likely 250 backpacks full of DZ scraps to craft an ideal Armor piece.

Now there are a lot of ways they can fix these issues. Hopefully the Community Managers mentioning that we don't know the whole story is a good thing. Maybe other changes are coming as well, like the ability to reroll 1 major attribute, 1 minor attribute, and 1 special attribute at the workbench. Also, those Assignments may give us a lot of crafting materials so there will less of a need to grind for a lot of them. Or maybe as some have suggested they will make the boxes in the BoO accumulate those crafting materials instead of just keeping 1 at a time based on how long it's been since you took them out. No idea, but these are the changes they need to make, as well as making Challenge Mode rewards guaranteed iLevel 31 drops (or it's new equivalent gear score) and increasing the base High End drop rates. Another change that would be useful would be to make Scavenging make a much larger impact on loot drop rates and quality so as to make that a priority to get on armor over other stats. Overall I'm going to take a wait and see approach, but at this point, like Puchiko, I'm very skeptical of how these changes to crafting materials can be anything other than awful for end game players.

I don't know if this useful to anybody but the easiest Challenge mission to do over and over if you just want to fill out your armor pieces is the Lexington Events Center. With a good enough group and enough coordination with skill usage, you can finish it as fast as 15 minutes each time. I'm not saying that you should do this to keep getting high end gear if you already have them but rather just for people who don't have a lot high end armor pieces yet and just want a few pieces to start with. At least it's a good place to get guaranteed high end pieces that you can just break down into mats though on the flipside I personally have a lot more high end fabric mats than I need. Not sure if this is also the same case as other people.

I'm now 45-ish hours into the game going borough-by-borough, doing side-missions until I get bored then matchmaking into the main missions. And still not done. I'm at level 28. I've occasionally dabbled in the DZ for fun, but have yet to sink my teeth into it. Compared to my feelings working through vanilla Destiny, I'm extremely happy with my purchase just as a single-player/co-op experience. I think the Ubisoft open world layout and borough hub design works surprisingly well to contextualize the content available at release.

Regarding the endgame, which I'm beginning to approach, I understand the frustration with nerfing the most efficient method of grinding for better loot. But I wonder what possible benefits that grinding can in the best case yield in a PvP game. I assume that the highest of high-end equipment will be only infinitesimally better than the rest, as the power curve has to level out somewhere. Do players grinding for hours and hours past the point of enjoying the shooty-time fun hope to get something way more damaging/protective than their current gear/weapons, or hope to get something that perfectly synergizes with their build?

Because on the same date as the nerf, the devs are also dropping a much better path to both increased damage and build synergy. That seems like a really fair trade, and one that removes some of the incentive to grind bland content. I suppose that in a Time Clickers kinda way, seeing the numbers go up might be a certain type of player's main incentive for continuing to play, and that's totally valid.

If you're into mindless loot games where the numbers go up, yes. If you are into modern/near-future military 3rd-person cover shooters, yes.

The game needs content though. The Dark Zone is fun but can't carry the entire game on its own. The story missions and dailys are fun too but get monotonous after 2-3 playthroughs.

The loot/crafting and progression system is completely broken post-level 30. The entire point of the endgame is to grind to get high-end gear, but the drops are so rare and random that it's almost impossible to get what you want. Even then, most of the "high-end" gear post-level 30 isn't that much better than the superior and specialized gear you get around level 26-29. It's just not worth grinding for. And don't even get me started on the whole 3 different currency thing. That just makes the problems worse.

It sounds like they are going to fix most of these problems in the 1.1 patch/update next week, so we'll see where it goes from there. Right now it's kind of a mess.

This game was super boring. I was really impressed by the graphics and I loved the weapons in the game. That's about it. I think it was when I got to the metaphysical well-to-poetically-wax mission provider in Autumn's Hope that I realized how done I was with the game. It was a constant chore of running around the map to go kill guys, or go tag boxes, or go kill more guys, or running around and looking for shit to hack. I mean holy shit this game isn't a platformer and it gives you some confusing terrain to navigate and I was donezo.

I think I got to level 18. I heard they were making it even more grindy and I just couldn't do it anymore. It felt like another Destiny to me, except there was some immediacy to Destiny. You could just go to PVP from the menu, you could go do things in the world, go do missions. I personally still hate Destiny, but there was a certain charm to it thanks to the setting. Also you could ride vehicles which made navigation less tedious. In a session a few hours before I quit playing The Division, I was thinking "Why the hell can't I at least have a bike? This is so inefficient!" and right next to me was a bike stand with about 30 bikes on it. Also, that's not even mentioning all of the cars that are still running with their doors open. Some streets have a good distance of free space, I can't even drive through the open areas?

There was just too much contention with The Division for me to really get into it. Also running around and collecting shit is boring. I'm so tired of collecting shit in Ubisoft games because it's only there to pad your play time and does not actually give you anything.

@thatdudeguy: Especially regarding PvP, build synergy is incredibly important. The power curve at 30 is huge between having all ilevel 30 Superior gear, even if it is synergized well, and a well crafted iLevel 31 build. Add to that some of the crazy builds people have developed and you might see players that are near unkillable by 99% of other level 30 players. One such build I've seen are players running around 170K DPS SMG, 85K Health, and 10K Skill Power with 65% (the cap at 4640 Armor) weapon mitigation with 30+% Exotic Mitigation (explosive non weapon damage) and running high resistance to Fire and Shock. This particular build I've seen many PvPers use takes a 200K DPS player at least 6 seconds of headshots to down, which in Division PvP is a really long time. Conversely they will probably down 90% of other players in 1.5-2 seconds. I've seen solo guys with this build routinely take down groups of 4 pretty easily.

In my own personal experience the same goes for a somewhat decently crafted build at iLevel 31 for Challenge Mode activities. I got completely destroyed by 31 enemies after I hit 30 with all 30 Superiors and now I solo 32 areas of the DZ pretty easily and can usually run Challenge Mode with Randoms even if they are newly 30. I run Robust on my Chest with Smart Cover Heal and Support Station that blocks all Damage Elements in CM's. If the team is having real issues I just switch to Cadecus so I can have skills always up and keep popping Survivor Link. I think Tech build like this will be incredibly useful in the Incursion. I can just sit in cover all day without taking damage. It's almost as much damage mitigation as having Survivor Link up when I'm in Cover firing. But either having maxed Mitigation at 65% (mine is only 45% normally) or running Robust on your Chest is key for that to work. With the new update I will probably try to drop my Skill and go more DPS and Health focused with a better Primary and hit the 65% cap and explore that Exotic Mitigation stat more, as that seem incredibly useful.

Long story short, build synergy actually matters quite a bit in the End Game of The Division. It literally can make you go from death in less than a second to surviving 5+ seconds while taking constant damage from high level enemies.

A guy I saw on Reddit has basically perfect stats named Tomnician. 197K DPS MP5, 95K Health, and 14K Skill and 64.5% mitigation. Those guys he fought in that video were highly geared as well.

@hestilllives19: Ye, some of the theorycrafting is getting a bit interesting. Builds coming up that make the original Midas look not that far off normal, offering 100% uptime/instant refresh on abilities with very high regen.

The reason I eventually moved from an AR to SMG (when things get too personal for a DMR or I just need to burn something down) wasn't the dps boost from the crit component but because I ended up with a decent enough SMG with crit regen (onto which I affix crit mods to push towards the 60% non-buffed cap). Armour to 65% cap, ok immunity: see a large health/armour pool and the survival strat is to unload into the chest/head area until the gun is completely empty. That's the most consistent way I've found to stay up - lots of orange numbers.

Meh, I like crafting. Also , 90% of the players wouldn't know a good item from a bad one so most people opinions of drops needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Some medium-high level gear has shockingly helpful statistics, and some ultra-high gear has some shocking average stats. I'll give you that farming and stat comparison can be tedious for some people, but for some people that is what they like.

I will admit that when you dump 22 High End Fabric into something and ist turns out to be shit that si no fun, because it converts to 1 High End Fabric if you need to start over. I think anything the PLAYER crafts should have a 1 hr window for deconstructing into HALF the elements you put into it. Thus, a holster that took 22 High End Fabric and 8 High End Electronics, can be recycled into 11 High End Fabric and 4 High End Electronics with in an hour of making it. After that hour tough luck...