Starting today, those who purchased The Division 2's Year One Pass have access to the first episode of its DLC saga, DC: Outskirts. It comes with a host of new additions that include two story missions, and a new activity called "Expeditions" that sees players go on, well, expeditions.
Longtime players will likely be psyched about a new matchmaking function being added for the infamously difficult 8-person raid, Operation Dark Hours. The raid was previously restricted to players who could muster a small militia via their own player networks, which incidentally excluded a lot of players who did not have that many personal friends or acquaintances. Fortunately, the new "discovery" mode provides a slightly leaner difficulty so players can experience the raid with match-made teammates.
In addition to new content and a new-found accessibility to older content, the DLC's Title 5 Update is reworking the game's Skills Performance. In an extensive blog post, the developers shared the thought-process that would eventually lead them to this rehaul:
We took a hard look at the current meta. The builds that are fun, effective and popular. We knew that skill builds, while it being something people want to play with, was nowhere near competitive. We knew there was an explosives damage build that was on the fringe of popularity, but none that actually relied on really good skill mods driven by skill power. We analyzed the best damage builds and survivability builds out there and looked at their efficiency - how fast they kill, how fast they can clear content, how fast they can take down enemies - and mapped that to our skills. How much more power do skills need to get from 3K skill power (our current maximum requirement on skill power mods) to compensate for all the damage bonuses the player is "giving up" on gear to reach that skill power? Then we looked at each skill and what it should be good at (burst, sustain, single target damage, survivability etc) and went to work tuning the mods to make a skill build approach the efficiency of a "red" damage build or a "blue" tank build. To that effect, here are the current changes to skill mods power levels, and in some cases base numbers, on skills.
The full list of changes can be found on the The Division 2's Episode 1 Patch Notes
As for everyone else, Episode 1: D.C. Outskirts: Expeditions will be available on July 30th.
