After announcing Warlords of New York, the first paid expansion for The Division 2, Ubisoft Massive hosted a special State of the Game to reveal some more details on the next title update. First up is the SHD System which will be replacing the Field Proficiency Cache system. The gameplay trailer for the expansion promised “infinite progression” and that’s what the new system offers.
Essentially players will get to increase stats in four categories – Offensive (headshot damage, critical hit chance etc), Defense (hazard protection, armor, health and explosive resistance), Utility (skill damage, skill haste, skill repair and skill duration) and Handling (reload speed, ammo capacity, accuracy and stability). Scavenging allows for going after certain materials and resources like currency. Each time you level up, you upgrade a stat and choose a Scavenging reward.
Legendary difficulty is also making a comeback, premiering in the first three Strongholds. The difficulty will scale with the size of one’s group and much like the first game, enemies will be a lot smarter. Some of them will even have upgrades, like the Black Tusk Heavy sporting a Wasp Hive instead of a Healing Hive. Directives are also returning and allow for selecting different modifiers to increase the difficulty of missions and the Dark Zone for XP.
Players can also set the Global Difficulty and ensure that everything is made tougher with Directives. Unfortunately, it seems that the 1000 capacity Stash that players spotted in previous videos was just a dev build and stash space is not increasing after all.
The Division 2: Warlords of New York releases on March 3rd for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Title Update 8 will arrive on the same day, free for all players.