I thought I would talk a bit about my varied experiences with The Division of late. I wrote the other day about some of the difficulties I had and frustrations that it was not easy to swap gear around to fix those problems. That said I decided to start trying to incrementally improve my lot in life. I sifted through my bag and my wallet and decided that I had enough components to be able to craft a single item… which luckily rolled with stamina on it. After that I found that the base vendor also had an item I could afford that added stamina to a slot I had none in. The above image is the original state of my character before swapping anything around. Notice how heavily I am apparently leaning into electronics… more than likely because that is just what I was able to get through drops.
This image is after that first swap of two items… gloves and mask. Firepower and Electronics obviously took a hit but my stamina went up significantly. This was enough of a change to make the game feel completely different for me. No longer was it feeling like a single shot was taking an entire pip of health off and I did not really notice that much of a difference in my ability to kill things. This little act alone was enough to revitalize the game for me, which makes me question… should stats make that much of a difference in the way the game feels? It basically took something that felt horrible every single time I attempted to play it over the last year… into something that feels pretty good. Sure I still feel squishy if I get caught in the open but so long as I stick to cover I can hold my ground, which is absolutely not something I could do before without swapping out those two items.
After a few more gear and mod drops this is where I am sitting today and the game feels pretty great. I played some last night, but eventually sleep claimed me. I did however managed to knock out a few lengthy side quests including one that had like five phases two it and involved taking down two yellow mobs. Now I am not entirely certain the yellow mobs were connected to the particular quest… but I took then down nonetheless in the progress of doing it. I also seem to have completed some Division Shields mission that rewarded me three pieces of endgame gear that will sit there and wait for me to hit 30. I am just shy of dinging 28 so I sorta can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had a lot of fun playing last night and it just seems weird that two item swaps could make all that difference.
I still have a significant number of quests to knock out in the world and there is at least two areas of the map that I have never even been to. I seem to be getting back into the swing of things and enjoying my time. It is funny how E3 works because it often has these side effects of making me interested in games that I dropped along the wayside somewhere. The coverage of The Division 2 gave me the drive to give the original another shot. Based on some twitter discussion that happened yesterday while I was completely swamped… it seems like there are a handful of other people still playing as well. I still have yet to fully catch up from the threads that went nuts while I was sitting in meetings all day. If you are playing Division however… friend BelghastStern my UPlay handle. I still don’t fully know what I am doing but I am dying a hell of a lot less.