Division 2 Warlords of New York thoughts and reviews

MaddMann

A nerd that found his place
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Jan 17, 2020
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Hey Folks,
It's been a few days since the new expansion released and I would love to hear your thoughts on the current state of the game, some thinks that you think are great, some things you think are terrible. My TL:DR Review will be at the bottom. Please, NO SPOILERS for the folks who have not played.

First off, I was rather disappointed with how short it was. I logged in with a clan member about 10 minutes after it went live, we sat and played it for 5 hours, cleared every mission, and hit level 40. I was rather amazed to see how quickly this went. I enjoyed it, it was great to see some "new" places, and the armor 2.0 system gave me a reason to toss everything I had worked on gathering for the last year into the trash. The last part there is bittersweet. I will be honest in the fact that though I put in almost 300 hours playing Div 2 year 1, I never understood the meta. I never made any kind of build that I didn't find online. Armor 2.0 is very very simple, maybe too simple. Where you used to really have to try and crunch numbers to determine dps by looking at several aspects. Fire rate, crit chance, crit damage, abilities, and status effects. Now, you look at the big number and maybe try and do some guesswork about crit chance.
So, comparing my tech build before Warlords, to my tech build AFTER warlord, I feel about the same power level as I did when I finished the story on year 1. While I understand Ubi and Massive wanting to try and level the field for all the new players by raising the level cap to 40, they also made all the work folks in the 1st year completely pointless. There are exotic weapons that now have to be re-farmed (which really hurts for guns like the Eagle Bearer that you can only try for once a week and Nemesis which takes the invasions to be in the right places). Now, playing devil's advocate and having been an avid WoW player, I can also see why this would happen, just as it does in other MMO's, when the levels go up, new items appear.
Something I REALLY REALLY hope gets fixed. Difficulty balance seems to be pretty far off, or they changed it to this purposely and didn't say anything. Before Warlords, doing anything on any less than the highest world tier or Challenging difficulty, was a waste of time. Now, well it's bad. For example, I used to be able to solo a tier 4 stronghold in about 10-15 minutes with some difficulty, but manageable and fun. Now, it is nearly impossible. Enemies went from having around 1 mil health, to having somewhere near 300 billion health. 1 enemy used to take about 1-2 magazines to kill if you didn't get many headshots. Now, it is not uncommon to run out of ammo on all your guns trying to take down 1 named enemy. To add to that, my current build has 1.2 million armor, which lasts about 5 or 6 shots from gold tier enemies on challenging difficulty. In other words, solo play is no longer possible unless you play on Hard or Normal, which would be better described as Easy and Normal.

TL:DR Warlords lets you go back to New York, where you get to see some familiar places, but they have been entirely overhauled. The new campaign is very short, but with the new season mechanic (Which is EXACTLY the same as Destiny 2) it should provide additional content to keep you coming back. Downside is endgame is now brutally hard, so plan on a single Challenging mission to take around an hour or more to complete vs the 15-20 minutes we were accustomed to.

So, tell me what you think of the game. Found any awesome gear you want to share? What makes you want to come back?
 
Jan 14, 2020
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And they want 40€ for that. That is pretty close to what is a full price game these days.

I put around 150h in because I had a couple of friends who played it and the game just lacked a real endgame and other interesting stuff. Dont worry if you never got "the meta" because there was barely one. You could make working builds, but the way the armor and weapon system worked was very bad. It was very hard, time consuming and random to find gear with the right combination of perks to make something work.

Not that Division 1 was a super deep in the sense of having a soul, but Division 2 feels like it has even less. The entire game world looks very bland to me and cant compete with the dead New York in winter scenario. Just the fact that it was winter with snow and fog gave the game much better lighting and this is completely gone in Division 2. Division 1 also had at least some environmental storytelling going on and that is also msotly gone in 2.

Division 2 has also not really learned from the mistakes 1 made and the biggest mistake is the endgame and the loot connected to it. A loot-shooter should respect the time people put into it, especially when it comes to endgame activities. This is still not the case and you get lackluster rewards for it. Neither in items and definitely not in regard of story, lore or something like that. That is no big surprise since Ubisoft are extreme cowards when it comes to the world building and stories in their open world games.

No thanks.