The Division’s 1.6 Update In Full Detail

The Divi­sion has had its ups and downs, and it seems they are still attempt­ing to get their game under con­trol. A large por­tion of this update has to do with the Dark Zone, which is not sur­pris­ing, con­sid­er­ing the next expan­sion involves a DZ aspect. It seems they are going to address some very annoy­ing prob­lems in this major update, which Ubisoft has described as “the largest update for The Divi­sion to date.”

This update will be released the same day as the Last Stand expan­sion. You can read more about what that has to offer (which is quite a bit) in this arti­cle.

The Dark Zone

First off, this update will be open­ing the north­ern parts of the the Dark Zone (DZ). Zones 7, 8, and 9 will now be avail­able. Accord­ing to the dev team, there are some sur­pris­es for play­ers com­ing to these new areas, they did not give any addi­tion­al detail. Also, with ver­ti­cal spaces, rooftop areas, and under­ground pass­es, the­ses zones are almost dou­ble the cur­rent DZ. 

As usu­al, these areas are filled with roam­ing NPC’s and Land­marks which get more chal­leng­ing the fur­ther north you go. DZ 7 is locat­ed just north of DZ 6, with 8 and 9 spread­ing out to the east, plac­ing them both north of Mid­town East dis­trict. Loot is going to be of the high­est cal­iber in these DZ’s, but it is not for the weak, so be prepared.

The new Land­marks have mul­ti­ple waves of ene­mies after the first ini­tial NPC spawn. Clear­ing Land­marks will now award you with addi­tion­al loot that is auto­mat­i­cal­ly placed in your inven­to­ry. No need to extract it. 

They are not increas­ing the amount of play­ers present in each DZ instance. This means they are hop­ing play­ers will be more spread out, giv­ing each play­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for more PvE bat­tles. With the increase of space, Ubisoft did make it pos­si­ble to fast trav­el between check­points in the DZ.

Below is a quick bul­letin sum­ma­ry of changes to the DZ:

• The Dark Zone has been expand­ed with three new areas, Dark Zone 7–9, north of Dark Zone 6 and Mid­town East.
• New Land­marks fea­ture waves of enemies.
• Land­marks award you with addi­tion­al loot placed direct­ly into your inventory.
• Fast trav­el between Dark Zone check­points has become available.

Con­tain­ment Events

A new event is also hit­ting the DZ, named Con­t­a­m­i­na­tion events. About every hour, Clean­ers in the Dark Zone will appear in under­ground loca­tions, and you need to stop them (of course). Be care­ful though. These areas are so con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed your virus fil­ter will not be enough to keep you from being affect­ed. Move fast and watch your health while ven­tur­ing into these under­ground passageways. 

Dark Zone Leaderboards 

Leader­boards are final­ly being added to the DZ. This allows you to com­pare your stats with oth­er play­ers across a vari­ety of activ­i­ties on a week­ly and month­ly basis. The stats are divid­ed into PvP and PvE.

PvP Stats:

• Rouges killed
• Man­hunts survived
• Extrac­tions hijacked

PvE Stats:

• NPC’s killed
• Locked chests looted
• Items extract­ed

All tracked activ­i­ties will be turned into a total score, divid­ed into three tiers, and the high­er you are in the com­pared to your fel­low DZ play­ers the bet­ter rewards you will earn when the leader­boards will reset. Why the hell they would reset them I have no idea. 

Leg­endary Difficulty

Ubisoft want­ed to give their hard­core play­ers more of a chal­lenge, so they con­coct­ed leg­endary dif­fi­cul­ty. They imple­ment­ed in on three mis­sion — Times Square, War­ren­Gate Pow­er­plant, and Napalm Pro­duc­tion Site. The dev team stat­ed, “This mode is sup­posed to be the most chal­leng­ing mode in the game, even more so than Hero­ic Incur­sions, and is real­ly going to test your build, your tac­tics and your group synergy.”

The ene­mies will not be the same in this new mode. All ene­mies have been replaced with smarter, much more pow­er­ful LMB that use advanced tac­tics against your team. They will react accord­ing to what skills and sta­tus affects you use, are going to be extreme­ly hard to hit because they keep their heads down under fire. They will always flank you and you real­ly don’t want to get into a melee encounter with them. That will spell death for you. It’s sim­i­lar to fight­ing a Hunter from the Sur­vival mode, only every sin­gle one of them is a Hunter.

There will also be named ene­mies through­out thrown into the mix through­out the mis­sions. They have their own behav­iors, roles and skills. You will be fac­ing a mix of nor­mal, vet­er­an, and elite ene­mies. Leg­endary does scale to the amount of play­ers present, sim­i­lar to Chal­lenge mode, but is sup­posed to be for more orga­nized groups of players.

Leg­endary dif­fi­cul­ty also comes with its own set of van­i­ty items that you can’t get any­where else, along with tons of reward loot for your hero­ic effort. Ubisoft plans on bring­ing this dif­fi­cul­ty to oth­er mis­sions in the future.

Exot­ic Items and New Gear Set 

Named weapons and gear now have their very own type, called Exotics. You will be able to tell them apart, in your inven­to­ry and when they drop from ene­mies, from the High End gear. Each of the items has also received a fla­vor and lore text as part of its description.

Each Exot­ic weapon has its own unique tal­ent, if it did­n’t have one already. The dev team gave a few examples: 

“The Hun­gry Hog, for exam­ple, will now come with the Glut­ton tal­ent (“Killing a tar­get increas­es your dam­age dealt by 20% until you stop fir­ing”) while the Tene­brae will have Lights Out (“Destroy­ing an ene­my weak point resets skill cooldowns for you and near­by group members”).”

These tal­ents do not work along­side the Alphabridge 4‑piece bonus set. This update is also intro­duc­ing Exto­ic weapon sets where you need to have two spe­cif­ic Exot­ic weapons to unlock their talent. 

Exot­ic Caches, which guar­an­tee an exot­ic item, will be avail­able as a week­ly reward from leg­endary missions.

Gear Set Changes

There is a new Gear Set com­ing with Update 1.6, called SEEKR. This sets spe­cial­i­ty is body shots. Its 4‑piece bonus will guar­an­tee a crit­i­cal hit after two con­sec­u­tive body shots (which can spread out between mul­ti­ple enemies).

Here are the oth­er changes to the cur­rent Gear Sets:

• Alphabridge 4‑piece bonus now shares the free tal­ent from your weapons instead of all three.
• Frontline’s 4‑piece no longer removes the crit­i­cal hit chance, instead it removes the effect of any mods you have applied to the shield.
• The Reclaimer set focus­es on the Sup­port Sta­tion. Its 4‑piece bonus acti­vates all Sup­port Sta­tion mods simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. It no longer has an effect on consumables.
• Tactician’s Authority’s buff only dis­ap­pears after you use a skill.

Armor and Resistances

Armor has always been one of those “go to” in The Divi­sion. You rolled for it if you could, it was­n’t fun and Ubisoft acknowl­edged this, com­plete­ly chang­ing the way Armor works. 

Instead, gear items will come with a base armor as usu­al, but Armor will now be removed as a major bonus, being replaced with health. Health and sta­mi­na will now be the new metas, tak­ing Armor out as a major fac­tor in the game. How­ev­er, this is going to impact heal­ing, skills, Skill Pow­er, and dam­age. So pret­ty much everything.

This now means play­ers who have invest­ed in Skill Pow­er have an increased advan­tage, espe­cial­ly when using a skill like the First Aid Kit. For exam­ple: with the new meta, since a play­er has so much health instead of Armor it makes it you will not be able to fill your health bars to full when you use the First Aid Kit if you have no points into Skill Pow­er (Elec­tron­ics). This also goes for all oth­er skills, like the Sticky Bomb, and Seek­er Mine.

They also changed the way resis­tances to sta­tus effects work. Now resis­tances are ana­logue instead of bina­ry, which means that they low­er the effect of the sta­tus effect by its per­cent­age instead of just can­celling it out – 40% burn resist means 40% less burn dam­age and dura­tion, for exam­ple. If you do man­age to build up a 100% resist to a spe­cif­ic sta­tus effect, it will no longer have an effect on you and any­one try­ing to apply it to you will see a “Resist­ed” mes­sage in the scrolling com­bat text.

Also, when­ev­er a sta­tus effect is applied to you, you will build up a cer­tain amount of tem­po­rary resis­tance to it for a short while.

Sum­ma­ry:

• Armor has been removed as a major bonus and replaced with Health. Gear still comes with base armor and some tal­ents will still give bonus armor.
• Health and sta­mi­na are your pri­ma­ry means of toughness.
• Cur­rent Health rolls have been turned into the new stat Resist All.
• Resis­tances have become ana­logue instead of binary.
• Dimin­ish­ing returns have been added to sta­tus effects.
• Oth­er parts of the game have been rebal­anced as a result, to make sure Time to Kill and Time to be Killed stay balanced.
• All changes are retroactive.

Changes to Skill Pow­ers and Skills

Sticky Bomb

• delayed det­o­na­tion with a red area warn­ing and beep­ing sound before it explodes 
  • Flash­bang — no longer cause the Dis­rupt sta­tus effect

First Aid

• giv­en a longer cooldown 
  • First Aid Defib­ril­la­tor — will now heal in two steps; one ini­tial burst fol­lowed by a heal over time

Shock Tur­ret

• will no longer do any dam­age on its own

Sig­na­ture Skills are also going to be tweaked. Immu­ni­ty after using a Sig­na­ture skill has been increased to 60 sec­onds, but you are now pre­vent­ed from being able to trig­ger the same skill when you already have the immu­ni­ty debuff from anoth­er player’s skill. Skill has will have an effect on Sig­na­ture Skills as well as reg­u­lar skills and Tac­ti­cal Link will give you less weapon sta­bil­i­ty then it does cur­rent­ly. This is so it can be coun­tered by Sur­vivor Link. 

Sum­ma­ry of Changes:

• Skill Pow­er has been moved to a sys­tem sim­i­lar to armor, where each new World Tier you reach will demand more Skill Pow­er to reach the same effec­tive­ness of your skills.
• There’s a big­ger dif­fer­ence in skill effi­cien­cy between low and high Skill Pow­er builds.
• Changes have been made to Sticky Bomb, First Aid and Shock Turret.
• We’ve rebal­anced Sig­na­ture Skills and made it impos­si­ble to trig­ger a Sig­na­ture Skill when you’re already suf­fer­ing from its immu­ni­ty debuff. Tac­ti­cal link’s dam­age bonus has been low­ered in PvP.

PvP Bal­anc­ing

• Hip fire sta­bil­i­ty while mov­ing has been decreased and a new hip fire cam­era has been added.
• The dam­age gap between body dam­age and head­shots has been lowered.
• When com­bat rolling, there’s now a one sec­ond delay before you can roll again.
• You can no longer reload your weapon while sprinting.
• Med­kits can now be used at full health and remove cer­tain sta­tus effects.
• The Reju­ve­nat­ed tal­ent has been changed to give addi­tion­al resis­tance to sta­tus effects.
• Adren­a­line no longer gives an over­heal from med­kits, instead it will give a heal over time.
• Your enemy’s health bar will flash when­ev­er they use a medkit.
• Sur­viv­abil­i­ty tal­ents like On the Move, Bat­tle Bud­dy and Crit­i­cal Save have seen some bal­anc­ing changes.

Econ­o­my Changes 

Guess what!! Unlim­it­ed freak­ing recal­i­bra­tions is final­ly here! You can now recal­i­brate an item an infi­nite amount of times, but it will get more expen­sive each time, until it caps out after five recal­i­bra­tions. It is still only one stat per item. 

Sum­ma­ry:

• Unlim­it­ed recal­i­bra­tion has been intro­duced. The price increas­es each time, cap­ping out at five recalibrations.
• Help­ing civil­ians reward Intel.
• High End pis­tols in Sur­vival no longer costs Divi­sion Tech.
• Scav­enger Box now scales with World Tier.
• Some item prices have been tweaked.

The In-Game Store

There will be a new cur­ren­cy com­ing in Update 1.6, called Pre­mi­um Cred­its. You can read more about that here. You can use these cred­its to buy a range of new items from the spe­cial ven­dor includ­ing — emotes, weapon skins, and plen­ty of oth­er van­i­ty items. Check out a cou­ple of those below:

Oth­er Changes

• All activ­i­ties now reward their own sep­a­rate expe­ri­ence points and award their own caches.
• In Sur­vival, solo play­ers can no longer end up in games with play­ers queu­ing as a group.
• Group­ing up while in a PvP Sur­vival game has been disabled.
• Reviv­ing a downed play­er in Sur­vival always costs a medkit.

That’s it folks. There is still no word on a spe­cif­ic release date for the Last Stand expan­sion, which is bring­ing this mas­sive update. We will keep you post­ed, there could be more on the way.