‘Tom Clancy’s The Division’ Reddit Patch Notes: SMG Criticals Are Back On 1.6
Tom Clancy’s The Division’s PTS servers are still chugging along, and now the fourth and final installment brings back critical hit chances for the acclaimed SMG weapons. Back in the day, these were the primary focus for Division players as they sought out optimal damage potential during their gameplay experience.
Other updates were also included per the notes distributed via Massive and posted on Reddit. Some players were excited; others not so much. Apparently, some Division players were bothered by the fact that their seeker mines barely made a dent in their opponents while others were all for seekers not dealing so much damage. The latter were probably on the tail end of those mines in the previous PTS version.
Some more pics from #PAXsouth2017 photoshoot! HIJACK! #TheDivision @Roxas_Studios @yannickbch @hamishbode @mattshotcha @gabeelikes pic.twitter.com/UtBp6s6tTs
— Splintershield is writing (@Splintrshield) February 7, 2017
From the looks of it, this includes both PvP and PvE environments as solo players felt they got shafted. Some have claimed their skill haste stats were taken down a few pegs with the cool down seconds increased.
“Yes but skill power users are totally shafted to ‘Servant’ status. Kind of lame if you are doing missions on your own.”
Is this what they mean by normalization?
Last Stand Changes
In this mode of The Division, normalization delivered by Massive in their new PTS 4 patch notes told of a “fully scaled min-maxed 256 build.” So instead of customizing your build to your specific advantage, it’s now geared more to your play style.
Normalization now rolls the max Gear Score 256 stat for the following.
- Your Gear major/minor bonuses
- Gear Mods
- Performance Mods
- Weapon Mods
- Major stats
- Weapon damage
- Weapon attributes
Fortifications More Lethal
In Tom Clancy’s The Division final PTS patch, fortifications in The Last Stand mode are deadlier. This means you must be able to play smarter as opposed to the opposition using heals and tanking against a turret at a check point. This means enemies will have to emphasize tactics against heavily fortified turrets this time.
Damage for these was increased by 40 percent, and their health bar was decreased by 25 percent. That said, this makes fighting against the turret more balanced, yet challenging.
Other changes in The Division’s Last Stand mode include joining a game already in progress, and the mercy rule now activates with more aggression with an increase of eight minutes to 10. There is also an increased threshold for personal scores with a player always gaining a win stash if his/her team wins no matter what their score is.
“The Last Stand score thresholds are now 3,000 for 1 cache, 6,000 for 2 caches and 15,000 for three caches.”
SMG Weapon Criticals Are Back
There is a ton that can be said about critical hit chance coming back to the SMGs. Back in the days of 1.3 and earlier, these bad boys worked well in combination with certain green gear set builds like that of Firecrest and Sentry’s Call. Also, critical damage was much easier to attain than it is currently. Rates of fire were phenomenal back in the day.
Now with The Division PTS version four, this will bring the SMGs up to the same level as, for instance, the assault guns. YouTuber Like Butter feels that maybe these SMGs will be slightly underpowered compared to the competitive assault rifles, but he took a more wait-and-see attitude towards it.
Although Massive was considering taking them out of the game altogether, they had realized that fans of this weapon had been so popular that they decided to keep them anyways. Like Butter ascribed them to their remarkable ability to focus on damage potential at close range. This could prove to be rather useful in PvP mode in either the Dark Zone and/or The Last Stand mode.
What do you think? Do you think Massive keeping the SMGs and bringing back their critical hit chance with a 22 percent cap was a good idea?
[Featured Image by Ubisoft]
