‘Tom Clancy’s The Division’ 1.4 Update: Armor System Broken? Review Of Optimized Gear Sets And Weapons For Efficient Gameplay

With Tom Clancy’s The Divison 1.4 update out for a little more than a week, gamers are trying to figure out how to adapt to the new patch to more efficiently operate their agents. There had been some changes made between the 1.3 update to the current one and gamers have developed builds to have a rather effective character. YouTuber Upper Echelon Gamers gave his recommendation on how to adapt your builds for survival purposes.

Updated God Rolls For Weapons Talents

The god roll preference in The Division has changed because in patch 1.3, the Brutal, Deadly, and Responsive talents were the more sought after talents for a weapons crafting roll. In update 1.4, Responsive, Unforgiving and Competent are now most recommended. There are alternative god roll combinations like Viscous, Deadly, Brutal, and Fierce that offer up a composite mix of deadly talent mixes, too.

Optimizing For Armor Mitigation

Now that the Tom Clancy game has four world tiers, armor mitigation percentages have changed per tier. The cap used to be 75 percent in The Division 1.3 patch and now it’s 70 percent. However, the higher the world tiers you go, the harder it is to reach that cap. This means attempting to achieve more armor points.

A decent happy medium for a Division agent is to achieve around 55 percent armor mitigation for PvP. The recommended gear set pieces to roll for armor would be the chest piece, back pack, knee pads, and holster. You can pump that number up a little bit more by acquiring mods attachments that have armor points on them.

This would allow your agent to survive better when a deadly blast from a shotgun or sniper rifle winds up coming your way.

Massive did this deliberately to allow us to rethink our strategies in gear management to adapt to higher level world tiers. You may even have to wipe the slate clean when moving from one tier to the next as you rethink what armor combination would work for you as you move up in The Division.

Best To Mix High-End Gear With The Named Sets

Tom Clancy’s The Division still has its gold gear pieces and now have the same 229 gear score that green set pieces do. In 1.4 if all your gear are just set pieces, they usually won’t be as effective as you incorporating your high-end gear along with your sets. Apparently, the talents that come with these high-ends add extreme value to your build.

For instance, a high-end tactical vest that has the Vigorous talent would grant overheals to all healing skills. As a result, this would fare much better than a green gear set piece without that talent. Also, there are the tactical gloves with the Savage talent for increased critical hit chance and also the Spec-Ops back pack that has Specialized as a talent as it takes 200 percent from your firearms and stamina and adds it to your skill power in The Division.

Armor System Broken?

Although the aforementioned tips above do help to make the best of The Division’s new 1.4 patch, YouTuber Macro Style thinks otherwise as it’s almost near impossible to get close to the level cap in world tier four. This can be seriously challenging for the player.

It seems that the four chosen armor pieces take away from rolls dedicated to other traits that a Division player could roll for. Basically, since most players typically prioritize their builds starting with their armor mitigation, he/she would have to roll for armor everywhere it’s possible. This would take away from rolling for any other trait you could receive for that piece that would be helpful.

So you would be giving up a ton for the sake of optimized armor. This would leave the player floundering for leftovers that they may think would be helpful to them. Of course, you don’t have to roll for armor on just about everything, but players may find themselves floundering, for instance, rolling for a “Major Attribute” that winds up being “Protection from Elites.”

According to the math put together by Macro Style, the toughness numbers wind up being lower against the elite NPCs. So you’d be shooting yourself in the foot by taking on this “Major Attribute.”

This begs the question that if someone sacrifices their armor for something else, would the latter put The Division player at an even further disadvantage?

Should another test server for Tom Clancy’s The Division be needed for a 1.5 patch, will this armor mitigation issue be addressed?

[Featured Image by Christian Petersen/Getty Images]