Oh. daesu
agent provocateur
For those who are interested, I'll post up Yannick's Last Stand preamble for the PTS week 2 release.
Figured 8t might be a better read separate from the patch notes.
...
Before beginning these patch notes, we want to take a moment to talk about the reasons behind the main changes coming with this new PTS build.
With the opening of Last Stand, we want to try something that has never been done with PvP in The Division: Normalization. The idea is to reduce the importance of gear building in PvP to leave more room for skilled gameplay. While a player with good and optimized gear will always have an edge, a less geared one should still have a fighting chance to ensure a fairer experience. Note that the Normalization formula listed below is a first version that we want to test on the PTS, and will probably evolve greatly before (if at all) implementation in Update 1.6.
The same goes for changes such as Body shot damage or reload while sprinting. We know that these can be controversial and have been heavily debated already, but we want to test these changes on the PTS and see how they impact your gameplay. This does not mean that they will be implemented in Update 1.6. It will all depend on the results of PTS testing, and your feedback on the resulting experience.
An important thing to note about Health and Armor changes, is that our intention is to move away from a meta where players could stack damage mitigation and face-tank enemies without having to worry about their positioning or using covers. We do want health and survivability to be a thing, but it should not mean that you can run straight to the enemy in the open and not be punished for it. Above all, good survivability should come in conjunction with the ability of positioning and using the environment.
Finally, you will notice that we went as far as having a complete pass on Gear bonuses in this PTS. The purpose is to try to offer more valuable choices for you to pick from when min-maxing your build, and removing the bonuses that were always disregarded as useless. The end goal with these bonuses changes together with the Health and Skill Power changes is to make specializing into different builds more valuable, and make sure that you always have interesting options to push gear optimization one step further no matter if you’re going for DPS, tank, support, or any other kind of gameplay style you are looking for.
Figured 8t might be a better read separate from the patch notes.
...
Before beginning these patch notes, we want to take a moment to talk about the reasons behind the main changes coming with this new PTS build.
With the opening of Last Stand, we want to try something that has never been done with PvP in The Division: Normalization. The idea is to reduce the importance of gear building in PvP to leave more room for skilled gameplay. While a player with good and optimized gear will always have an edge, a less geared one should still have a fighting chance to ensure a fairer experience. Note that the Normalization formula listed below is a first version that we want to test on the PTS, and will probably evolve greatly before (if at all) implementation in Update 1.6.
The same goes for changes such as Body shot damage or reload while sprinting. We know that these can be controversial and have been heavily debated already, but we want to test these changes on the PTS and see how they impact your gameplay. This does not mean that they will be implemented in Update 1.6. It will all depend on the results of PTS testing, and your feedback on the resulting experience.
An important thing to note about Health and Armor changes, is that our intention is to move away from a meta where players could stack damage mitigation and face-tank enemies without having to worry about their positioning or using covers. We do want health and survivability to be a thing, but it should not mean that you can run straight to the enemy in the open and not be punished for it. Above all, good survivability should come in conjunction with the ability of positioning and using the environment.
Finally, you will notice that we went as far as having a complete pass on Gear bonuses in this PTS. The purpose is to try to offer more valuable choices for you to pick from when min-maxing your build, and removing the bonuses that were always disregarded as useless. The end goal with these bonuses changes together with the Health and Skill Power changes is to make specializing into different builds more valuable, and make sure that you always have interesting options to push gear optimization one step further no matter if you’re going for DPS, tank, support, or any other kind of gameplay style you are looking for.
