zsozso1026
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/04/24/dying-incredibly-fast-in-the-division-the-worlds-dumbest-bug-may-be-to-blame/#787ef9da49ab
I vowed that I wasn’t going to write up every little bug that cropped up in The Division, because there are so many at this point, I’d never write about anything else. But this? This is something I couldn’t let pass without comment as it may explain a mysterious, core problem with the game that has been going on for a while.
It’s normal for games to get harder as time goes on, but in The Division, as you reach higher tiers of gear, it’s easy to feel like enemies start hitting like semi-trucks and all the armor and health in the world means nothing.
Now, players have figured out there may be a bug that’s a direct cause of this phenomenon. I’d say you won’t believe it, but given the state of the game the past few weeks, you very well just might.
This all started because a player was snooping through the game’s code and found something that seemed to indicate that either the “% Reduced Damage from Elites” stat was giving less damage reduction than it said, or perhaps, more disturbingly, that the formula is just flat-out reversed and it actually increases damage from elites instead.
That would be crazy, right?
Well, many players have gone on to try and test this in a number of ways, and the test that seems to be able to prove this definitively is taking a piece of gear with the stat, getting shot by an elite sniper (where damage is easy to see in a single shot), then going to re-roll that damage reduction stat out of the gear to see what happens, holding everything else equal.
Photo: Ubisoft
So far, the testing seems to indicate that yes, “Reduced Damage from Elites” is actually increasing the damage you take from elites, which is all yellow-bar enemies (ie. every enemy in “Challenging” difficulty) and named bosses who can melt you in an instant.
Anecdotally, this seems to explain a lot of issues that have cropped up in the game. For a while, the gap between hard mode missions and challenge mode missions has seemed incredibly wide, but if you’re running say, 20% Damage Reduction from Elites like me, suddenly you go from taking normal damage from most enemies to taking increased damage from every enemy. It may explain why say, last night, I lost an up-close gunfight in a challenge mission with an elite sniper using apistol who was able to burn me down before I finished emptying my clip into him.
It also explains why essentially there is no effective “tank build” in this game. Never mind the fact that the shield skill is bugged beyond belief, but if you’ve stacked 30% Damage Reduction from Elites, your 100K health and 65% armor aren’t going to matter given the potential massive damagebenefit you’ve given to all your enemies, if this stat truly is reversed.
I am a bit curious if this bug classifies other players as “elite enemies,” as I don’t think that’s been tested yet, but it could explain why fighting Rogues these days is a recipe to get burned to a crisp in a few shots.
Photo: Ubisoft
Some may say that 10-20% in this stat shouldn’t be making that much of a difference, as if you’re caught out of cover or hit with one or two sniper/shotgun shots you’ll drop all the same. But, if you have say, 20% in “Reduced Damage,” you may really be going from -20% to +20%, meaning the gap from where you should be to where you are means could be taking effectively 40% more damage than if it was working correctly. If this stat has really been bugged from the start, players don’t actually have any idea what playing with less elite damage actually feels like.
The Division has had bigger bugs than this, ones that actually break the game like wiping characters or glitching through walls or things like that, but there’s something about this one that feels just so inescapably sad. Like, this is a game that’s been in the works for years and years and a hugely important stat that changes the entire fabric of how the endgame plays is just….backwards? And it had to be the players who caught it by hunting through the code and setting up their own scientific studies to test it? Come on.
I would advise players who are currently complaining about spending so many precious materials crafting gear with this stat not to immediately scrap all their Damage from Elites armor despite the possible existence of this bug. This has gone from zero to a hundred very quickly, and though everyone is skeptical of Massive these days, hopefully it turns into a priority fix (honestly, it can’t be a hard one), and your tank build may indeed actually be a tank build once this is fixed. As I said, if you’ve stacked 30% in this stat, if it’s reversed, you could suddenly be taking up to 60% less damage than you were before. But in the meantime, yeah, I would probably not run with this stat equipped if you can avoid it.
This may be not be the biggest bug in The Division’s history, but it’s more significant than it looks, and it’s certainly one of the most facepalm-worthy that’s been discovered in the game so far. Hopefully it gets fixed soon, and players might want to start alpha testing other stat values to see what is or isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.
I vowed that I wasn’t going to write up every little bug that cropped up in The Division, because there are so many at this point, I’d never write about anything else. But this? This is something I couldn’t let pass without comment as it may explain a mysterious, core problem with the game that has been going on for a while.
It’s normal for games to get harder as time goes on, but in The Division, as you reach higher tiers of gear, it’s easy to feel like enemies start hitting like semi-trucks and all the armor and health in the world means nothing.
Now, players have figured out there may be a bug that’s a direct cause of this phenomenon. I’d say you won’t believe it, but given the state of the game the past few weeks, you very well just might.
This all started because a player was snooping through the game’s code and found something that seemed to indicate that either the “% Reduced Damage from Elites” stat was giving less damage reduction than it said, or perhaps, more disturbingly, that the formula is just flat-out reversed and it actually increases damage from elites instead.
That would be crazy, right?
Well, many players have gone on to try and test this in a number of ways, and the test that seems to be able to prove this definitively is taking a piece of gear with the stat, getting shot by an elite sniper (where damage is easy to see in a single shot), then going to re-roll that damage reduction stat out of the gear to see what happens, holding everything else equal.
Photo: Ubisoft
So far, the testing seems to indicate that yes, “Reduced Damage from Elites” is actually increasing the damage you take from elites, which is all yellow-bar enemies (ie. every enemy in “Challenging” difficulty) and named bosses who can melt you in an instant.
Anecdotally, this seems to explain a lot of issues that have cropped up in the game. For a while, the gap between hard mode missions and challenge mode missions has seemed incredibly wide, but if you’re running say, 20% Damage Reduction from Elites like me, suddenly you go from taking normal damage from most enemies to taking increased damage from every enemy. It may explain why say, last night, I lost an up-close gunfight in a challenge mission with an elite sniper using apistol who was able to burn me down before I finished emptying my clip into him.
It also explains why essentially there is no effective “tank build” in this game. Never mind the fact that the shield skill is bugged beyond belief, but if you’ve stacked 30% Damage Reduction from Elites, your 100K health and 65% armor aren’t going to matter given the potential massive damagebenefit you’ve given to all your enemies, if this stat truly is reversed.
I am a bit curious if this bug classifies other players as “elite enemies,” as I don’t think that’s been tested yet, but it could explain why fighting Rogues these days is a recipe to get burned to a crisp in a few shots.
Photo: Ubisoft
Some may say that 10-20% in this stat shouldn’t be making that much of a difference, as if you’re caught out of cover or hit with one or two sniper/shotgun shots you’ll drop all the same. But, if you have say, 20% in “Reduced Damage,” you may really be going from -20% to +20%, meaning the gap from where you should be to where you are means could be taking effectively 40% more damage than if it was working correctly. If this stat has really been bugged from the start, players don’t actually have any idea what playing with less elite damage actually feels like.
The Division has had bigger bugs than this, ones that actually break the game like wiping characters or glitching through walls or things like that, but there’s something about this one that feels just so inescapably sad. Like, this is a game that’s been in the works for years and years and a hugely important stat that changes the entire fabric of how the endgame plays is just….backwards? And it had to be the players who caught it by hunting through the code and setting up their own scientific studies to test it? Come on.
I would advise players who are currently complaining about spending so many precious materials crafting gear with this stat not to immediately scrap all their Damage from Elites armor despite the possible existence of this bug. This has gone from zero to a hundred very quickly, and though everyone is skeptical of Massive these days, hopefully it turns into a priority fix (honestly, it can’t be a hard one), and your tank build may indeed actually be a tank build once this is fixed. As I said, if you’ve stacked 30% in this stat, if it’s reversed, you could suddenly be taking up to 60% less damage than you were before. But in the meantime, yeah, I would probably not run with this stat equipped if you can avoid it.
This may be not be the biggest bug in The Division’s history, but it’s more significant than it looks, and it’s certainly one of the most facepalm-worthy that’s been discovered in the game so far. Hopefully it gets fixed soon, and players might want to start alpha testing other stat values to see what is or isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.
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