Changes to The Division 2 (and not for good)
Dear devs at Ubi/Massive
Today I spent around 3-4 hours playing The Division 2 after the big update. Just the regular D2 stuff, I didn't buy the expansion yet. I'm ok with all the changes in gear, I already knew all my cool builds would be gone. So I made some adjustments with the gear I have (and I have a LOT of stuff) and off to the world I went.
But what I found out made me so frustrated I felt the need to stop playing to address some issues (aka ranting).
Players are back to being made out of glass. The amount of armor/health you have is irrelevant, if an enemy manages to flank you, you are DEAD in less than a second.
Enemies (including the regular red life ones) are spongier than ever. During the Saint fight in Grand Washington Hotel, I had to go back to restock TWICE. And it was on HARD!! Such a thing had never happened before. Well, GWH has a pretty useful restocking chest at the entrance of the scenario, but I'm pretty concerned with other missions: I believe some don't even have a restocking chest available.
And the elites: we're back to the time where you need to hit an elite around 25-30 times with a high damage rifle to kill them. That's not only beyond unrealistic, it's incredibly NOT FUN. Elite Medics now run towards you, kneel right in front of you, heal their fallen companion back to full, stand up and shoot you (taking away ALL of your armor and 75% of your health in a single shot) all while you repeatedly shoot them in the face with a rifle. Hadn't we stablished very clearly that this type of behavior isn't acceptable? Shouldn't enemies run for cover when shot at? Shouldn't they be staggered a bit with all the shooting, at least enough to prevent them from healing a fallen companion?
Also back are the times where shotguns damage you like they've been shot at point blank, when they are being shot at a marksman rifle's distance with about the same precision. Fun times (not!).
But the most ridiculous situation was when I was attacking a control point and an enemy kept shooting the minigun for over two minutes without pause. I even thought the overheat mechanic was removed, but when I tried the VERY SAME minigun later, it was overheating as usual. So now NPCs are breaking environmental rules? I even captured some of that in video because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
And last but not least: shouldn't getting gear over score of 500 make me STRONGER? Because I'm 510 at the moment and I feel WEAKER THAN EVER!!!