I've been gaming for...Oh I don't know, 35 years or so, and mostly RPG's or shooty shooty stuff, like COD or Battlefield, hence why I figured The Division 2 would be right up my alley. I'm one of the €3 bunch though, so I've only been playing for 3 weeks, meaning I got almost a week in before the expansion hit, and thus had a taste of the old build system. I have to say I find the newer system far more streamlined, though also really rather broken in terms of set items not functioning properly. I've also not moved beyond "Hard" difficulty in missions yet, either, mostly because I'm still finding my feet when it comes to putting a good build together.
The gear ceiling seems perfectly fine, though I do wish there was a SHD level equivalent for us non-DLC owners, as it feels like we're being left behind for no real reason. Surely the DLC is mostly about being able to go to NYC and kick Keeners arse, right? But they get all of that, plus level 40, plus SHD levelling, plus global difficulty levels, plus the new gear system, and we get... Gear 2.0. That seems a little unbalanced to me. Am I having fun though? Hell yes. 138 hours (according to the Ubisoft launcher) so far, and I have no intention of slowing that down too much, and I'm looking forward to pushing forward with my "Hard" difficulty missions. Fingers crossed they fix some of the hideously broken AI behaviour, and the seemingly chaotic spawns (2 mortar dogs, 2 heavy gunner dogs, and 2 heavy gunners, in a small corridor in the Federal Bunker. On hard. What the heck?), and I'd also like to see them re-work both exotics, and the specialization weapons in short order.
Does the game have problems? Yes it definitely does. Are they any worse than other companies? Yes, in some ways, though I guess what everyone else does is rather irrelevant. Will I be buying the DLC? No, I won't. Not just because I'm piss poor, though that plays into it. Rather because a lot of these issues, up to and including the incessant connection problems seemingly after every single patch (Who on Earth does your network testing Massive?) would make spending €30 on it a very, very poor use of my incredibly limited funds. Likely what I'll do instead is pick up The Division 1 while it's on sale, and get an entire games worth of content for one third the price. Maybe I'll get the expansion at a later date, but only if they fix what's broken, and hopefully before adding anything new.