Agents,
With the Update 1.4 PTS wrapping up a few hours ago, we want to gather some feedback regarding Skills on the PTS.
Click the link below to access the survey.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/tdptsskills
Do not hesitate to leave a comment in this thread, if you’d like to discuss the matter further with the rest of the community!
Thanks,
The Division Team
Originally Posted by Ubi-gabelikes Go to original post
I highly suggest keeping the skill slots in the gear. Or make a mod for the most important Shield stat. The shield res. Which in four weeks I never got a shield res performance mod.
I primarily play shield. I like most of the changes. But not being able to increase my shield resilence. The shield was way stronger in PTS, but at harder content In some situations it melted too fast to scramble to cover and reviving teammates. Also when sprinting with the shield up there is a large chance the shield will disappear, Which means you cant damage with anything other than your pistol, even from cover.
I utterly dislike what you have done to the major support skills on the PTS.
They needed some adjustments, yes, but you almost trashed them all.
The biggest issue is the cooldown right now. Why for the love of everything holy did you need to slap the "only let the cooldown start after the skill duration is over" on the 2 biggest support skills right now? Namely the support station and the smart cover. Why? You yourself said that if a player wants to go for firepower they can skill for it but then sacrifice thoughness and skill power. If someone wants to go for thoughness, they need to sacrifice firepower and skill power. If someone goes for skill power they have to sacrifice firepower and thoughness. The difference however is, that those who go for firepower can rely on it, allways. Those who go for thoughness, can rely on it, allways. Only those who go for skill power have to deal with long as hell cooldowns and unreliable skills that are on a 20 second cooldown in the middle of a fight even though their skill power is in the 200k's. Imagine slapping a 20s reload time on every MG there is. This is ridiculous. If you want to play a support role now and don't want to leave your team hanging for 20 seconds mid fight you have to have an SVD with coolheaded on it. Or any other MMR with wich you can chain hit headshots with a coolheaded talent, but the SVD is the by far best one for this job. So much for the bigger build and weapon variety.
But back to when the cooldown starts on those two skills. The turret cooldown starts right after you deployed it and the Pulse cooldown starts right away too. Why not for the SC and SS? Because they have the cooldown reduction bonus on one of their mods? I don't get it.
Besides that, supports now only can support their team with defensive skills. There are 3 skills that give a bonus to damage. The pulse wich is more usefull for the highlighting enemies part then for the CHC an CHD it gives, the booster shot heal wich damage increasing part is not affected by skill power and the mobile cover wich damage boost also is not affected by skill power. So, if you heavily invest into skill power the best thing to choose is smart cover and pulse. However with the changes to smart cover it alone doesn't make you survive very long. You need something to heal yourself too, especially in the underground. So pulse goes out of the window and since you have to spam with an SVD you need alot of ammunition too. So the best second choice is an ammo station. And there we are! Incredible diversity for skill power supports, yay.
But what about the offensive skills? Like the turret and the BFB? Well, with all that skill power they are still pretty damn underwhelming. I sacrifice firepower and thoughness and my skills can't even kill an enemy that comes at me before I get slaughtered by it. The turret doesn't draw aggro away from me and the lock on and spin up time it needs until it finally shoots something is too long. And with the speed up enemy movement, they run from cover to cover before the turret can do any major damage. So they are only left as CC options, and you don't need skill power to CC an enemy. The BFB too doesn't do enough damage to justify giving up so much firearms and thoughness and the seeker mines even less so.
So skill power useres are kinda stuck with support skills atm.
And with the current meta consisting of run and gun tank/firepower builds and support skills being static except the puls maybe, most of the times people don't even need a support to begin with. As I see it at the moment you might aswell get rid of all the skills except the heals and call it "Call of Division".
Unfortunately I am used to the way skills worked in 1.3 so I have found it very difficult to enjoy the major changes that the PTS made to skills.
Obviously with only 4 weeks testing and the amount of variation between the levels in each week of the PTS I think it is too early to give bad feedback but from what I have tested I feel no urge to make a skill build as it seems of very little benefit. The major benifit right now appears in firearms and I am not saying this in itself is a bad thing for a shooter but I would like to feel that a skill build would be beneficial also.
Done It!! wow
I really wish there is a guaranteed source of Backpack and Kneepad for Non-Season-Pass player....
Smart cover is almost useless and needs a buff. It's all very well buffing and nerfing stuff but all you've done is take useless skills like turrets and seeker mine and make them slightly OP and take the skills like pulse and smartcover that were OP and make them useless.
How about you make ALL skills equally useful and give players an actual choice.
Same old problems. Usefulness, and scaling.Originally Posted by Ubi-gabelikes Go to original post
I could almost predict the results on this poll, First Aid (booster shot at that) will be so ridiculously high on the skills used pile you might not even notice anything else there. Flame turret might of seen a rise, but only because of a set 3pc makes it useful in general, instead of niche useful. Also, since you both nerfed and screwed Smart Cover (to be fair, it was the biggest source of broken and directly lead to the abomination that is 1.3..) and Support Station with their cooldowns... I cant see them being used much outside of niche circumstances, Immuniser being the only real choice there in Dragons Nest, maybe thats the intent, and you want us to swap skills out, awkward that it is to do that when your in the middle of a firefight or especially solo... but I can see your standpoint.
Seriously, whomever your numbers guy is, take him out back and shoot him. Skills have never worked right from day one, either being utterly broken (shield), utterly useless (Mobile Cover) or being utterly indispensable (First Aid). Which is kinda funny since, for a brief window, HoK and Predatory were a viable build that alllowed some other skill uses aside from First Aid. But nooo... had to nerf that too didnt you, never mind that you were probably giving up a ****ton of damage boosting stats to get it... without perfect gear rolls ofc.. mostly it was a choice, damage, or sustain. Given how faceroll week 3 was overall, it looked strong, but with week 4, you went kneejerk overboard yet again.
Long story short, Skills/Electronics need a complete overhaul. The skills themselves are fine, but the numbers... /sigh
it was nice to try different skills on the pts, but you almost destroyed every skill, which was useful and fun in 1.3
in 1.3 the skills were necessary, in the PTS the only useful skill was overheal - and even this was destroyed
smartcover was needed to get a nerf... it was overpowered and you couldnt play pvp,because every moron was behind a smartcover.
but i think, you should release this build as 1.4 now and take a look to the skills in the next update.
1) There are no OP outliers on the PvE side.
2) But FA and Pulse will remain as the go to skills, even with Pulse losing a good chunk of it's CHC and CHD. They are easy skills to use - fire and forget, have little clunk beyond the Pulse delay, offer instant bonus, and are good quality of life options (self sustain and wallhacks). IMO AI need to start using concealment effects.
3) The primary reason why I was motivated to try different skills is not your skill changes. It was the availability of gear on the PTS leading to broader builds.
4) Damage tech skills were useless beyond Hard mode vanilla missions. Although I had fun throwing around seekers and BFBs in Challenge UG, they just didn't anything that a proper Firearms build could do, only more often.
5) Support skills excluding FA, (such as SC and Support Station) do have their place, but it will take a good eye opener to convince people that the cooldown after duration ends change was worth whatever reason you did it based on... I used a 4PC reclaimer build with very around 150k SP and close to 60% haste along with a weapon that had both Coolheaded and Determined. Hence the skill recovery was extremely fast. But this is a super optimized build when it comes to cooldowns, and lacks armor for PvP. The global cooldown on consumables also makes Soda the only choice for this build.
6) Mobile Cover needs many QoL changes to make it a choice worth using, even though 1 million toughness builds are really fun in PvE...
7) Ballistic Shield - I think outside of bugs this is a solid choice. There are proper damage options, defense option, and the new aggro changes helped this skill a lot.
8) Turret - the reduction in TTK has made the sensor turret a strong contender with the flame turret. The zapper is underwhelming in PvE, in part because the CC type is not much different from the flame turret mechanically.
9) Gas mine - PvE option only.
10) Trapper mod - useless.
Regardless, this game is too mobile and too spread out for the remaining cast of the skills to be of much use. Even being grounded to cover, players still have to move around a lot to get LoS on AI. Hence Support Stations and Mobile Covers etc, deployables in general end up falling behind FA and Pulse, literally and figuratively.
When playing solo on the PTS I mostly used pulse, and a flame/zapper turret for crowd control, as my Nomad/AlphaBridge build took care of most of the healing. The downside to that is that ammo cache wasn't available, and would have been extremely useful when playing Underground challenging.
I think it would be nice if we could have more than two skills easily available, but only have two active at the same time. Hell, I could say the same about weapons![]()