🛈 Announcement
Greetings! The Division forums are now archived and accessible in read-only mode, please go to the new platform to discuss the game
  1. #1

    Dark zone

    Hi can anyone explain the dark zone mechanics please thx
    Share this post

  2. #2
    Bambihunter1971's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    May 2014
    Location
    Rural Oklahoma, USA
    Posts
    1,545
    It is advertised as a PvEvP area. In reality, you have quite a few PvE farmers that go in trying to get geared up for Legendary missions and the other more difficult content. Then, you have a group of people that farm the farmers. Some want legit heads-up PvP and if/when they don't get it, they move on. Others, they are just griefing gank squads that like the 4v1 ratio. So, they wait until you are engaged with NPC's, hit you from behind, and often with cheats and then you never have a chance.

    When the game was first released (March of 2016), you really had to go into the DZ to get any gear worth having. But, they slowly changed it and thankfully, it is available elsewhere everywhere now. So, don't think you HAVE to go in there if the playstyle is not for you. I have over 3k hours in the game and would have stopped by 150 hours if they hadn't made that change. One thing to note is that in the DZ, you can carry up to 8 contaminated items in a special section of your backpack. Once that is full, you can't pick up more until you extract. You extract by going to one of the marked areas and firing a flare. A couple minutes later a chopper arrives. Between those two events, you'll have to fight off some NPC's. It also alerts all other players in the area. Some will come along and join your extraction by putting their own items on the rope to be extracted. Others will come and cut the rope and steal your stuff. Others yet are there just to kill you as most people stay close to watch their extraction. If viewing the map, it will blink a light color. Yellow if I remember right.

    Once you extract a few times, you'll need to go to one of the safe houses and go through the gear in your stash (it is also a separate part that you won't have used before). If memory serves, it holds 30 items so that means you can extract 3 full loadouts before needing to return.

    Just know in the DZ, you can join groups, or you can just go alone or co-exist with other groups doing stuff (without joining their group). But, at any time, they can flip a "Rogue" switch and they can attack you. This is the part that I'll never understand the fun in it. You just helped a person, now you suddenly decide to be a ****. Watch for the skull logo appearing above their head. It used to be a nearly instantaneous thing but now it takes a second or two. The griefers *****ed about it but most everyone else liked it. Personally, I wish they had to declare their rogue/non-rogue status upon entering but that's a whole different story.

    Also, there are a couple other events in the DZ. One is the supply drops. Those, you have 5 minutes to locate, clear the enemy, and loot before it expires. Quite often people will sneak in and take the loot while you have the enemies drawn away. As such, I try not to pull the enemies away from the loot box unless you are doing this with a team and doing that on purpose. The other event is Contamination Event. The areas below street level will become contaminated. You'll need to have a way to keep yourself healed. This is generally done (if solo) by using the Nomad gear set, health on kill on your gear or weapon, skills such as Overdose or Support Station with Immunizer. With a group, one person running a full reclaimer helps. Solo, I'd suggest running Nomad and/or having good health on kill. I generally go for 10% health on kill on gear, and then I generally run Predatory which gives you 35% health over 20 seconds.

    One last thing, remember to carefully consider your build for the DZ. Those that I have specifically for the DZ are a fair amount different than those for PvE. For instance, things like Damage to Elite or Enemy Armor Damage don't count towards PvP. So instead, you'd want to roll those types of things into Crit's (hit chance or damage). I generally roll off All resistance since in the DZ you'll likely either only have shock or burn damage. It seems like they were talking about a change whether bleed resistance would affect bleed from Predators Mark in PvP. I don't think (but again not sure) that it helps though it does help with the bleed from grenades.


    To finish, I'll reiterate what I said about going in there. By all means try it. You may like it. But, you may not. Especially with the cheaters running rampant (and most have -BR in their name so keep an eye on those hanging around). There are several more fun and much easier ways to gear up if you are new. Personally, I always suggest Global Events (one going on now ironically) as you can get a lot of classified gear during that time. 2nd best way is doing boss runs. There's plenty of maps available online where to find them. They respawn every 4 hours, but if you have multiple characters, that is per character so you can run them on each account. Many people like doing the wave ~10 in resistance. I have helped a lot of people in resistance so I can't hardly stand it now but if you do it right, it is fairly quick and easy to get good stuff. If you have the Gold Version of the game, you'll get supply drops twice a month. Some time back they added classifieds to those but more importantly you get Div Tech from them so that alone makes it worthwhile once you finally get gear that you want to optimize. Though I generally play alone, if you are on PC and would like a hand on a couple of these, just add me and we'll do some. I am going to be hitting the Global Event hard this week though.

    Sorry for the long post. I am at work and bored. :-)
     2 people found this helpful
    Share this post