I was hoping PTS phase 2 would alleviate some of my concerns but it did not
Optimization is still far, far too expensive.
We don't have enough sources for materials. The only thing that appears to have been added are Rogue drops in the LZ and Summit caches. Both rewards are pitiful.
Each rogue can drop a random material plus the last rogue you kill drops a bundle of several material types. Not really worth it for the amount of effort to kill rogues.


Summit caches come irregularly from completing challenges (which range in difficulty and cannot repeat between each 100 floor run) and the rewards are just as bad.

Meanwhile the project and crafting costs appear unchanged from PTS phase 1.
Crafting isn't a viable solution at all to obtain materials due to the costs; I run out after making 1 or 2 batches. Yes, you can get regular materials back with SHD scavenging points but the return is incredibly bad when you get 25 electronics and a blueprint can ask for 1000. Not to mention that you can't batch redeem scavenging so you'll be hitting that button 40 times to get 1000 electronics.




Let's take a look at an example of how inflated these costs are:
I have a chest piece with 3 godroll stats, and 1 stat that is 10.5% out of a possible 12% which is a 87.5% roll.



Adding up the combined costs that comes to 612 chest piece alloy, 311 field recon, 179 Black Tusk material, 124 project material.
Each high end or gear set chest piece deconstructed always only gives 1 alloy for its corresponding optimization, so I need 612 of those. I can try crafting but due to the extremely high cost of fabric I will at most be able to make 30 alloys before running out.
Field recon is not too bad, I get 4 for each Heroic control point. I still need to do 78 control points to fully optimize this piece.
Faction material is going to be the second worst to farm the way it currently works in the PTS. When they teased that there were still new sources of optimization material to be added in the SOTG, I was hoping this was the area where they improve it. Sadly this is not the case. Intuitively, every named enemy of the relevant faction should be dropping faction material. This is not the case. You only get optimization material at the very end of missions, or bounties, or Summit floors with specific enemies, and only seems to scale with global difficulty. Doing a daily bounty with only 1 named enemy gives as much faction material as doing a Heroic bounty with 3 named enemies. Heroic control points with named enemies do not drop faction material, and open world bosses do not drop any either. This feels wrong and unintuitive and should be changed.
Project material is the worst of the lot. I need 124 of these to fully optimize this piece. Each daily project gives 1 and each weekly project gives 5; Summit caches give 1. Assuming I go to the effort of doing every project I can get 24 project material per week, so it takes me about 5 weeks to get enough materials. A little over 10 weeks if I don't do DZ projects.
The best way to fix optimization is to completely get rid of all these numerous currencies and just bring back Divtech from Division 1. Having one currency with many sources to acquire it is way easier to manage than 21 different currencies from many different and unreliable sources.
If this change isn't on the table, then there are other suggestions I can make:
1) Decrease the costs/ remove the cost scaling. This is just overly punishing to the most hardcore players, where the only way to progress further is pray for full godrolls or optimize. Make the costs a flat amount so that it's reasonable to actually optimize 90% rolls.
2) More sources for materials. Every named enemy should drop faction materials. Stop trying to force people to do activities they don't want to do , or punish players who want to farm efficiently. Exotic and named items should drop more materials (or in the case of exotics, they should drop any materials that are not just exotic components). Faction lock boxes should drop optimization material as well. They usually take effort to reach, require keys to open and only respawn once every 24 hours.
3) Remove the time gating that is project materials. It's absolutely stupid that I need to grind for weeks or even months. Yes, I can spend scavenging points for this but this is just punishing people who aren't high enough SHD level to have lots of scavenging points saved.
12 people found this helpful