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  1. #1

    Exotic gear and SHD levels guide for a newbie

    Hey fellas

    so i have the division 2 ultimate edition on my second account (first account has just the base game) and i used the level 30 booster to straightaway jump into the WONY campaign.
    Now im 40 and want exotics. However, the post wony content is really confusing so needed a bit of help here.

    1. im SHD level 5. If i upgrade that, do i get gear with better stas? cuz my ARs have damages in the range of 60-70k whereas other guys on level 40 have ARs with 130-140k damages. Whats the deal here ?

    2. Exotics. Im a casual player so i play on normal difficulty. Is there a sure shot way to get exotics ? i dont wanna go crazy over completing heroic difficulty missions to have a 7% chance of an exotic drop.
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  2. #2
    Sircowdog1's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Hey fellas

    so i have the division 2 ultimate edition on my second account (first account has just the base game) and i used the level 30 booster to straightaway jump into the WONY campaign.
    Now im 40 and want exotics. However, the post wony content is really confusing so needed a bit of help here.

    1. im SHD level 5. If i upgrade that, do i get gear with better stas? cuz my ARs have damages in the range of 60-70k whereas other guys on level 40 have ARs with 130-140k damages. Whats the deal here ?

    2. Exotics. Im a casual player so i play on normal difficulty. Is there a sure shot way to get exotics ? i dont wanna go crazy over completing heroic difficulty missions to have a 7% chance of an exotic drop.
    SHD level has nothing to do with drops. It increases passive attributes like crit chance or skill haste and the like. Go into your watch and look at each option, because eventually you'll max them all out at SHD level 1000.

    Check your projects. There's a weekly project to turn in a bunch of resources for an Exotic Cache. It's only one random exotic, but AFAIK it can be any exotic from the general loot pool plus any exotic you've already unlocked/crafted. And it can be completed on each of your characters.

    Seasonal Events like the Golden Bullet that just finished last week, or the upcoming Kestrel League, will have an exotic cache as the final reward.

    Grouping with other people might work, since if they don't need an exotic they can pass it to you.

    Heroic runs might have a slightly better chance to drop an exotic, but it's not like it happens often. Just play whatever you're comfortable with.
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  3. #3
    1. Your gear will get stronger as you increase your shd level. You will increase your base weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, skill damage etc...

    2. You can get two exotics very easily every single week thru weekly projects. The weekly shd requisition is a complete joke that rewards an exotic and named weapon without even killing a bad guy. Just turn in water some fabrics and some crafting mats and presto you created a max level exotic. Another super easy project to complete is 30 levels of the summit mainly cause it doesn't matter which difficulty you select.

    And then there are some exotics you can craft such as chatterbox, liberty, dodge city holster maybe some others like nemesis. I can't quite remember all of them cause they are year 1 exotics but still decent in year 2.

    Oh and the season pass (free version) has some amazing exotics that you get just by leveling up playing the game. The Scorpio is a must have for pve. Its so op but in a good way. Waveform holster is great for most skill builds and the capacitor is used more that exotic ar's like the eagle and bighorn. Technically you get the capacitor by completing 5 weekly summit challenges but again they are very easy to do solo cause you can play on any difficulty.

    Enjoy getting those easy exotics and dominating D.C..
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  4. #4
    Thanks. ill check out the projects. just a few clarifications:

    1. if gear keeps getting better, then whats the point of me grinding for exotics? wont they become obsolete as SHD increases ? Or can i increase their stats somehow after ive gotten them the first time ?

    2. if i complete 30 levels of summit im just .... given an exotic ?
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  5. #5
    Aced_100's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Hey fellas

    so i have the division 2 ultimate edition on my second account (first account has just the base game) and i used the level 30 booster to straightaway jump into the WONY campaign.
    Now im 40 and want exotics. However, the post wony content is really confusing so needed a bit of help here.

    2. Exotics. Im a casual player so i play on normal difficulty. Is there a sure shot way to get exotics ? i dont wanna go crazy over completing heroic difficulty missions to have a 7% chance of an exotic drop.
    I have a bunch of exotics and only completed one mission on heroic and incidentally didn't get an exotic from that, Chatterbox from opening Hyena Caches, Nemesis from completing set invaded missions, Liberty Pistol from completing set missions, Youtube is your friend in getting these, Capacitor from the Summit, and the rest from Exotic Caches by donating resources in Projects which is a sure fire way to get them, but be warned you rarely get what you want, and will get more than one of the same.

    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Thanks. ill check out the projects. just a few clarifications:

    1. if gear keeps getting better, then whats the point of me grinding for exotics? wont they become obsolete as SHD increases ?
    Not the way it works, the gear you have gets better because you have higher shd levels and can increase things like weapon damage, for example if you choose weapon damage any weapon you have gets its base damage increased by the percent you have increased. Also if you have a piece of gear with 10% weapon damage all your weapons get another 10% base damage boost.

    So that AR with a base damage of 70k and then you have another 40% weapon damage through gear, shd levels and even your specialization for example it becomes 98k. Add to that you can have specific AR damage increases so the base damage keeps increasing, not to mention CHC/CHD, head shot damage etc. Same weapon but higher damage.
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  6. #6
    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Thanks. ill check out the projects. just a few clarifications:

    1. if gear keeps getting better, then whats the point of me grinding for exotics? wont they become obsolete as SHD increases ? Or can i increase their stats somehow after ive gotten them the first time ?

    2. if i complete 30 levels of summit im just .... given an exotic ?
    1. The drops are random but even if you get an exotic with poor stats, you can re-roll it to hopefully get a better one.

    2. Yep and a named item and about a half of a level up of XP.
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  7. #7
    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Thanks. ill check out the projects. just a few clarifications:

    1. if gear keeps getting better, then whats the point of me grinding for exotics? wont they become obsolete as SHD increases ? Or can i increase their stats somehow after ive gotten them the first time ?

    2. if i complete 30 levels of summit im just .... given an exotic ?
    Base damage on a weapon is not the same for everyone. It depends on the gear you have equipped. The same gun you have will change when you change something like your mask. Or any other piece. Like, the more armor you have, the less damage your guns do.

    As for attributes on weapons and gear, yes, they can be recalibrated or even optimized. Optimization is insanely expensive to a broken degree at the moment. They are supposed to make adjustments to cost soon. Find the recalibration table in the base of operations. It also has a library where attributes can be taken from a piece and stored to use on another piece. The piece the attribute is taken from is destroyed in the process.

    Once a week, you can do a Summit project. Yes, you get a free exotic for doing 30 floors. Even if you do the first floor 30 times.
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  8. #8
    Sircowdog1's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post
    Thanks. ill check out the projects. just a few clarifications:

    1. if gear keeps getting better, then whats the point of me grinding for exotics? wont they become obsolete as SHD increases ? Or can i increase their stats somehow after ive gotten them the first time ?

    There's a couple things that should be clarified:

    SHD level has NOTHING to do with gear or gear drops. Each category of the watch contains bonuses to an attribute, which you can increase with the more SHD levels you get. Things like skill damage, hazard protection, and even weapon damage. However, again, this is only effecting your character's attributes, not drops.

    It's a fine nuance, but an important one.

    As for getting better gear, yes, you will acquire better gear the longer you play. But that has everything to do with your luck and the randomness of what items drop. Whatever gear you get from completing missions, killing enemies, or opening crates is totally independent from your SHD level.

    Hopefully that makes sense. The only way to increase the chances of getting better drops is by turning up the difficulty, or adding directives while in the summit. Playing in a group helps, since sometimes people will pass gear to you. But keep in mind that there are no guarantees of "good" gear. Turning up the difficulty only raises the minimum rolls on each drop, and makes it more likely to get better items. There's no way to guarantee you won't get garbage, however.

    But that also means the opposite is true: Even playing on a lower difficulty, there's always a small possibility of getting perfect attributes on an item. That's RNG for you.

    Now, even though this wasn't actually what you meant when you asked it, there IS a way to upgrade equipment after you get it:

    • There's the Recalibration station, which allow you to swap out a single attribute on a non-exotic item.
    • There's also Reconfiguration recipes that will allow you to completely reroll an exotic. But be warned, it costs an item only obtainable by scrapping another exotic, and the re-roll is completely random. Meaning it could be worse than what you have originally.
    • Then there's Optimization, which lets you permanently increase any attribute, up to the max, on any item except mods. However, it is extremely expensive(I'm not joking. Even veterans with thousands of SHD levels think the cost is too high).





    Originally Posted by Wraith_9z Go to original post

    2. if i complete 30 levels of summit im just .... given an exotic ?
    An exotic Cache and a named item and a crafting blueprint and points for your specialization. It's really good, but remember it can only be done once per week (can anyone confirm if that's per character, or per account?) Looks like this in the projects screen:

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  9. #9
    There is a lot of good stuff here, and I will try not to duplicate. You seem to be looking at other people's weapon damage and wondering how to get that yourself. The good news is, you can.... the bad news is, it takes time and patience.

    If you are just now at level 40 and new with SHD level 5, playing on "normal" difficulty is about right. What you want to focus on, is trying to improve your build so you can move up to "hard", then "challenging", and ultimately "heroic". BTW, "build" is the combination of armor pieces, weapons, and skills that you are using.

    When you look at someone with 130-140k damage from their AR, that is the result of having moved up into the more difficult tiers to at least challenging, but likely heroic. Because at "normal" difficulty, you will notice most drops have stats that are somewhere around 25% to 40% of max. But when you are at challenging/heroic you will not see many drops with stats that low, and instead you will see drops with all stats at the upper range. SO playing on "normal" you are going to see AR drops that are about half as powerful as what you will see on the harder difficulty.

    The problem is, you can't just bump up difficulty. Well, you can, but it wouldn't be very fun. The challenge is, in order to play on the harder difficulty in order to get the better drops, you need a better build to be able to play effectively.

    But alas, this is what the game developers have to do, and IMHO they did a good job..... making the game feed you gear while playing at your current level, which will ramp your build up so you can play the next level of difficulty. That said, it won't happen over night.

    Before I go further, I should clarify - I am talking abotu drops not loot chests. Yes, you will find loot chests in missions or on the street that give purple gear on the higher difficulties. What I am talking about, are drops that happen as you kill NPCs, bosses, etc. Those scale according to difficulty, whereas static chests do not.

    That said, chests that you have to earn in order to open, like control point yellow chest, DO scale with difficulty.

    I have always noticed that most of the time I have played this game (nearly 2 years now), I am almost always running gear that I obtained as a reward -- not from a loot drop. This is an important point. You can see the "source" of how you obtained each piece of gear in your inventory. If it says "looted" then it was a drop. If it says "rewarded", it wasn't a drop -- it was given to you for completing some objective. Why is this important? Because people get very upset that loot drops aren't great.... but that isn't the only way to get loot and isn't where great gear comes from.

    So where does "rewarded" gear come from? When you complete a mission, or a control point, or an open world event, etc. You will notice when the "mission complete" flashes on the screen, you will see an item or two listed which are your rewards. These just get put right into your inventory -- or if inventory is full it goes into your mailbox (in your stash).

    So, my recommendation to anyone is to focus on these rewards by playing missions, open world events, control points, projects, etc. Worry less about RNG and loot drops, and play the content and the gear will come.

    As it turns out, the same things you do to earn rewarded gear, are also the things you do to get XP which gets you up in SHD levels. And as has been pointed out, as you go up in SHD level you will increase things like weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, armor, health, etc. Don't fret how to best spend each point, because your goal is to get to 1,000 and at that point you will have everything maxed. How long that takes depends on how often and long you play, but it is within reach for the casual gamer that only gives this game an hour a day.

    Recently they added seasons, which have a ton of things to do which ear rewards and XP, and also give you specific new gear. But I have to say, the seasons may not be very compatible with the causal gamers life -- and certainly not at a low SHD level. But through season rewards is where one gets the newest gear sets and/or exotic/named weapons.

    Speaking of exotics -- you really don't "need" exotics as a general rule. But, depending on your play style, you might. For example, one running a marksman rifle build really, really should want the Nemesis sniper rifle. That is obtainable over the course of about a month. There are plenty of guides that tell you how.

    But you run an AR, and the best exotic AR's in the game are locked behind content that isn't going to be very compatible with casual play. The only way would be to find a team that is willing to carry you through harder content. People exist that are willing to do that, but my experience has been most teams try to stay away from casuals because they don't want to carry..... but then, I'd argue, wouldn't that mean that team is really looking for people to carry them? LOL.

    Anyways, back to the point..... now you know how to progress in the game to get the gear, but how do you know which gear to wear?

    It really depends on your play style, and how you want to play the game. You play with AR, which I did for well over a year and half. Its a fine weapon and way to play. How do you get your AR damage high? Well, you will notice each piece of armor has a few stats -- one big one and two little ones. As a general rule, a new AR player should have a combination of gear that has all six pieces with a "main" (big) stat which is red (offense). Specifically, the big red stat is weapon damage.

    Right now, at your point in the progression, you are going to see gear that has a big reed stat of about 8-10. As you progress up the difficulty ladder, you can expect to see higher. But if you were to put on six pieces of gear that have a big red stat, that would be 8-10% increase weapon damage multiplied by 6. So it is big. I'd focus first on that.

    Next, you want to put on at least one piece of Fenris, as wearing that will increase AR damage by another 10%.

    Then you go into your chosen specialization skill tree, and make sure that you have "AR damage" increased -- if not, that is where you want to spend your spec points.

    You do all that, and now your AR will put out a lot more damage. There is a lot more to a build than weapon damage. A good build will increase your weapon damage to a point, but also increase your survivability. The key to putting together a highly effective build is balancing between offense, defense, and skill power.

    But until you learn more and are a little higher on the progression ladder, you almost can't go wrong by picking your gear such that you end up with everything red. By that I mean the main attributes as well as the 2 secondary attributes on each armor piece. Focus on weapon damage, then crit chance and crit damage and headshot damage.

    Now, that is easy to say, but hard to do because you don't have the pieces with the right stats. And you might need to play the game hundreds if not thousands of hours getting everything to drop with what you want. This is where the recalibration comes into play. Don't even worry about or spend any time on optimization. The intent of optimization isn't to be useful for where you are at the game right now. So just forget about it until you are much further down the road.

    Recalibration lets you pull ONE stat off one piece, and paste it onto another piece (replacing some attribute on that piece you don't want).

    But there are two phases to recalibrating. First, you need to populate your recalibration library -- because you have to have stats in your library before you can paste them onto another piece. The great thing about recal, is that you can bank your stats. Just collect all the gear that drops, and if it isn't gear you want then rip the best stat off it and bank it in your library.

    Over time, you will have your recal library 100% full with maxed stats. Now you can really tweak your build, and even put together new ones. No, you don't HAVE to max your library first. If you know what you need, and you see that stat on a piece that dropped, then just rip that stat and then recalibrate it onto the piece you wear.

    Big caveat -- you can only recalibrate ONE stat or talent per piece. No need to dive into that too much, as you will figure it out.

    So even after recalibrating, you will not likely end up with every stat you want. But recalibrating will get you quite close -- if you are lucky and you choose well.

    And that is where optimization comes in -- much later down the road when you can't possibly increase your build any further because it will take an act of God for a piece to drop with the stats/talents you need, and you already recalibrated each piece once to get where you are. Optimization exists to provide a path to complete maxing -- but it isn't quick and takes work.

    I've said before and will say again, optimization should be ignored until SHD watch maxxed and build already maxed as far as is possible through recalibration.

    There are a host of other things you really need to know and factor into your build. I am telling you here to build an all red build. But truth is, you are going to feel very powerful -- but also very fragile. This is because everything is red, and hence armor (and other things that fall into the category of 'survivability') are just not in the build.

    Once you get that full red build and get used to playing it, next you work on figuring out how much of that red you can sacrifice to improve survivability. Because clearly, it is a balancing act.

    And survivability is NOT armor. Armor is ONE piece of survivability -- other pieces include: armor on kill, armor regeneration, health on kill, etc.

    Lastly, you might also need to sacrifice a little more damage output in order to get your skill tier up . If skills are a big part of your play style, then you do need to do that. But in all honesty, a build that tried to be all three is probably going to be a problematic build. I'd say my current build is about 70% red, 25% blue, and 5%yellow. IF I tried to get an equal 33% red, 33% blue, 33% yellow, I probably wouldn't be able to play it as well as I can my current build.

    And finally.... all that said.... your all red AR build, with one piece fenris, specialization with AR buffed all the way, also needs this -- "unbreakable" talent on the chest piece. Because that is a big talent that gives you a huge survivability boost. It literally gives you back almost all your armor when your armor gets shredded. It is like having two lives. But this can only happen about once every 30 seconds -- which actually isn't that long. So you can still die, but it won't be as easy to die.

    Oh, and one more thing -- finally for real this time..... skills. The kind of standard "go to" items are turret and drone. Fixer drone + Assault Turret. Fixer drone will heal you while you play -- so another survivability boost. The Assault turret will help cover your back, draw enemy focus from you, etc.

    Or, assuault drone + revive hive. Revive hive will revive you when you are downed. So again, survivability. Assault drone is a little more effective than the assault turret.

    Of course, you can pick any combination of skills, but I highly urge you to pick a combination that gives you additional survivability, and at least one offensive thing.
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  10. #10
    Aced_100's Avatar Senior Member
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    I get lazy with my characters at times, after reading this thread I looked at one and by rearranging and re-calibrating some attributes on some gear, I got an extra 29% weapon damage.
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