The Division’s new Seeker gear doesn’t seem to be meeting Massive Entertainment’s expectations. The Public Test Server seemed to pick up a lot of issues with it, and the latest notes suggest Massive has their work cut out for them with other aspects of the update as well.
The Seeker gear set will not be included in Update 1.6. The devs did not mention whether or not the gear would be released at a later date, but as if now they have deemed it too imbalanced to be a part of The Division’s. Seeker was already re-balanced in PTS 2’s update, but that was not enough to fix it for true implementation.
Massive is also looking at normalization in the new Last Stand mode, and the best way to keep things fair. Right now normalization does work, to an extent, but there are areas that the developers want to improve. The team thinks that, to be specific, skills do a little too much danage, and they will be working to correct that.
Other notable changes for PTS 3 include some tweaks to move players away from the skill power meta, a nerf to the Historian exotic marksman rifle, and an additional checkpoint to the Legendary difficulty missions. Almost every player seemed to spec into the category where skill power was concerned. A focus on skill power tended to diminish other roles (DPS, Tanks, etc) and Massive hopes to bring these types of players back into the fray.
The skill power builds were making the Historian class pretty powerful, thanks to the weapon’s exotic perk. (Each bullet embeds itself in the target and detonates 2 seconds later for 20% skillpower). And with players running around with that high skillpower build, the 20% damage was packing a pretty big punch. You’d only need two or three shots at any range to eliminate an opponent. In PTS, the Historian will benefit players with firearms builds, but how exactly remains unclear so far.
Presently, The Division Update 1.6 is live on the PTS for PC.
