Huge update brings weapon balances to The Division

Various weapon changes are coming to Tom Clancy's The Division in its 1.3 update, coming June 28th. The Division development team explained their plans to address the issue of an unbalanced meta in a recent blog post."Selecting a strong weapon loadout is crucial to your overall effectiveness when dealing with enemies. Currently, this often revolves around the combination of an SMG with a Marksman Rifle, specifically the Aug/Vector paired with an M1A," the dev team said. "As the only two weapon families with unique bonuses, they are the most sought-after and used weapons. This has led to an unequal spread of weapon usage among players."

• Vincent Yeung
• June 27, 2016
• in Gaming

Various weapon changes are coming to Tom Clancy’s The Division in its 1.3 update, coming June 28th. The Division development team explained their plans to address the issue of an unbalanced meta in a recent blog post.

“Selecting a strong weapon loadout is crucial to your overall effectiveness when dealing with enemies. Currently, this often revolves around the combination of an SMG with a Marksman Rifle, specifically the Aug/Vector paired with an M1A,” the dev team said. “As the only two weapon families with unique bonuses, they are the most sought-after and used weapons. This has led to an unequal spread of weapon usage among players.”

In order to combat the domination of SMGs and Marksman Rifles, here are the upcoming update’s changes:

• Add unique bonuses to each weapon family
  • SMGs now have a crit hit damage bonus rather than crit hit chance. It is much harder to reach a higher critical hit chance now, and you will have to make more stat choices when selecting gear in order to take advantage of the new bonus.
  • LMGs receive a bonus that increases their damage to targets out of cover by about 25%. The design of LMGs is to force people into cover and control areas with their large magazine sizes.
  • Shotguns receive a stagger bonus against NPC. When shooting targets, you have a high chance of causing them to stumble and lose their balance. This will not affect other players, however. Shotguns are also receiving a buff to their base damage that scales with the weapon’s level and up to a maximum of 30%.
  • Assault Rifles receive a bonus to enemy armor damage. This allows Assault Rifles to be a powerful weapon in PVE situations.
  • No changes were made to the bonus on Marksman Rifles
• Increase Shotgun damage output
• Decrease the damage of the AUG and Vector 
  • Reduce the damage done by the AUG and Vector by 10%.
• Make adjustments to the M1A
  • Increase the minimum accuracy cap on the M1A. When you shoot consistently, the cross hair will grow to a much larger size than it previously did.
• Introduce new weapons 
  • Named Shotgun: Showstopper (fully automatic)
  • Assault Rifle: G36
  • Marksman Rifle: SVD
  • SMG: PP19
• Add the ability to reroll talents on weapons 
  • Collect in-game currency called Weapon Kit that can be obtained through crafting, enemy drops, and crates in the Underground. Spend them in combination some Phoenix Credits at the Recalibration bench to be able to recalibrate a talent on your weapon.
• Make changes to Special Ammo 
  • Explosive and incendiary ammo nerfs

The Division 1.3 update will be released on Xbox One and PC on June 28th. A release date for the PlayStation 4 has yet to be revealed.