Looting At Level 30 – Is There Enough To The Division’s End Game?

A lot is made of the so-called ‘end game’ in titles like The Division. Ubisoft want you to come back to the game time and again, in order to revisit what content is offer, play it at higher difficulty levels and cross your fingers for the game to drop you some new and more powerful gun or a new piece of armour.

I’ve enjoyed The Division a great deal since it launched a fortnight ago, and exploring all the corners of New York was a joy, as I charged through the story on the way to reaching the current level cap. And I’m still enjoy it, but I don’t currently see quite the same level of draw and engagement as I did with Destiny. I don’t feel quite the same need to log on each day and complete that day’s particular highlighted story missions, and my map is still full of the little icons for side missions, engagements and the myriad collectables.

Missing a day or two to play other games is fine with me, because I don’t really get the sense that I’m working toward anything meaningful right now. That’s likely going to change as Ubisoft prepare to release the first of the ultra-challenging Incursion missions next month, which will presumably up the difficulty quite significantly and demand that players have some of the best gear before venturing in.

There’s a number of avenues for getting the best gear in the game, whether with the main game’s currency at the Advanced Weapons Vendor or crossing fingers when you kill named enemies in the Dark Zone. However, the most consistent way is to earn and spend Phoenix Credits, the specific end game currency that you start to earn after level 30. A small handful are dropped when you kill named elite enemies, but the focal point for earning Phoenix Credits is with the three daily missions and the relatively easy 80 credits you can grab each day.

The trick is knowing what to spend them on, and there’s a dedicated Special Gear Vendor upstairs in the Base of Operations who sells High-End gear and blueprints. The most common recommendation online is to grab his Vector 45 blueprint, then transform a large number of weapon parts and tools into the diminutive SMG. It’s a good gun, and you can go further with the blueprints for the other classes of firearm and each particular configuration of armour. However, when the vendor’s shop refreshed on Saturday, the blueprints didn’t change and the specific items on sale did little to tempt me, dashing my expectations of him being a piñata of both joy and anguish akin to Destiny’s Xur.

There’s also the Dark Zone currency, which is hampered by the strict limitations on having to be level 30 in the Dark Zone before you can buy most of the gear from them, and level 50 if you want High-End kit and blueprints. In my experience, by the time I was level 30 in the Dark Zone, it was then difficult to find a vendor with anything I wanted to buy that’s appreciably better than what I own. So much of the drive to continue on with the end game comes from the loot system and the desire to better your character, but you’re surrounded by shops that feel less than inspiring and pushed toward grinding missions and hunting Dark Zone AI. I’ve been here before with Destiny’s loot drops.

Each of the six armour categories that you can equip bolsters your Firearms, Stamina and Electronics stats, and by mixing these together in different ways you can affect different attributes in battle. More Firearms means you deal more damage, more Stamina lets you take more damage, while higher Electronics increases the effectiveness and the frequency with which you can use your skills.

Were these the only things to worry about, I’d be fine balancing these three stats to suit a particular role, but there’s so much more depth, to an almost baffling degree. The better the weapon you have equipped, the more Talents they have, which are specific boosts or abilities that can only come into effect if your character can meet the Firearms, Stamina or Electronics requirements.

So you need to look out for armour that has a certain stat, but then you also become aware of the extra modifiers that the armour can have. Gloves that boost pistol damage by a few hundred points do nothing for me, but if they’ve got extra LMG damage, deal more damage to elite enemies or stealth health upon killing, I’ll be over the moon. So long as they also have a comparable armour value to what I currently have, that is. I’ve had High-End gear drop with literally half the armour value of what I have equipped, which always saps some of the excitement.

You can dive into the overwhelming nitty-gritty of setting up your character a particular way and building it around a particular set of guns and pieces of armour. Gun attachments all have their own randomised stats, and you want to keep an eye out for certain modifiers to temper and tame your chosen gun’s deficiencies. Initial Bullet Stability lets your sniper be more accurate more quickly when you aim, while horizontal stability will lessen its kick to the right after each shot. You can spend Phoenix Credits to re-roll the stats and perks at the recalibration workbench in the BoO, but it’s prohibitively costly to do so.

But I think I’m finding myself lost in all of this to the point of not really caring. I see a lower armour number – it’s the biggest and therefore “most important” number, to be fair – and I dismiss it out of hand. I’m doing fine with my LMG and SMG combo, and I can easily swap out my trio of active skills to fit with the others on my team.

And that, for me, is the real highlight of the end game so far. Of the three highlighted missions each day, the Challenge Mode mission is by far the most difficult, as it pits you against level 32 enemies – two higher than you are – all of whom have the yellow health bars to signify that they are elite enemies. They give you a stern test of your skills, with the promise of a piece of High-End gear at the other end.

You have to talk to one another in order to spot and call out incoming threats – enemies with shotguns are a particular danger – before focussing your fire and using your character skills in concert to neutralise them as quickly as possible. These can be a bit of a slog, certainly, but they help to highlight working as a team and having complimentary abilities. You lose some of that when playing this with matchmade teammates, but even then, you can quickly and easily adjust to cover a weakness in your team’s set up thanks to the classless design to this RPG.

It’s really a shame that there are only four designated challenge missions in the game right now, and this lack of variety is compounded by there being 16 story missions in total and having three highlighted each day. Ultimately, I know that the Incursion missions are on the horizon and the monthly stream of new content will keep me playing, but I do wonder about how long this will continue to be interesting, because right now, the looting isn’t quite doing it for me.

Then again, there’s still hope for it to sink its hooks into me. As I went to grab a few screenshots for this article, I found the Advanced Weaponry Vendor selling a First Wave M1A marksman rifle with an obscene amount of accuracy and stability… It might “only” be a purple gun, but trust me when I say you need to buy it today.