YMMV / The Division 2

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • What happened to the Player Character of the previous Division game? Did they die in the attack on City Hall? Did they join Faye Lau going rogue? Or are they (potentially) the Washington D.C. Agent? Word of God has been mixed.
  • Is Agent Keener a Well-Intentioned Extremist or just a Smug Snake with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder? He proceeds to reveal his big plans are just to build his own weaponized version of the Dollar Flu then use it on the JTF as well as other groups. Even his own agents think his idea is insane (aside from Hornet).
  • Faye Lau in Warlords of New York and its subsequent seasons. Is Faye Lau someone who broke bad because of her sister dying due to the Rikers and general incompetence or because she had a Batman Gambit to kill President Ellis as well as bring the Black Tusk down from the inside? Did she die because of Poor Communication Kills or as a Heroic Sacrifice? Is she even dead?
  • Is Antwon Ridgeway a Smug Snake General Ripper or A Father to His Men who has changed his morality to deal with the horrifying circumstances of the Dollar Flu? Is he actually just a self-serving jackass attempting to paper over his crimes with Delusions of Eloquence?
  • What is the true goal of the Black Tusk? Are they A Nazi by Any Other Name fascists who want to Take Over the World or attempting to do their own version of rebuilding America? What part did they play in the fall of the United States federal government?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • While the Division themselves use gadgets that in real life have mostly have never left a drawing board, Black Tusk's most notable equipment, from their "BigDog" style robotic Warhounds to the blanket sized flexible displays that litter their areas, are based on publicly known prototypes from when the first game was set.
  • EMP grenades from Black Tusk Elite Controllers both harm the player as well as disrupt them. This seems a little far-fetched, but it's entirely possible that those grenades are emitting some form of lethal radiation, which is known for disrupting electronics in real life.
  • The Turbine Blimp improvement is something that is being developed in the real world.
  • The level design of The Summit was generally considered "uninspired" by most players, with a common criticism being that it's a skyscraper that has very few windows. A Reddit user jokingly made a picture of what The Summit would theoretically look like from outside. However, there actually is an equally unassuming building in real life on 33 Thomas Street that's speculated to be some sort of NSA communications hub; it's lack of windows is just one of many features of the building meant to withstand nuclear blasts. The Summit's general location on in-game Manhattan is in the same general area as 33 Thomas Street, lending some legitimacy to this theory.
• Anticlimax Boss: The final mission of the End of Watch Manhunt has one of these. Faye Lau is the last boss. However, the way she is fought makes Aaron Keener's boss fight actually good in comparison. Basically, after you disable the helicopter, you just shoot Faye and she will die. That's it. Nothing special. No cutscenes, no plot twists, etc. The closest thing to anything interesting happening is a wall of grenade launcher Warhounds backing her up and spraying everywhere as a form of Fake Difficulty. As a result, the fanbases went rabid against Massive and Ubisoft for killing off Faye Lau in such a cheap and undignified way. However, there are still evidence that this isn't the case and that Faye actually faked her death.
• Broken Base:
  • As far back as E3 2018, the game was already getting flak for "dumbing down" the gearing experience, with Gear Sets now having been replaced with small set bonuses that go up to three pieces, as opposed to the first game's four (and eventually six) piece set bonuses. Gear Talents have also been tweaked to activate under different stat ranges, such as going below a certain damage threshold. Lastly, weapon mods were reworked as one-time unlockables with tradeoffs for their benefits instead of being elusive stat sticks. Players who were into The Division for the loot grinding and number crunching aspects of it took to the changes the worst, while other players who were into the game for a Tom Clancy tactical shooter see the changes more in a positive light. When gear and weapons were simplified a few weeks after launch, it only stoked the fires of this particular debate further.
  • PvP players haven't taken too kindly to the new Dark Zone, having been split up into three relatively small areas and reducing the player count from 24 to 12. A number of gameplay changes also seem specifically targeted against PvPers, such as the effective removal of chicken dancing by implementing a skidding animation when turning around during a sprint, the removal of instant healing options (e.g. First Aid), and having only one type of special grenade per Specialization (as opposed to everyone having six different grenade types). Most of the outrage from this crowd revolves around, ironically, being forced to use cover in a cover-based shooter thanks to all of these changes.
  • The game's summer season setting and a slightly slower pace from its predecessor have led to people unfavorably comparing the game to Ghost Recon Wildlands.
  • The mere existence of a Girls' Frontline Crossover announced in April 2020 sparked some controversy, perhaps unsurprisingly for a game with a predominantly Western player base. As with a lot of anime-related controversies, the backlash revolves around assumed pedophile baiting and/or pandering to kids shows, finding themselves contending with people who are just a bit too enthusiastic of Girls' Frontline's Moe aspects. Caught in the middle are GFL players who simply appreciate the grim, post-apocalyptic plot of both TD2 and GFL and people who just don't know and/or care about GFL in general, wondering what all the fuss is about.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most players are just stacking Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Weapon Damage. Since Skill Power is basically useless unless you really spec into it, and stacking even colossal amounts of Health and Armor amounts to not much beyond being able to take a few extra shots, most players are going all-out on damage builds to shred enemy NPCs before they have a chance to fire back. Hell, this playstyle was what the dev team was trying to push for in a Community Update thread before people started complaining about the weakness of tanking and skill power builds.
    "It’s a complex issue to solve, but in the interest of transparency, here’s our thought process. The way to take the least damage in the game is to kill everything that could do damage to you. So the players damage output ends up also mitigating a lot of incoming damage in that indirect way. Further, the faster you burst an enemy down, the less time you have to spend popped up from cover."
  • The Demolitionist is probably the most widely-used out of the three endgame specializations. This is because the Signature Weapon, a multi-shot grenade launcher, is an extremely powerful weapon that requires little skill to use. Another reason is because it gives fifteen percent bonus damage to SMGs, and has a perk called "Crisis Response," both of which are integral to the "Widdz Build" a build focused around abusing the Clutch armor talent to heal, Crisis Response to keep constantly refilling ammo, and the inherently high crit chance of an SMG to basically put out collassal amounts of short-range damage while being essentially unkillable.
  • Getting "geared enough" for the Operation: Dark Hours raid usually involves stacking as much Damage to Elites and weapon damage/(insert gun category here) damage mods as possible. Failing that, people are otherwise expected to have a build containing the Unbreakable talent, which gives the player a free armor bar refill should they run out of armor. Most players are immediately tossed from any raid if they don't meet either of these requirements. To add the cherry on top, in the grand tradition of MMORPG raiding, a lot of players can't join a raid because they haven't been raiding since day one.
• Contested Sequel: While initial impressions of the game were strong, there were quite a few hardcore players who voiced dissatisfaction with the game, and as time went on, the player base slowly became more and more frustrated with some of the Scrappy Mechanics to the game. Some still think that this game is an improvement on the first in nearly every conceivable way, while others pine for the days of the first game. PvP has been a huge part of the conversation in this regard. While few will argue that this game has better-balanced PvP, quite a few of the hardcore players still maintain that the first game's PvP was more dynamic and interesting.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Manny's mania for his map's precision and timeliness could be a symptom of OCD, or simply a reaction to the stress of his job.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Hyena Tank is this thanks to possessing armor that allows them to soak up an immense amount of damage, and a machine gun fed by an ammo backpack. These often become greater threats when accompanied by other enemies, just solely due to the amount of suppression fire they put out.
    • Outcast Heavies are arguably even worse. Thet trade out the LMG for a one-shot Sledgehammer and can move surprisingly fast, considering all the armor that they're wearing. They make it pretty much impossible to stay in cover for more than a few seconds before you have to sprint away from them.
  • The Controller and Operator archetypes are marked by their ability to harass players by moving as far as possible and spamming remote-controlled machinery (primarily of the explosive variety) at their targets. Black Tusk "Rushers", despite the name, also fall into this trope for employing the same strategy.
  • Black Tusk as a faction, quite deliberately. They only show up after the end of the main game, and it's clear why, with the most aggressive and advanced AI in the game and several unique, highly tough units like Warhounds, plus their own Controllers, one has an ever-present Final Boss for the whole post-game.
• Disappointing Last Level: Tidal Basin was this for many players. After several weeks of build-up, the Stronghold was finally unlocked and it... was just another Stronghold. Not a bad Stronghold, but it left a lot of players wondering why it was locked off for weeks. Many players were anticipating an experience that was going to be something more, but it turned out to just be another Stronghold with very little in the way of unique mechanics. For many players, the only memorable part was the end boss, because she had the ability to turn herself invulnerable for brief periods of time in a manner similar to Bobcat from Stolen Signal. Compounding the issue was that many players found it to be very easy, since the weeks of delay meant that players not only had Gearscore 450 builds (Tidal Basin has a Gearscore requirement of 425) but they also had very min-maxed 450 builds, so many players were able to shred through the Stronghold on Story Difficulty.
• Ending Fatigue: After you complete the "final" mission of the story, it seems you've unlocked the endgame, being granted access to a Specialization and a new version of the map with more dynamic activities and Control Points. However, all of the original missions have now been "Invaded" by the Black Tusk. This is officially a continuation of the story, but it's the length of all of the original missions, plus a new one, and reveals little more than the fact that the Black Tusk orchestrated some of the original conflicts. After you're done with those, you unlock another endgame, introducing new features, as well as further post-launch story missions. Whether you're in the game for the story, to hit the endgame, or both, there's a surprising level of layers that slow everything to a crawl.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Some fan theories about the identity of the Hunter the Agent can battle in a side mission range from Aaron Keener to the player character of the first game. The former is disproven by the fact that various audio logs made by Aaron indicate he's still trying to manufacture viruses with the 'help' of Tchernenko, and similarly, a NYC update log states that the Agent of New York is "still running around with Faye."
  • An extremely small subset of players hold an unpopular, conspiracy theory-like opinion that Ubisoft and Massive's insistence on keeping the game extremely hard is a ploy to eventually add pay-to-win options to the game's cash shop. Supporters of this notion usually cite free-to-play mobile games where similar events have happened, other retail live service games whose game design evolved towards nudging players towards pay-to-progress options like Grand Theft Auto Online, or even past Division 2 debacles like the Fake Difficulty involved in unlocking Episode 1's Specializations and the instant unlock for these tied to a Season Pass. However, considering the worst case scenario hasn't happened at all even since Division 1, most people regard this group as simply wearing the tinfoil hat too tightly.
  • Some Division fans have suggested that Faye Lau was actually going in deep with the Black Tusks to take them down from the inside. One such YT video seems to agree with this idea.
• Even Better Sequel: Some that played The Division 2 primarily for the PVE content are pleased that early game enemies are no longer bullet sponges and those that do are justified with the armor plating and boss-tier levels, as the overall pre-postgame experience has a more plausible and steady leveling curve meant to ease up newcomers and make returning players feel like it's the first time playing. The fact that finally, Body Armor as Hit Points are no longer enemy exclusive (as opposed to how in the first game, armors available for the players are merely adding health and applying percentage based damage reduction) as well as some of the "cheating" elements from the first game (such as the seemingly homing enemy grenades) removed is the cherry on top. There is also how the combat zones tend to be wide, large, and sprawling compared to the combat zones of the first game.
• Game-Breaker: For a short while after Warlords of New York released, the newly-introduced Negev was the reigning champ of guns in the game. This was due to it being a high rate-of-fire LMG with damagwe comperable to low rate-of-fire LMGs. This, combined with the massive 100-round magazine, made it an absolute terror. Unsurprisongly, it was quickly nerfed to bring it back in line with other LMGs.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The entire Capitol Building mission became more relevant after the recent Capitol building raid by alt-right groups in January 6th, 2021. The devs even spoke out about this, stating that The Division 2 was not meant to be political - which a few gaming journalists called bullshit on, as the Capitol Building mission is occupied by what are essentially alt-right anti-vaxxers hellbent on overthrowing the United States government.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • Operation Dark Hours is this to console players, as it heavily emphasizes DPS builds at the expense of all others (e.g. tanking and skill power) and requires precise aim on a moment's notice to deal with raid mechanics - a feat that's harder to do on a controller than it is with a mouse and keyboard. It should be noted that players on the PC version defeated the raid within 5 hours after its launch, while it took well over four days for the first console raid group to beat it.
  • Much of the game's early lifespan was plagued with this type of criticism, with almost all enemy NPCs having their damage and health overtuned and a few AI-related bugs only compounded the problem. After nerfing both players and enemies a number of times, there was a large swathe of time where the opposite was true, then the game's criticism went straight back to this again after Warlords of New York came out, and it's only gotten worse since then with Massive's repeated insistence on nerfing anything that could be even remotely construed as giving the player enough of an advantage to push the game below "gruelling and mind-numbing Damage Sponge Mooks that can One-Hit Kill players at any moment" in terms of difficulty (read: basically everything that isn't a straight DPS build, and even then those aren't safe).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • It's somewhat amusing to do a Capitol mission and kill all the bad guys after what happened to the Capitol in January 6th, 2021 considering that who you're killing is basically "alt-right anti-vaxxers hellbent on overthrowing the United States government." Not to mention you're raiding a capitol building with your buddies and actually succeeding.
    • Hell, Capitol Raid in general could be considered this despite also being in Harsher in Hindsight.
  • Complaints were made about the game having four seasons planned of Manhunts and seasonal content. By 2023, there's been fifteen seasons of Manhunts and seasonal content.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks:
  • One of the biggest criticisms leveled at the game over the Beta is that it feels very similar to the original game. How much this is true is up for debate, however, as many of the biggest changes are not immediately obvious, and can be easily missed by someone who abandoned the first game after a few months.
  • People were not happy when a May 2020 Content Leak revealed what Massive was planning for the game: four seasons of Manhunts. The first season was already getting criticized for doing almost nothing new, save for moving the Cleaners to DC with no other changes and a new variation of the Roosevelt Island mission, which was also criticized for having Fake Difficulty even on Normal due to instant kill EMPs that can only be disabled by standing next to them. With the second Manhunt playing out in a similar fashion (Outcasts moved to NYC, Manhunt targets get Eclipse Protocol grenades, which are essentially glorified Chem Launcher rounds that are thrown instead of shot, and Tidal Basin but with Eclipse all over the place), the playerbase predictably didn't hold high expectations for the other seasonal Manhunts. It would later become fifteen seasons of Manunts with only minor gameplay changes.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The three Gear Sets that came with the Tidal Basin update are disliked, with the general consensus being that the Set Abilities are too situational, weak, and/or gimmicky to be worth giving up the Talents that come with High-End gear.
    • True Patriot is ostensibly a debuff-inflicting set, yet said debuffs hardly have an effect. The damage-decreasing Red debuff doesn't help in content where every enemy is very capable of inflicting a One-Hit Kill (basically every Challenging difficulty mission worth farming), the armor-leeching White debuff restores mere pixels of armor per shot, and the skill cooldown-reducing Blue debuff is better served by plain old cooldown reduction attributes and Brand Set bonuses.
    • Ongoing Directive's 5 piece bonus "vacuums" armor, grenades and ammunition near the player every 30 seconds, which is arguably only useful in Challenging or harder missions (again) where risking one's life to grab that single Signature Weapon round is 99% not worth it. Meanwhile, its 6 piece bonus gives a scant three rounds of status-inflicting rounds of a random type to a random holstered weapon, which ends up only being useful when shock ammo is involved.
    • Hard Wired's 5 piece bonus turns skills that are deployed on the ground into makeshift shock mines. Although this sounds broken on paper, it takes way too long for its effects to activate, all the while giving itself away with lightning effects that even the blindest Player Versus Player agent can't miss. Its 6 piece bonus offers skill cooldown resets for both equipped skills under the condition that the set's user either kills an enemy with a skill or heals an allied agent from zero armor to full. The problem with the former is that skill cooldowns don't begin until a skill is destroyed, necessitating the need to juggle skills (a la Division 1's 6 piece Tactician set) and most competent agents run their own heals anyway, rendering the latter benefit moot. This got updated so that the focus is on switching between gadgets with a hard 30 second cooldown on the skill reset so its usable without letting you just throw them out constantly.
  • Many players prefer to use Specialized (blue) Mods over High-End (gold/yellow) Armor Mods. This is because Blue Mods are generic, so they can fit into any slot, and they offer stronger, but fewer, bonuses compared to High-End Mods. A Blue might give plus five percent Weapon Damage; while a High-End might give one percent bonus Weapon Damage, one point five percent Crit Chance, and one percent Assault Rifle Damage.
• Memetic Badass: Kestrel, from the Season 4 Manhunt. He's supposed to be a bog-standard Rogue Agent, but various bugs in his pathfinding enable him to do a lot of crazy stuff, like phase through walls, teleport, float, and moonwalk. The fanbase ended up comparing Kestrel to Agent Smith, treating the glitches like it's legendary dodging skill in-universe.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • A bug present in the private beta caused Hyenas and True Sons Rusher dialogue to become this. Massive even singled out /r/thedivision in the associated patch notes for pointing this out.
    Despite the meme potential (sorry, Reddit), Rushers do not curse as much while rushing the player anymore.
  • "Optimize your build." ^ExplanationThe devs' usual go-to statement for the game's difficulty after the release of Warlords of New York. Fan speculation on why exactly they do this ranges from dumb players not "getting" their game design to the rather tinfoil hat-ish idea that Ubisoft is secretly preparing to add pay-to-win mechanics so that people can buy back their power.
  • "Gotta reign in that fun" ^ExplanationComes from this Twitch clip (albeit paraphrased) dated to a few weeks after Warlords of New York's release, where Massive was in the midst of doing what they usually do and nerfing everything remotely powerful into the ground (see It's Hard, So It Sucks!). Affiliated forums took this and ran with it as it gave the game's detractors all the fuel they needed to "prove" that the devs only want their players to suffer for fun.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • While the True Sons weren't exactly the nicest people to begin with, they cement their irredeemably evil status when they use chemical weapons to exterminate the survivors taking shelter at the Castle Settlement. This is especially egregious as the True Sons did so under orders from General Ridgeway solely because the man leading the Castle was an ex-member of their organization. Even Ridgeway's own people wonder why they're bothering to attack it as they're no threat.
    Agent Kelso: The attack came from Jefferson Plaza. You know what to do... Kill them all.
  • Emeline Shaw is a walking Moral Event Horizon as while she has a sympathetic backstory and Freudian Excuse, having been locked away in a quarantine where she was left to die (with her daughter not making it), she crosses it for most players when she's revealed to be trying to bring back the Green Poison and use it on innocent civilians. Given the sheer devastation of the world at the hands of the disease, most players think she goes from an annoyance to an existential threat to humanity.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story:
  • The game's story is extremely threadbare and is downright Cliché Storm, with no real overarching narrative connecting the missions, which are more like episodes loosely tied together by the vague premise of taking back DC from the various factions, with basically nothing in terms of plot twists or intrigue. However, the actual gameplay is so good that most players don't really care about the nearly nonexistent story. A point several reviews have made, such as the UK edition of PCGamer, is that the story never makes you stop and pay attention to it; instead putting focus on combat and the loot grind. There's a lot of story in the game if you poke around, but you're never stopped and forced to listen.
  • The game gradually has started subverting that with subsequent seasons as a Government Conspiracy and various characters being developed like Big Bad Natalya Sokolova as well as General Anderson have appeared in multiple seasons. Warlords of New York also attempted to give the game more depth by tying the game to the previous setting in New York as well as having Big Good Faye Lau make a Face–Heel Turn.
• Paranoia Fuel: If you stop to think about the whole 'invasion' arc, you start getting a little nervous. The Black Tusk are revealed to have played a larger role in events than first imagined, including sabotaging the SHD Network, arranging the 'suicide' of President Mendez, and supplying arms to the Hyenas to keep Washington in chaos. But ultimately, Black Tusk are mercenaries: who's picking up their tab? Who paid them to do all this, and why? Who profits by their campaign?
• Rooting for the Empire: After the Warlords of New York ended with a new Rogue Division Agent network being established, some players wishes that for the next game, going rogue isn't just a Dark Zone gimmick but a whole new accessible storyline as well, due to even fan favorite characters like Faye Lau went rogue as well as the annoyingness of ISAC (see The Scrappy below). It didn't help that Aaron Keener's lieutenants as well as other rogue agents as featured in Warlords of New York embodies Evil Is Cool. As well as how ANNA, the Rogue Network, sounds more pleasant than ISAC.
• The Scrappy: ISAC, for his complete lack of personality and his tendency of voicing everything (including side dynamic activities that often distract the player from the main destination) as well as never having to shut up at any moment. At one point in a mission even Manny Ortega said it's a "piece of shit wristwatch" after ISAC saying how pretty much escape is impossible and Manny suggests the agent to improvise... which works.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Unlike normal missions, the game Hard Locks players out of Strongholds if they aren't at the required level. This includes the Invaded Strongholds that are needed to advance to the next World Tier. This means that a player might have a great build going... only for them to be turned away from the Stronghold because they have a Gearscore of 274 instead of 275.
  • The Tac-50 Sniper used by the Sharpshooter Class has a rather annoying mechanic where the gun takes a few seconds to become fully accurate, so players have to sit with their body and head exposed to enemy fire for a few seconds if they want to be even slightly effective with the weapon.
  • The Alert Level system. After hitting World Tier 4, all free roam activities scale in difficulty from +1 to +4, equivalent to missions on Normal, Hard, Challenging, and Heroic difficulties respectively. A Control Point's Alert Level goes up when nearby activities marked by a red line on the map are completed. Sounds good on paper, but many crafting blueprints for weapon mods, especially for 7.62 caliber weapons, are gated behind +3 or higher Control Points. Given the lack of chokepoints at a lot of them, plus the randomness of other activities like enemy resource convoys, +3 CPs are deceptively harder than their Challenging mission counterparts and are basically impossible to do with an uncoordinated team of random players. By far the worst part of all this is that, if you summon allied reinforcements to the control point, and then die before retaking it, you can't respawn back at the control point. So you have to run back to it from a nearby respawn point. Then, if your allies take back the control point before you get back, you get nothing. No experience, no materials, no blueprints.
  • Level 40. By continuing to the expansion's story, the World Tier is removed, returning into a conventional level 30-40 progression. By the time the expansion ended, there is a new leveling system, SHD Level, which features a more incremental addition instead of flat ones. There is also how in the hard cap of Level 40, equipment stats vary more wildly and gear optimization is often extremely encouraged, as now even "red-bar" type enemies often has additional green armor bar.
  • The Hard Wired Gear Set, unlike its other two counterparts, isn't dropped randomly from Black Tusk enemies. Instead, specific components for it are farmed from specific missions, while its common crafting material, Hard Wired Tech, is dropped by Black Tusk enemies. Each gear piece requires one component and 10 Hard Wired Tech, and the latter is capped to 30, forcing players to farm more at some point if they want to craft all six gear pieces. As if that wasn't enough, the blueprints for the set are unlocked through a Goal Project that requires said crafting materials. To add insult to injury, Hard Wired is just as underperforming damage-wise as the other two Gear Sets.
  • Raid matchmaking. This is an odd case in that the "mechanic" is scrappy because of its absence, with Massive's official reasoning being that they don't want people to grab whatever randoms they can for the hardest content in the game and cause everyone in the raid party undue frustration. Most of /r/thedivision didn't buy that excuse for even a second, citing that other MMO-type games have raid matchmaking, and the excuse is veering on false advertising as a pre-release infographic claimed that every activity would have matchmaking.
  • Because of the way skill power requirements scale with level and item rarity, the best way to farm generally usable skill mods is to either farm blue mods on a level 19 character and/or leave an alt's crafting bench at World Tier 3. People are also more likely to farm blue gear mods for the simple reason that losing two attributes per mod is absolutely worth the cost of having a much higher value on the remaining attribute. This all results in a rather bizarre gear treadmill where the best way to get min-maxed gear is to not actually play endgame content at all.
  • "Specialization Research" missions, which are required to unlock the Gunner specialization. They are essentially a variety of busywork 20 Bear Asses-styled quests which require a lot of tedious grinding, which some players think is intentional by design to entice people into buying the Year 1 Season Pass to skip all of the grind.
  • The Dark Zone has been this since the previous game, but got skyrocketed to Scrappy Mechanic status in Title Update 6 as PVE players who otherwise wouldn't touch any Dark Zone with a ten foot pole now "feel forced" to farm Dark Zone-exclusive gear with "Perfect" talents centered around weapon damage. The Yaahl Gear brand set in particular has been a sore point since launch, as its always been Dark Zone exclusive and its three-piece set bonus is a flat increase to weapon damage. Good luck not losing any of that gear to Player Killers at extraction points!
  • The "budget system" that determines an item's attribute rolls has been a sore point since launch day. What this basically means is that each item has a "budget" to randomly allot attribute increases to. To put it another way, how highly rolled each attribute is is determined relative to each other, so if one attribute is "god rolled" (maxed), then the rest of them will be extremely low. Likewise, if one is mediocre then it's most likely that the rest of them are mediocre. The system was so reviled that Massive pledged to remove it and simply have attributes roll independently of each other as part of their gear rework for their Year 2 Roadmap.
  • The Optimization Station made a return from the first game in Title Update 12. However, a vast majority of the player base are of the opinion that this game's iteration of it is the epitome of Fake Longevity. Not only are there now twenty different types of optimization materials to farm (up from one type in the first game), optimization costs get exponentially more expensive the closer an attribute gets to its maximum value. Despite nearly a month of beta testing this feature and tons of negative feedback on it, Massive insisted on keeping the optimization costs as is, explaining on a State of the Game livestream that they never intended for optimization to be the best way to obtain "god rolled" gear like in the first game. This led the player base to question why the mechanic was even developed in the first place if they explicitly don't want people to use it. On the other hand, a comparatively smaller segment of the player base thinks the "fake longevity" is justified, since optimization was pretty much the only extremely long-term goal for hardcore players at the time of its release.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer:
  • Free roam activities are dynamically generated (even more so after level 30), so it's perfectly possible to set out of a safe house with the intention of walking to a mission, only to end up several blocks in the opposite direction following a daisy chain of smaller activities.
  • Loot in general. While the game is certainly generous with it, the lack of deterministic rewards turns many players off. Without the ability to properly chase specific pieces of brands of loot, many players feel like they have to invest an unreasonably huge amount of time into the game in order to have a good enough build to take on high-level endgame content like the Raid.
• That One Attack:
  • Just like the first game, the Hunters' EMP jammer can put a dent in any game plan revolving around the use of skills, whether it's DPS players relying on an Auto-Revive, tanking players relying on the Ballistic Shield, or literally any Skill Tier build. The only foolproof way to deal with it is by using a build that renders the player immune to the EMP status effect, which often involves sacrificing at least one other key stat.
  • Bosses who happen to have the Oxidizer Chem Launcher and/or a skill capable of inflicting Burn can make short work of players' armor, regardless of difficulty.
• Tainted by the Preview
  • The Private Beta left a sour taste in some people's mouths. One of the biggest complaints was the presence of an incredibly large number of Server issues that would make people disconnect every hour or so. Also, the presence of a memory leak bug that made their performance degrade over time; as well as the presence of several bugs and exploits, like Head-Glitching, that have existed in the game since the First Division launched back in 2016. The UI has received criticism, at least on PC, for being very clunky and difficult to navigate, requiring players to double-click buttons for no apparent reason.
  • More like Lack of a Preview, but as of the time of this edit, roughly a month away from release, Ubisoft has not clarified many, if any, details about the Division 2's post-launch monetization. Questions about lootboxes, pay for power, paid-only cosmetics, etc... have all gone unanswered. Considering Ubisoft's recent history, many players are concerned about what they'll be selling.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A biggest example of this trope has to be LVOA-C and Lightweight M4. In the predecessor, they was so versatile that almost every agents/players began to use it 24/7 in every situations. However, in the sequel, Ubisoft downright bastardized them by turning them into a rifle category, meaning that not only the fire-rate reduced, it is now semi-auto. Combine that with sub-par damage and a short range for rifle standard (Which is absolutely terrible for taking down enemies in heroic difficulties), you have a hollow shell of what made the previous game so special. As a result, most people began to disregard both weapons and they quickly fell into obscurity, especially in endgame.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of build-up was made for Aaron Keener's plans in The Division with him depicted as an incredibly savvy, dangerous, and ruthless political operator. With Warlords of New York, we finally find out what his plan is, to just use a bunch of Dollar Flu bombs to kill people until they do what he says. Many fans felt that his Villain Decay was a waste, especially since he dies at the end of the expansion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The player characters get very little build up to finding out the Castle has been massacred. How much better would it have been if you'd arrived, gotten to know them, done missions for them and then it is slaughtered by the True Sons? That would really justify a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Much of the base game is building up to the arrival of the Black Tusks but they have almost no initial development or reasons for doing what they're doing. Likewise, much of the history of how Washington D.C. as well as the Federal government collapsed is restricted to optional content. It's not until the expansion seasons that anything resembling a plot about how the Black Tusks helped bring down the United States becomes clear.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Named NPCs that utilize SHD Tech skills. The only places such enemies exist are in the Dark Zone (which is unpopular due to its PVP nature), Heroic bounties (of which there's only one per week and takes some Target Intel grinding), and Hunters (which can only be fought once per account unless partying with another player who hasn't killed theirs yet). Mitigated by the release of NPC Rogue Agents, who appear semi-regularly and come with two randomized skills as part of their kit.
  • The armor-ignoring Poison debuff hardly sees any use, and when it does appear, it's mostly used in the form of a Fog of Doom that deals extremely slow Damage Over Time, either as an enemy Trick Bomb or a Summit floor gimmick. This is especially true for players, as the only way they can inflict Poison is via the Scorpio Exotic shotgun, whose Poison debuff deals pathetic damage.
  • It got more use from the Vile mask, any affliction adds poison automatically so you can focus on others and it works with a wide verity of status effects, and with the right build it becomes the go to for killing groups on normal or hard.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • The announcement of eight player raids was seen as this, since the previous game's "raid" content was designed solely for a four-man team.
  • The devs are planning for Exotic weapons and gear to be something special, including in terms of stats. In most cases in The Division, Exotic items were (or became) generally underwhelming, save for a handful of guns released late in the game's lifespan that gave enormous damage bonuses.
  • The activation of gear and weapon talents went from stringent stat requirements in the E3 2018 build to counting the number of stat rolls in the same category (including those from gear mods) from the private beta onwards, addressing complaints that the former would've stifled build variety.
  • The free roaming segments of Washington D.C. see a lot more use after level 30, throwing in the Black Tusks among the mishmash of enemy factions and initiating a Forever War with the Division to give players something to do. This is in stark contrast to the previous game, whose world map didn't have much going for it after clearing all the side missions besides a few bosses with a fixed wander range.
  • A clan system makes its debut in this game after its conspicuous absence in the first one. The system includes clan ranks, tags and descriptors, in-game methods of clan-wide communication, and weekly objectives dedicated to leveling up the clan for unlockable benefits.
  • In a sort of twofer, the developers addressed a concern about the Division 2, while also addressing a common criticism of the first game's Endgame. A player discovered that one of the weapon attachments came with a minus fifty percent Damage to Elites, and considering that the high-level endgame activities in the first game turn every single enemy into an Elite, many players raised concerns about the design philosophy of such an utterly terrible stat, and why the developers could have possibly thought that this was a good idea. The developers responded by informing players that in the first game, high-difficulty activities turned all enemies into Elites, but that this was no longer the case in the second game, and that even high-level endgame activities would still feature plenty of red-bar "normal" enemies. Not only did this make many players feel better but also excited at the prospect of an endgame that isn't an endless parade of Elite enemies.
  • In the first game, one of the biggest criticisms was that after you beat the campaign and hit level thirty, there was really nothing to do except for going into the Dark Zone and farming for High-End gear, leaving players who didn't like PvP rather upset. The Division 2, on the other hand, has a significantly stronger offering of PvE Endgame activities, like Strongholds, Invaded Missions, Bounties, the 52 Card Bosses, and the Eight-Player Raid.
  • The game's launch month saw many smaller bugs and player suggestions make its way into the game over the course of no less than three major patches. On top of that, the development team has been very transparent on forums regarding their design philosophy (e.g. this Community Update thread) - which, as several commenters have pointed out, is a rarity with AAA live service games, especially in the wake of fellow looter shooter Anthem.
  • After a couple of weeks of protracted backlash regarding the lack of raid matchmaking, Title Update 5 introduced said feature and also threw in a "Discovery Mode" version of the raid on top of that to help newer players get acquainted with the raid gimmicks without having to be ridiculously geared for it.
  • Title Update 6 addressed the long-standing issue of loot being too random by having each district and mission have "Targeted Loot", weighing drops more towards the gear type and/or Brand Set marked on the world map, with the loot types rotating weekly. The same patch also added the Hard Wired Gear Set to the general loot pool as players found the set underwhelming compared to how much effort goes into crafting it.
  • The Warlords of New York patch and Title Update 9 after it were panned for being too hard for the wrong reasons and re-introducing a number of game-breaking bugs that were widely assumed to have been fixed a long time ago. Fans often blame the lack of a public test server for either of these patches as the biggest reason behind the lack of QA, with the official reason behind it being that they were basically getting tired of console player accusations of PC favoritism, since that platform got first dibs on upcoming balance changes and new gear. The developers eventually got the message and went back to testing things on a PTS again starting with Title Update 10.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The developers took quite a bit of flak after one of their spokespeople said that no political message was intended, which others took to be Implausible Deniability given that Tom Clancy (the premiere name on the game) was famous precisely for politically-themed thrillers. They most likely meant that the game is not a statement on recent real-world politics, unlike for example Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus which was often interpreted as (and even marketed as) an allegory for current political events.

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