The Division Update 1.4 To "Bring Back The Shooter Feeling"

Ubisoft announced yesterday that Tom Clancy's The Division Update 1.4 will introduce a number of character balance changes that are intended to "bring back the shooter feeling, add more decision making and hard choices when building your character and add more variety to the viable builds." Nearly every part of character development is being adjusted in order to improve the overall experience. Here are some of the highlights.

All gear will provide bonuses to all three stats, one of which will be higher than the others, but will no longer provide skill bonuses. Backpacks, holsters, and knee pads will each be given "new performance mod slots." With these changes, Ubisoft intends to allow players to recalibrate their stats at any time, while increasing survivability, and give players more control over the mods they want to use without having to worry about the skill modifiers that were chosen by a random number generator.

Gear scores will be undergoing major changes that make them "much clearer and easier to understand."

There will be a new damage per second formula "based on damage, rounds per minute and crit."

There will no longer be any hard caps on skills, but "a curve of diminishing returns" is being introduced.

Ubisoft summarizes the update as follows.

As you can tell by now, big changes are coming to The Division in Update 1.4. At first glance, it might look as if though we’re just raising or lowering numbers across the board, but mixed with the new enemy balancing and time to kill-changes detailed in our last development article, our goal is to make you feel more powerful once the update comes out. The current big numbers are going away, but that doesn’t mean you won’t feel a steady increase in power as you get better and better gear.

You can find more information about the  character balance changes here.