The ramp to level 30 for me was great, i felt like there were always significant gains made every activity i did or every trip to the DZ i made. These things always ended in me getting a new piece of gear that was better than what i had. Now i feel like anything out of the Dailies or Challenge levels or the DZ (whether it's level 30,31, or 32 mobs) are just on par with what i have. Like a grind in the DZ will yield maybe less than one actual useful piece of gear per hour spent playing in the DZ and even then it's not a huge bump in stats. The only way i'm able to increase my survivability or DPS is to reroll stats on my armor to min max Firearms or Stamina. Is this all there is in the end game or should i be getting better gear and i'm just unlucky? My current DZ level is 41, Current dps is around 100k and health around 55k.

Yeah, yellow drops are ludicrously rare (only found two amidst the dozens of hours invested - both were mods...), and so the DZ grind is basically for getting to DZ rank 50 and for maybe collecting a few loose phoenix credits along the way. I guess the purple stuff is somewhat worthwhile to then deconstruct into parts... But because there's rarely ever any loot worth... looting, there still continues to be no real reason for people to go rogue even with the recent patch. The only time I've ever encountered rogue players is when it's a squad of 3-4 that are simply going around killing people for the Hell of it. They don't have the contaminated backpack on their person and in some cases their levels are 50+ at that. Everybody else is just gettin' on with the grind to hitting 50, least that's been my experience.

EDIT: Oh, that's of course only the DZ I'm referring to. I find that Challenging missions are still worth the time for the credits. Though while nearly all of my gear is level 31 yellow stuff, there's still some weapon mods to purchase in the vendor back at homebase to save up for. Plus once you hit 50 there'll be more stuff to purchase in the DZ. Not gonna lie, I'm really tempted by those jackets the special vendor's selling, even though I'm almost certain they're just going to be different colour schemes of already existing jackets...

@yummylee: I've only seen the Ranger jacket, but yeah, its a palette swap of an existing jacket. You can get those from your Scavenger crate in your Base as well, if you get lucky.

@oldmanlight: They've slightly improved drop rates of High End pieces in the latest patch, and also added them to the Key chests drop table, so you have another way to get them in addition to Challenging mode bosses. But yeah, after a bit at 30 most of the stuff you're picking up is either worse or a small upgrade. At this point the only reason I'm even picking up purples is to deconstruct them to keep crafting the same High End blueprints in hopes for better rolls. I haven't picked up all the Phoenix Credit blueprints from the DZ yet, mostly because I don't want to spend all my Division tech because it takes ages to farm. For what its worth, your Firearms and Stamina stats seem fairly average for a level 30, so there is still room for improvement if those are the stats you're spec'ing towards. Granted it'll probably take a long time to get better upgrades, but still.

@yummylee said:

That's exactly what they are. Don't waste the credits on them unless you have nothing else to spend them on. You can always look up pictures of all those jackets online, you know.

Until they patch in item sets next month and possibly increase level caps/just provide new ilevel tiers with the expansion content then there's not much room to grow into.

You hit level 30, you've probably got or are close to having a full set of purple ilevel 30 gear and weapons and mods. The room to upgrade is better itemisation (making sure every stat synergises with your build via reforging plus incredibly luck to have all but one stat already line up perfectly with your needs) and going up to ilevel 31 with either purple or gold/yellow rarity (ideally ending up with all ilvl31 yellows).

For a game where you can easily spend 60 hours just playing up to the cap, I'm not that enthusiastic about a really long grind for the top loot. The locks behind Phoenix Credits for that stuff (and even then, lots of random rolls for crafting to really get best-in-class gear) seems reasonable. It'll be interesting to see where the gear requirements for the first incursion end up (as I don't think we know what "150" means yet - does that mean you need to have some ilvl31 and yellows to run the incursion?) and how they're going to build out the end game. The Challenging difficulty treadmill does not sound like it has quite the same longevity as WoW Heroic raids have for a large percentage of that user base (who can grind that for a good 1-2 months after an expansion launch before being geared to enter to bottom of raiding, if they want to move up beyond completing dungeon sets).

I think the current crafting of end-game gear and RNG for the perks for almost all that is a really useless system in the Division. Lots of people seem to be grinding gear to disassemble to roll the dice on more crafting to get a perfectly itemised ilvl31 yellow despite how mathematically unlikely that is - and it's not like if they got it they'd have suddenly unlocked access to new content to play as it seems like people are already getting on top of the Challenge difficulty without needing the absolute best gear. You're going to be moving from 70-80% extra clip to 90-100% extra clip - it's worth having but that upgrade to the very best isn't huge. Your combined Firearms + Stamina + Electronics should be above 5000 by the time you start looking for good gear, it'll be 6000 once you've collected that gear - again, worth having and a boost but it's all about where you put it. If you spec it out and have a good weapon then 200k paper DPS is possible but that's more about the paper calculations than anything else.

Oh, one thing: scavenging. It's the key stat to push the dice rolls on drops so if you're used to getting bad drops, check your gear for that stat (as you can get a single piece with a decent stat for it pushing 70%+ just at the cost of one other stat and that's a lot more than the base 15% boost you get as a perk). It's not going to make it rain yellows but it's there for a reason. No content expects your gear to all be perfectly spec'd so why not give yourself a bit of extra luck with the RNG and make sure you've got some gear with some bonus scavenging to it. Sure beats that stat boosting a skill you don't use that most gear ends up with (or extra xp when you've long since hit the level cap) [again, the issue here being the entire game does not seem built to make it realistic to get perfect itemisation - maybe item sets will all have fixed perks and so be a lot more likely to give us what we want from an end-game loot grind].

@shivoa: Are you positive that Scavenging affects the quality of loot? A lot of the current thinking on that stat is that it only increases drops of crafting materials, not quality of items.

I know, but I wanted to keep them a mystery just in case.

All of my gear slots are high-end now. Drops from challenging difficulty and random DZ drops are no longer upgrades for me, and I already have all the high-end blueprints from the Base of Operations vendor. The only way to improve my gear now is to grind to DZ rank 50 and spend my Phoenix Points at the DZ vendor for slightly better high-end blueprints.

I'm not sure if I want to do that, or wait a couple of more weeks for the free update with Incursions and get better gear that way.

@mike: I don't know for sure (not sure if they've said or that anyone has enough data from running with and without to compare [stuff like this preliminary testing is far from conclusive either way due to small sample size]) but I assumed it pushed all random drops (ie ones not fixed to be specific tier/lvl) to be slightly higher in tier. It's certainly possible it only gives you better crafting mat pick-ups (in which case, it'll be time for a combat set without scavenging and a quick swap for collecting mats - very much worthwhile to get yellow crafting mats if you're doing a loop of mats drops).

Just absolutely sleep-walked the daily Challenging (Lexington Event Centre) with none of us wearing anything special or even much coordination other than knowing where to set up some killzones to trivialise some of the spawns.

@shivoa:

Everything leading up to the end game and basically superior (Yellow) drops was a great ride. This was mostly because you were always doing the grind loop in service of completing more story, getting more unlocks. At this point in time, when I'm all purped up and have a few yellows slapped on as well, that loop is no longer the fun marathon without end in sight but a constant walk around a very short and familiar block. I'm killing baddies in service of getting better weapons to kill better baddies, ad nauseam. This is usually the point in these sort of games where I slowly start to call it quits as I just don't have the tenacious grind mentality in me anymore. A day ago I did a long stretch in the DZ and got about 5 yellow drops, one of them being that Midas uzi that recently got nerfed and is subsequently worse than the yellow vector schematics still up on sale. Last night I did another long stint in the DZ with no yellows in sight, and barely any phoenix credits to show for it. I guess I was kind of late to the party since the patch completely demolished the amount of credits you get for felling a named boss in the DZ as it went from anywhere above 10 to a scant 1-2.

Challenging missions give gear and the most credits but unless you have a dedicated group it can be really hit or miss. Some I've done that went smoothly. Others it seemed like my team wasn't quite at the level it needed to be to pull it off. Once I spent 45 minutes in a challenging mission only to have the servers go down, effectively wasting that entire hour of my life - and these days I only get a few hours a night to play. So ultimately the best loop is to fly through the Dailies on hard and then grind out the DZ hoping for some lucky drops. Sadly all of this is done in service of leveling up for an ethereal DLC pack, which may or may not be even worth the time and effort..

So yah, end game grind is quickly losing it's appeal.

@oldmanlight: 100K DPS and 55K Health and I assume about 18K Skill seems about on par for regular level 30 Superior/High End gear. I don't have all High End iLevel 31 gear yet but I'm pushing 125 DPS, 75K Health, and 21K Skill with iLevel 31 Superiors with a few High Ends. The biggest part of end game is similar to a game like Diablo where you want to synergize all of your gear and perks towards a build and what weapons and perks you use most frequently so that you maximize their usefulness. Personally I try to stack mod slots, crit chance, crit damage, and skill power on anything that can have it, and then perks that affect Pulse and Heal. Late game is mostly about buying iLevel 31 High End blueprints for weapons, armor, then mods with Pheonix Credits. To get those run challenge mode and dailies frequently, and try to get to DZ Rank 50. I am still just at 48, almost 49. It's a chore for sure, but last night I used kill xp gear that wasn't very good to use, but I just ran through the Level 30 DZ areas and was getting almost 300 XP per kill so that speed things up significantly. I think once I get all iLevel 31 High End I can be pushing 130-140 DPS, keep 75K Health, and put Skill to around 25K to see if Sticky Bomb if viable again or not. But really after getting all iLevel 31 purples its just minor min maxing and getting those High End perks that help a bit. Seems High End Mods for Armor and Weapons might be the most valuable things but I haven't gotten a chance to buy those yet.

But your entire statement is very valid. It does really feel like it's hard to make improvements. I'm finding that I make strides on about 1-2 pieces of gear per night and get a few more DZ ranks in, and that's about it. I really hope some of the DZ blueprints don't change this week since I'm about to hit 50 though, I really want that Custom M44 and Navy MP5. That Skill Health mod with 100+ Stamina and like 1,200 Skill Power looked great too but I fear that will definitely be gone.

Man I just reached the level cap and now I'm reading this it's kinda putting me off even bothering as I won't have as much time to grind as I'd like.

@flameboy84: So the ilvl 31 stuff is around, the high-end yellows are around - it's not like you'll see none of them during light play; just that the very best itemisation is pretty random so people wanting to be top are going to have to grind a lot of them to get there. Right now, if you've finished the game and have generally ilvl 30 purples then you're probably going to be ok for playing new content as it arrives. At least I hope that's roughly what their gear level requirements work out (we find out in a few weeks when the first Incursion arrives). So don't feel forced to grind or play more if you're not into it - the act of playing is kinda the main reward (as noted above the end-game loot is nice and has gear perks and that 3rd weapon perk but that's not always incredible, you're moving from 5000+ stat points between the 3 categories to ~6000 and refining your itemisation to best suit your needs, or have several options so you can swap Firearms or Electronics builds as you desire or swap gear for skill swaps).

But, if you want to do a limited amount of play, you can do that. The dailies are generally worth it. Don't expect the lvl30 Hard missions to drop anything (except ilvl30 purples) so those are just easy fast runs to get used to team fighting with 15 Phoenix Credits handed out at the end of each. But the Challenging daily ends with one high-end drop and gives a fair number of Phoenix Credits (the drop and 20 PCs are for just doing any Challenging mission, plus 30 more PCs for it being the daily). And the focus on those dailies means matchmaking will go faster, because everyone will be probably doing that first for the extra PCs.

At least some of the missions on Challenging: not challenging. They're designed for groups of 4 and everyone has played them before so all the story and stuff you just sprint through to go between the actual fights (just like MMO Heroics, only without the fixed roles and need to know tactics for each fight to make them easy). So, assuming you don't get somewhere where you're stuck and keep on wiping, they're pretty fast. And that's 50 PCs each day just for doing the Challenging daily mission, plus a random yellow drop. Quickly adds up to enough PCs to buy blueprints (and all those worthless purples will mean you've got plenty of crafting materials for at least a few rolls on getting an ok stat combo on an ilvl31 yellow crafted) from the vendor upstairs in you home base.

If you like the DZ stuff then you can get those ilvl31 drops there too (from the higher level enemies), and a few PCs from named elites. I've not found that so fun at the level cap (as I was enjoying the DZ as a dangerous solo farming zone before the level cap), but if you've got a regular group then I can see how that would be where you go to play together if you're not eager to repeat missions. Clear Landmarks and extraction zones, keep your scavenging stat up, hope for good drops.

@shivoa: @flameboy84: In practice I hope Shivoa is right that the incursions will be able to be done with iLevel 30 gear, that's more of a wait and see type of thing. Right now, at least from the people I've played with, you can easily kill any level 30 with iLevel 30 gear, Level 31 enemies are tough but manageable, and Level 32 have to be approached extremely cautiously because they will wipe you pretty quickly. Those small adjustments actually matter quite a bit at end game enemies. If you get all iLevel 31 Superiors you can pretty adequately manage Level 32 Elites and take caution near bosses. With iLevel 31 High End gear you can pretty well breeze through all of the enemies in the game somewhat brazenly, even ignoring cover sometimes. Personally I'm afraid without at least iLevel 31 Superiors the Incursions are going to be extremely difficult, but I hope I'm wrong. But don't be afraid of just investing a small amount of time. Like Shivoa said, you can pretty easily get iLevel 31 Superiors from the DZ by fighting level 31 enemies which you should be able to handle with just regular ilevel 30 gear. And you could always take a wait and see approach for when Incursion launch because those should change the End Game dramatically and will be out relatively soon.

If anyone wants to bother, I did find an area that seemed to offer a higher chance for drops. Not guaranteed golds of course, but the rate of drops in general seemed higher. I would put a spoiler on this but, considering the thread, I'm guessing you duders know what's up already...

The mission is called "Police Academy" and it is the one where you first discover the "rogue" agent. At the end of this level you are about to leave the police station and have to wait for ISAC (Garrus!) to get some data off a computer near the exit. As you wait, there are a group of four or five guys that breach the door and you have to fight your way to the street where even more enemies, including a named first wave agent (Scarecrow) eventually spawn. Now, I can't guarantee that they'll all drop something amazing, but between the rush of enemies and the named rouge, I've been having good luck with the drop rate. As a bonus: If they aren't dropping much besides ammo, you can die and you'll be re-spawned at the checkpoint right before the initial door breach occurs so you can try again.

Again, this isn't a sure "High End" farming trick, but with a few scavenging boosters and some luck, you might get some better gear.

EDIT: Just did a quick google search and, of course, there is a glitch that makes it even easier. Apparently you can use the mobile cover ability to flat out skip 90% of the damn level and fight "Scarecrow" almost immediately. Give that a search if you like; I'm not sure I can link a glitch video here or not.

I'm kinda burnt out on the game. In all my time in the dark zone I haven't found something I'd actually use.

Game is being rebalanced next week so there is a new tier of weapons beyond the best stuff in the game getting added - expect everything to move up a step as the new top-tier stuff displaces the old stuff.

Loot tables for nameds are being redone so you can get a feel for "person [x] drops high-end kneepads 50% of the time" and know that if you want new kneepads, they're the one to go after. As someone with plenty of LMGs and no interest in using them, I'm going to be happy if I know which bosses roll from a DMR or SMG or AR table.

All named will guarantee a high-end drop when you kill them. No more killing a boss and getting nothing but purples. That drop will be the same level as the named (this is one source of the new item level 32 high end gear).

There are gear sets being added so you'll be collecting a set rather than just looking at random items. I set for PvP and one for each of the main stats. You need to get 4 of the 6 pieces in a set to activate the gear talent on it (rather than per-item small gear talents from current high end). So that should be more like WoW progression towards a set rather than randomly churning through drops which are no good or don't match your build needs.

All out next week.

As much as a appreciate the work massive has done, I've been feeling the same as op for about a week now. The update is all well and good, but doesn't this just help the elite top 10% of the player base to get further ahead. Now these players who can sink days into farming these named bosses are going to be swimming in gold.

@reddonkeyham: Technically yes. Actually, gold isn't going to be the thing that helps them crush you now, but your point is very valid. You will probably be swimming in 32 High End pieces with the changes, at least that is my hope. The reason they will still far outclass you is that the top 1% will likely have great set pieces that maximize their builds, now with extra headshot damage and 100% crit damage. Set stacking will be a huge thing and we will see how quickly available the highest gear rated sets will be obtainable.