The Division 2 patch to address underwhelming Skill and Tank builds

With an upcoming patch for The Division 2, Ubisoft will look to make Skill and Tank builds more viable.

For as well received as Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 has been, one of the biggest gripes surrounding the game is the lack of build diversity. “Skill” builds and “Tank” builds, in particular, feel very underwhelming compared to your standard DPS builds. Ubisoft is listening though, and the developer plans to address this in a future patch.

In a recent community update, Ubisoft specifically brought attention to player complaints regarding both builds and outlined their plan to make them more relevant.

For Skill builds, Ubisoft acknowledged that they are “underwhelming” and “require to much of an investment into Skill Power.” They’ve taken steps to address this by revamping skill mods “so that high end and purple mods have reasonable requirements for mid-level to all-in skill power builds.” However, there’s still work to do.

In the next patch, which is expected sometime this week, players will be able to craft blue skill mods. This will provide an option for low Skill Power level builds. Additionally, Ubisoft will once again buff the power level of mods so that they pack a little more punch. Right now, the little boost you get doesn’t make up for what you sacrifice in other stats, so hopefully, this change makes skill power builds – either full or hybrid – more viable.

Turning their attention to Tank builds, Ubisoft similarly admitted that they don’t feel viable in the current landscape of the game. What it boils down to is armor and health “don’t seem to provide enough benefit of sustain,” Ubisoft said. Unfortunately, a fix for this doesn’t appear as simple due to the overall approach to the game’s design. Diagnosing the issue appears quite simple; fixing it, however, could require a bit of work.

"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. Added to that, we didn’t want to scale enemy health as much as their damage in harder content always to avoid as much of the “bullet sponge” syndrome as we could, and so damage output again gets another advantage over defensive stats when moving up in difficulty."