When "The Division" launched in March, it was heralded as the next big thing in MMOs and a true competitor to "Destiny" on consoles. Things have changed since then as more bugs and glitches have begun to surface, however one of the worst among them may have flown underneath everyone's radars since the very beginning.
It's par for the course for games to get harder as they progress, and as an MMO, "The Division" is no different. However, something just seemed off. It appeared that no matter how well-geared you were, enemies would start to hit like trucks, and all your hard-earned gear did little to help.
As it turns out, this feeling of vulnerability is tied to a bug that's tied to the very core of the game - and its likely been around since Day 1.
It all started after when a Redditor named AlCalzone89 was digging through the game's files and came across a line of code that appeared to indicate that either the "X% Reduced Damage from Elites" mod was giving less damage reduction than it said or didn't work out as intended and actually increases the damage from elites instead.
There's no way Massive could have made such a blatant mistake, right? Well, considering the state of the game, it would be hard to give it the benefit of the doubt and unfortunately the developer didn't betray expectations.
In a series of tests by taking a piece of gear with the "X% Reduced Damage from Elites" mod, getting shot by an elite sniper, then removing that mod from the gear and going back to get hit by that same sniper, players found that the mod is actually increasing damage received from elite enemies - the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do.
"The Division" is quickly becoming known as a hub for a multitude of exploits, bugs and glitches, and while it may not be the worst (there was one that actually deleted some players' characters), it is certainly the most concerning and explains so many issues that have cropped up.
For example, the gap between hard-mode missions and challenge mode, where all enemies count as elites, had always been wide, but the glitch makes this issue a certain percentage worse. Players who thought they prepared appropriately for this mode by stacking damage reduction are actually taking extra damage from every enemy.
Furthermore, this bug means you can kick the concept of a tank build out the window. Your 90K health and 65 percent armor means little when every enemy can deal 30 percent extra damage to you.
However, even with these bugs in place, it would be advised to not immediately re-roll your equipment. This looks like a high-priority fix, as well as one that looks like it can be fixed quite easily, so when Massive gets around to it, your mods will work just the way they were supposed to. In the meantime, simply use another set of gear.
If the bug has been around since the beginning, its impact may not be as huge as we're led to believe since players won't really know what playing with less elite damage actually feels like. However, that's beside the point. The issue is the fact that "The Division" has been in development for years and a stat that has huge impact in the postgame works completely backwards. Even worse is the fact that this revelation was prompted by an accidental finding and had to be tested by the players themselves. You would think that with the developers threatening to punish players who glitch "Falcon Lost," they would be more on the ball.
In the end, this discovery begs the question: what other stats or mods don't work properly? It stands to reason that "The Division's" postgame content is only really challenging because half of our stats don't work.
