Data mining in video games is nothing new. Players have been doing it to glean information about future DLC, such as with learning future add-on characters in "Street Fighter V," or determining exactly what items Xur would have for sale in "Destiny." Now it's Ubisoft's "The Division's" turn to get thrown under the magnifying glass.
Earlier this week it was reported that someone who picked through the game files and found lines of code that would suggest that the mod "X% Reduced Damage From Elites" doesn't work as it was intended and testing revealed it was actually increasing damage taken from those sources (Thursday's patch should address this). This time, a dataminer has uncovered details that unveils some information about another important facet of the game: item farming.
Thanks to a dataminer who goes by the name Halsey, we have a little insight about how the loot system works, particularly with scavenging. Before we begin, it should be noted that this is some complicated stuff. There are some reports about this, and the miner noted that they made "useless assumptions" that the Scavenging mod is 100 percent useless, which can be seen here.
In Halsey's own words, the stat isn't useless, but its value as a whole is quite weak, likely meaning that it may not have much impact on boss drops.
"An item is dropped, then quality is rolled for," the statement says. "Scavenging will increase the chance that this roll ends up at a higher quality (by quality I mean colour: superior, high-end etc). The math will apply to all items that have an inherent quality which means crafting materials too."
"Yes, for people who doesn't [sic] have luck, scavenging doesn't help you due to how insignificant the number is," it adds. "Massive, my suggestion: be generous, and make scavenging more unique by also rerolling attributes based on player best/second best stats to improve their skill and make the loot more attractive."
There are other pieces of information such as that every boss adheres to a specific loot table depending on what faction they're in - Looter, Cleaner, Riker or LMB. Once these tables are taken into consideration, they're then spruced up depending on the difficulty you're fighting on them on. This means that beyond a specific set item that might drop from a Challenge mode boss, there is no distinction between that boss and other bosses within the same faction.
There's other really interesting information that can drastically change the way players farm loot, so it's highly recommended that you go to this Reddit page to check it all out.
