The Division is getting a big overhaul soon with update 1.4. Ubisoft is trying to make the game more challenging, and to pull that off it sounds like all gear, armor, weapons and skills are open for big changes. While the entire post over on the website is pretty involved, we can hit the high points briefly to give an idea of what it is Ubi is trying to accomplish.

“One issue facing The Division today is that the power difference between optimized and non-optimized builds is too great. We still want people to optimize their gear and min-max to their heart’s content, but in order to balance the game, we need to reduce the gap between the two extremes. As part of Update 1.4 we also want 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.”

Gear

• All World Tier 2 and higher gear will have stats for Firearms, Stamina and Electronics
• Stat overlaps between gear have been removed
• Gear scores will be adjusted to match High end gear scores withing the same World Tiers
• All gear will lose their skill bonuses.
• Backpacks, holsters and knee pads will gain new performance mod slots

Weapons

• New DPS formula on weapons has been introduced, but is a work in progress and will change over the course of the PTS.
• The damage and roles of certain weapons have been changed. Some weapons have seen a damage increase; others have had their damage lowered.
• Named weapons will not be changed in this update.
• Weapon mods will now come with one major bonus and an amount of smaller bonuses, depending on the quality of the mod.
• Damage bonuses are now additive instead of multiplicative, reducing the current spikes in damage which made the game hard to balance.
• The Firearms stat will become a much more significant source of damage output, leading to more decision making when building your character.
• Weapon talents have been rebalanced; some have been buffed, others have seen their numbers reduced.

Skills

• Electronics will be the main source of Skill Power.
• Skill Power will not scale linearly anymore, instead it will follow a curve of diminishing returns.
• Certain skills are currently much more popular than others. Some skills are overpowered, others underpowered or bugged.
• Skills have been rebalanced to fit the new game balance or to bring them up to par, in the hopes of creating a more varied meta.
• First Aid no longer allows for multiple heals, since those happened due to a bug. First Aid’s healing has been increased to make up for this fix. It will now heal instantly.
• Smart Cover and Pulse have been reworked. Smart Cover is now more defensive and Pulse’s high damage boost has been lowered to make it balanced with the new enemy health.
• Ballistic Shield and Support Station have been given more health. Support Station’s healing has been increased.
• Many bugs associated with skills have been fixed.

There are a lot more changes, and I’d recommend digging into the complete post if you are a serious player of The Division. No word on when update 1.4 will be released for all platforms, but if you play on PC the Public Test Server is up and running as we speak.