How to Gear Effectively - A Quick Guide

maskedweasel

By now many people are hitting high levels - generally in the high 20s and max 30s, while some others are taking their time and are probably around the 1 - 14 mark still.    At around 11+ you start hitting a difficulty curve in a lot of missions, and some hard mode missions are extremely tough.  You may have ready my other post  http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/447300/the-real-problem-with-the-division/p1  now I'm going to give you some examples on "smart gearing" that will help you in both PvE and PvP.

As stated before in the other post, main gear stats are broken down into 4 parts. 

• Firearms - DPS
• Stamina - Health Pool / Tanking
• Skill Power - Special Skills - Caster / Support
• Armor Rating - Damage Mitigation

Much of the gear you find will be heavy in one or two stats, generally picking a single stat as its "main stat".  

Each piece of gear from green and above also have attributes.  These attributes come in many forms -- 

• Main Attributes - Like upgrades to Armor, Skill Power, Health, Specific Weapon Damages or Critical Percentage -- Mod Slots
• Minor Attributes - Like Increase Kill XP, First Aid Ally Heals, Sticky Bomb Explosion Radius / Damage / Cooldown, Turret Duration, etc.

Gearing effectively will essentially hinge on an amalgamation of specific gear choices that boost the stats that you want, and remove useless stats.  For example, you may decide that your support character needs less health and more DPS because they have such high healing and low cooldowns, or you may want your Tank to have higher healing and health but also have increased threat to ensure focus is kept on them.

Gearing is generally Random,  and this can cause some issues with finding the gear thats right for your character,  but there are ways to plan a better character.

The Recalibration Station

Effectively gearing can be as simple as opening up this 200 tech point - tech wing upgrade.  With this upgrade in the tech wing, you can change a single stat on any piece of gear to fit your needs -- granted that the recalibration you're looking for is available. You can only respec the ONE STAT, and after doing so you can only reroll that stat on that piece of gear so choose wisely.  You will know what options you have for recalibration prior to paying for it, BUT  you will not know the exact amount of the stat you'll receive.  

Lets run through a quick scenario.

You receive a piece of blue gear that has 

• 50 armor
• 50 firearms
• Major Skill 50 armor
• Minor Skill 5% kill xp
• 10% sticky bomb radius

Total weapon stats would look like this:  Armor 100, 50 firearms, 5% kill XP, 10% sticky bomb radius.

But you say to yourself,  I am a tank, I don't need the firearms skill, I just want to take damage and heal.  You can choose to do this in 2 different ways.

To buff stamina, you can either respect the 50 firearms ability and instead reroll it to stamina.  OR you can reroll the Major Skill of +50 Armor and reroll it to a Health Buff,  which will depend on level range to determine how much health you receive.  Generally in this bracket of about 50 armor you'd receive roughly 200 - 400 health.  

So the question remains, "Which is better, to reroll stamina, or to reroll health?"  This is to be determined.  Mostly it will depend on the roll and what other buffs you have.  Generally, increasing your Stamina will give you access to better weapon talents,  while increasing health will just ensure you take more damage.


In the end you can imagine dozens of different opportunities to modify your gear to better suit your needs.  Recalibrate your DPS gear from having extra Skill Power to increased Health so you can take more damage.  Respec your Skill Power Support Character for increased health to stay alive longer and ensure your team won't lose.   You can even specialize further.   Think increasing your turret duration by nearly 25 percent on a high support character so you will ALWAYS have a turret up.  Or increase your Critical Rating for your SMG based DPS to do IMMENSE damage in the shortest possibly time.

The possibilities are numerous.  

** Quick edit -- 

Some might ask "What are the costs associated with Recalibration"  It is definitely not as expensive as purchasing new gear,  but it will depend on the color of the gear and the level.  At high levels, you no longer use credits but Phoenix Tokens to Recalibrate High Level Gear.   Hope that helps. 

maskedweasel

skadad said:

Dont even bother with crafting, recalibration, hardmodes etc until 30. then get into it is my tip!  

Normally I'd agree, but... I don't simply for the fact that a lot of the money you earn (if you've been saving) is mostly useless as you have to use Phoenix Credits to recalibrate the best types of gear.  I say, use it as you level up and as you fight your way through the darkzone to get that extra advantage and wear the exact kind of gear you want.

You really aren't saving that much by hoarding currency.  The gains go along with your levels, so you will always be able to get more money fairly quickly.

caveogre72

To add to what maskedweasal said, it is easy to "play around" with this at low lvl to see how it works while it is cheaper to do so.  but I wouldn't worry about trying to mod out a full set of gear at low lvl.  1 or 2 pcs could make a big difference for you though.

corvas

If players played Diablo 3 then they notice it is the same as relolling the stats on items in D3, you can only reroll one stat on an item, when choosen and rerolled once you can ONLY reroll that stat over and over again on that item AND it will become more and more expensive when you keep rerolling it.

For example a high lvl purple item (Item Lvl 31) can cost more then 200k a roll for its 4th roll and up (most of the time the cost will double for the next roll)