Tom Clancy’s The Division: 10 Tips You Need to Know

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s taken literally years but The Division is finally here, and whether you’re finding your feet in the full game after missing the beta, or you rocked that beta like a hurricane, we’ve got some tricks and tips that might surprise you, and will give you a head start on taking back New York.

Don’t be a lone wolf

Ubisoft insist that The Division is still a ‘great single player experience’, but let’s be real: it’s more fun with other people. Not only that, but it’s easier. Going it alone means that you won’t be able to deploy as many offensive and defensive skills to help you out in a fight. Playing as a team means you get more of a spread of options, not to mention more of you to shoot stuff up. Many guns make light work. That’s the saying, right? Right?

Define your team roles

The Division doesn’t have classes, so the job each person does is determined by their loadout. Once you’ve ponied up with a group you should have at least a brief discussion on who is tooling up with what, so you don’t end up with three people throwing out turrets and nobody with first aid when you’re down to the wire. This also applies to weapons, because if everyone is heading out with sniper rifles you’re going to have some issues if you get ambushed unawares with no close and mid range guys on your side.

Explore your inventory

The inventory system in The Division is, at first glance, more complex than e.g. Destiny, and it’s definitely more complex than a standard shooter. Before you dive in properly take a few moments and play around with your inventory to get familiar with it. Note how many slots there are for your armour, and how many for modifying your weapons. Some of these slots are just vanity ones so you can equip stuff like cool belts to make you look like a total boss, though. Even in a post apocalyptic scenario you have to maintain some standards.

Understand the different ability trees

If the inventory is a bit complicated then the abilities definitely are. They’re split into three different types: Skills, Talents, and Perks. Skills are abilities to use in combat, like sticky bombs, first aid, and a scanner, that have a cool down after you use them. You can equip two Skills at once and unlock them as you level up, although some are tied to mission progress. Talents are abilities that trigger in specific situations to do stuff like buff your damage and so forth, while Perks are passive abilities that can do stuff like increase your inventory or flag up contaminated areas on your map.

Go into the Dark Zone

The Dark Zone – the PvP enabled area of the game, hereafter referred to as the DZ – is where you’ll find the juiciest guns and equipment. The issue is that the enemies are a much higher level, and anything you pick up there has to be extracted, via helicopter, and is then unavailable to you for a bit until it’s been decontaminated. You probably want to be at least a level eight before you head on in there, because you’ll also encounter other players. Which raises another good point…

Trust no-one

According to Ubisoft’s numbers from the closed beta, of all the players who went into the DZ 87% turned rogue, meaning they shot up other players and nicked their loot. What this means for you is that if you try and be nice when approaching unknown quantities you’ve only got a 13% chance of not being dicked over, which equates to just under â…› if you prefer fractions. Those aren’t great odds.

Now, we’re not saying that you should become one of the 87%. Not unless you want to, although obviously the statistics are saying that you will. We’re saying that at the very least you should never make the first move, and don’t let your guard down even if they do a friendly emote at you, because extracting stuff from the DZ is a massive ballache even without the threat of murder and your corpse being looted.

Don’t put stuff, throw stuff instead

It’s not immediately obvious, but for a lot of skills you can aim them and then lob them out, rather than running to where you want them to be. This is especially useful for things like first aid and turrets. The latter you can welly on top of vans and the like, giving it better vantage to shoot enemies as well as making it harder for enemies to take it out. Throwing first aid is great: it’s an area of effect skill so you can just chuck it in the general direction of whoever needs it and not pay too much attention, instead of having to run up and lose your position.

Hit ’em right between the eyes

Go for the headshots. Yeah, that sounds patronising, especially if you’re familiar with any game that has ever featured guns ever, but seriously. You’ll get the usual bonuses for headshots (conserving ammo, more XP, and son on) but some of the enemies soak up bullets and headshots are the most efficient way to deal and move on.

Remember to eat a balanced diet

Okay not totally balanced, since New York isn’t in great shakes and you’re not going to get reservations anywhere, but you’ll be able to find a bit of canned food and soda around the place. It’s easy to forget you have them, but you can eat and drink stuff to raise your game. Eating an energy bar, for example, will remove all your bad status effects, whilst drinking water buffs your damage (for a reason that no doubt made sense to someone in the design process).