Tom Clancy’s The Division Guide: Primary Attributes and Combat Gear

In The Division, as in life, what you choose to wear has far reaching consequences that you might not have expected at first. The gear you put on, more than affecting what you look like, changes the kind of agent you actually are. The gear you wear affects almost all your character stats and abilities, and will completely change your game. So let’s do our best to understand it together, eh?

Types of gear in Tom Clancy’s The Division

You have six slots for gear in The Division: body armour, gas mask, knee pads, backpack, gloves, and holster, and these have the same quality coding as the rest of the items in the game. When gear drops as loot it has all its stats randomly generated, and you can only equip gear of your current level or lower, but you should always try to have equipment as close to your current level as possible.

You can also find clothes which offer purely cosmetic changes, and these are equipped separately under the appearance tab in your menu, but they don’t functionally do anything except make your coat look puffy or a different colour or whatever.

Primary Attributes in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Your primary attributes will show you what your Division agent is best at, as well as gating special talents attached to weapons. You can see your primary attribute scores in your inventory and character overview screens, and there are three to worry about:

Firearms – the firearms skill increases your Damage Per Second (DPS) by 1% for every point of it you have, so it’s best for high damage classes like snipers and machine gunners.

Stamina – stamina determines your health. Each point you have in stamina increases your total HP by 30. This is a good attribute to look at if you’re playing a tank.

Electronics – because all the skills in the game are basically little machines of one kind or another, every point you put into electronics increases the power of your skills by 10. Electronics is an important attribute for medics, and anyone relying on the offensive skills too.

Your attributes are directly linked to your gear, because the gear you wear determines how many points go into each of these attributes. Different bits will increase or decrease the points in one or more of your attributes.

Secondary attributes in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Okay, deep breath. Let’s keep going.

Aside from your three main attributes, there is an almost inexhaustible list of other ones to take note of. This includes more familiar things, like critical hit damage or health regeneration, to in-depth ratings like damage bonuses to specific weapon types, and buffs against high level elite enemies. Of these your gear will most directly affect your armour rating, which reduces incoming damage a bit, but it can have abilities and bonuses attached which boost some of the other ones too.

Individually these bonuses may not mean a lot, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as they say, and paying attention to your secondary attributes can make your agent a force to be reckoned with.

Gear abilities and bonuses in Tom Clancy’s The Division

Depending on the level and the quality of a piece of gear, it can have anywhere from zero to four minor and major attributes that affect your agent, the maximum four kicking in at superior quality and higher (superior gear is the stuff that shows up in your inventory as purple).

Different types of gear are more likely to receive different bonuses. Body armour often gets attributes that will boost your defenses, ammo and inventory capacity, health, and XP, whilst backpacks almost always include an increase to your inventory size. For some reason gloves usually get buffs to damage (because with good gloves you shoot better?) but remember that these will all be randomly rolled for any bit of gear you loot or craft.

Gear modifications in Tom Clancy’s The Division

When you pick up higher level gear it will sometimes have a modification slot or two. Gear mods will improve base attribute scores (so, increasing the firearms/stamina/electronics score on an item) as well as adding further bonus abilities depending on their quality. Gear mods tend to drop less often in the wild, though, so it’s often easier to make them yourself at the crafting station in your Base of Operations.

As ever, the bonuses on mods are randomly generated, but there are fewer options for gear mods than there are for weapons, which at least makes the process marginally less complicated.