That's right, guaranteed High-End loot drops. The catch? You're going to have to work for it.
The latest set of patch notes for Tom Clancy's The Division revealed a few changes to The Division, including gear sets, item trading, assignments, and of course this one brings the hotly anticipated Incursion game mode. Let's run down the list of, in my humble opinion, the important stuff.
The new Falcon Lost Incursion is a 4 player oriented challenging mission, with greater rewards. In order to access you'll have to have a level 30 Agent and have completed the final mission, "General Assembly."
Gear Sets: Like any good RPG, certain armor items work best together, and presumably The Division is no exception. Ubi Massive is introducing new Gear Sets. Each Gear Set will be tailored to a certain type of play style.
“Tactician's Authority” – enhances electronics and support capabilities
“Striker's Battlegear” – provide bonuses for assault capabilities
“Sentry's Call” – enhances marksman capabilities
“Path of the Nomad” – provides bonuses for lone wanderers
Trading items between players in a group. It seems you must be in a group to trade loot drops, and you can only trade items that have dropped while in a group or items dropped while you were previously in a group. You also have a 2 hour time limit on each item.
Weekly and Daily Assignments. Assignments come in a few flavors, Combat, Dark Zone, and Crafting and must be completed within their respective allotted time frame.
Dark Zone Supply Drops: Every so often, a few time a day, The SHD, "Strategic Homeland Defense", will be dropping supply caches into the Dark Zone to assist Division Agents. What come out of these drops are non-contaminated and can be used as soon as acquired. This means these high-level drops will be much sought after by enemy factions, as well as other agents. If you're going after these, be ready for a fight.
Gear Score: Non-vanity gear items level 30 will have a Gear Score attached to it. Increasing Gear Score will open up tougher challenges and more powerful loot drops.
Group Spectator Camera allows downed players to watch their teammates while waiting to be revived or for the entire team to go down.
High-End Named Weapons: Warlord - Assault Rifle, Valkyria - Sub-Machine gun, Historian - Marksman Rifle (although it will apparently be unattainable until update 1.2).
There are also a lot of gameplay changes, the most notable of which is changes to the crafting system. Ubi Massive has increased the conversion rates for Specialized and High-End crafting materials, while also decreasing material gain from deconstructing Specialized and High-End items.
That last change may seem like the most radical. Tell me how you all feel about it in the comments. I'm still processing how late I am on finding all this news...