Division 2 Players Not Happy About Aggressive Exotic Nerfs

Following the major Warlords of New York update for The Division 2, fans report that many exotic gear changes make the items worse than they were.

 At a surprise to most players, Ubisoft launched the Warlords of New York expansion for The Division 2 a day early, letting fans take the fight back to New York and central villain, Aaron Keener. In addition to all new story content, the release also brought with it a sizable update to the base game including new levels, new skills, seasonal content, and other reworks. However, not every change has been met with open arms with players and the biggest outcry appears to be surrounding the new streamlined exotic gear.

Numerous posts have started to appear on community driven sites like Reddit where The Division 2 player base appears upset by recent exotic gear changes. The biggest complaint from the community is that the changes made each unique item too simple by removing their unique talents and replacing them with something a bit more generic and easier to understand. Some are even claiming that the nerfs were done to the DC exotics in order to make the new Warlords of New York exotics more appealing and thereby pushing players to grab the paid expansion.

Players are still coming to grips with the laundry list of changes that the Warlords update applied to the game, but so far it seems that Kendra's Liberty pistol and BTSU Gloves are the ones that are being highlighted the most. In terms of Liberty, the weapon featured three powerful talents like Independence and Blind Justice which made the weapon a very heavy hitter. After the major update, the pistol's talents have essentially been reduced to gaining stacks and repairing the player's shield 3% per stack after a headshot.

Massive Entertainment's reasons for the exotic reworks inside of the Warlords of New York update was the idea to make them more accessible, similar to the other changes to the gear system overall. The bonuses have been streamlined to do one thing really well, while removing all the layered bonuses and complexity typically associated with them. However, this strategy seems to have backfired as the changes were too extreme and made many popular exotic weapons much less effective.
This isn't the first time that something like this has happened however. Many fans have pointed out that a similar thing happened in the first Division game, where exotics at certain points we re-rolled with new perks, ultimately changing how they functioned. Naturally, this screwed up a number of builds that players were working on and upset the community.
While the exotic issue seems to be the biggest issue currently impacting the community, the Warlords of New York launch wasn't terribly smooth either. Following a lengthy downtime, numerous errors prevented players from logging in and accessing the new content. Thankfully, Massive was able to clear many of the issues, though at this time, there are still a few problems impacting the experience.