GCROCK Reacts to Y8S2 PTS Phase 2 Patch Notes! Escalation Changes! | The Division 2

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Have a look. Let's have a look.

[00:00:03]Into Dark PTS Phase 2 patch notes. This is just PTS Phase 2. There could still be changes before the new season launch.

[00:00:09]I imagine these are pretty much locked in now, though.

[00:00:13]Contents. So, let me follow that. Dark Zones for PTS Phase 2. The Dark Zone structure still revolves around three rotating rule sets.

[00:00:20]Classic, [snorts] toxic, and balanced. This phase is mainly about seeing how each Dark Zone variant feels, if the rules are clear, and the rewards feel worth it. How do you obtain weapons and gear, how they affect PvP, and how the overall experience comes together. The PvP balance pass applies across all PvP environments, including Conflict and all Dark Zone variants. More details are available in the global PvP balance section below. A Dark Zone vendor overall has also been added with updated inventories, new caches, and rebalanced DZ currency costs. We'll check all that out when the season goes live, really.

[00:00:52]Dark Zone rotation. Classic Dark Zone will be standard PvPvE risk versus reward gameplay. Rogue protocol active, shared and expertise active, global PvP balance active. Toxic Dark Zone, seasonal PvE survival and cooperation.

[00:01:06]Rogue protocol disabled, shared expertise active, global PvP balance active. Balanced Dark Zone, competitive skill-based PvPvE active, shared expertise disabled, global PvP active.

[00:01:19]>> [clears throat] >> Dark Zone variants.

[00:01:23]Classic Dark Zone remains the baseline PvPvE experience with normalization, shared watch expertise progression, rogue protocols, and periodic invasions active. Toxic Dark Zone remains seasonal PvE focused variant with rogue protocols and friendly fire disabled. Toxicity builds over time and can be managed through surge active modifiers. Safe hours is by leaving the zone.

[00:01:45]Even though Toxic Dark Zone is PvE focused, it's still part of the wider Dark Zone experience. Global PvP balance also applies here, so players can create builds around the same PvP rule set used in other Dark Zones. The goal is to make the jump between PV and PVP variants feel less abrupt without requiring a full build rethink.

[00:02:04]Okay.

[00:02:05]So, the global PVP balance will apply.

[00:02:10]Interesting. For phase two, several changes have been made. Landmark chests now drop sample canisters as contaminated cash items. These work like regular contaminated items and must be extracted. Calling the extraction helicopter in the toxic dark zone now requires a stabilization agent which has a 33% chance to drop from landmark chests.

[00:02:30]Okay.

[00:02:32]So, you've got to get something in order to extract. Toxicity no longer resets when entering a dark zone safe house.

[00:02:39]Instead, the current toxicity value is frozen while inside. That contradicts what I said above.

[00:02:45]It's a little bit annoying.

[00:02:48]Toxicity debuffs have been reduced, so okay. Toxic dark zone hunter difficulty has been adjusted. Toxic dark zone hunters now guarantee one exotic component each and have a dedicated 2% chance to drop Eagle Bearer or Ravenous.

[00:03:02]So, okay.

[00:03:04]Sample canister gains and costs have been adjusted.

[00:03:07]Uh balanced dark zone remains the competitive PVP variant using high-level normalization based on the conflict draw set. Shade watching expertise are disabled. Deconstructing dropped contaminated items grants double dark zone currency.

[00:03:19]So, look at the dark zone vendor overall then.

[00:03:22]Uh vendors have been adjusted for PTS phase two with a dated inventories, new utility and progression caches, and rebalanced DZ currency costs. Uh following phase one feedback, we've reduced the cost of the new vendor caches. So, DZ East recalibration cache is 40 DZ currency, optimization is 60, uh DZ West exotic component cache 120, and reconstructed cache 180, DZ South prototype core cache 125, prototype cache 260. High chance of better perfect stats on that.

[00:03:51]Full updated vendor inventory or vendors, I will link this in the video if you want to read it all. I'm not going to go through all that.

[00:03:59]PVP environment improvements, general Dark Zone updates. The Dark Zone entry and checkpoint updates introduced in phase one of the main part of the phase two test. So, checkpoint turret damage scaling. This is to help prevent checkpoint containment entrance turrets now do additional direct health damage to hostile agents within range. Turrets inflict an additional 4% direct health damage on top of the standard base values.

[00:04:22]Entry invulnerability window. You have a 5-second invulnerability window immediately after entering the Dark Zone. This gives players a short moment to load in, check their surroundings, and decide their next move before they take damage.

[00:04:34]Uh this ends early if the player moves or fires their weapon.

[00:04:38]Global PVP balance. The first balance pass focuses on currently active weapon and gear talents across conflict and all Dark Zone variants. The goal is to reduce mandatory must-pick options and give more builds a chance to compete.

[00:04:50]This is part of a wider multi-phase effort. Future updates are planned to look at skills, attributes, status effects, and other PVP areas. Following phase one feedback, we made another pass on the PVP balance list. This includes some further tuning for damage talents, status-based talents, armor repair bonus armor options, support-focused builds, etc. We also revisited a few special items like Striker's, Cavalier, Contractor's Dilemma, Ongoing Directive, The Big Horn, Striker, Backfire, Pestilence, and many more. We have a dedicated balance list here. Again, you can go and read all that if you want to.

[00:05:23]When reviewing these changes, please look at the wider PVP balance picture rather than focusing on one talent in isolation, which I think most people are doing.

[00:05:30]Uh some people think this is going to PVE as well, all these changes. They're not.

[00:05:35]They're not.

[00:05:37]Modifiers. Several modifier adjustments have been made for PTS phase two. So, the search effect no longer depends on the weapon used to apply stacks, for example. In health can now be triggered by headshot kills for any weapon, not only MMRs. Okay, that's good.

[00:05:53]Uh Super Fighter Toxicity Uh Toxicity now only increases when Super Fighter applies to sorry through its own effect instead of increasing every hit.

[00:06:04]Make Doctor now affects health only instead of health and armor.

[00:06:07]Active and hostile modifier values have been adjusted across so I'll have to just do that when the season comes out.

[00:06:11]Escalation several reward in the economy updates have been made for phase two.

[00:06:15]Here we go. Escalation, I'm interested in this one.

[00:06:20]More so.

[00:06:21]So reward, escalation completion rewards now grant one plus exotic component for each escalation tier starting at tier five. That's awesome. So that means five will be one then two, three, four, five.

[00:06:36]Hold on.

[00:06:38]Yeah, five That'll be five exotic components for tier 10.

[00:06:42]Not bad. Prototype target loot drops have been added back to escalation chests. Let's go, I like that.

[00:06:48]Escalation tokens, the escalation token economy has been adjusted to better reward group leaders and make the overall flow less punishing. Got to look at 10s. So cost is going to be 80 to go into a tier 10.

[00:06:58]Uh leader reward be 102 so you're going to get 22 profit and the group 11. Currently the group gets rewarded 25 for the leader gets seven. So they've kind of nerfed the ones running but the leader now gets 22.

[00:07:16]Happy with that. Uh requisition vendor, escalation requisition vendor prices have been uh updated to match the new token balance. So random prototype should be 10, gear prototype 20, weapon 20 so they've been doubled.

[00:07:31]New gear weapon talents, the following adjustments have been made since PTS phase one. Um not We can read that if you want to. So this is all the new stuff. So that's all they're doing with escalation. I like the exotic components. That's going to be such a good exotic component farm.

[00:07:48]Um oh, two months Nimrod, thank you. Um yeah.

[00:07:56]Like five every run.

[00:08:04]I I like that.

[00:08:09]Additional updates. Prototype gear.

[00:08:11]Prototype core cost for upgrading prototype organs has been increased.

[00:08:15]Maximum one out item now cost 46 prototype cores up from 31.

[00:08:25]Oh, okay. So, it's when you're upgrading it. Okay, I'm not bothered about that.

[00:08:29]Retaliation. A new threat may now ambush you during retaliation. Stay alert. Ooh.

[00:08:35]What's that?

[00:08:40]Hunters?

[00:08:41]What's that?

[00:08:44]I kind of want to get on the PTS to check that out. PTS only.

[00:08:48]During the test, all modifiers will be unlocked from the start. And that's it.

[00:08:57]Feedback is important during the this phase of PTS. And make sure you join the Discord to share it.

[00:09:05]It looks like they've reined in a little bit with escalation.

[00:09:11]How much they've gave out. And now I think a lot of this might also be because the chests. Because we're now going to get prototype from chests again. So, your cores are going to increase on a whole because of that.

[00:09:24]We've seen when it came out and it's broken how many prototypes we got from chests. So, if it's dropping similar to that, you are going to get a lot more cores.

[00:09:34]They've only >> Thanks for your business.

[00:09:38]>> Like we were chatting in stream earlier about this. I think at this point you're never going to keep everyone happy. I was very happy with escalation when it came out. I appreciate that they had to make it a lot more fairer though. They did that. And they did it again.

[00:09:53]I think it's just like the third or fourth update to escalation now. I think at some point we've just got to say it's done.

[00:10:00]Um hopefully people are kind of happy with this. I don't think they're going to be seeing that as a nerf maybe.

[00:10:07]That's not that bad. Um the container protos are going to be very nice.

[00:10:14]And increasing the the people aren't going to be happy about that.

[00:10:18]Increasing the cost for the caches, but again you're going to be getting more proto cores now anyway through the containers, so that should be a fair adjustment.

[00:10:32]It's just them the the the up in the I've got where they put it.

[00:10:38]But they said they're going to our prototype target No.

[00:10:43]They're going to adjust when you're upgrading it to 10 it's going to cost more cores. Now I don't think that's that bad.

[00:10:51]I think the last thing they could do is maybe reduce the cost of rerolling augments. Maybe go I've said this for a while but from 25 to 16 or something or even 10. Some people's RNG on augments is terrible.

[00:11:04]I think that's the only other thing I would amend.

[00:11:07]I'm happy with where escalations are.

[00:11:10]Yeah. That's all in the PTS now. It's live now. You can play it. I'm guessing it ends Monday.

[00:11:15]And we're not going to get chance to get on the PTS phase two.

[00:11:19]We're too busy just playing the game and farming right now, but I can't wait for the new season. The new season must be around the corner. I think like a week or two away probably at the end of stretch goals. So I can't wait to get stuck in and really give this all a proper go. I'm excited for the new season. Kind of excited for the new modifiers as well and how they're going to affect our 10 escalation farmers because we've got very used to this 135% headshot damage. That's going to go next season. So, I imagine our escalation farmers are going to be a bit more difficult even though we're going to get damage to armor and stuff.

[00:11:49]But, yeah. Excited for the new season.

[00:11:53]Loving the game. No complaints. I I I wouldn't even know where to begin with the amount of different opinions they're getting on stuff like escalation.

[00:12:01]Um But, yeah. There's a lot of um people in the community not happy with it and things like that. I think they're trying to find some sort of happy medium.

[00:12:13]But, uh I say move on from escalation. I can't wait for the next piece of content. Survivors coming at some point.

[00:12:21]Central Park DLC. It's a brand new season in general with PV, Dark Zone.

[00:12:26]Lots to look forward to. Excited for new season, guys.

[00:12:30]And there might still be some amendments made before it goes out of the circle of weeks. Survivors PTS live.