The Division 2 – How to Change Global Difficulty

The Division 2: Warlords of New York will alter how agents tackle the game’s many activities by finally introducing a Global Difficulty toggle. No longer will agents have to manually boost control points by completing events around it, or change the difficulty of each mission on a case-by-case basis. So, how do agents set the Global Difficulty?

Global Difficulty is adjusted via the All tab on the Map.

Agents who purchased The Division 2: Warlords of New York will notice a new option at the bottom of their map when they boot the game up: Global Settings. What the Global Settings option allows them to do is set a Global Difficulty for content in the game. By choosing a Global Difficulty every single activity in the game will sync with whatever the agent picked.

Say you feel ready to move into Hard difficulty, because Normal’s now a breeze to clear. You go to the All tab, hold down the button for Global Settings, and select Hard, then confirm your choice. Afterwards everything in The Division 2 will be set to Hard difficulty, including light zone events. This will force a few things: all players in the world will respawn into the Hard version of the world, all completion in the world will reset, and any loot left uncollected will disappear.

This new feature does a few things that make it worth using. First, it will set every control point in the game to that level, meaning you no longer need to clear events to boost them to a desired difficulty (though, you can still boost them as you did before). Second, loot rolls are better the harder the difficulty, so aligning the entire game to one difficulty makes everything you do more rewarding. When you feel a certain difficulty has become too easy you just go to the Global Settings and bump up the Global Difficulty.

Missions can still have their difficulty altered manually without resetting the whole map, if agents do not want to reset their progress every time they opt to tackle a mission at a difficulty above their global preference. You can also pair Directives with this new setting if you seek an additional challenge and more experience.

UPDATE 03/09/2020: Despite Massive stating in an early stream that you could reset control points by changing the difficulty, this does not appear to be the case. Apparently control points reset when an enemy faction takes them over, as they did before the expansion. That said, some players are reporting this isn’t working as intended.

That’s how to change Global Difficulty. Play the entire game now as you see fit, but be mindful of the reset whenever you alter the setting.

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