The Division 2 Spearfall Y8S4 PTS is almost here, and it is a big one. The Division 2 team hosted a dev stream on November 12 walking through everything coming to Year 8 Season 4, called Spearfall, and RogueGold broke the whole stream and the official PTS patch notes down in a new video.
The test itself is PC-only and runs on the Public Test Server from Friday, November 13 at 8:00 AM ET to Monday, November 16 at 8:00 AM ET, with preloading from November 12 at 12:00 PM ET. One important note before we dive in: this is a test build, so every number below can change before Season 4 launches for real.
First, the Server Issues
Before the new content, the team addressed the rough stretch the game has had since Echoes of Central Park launched. The November 12 maintenance migrated PC players to the new crossplay servers and included general server stability work, plus a matchmaking fix for the Climax Mission.
The maintenance also temporarily adjusted the damage of the Loaded for Bear Exotic Gloves — their excessive damage was causing server stability problems — with a permanent fix planned for Season 4, when the adjustment will be reverted. Full crossplay between PC, PlayStation, and Xbox is still set to go live on November 17.
Spearfall’s Seasonal Modifiers: Unknown Technologies
This season, enemy factions have gotten their hands on counterfeit Prototype Gear Augments. Some enemies carry a Hostile Modifier: a passive bonus plus a Contra-Augment that charges during combat. Shoot the enemy’s highlighted weak point to cancel the Contra-Augment before it activates — hitting them anywhere else makes it charge faster. Let it finish booting, and it activates with effects based on its type: Quantum, Echo, Amalgam, or Anomaly.
The Global Modifier, Unknown Technologies, pays out seasonal attribute bonuses through a five-segment Enhancement Track — from Rate of Fire and Armor on Kill in Segment I, through Skill Damage and Skill Repair, Weapon Handling and Protection from Elites, Status Effects and Skill Haste, up to Augment Efficiency and Hazard Protection in Segment V. Defeating Hostile Modifier enemies and cancelling Contra-Augments earn your progress.
Cancelling a Contra-Augment also captures a Frequency Pattern. Fill all five slots in your Frequency Pattern Matrix and you can fire one of three Active Modifiers: Advanced Lethality, Mirrored Sabotage, or Mirrored Boost — the last two change based on the last Contra-Augment you cancelled. There are also 11 Passive Modifiers: five Enhancements (Augmented Track I through V, each boosting its matching track segment by 30%) and six Tweaks that change how you earn Patterns and progress.
Legendary Open World Is Finally Here
Legendary difficulty is expanding in two ways. First, four Main Missions get a Legendary option with reworked White Tusk encounters: Air & Space Museum, Space Administration HQ, Grand Washington Hotel, and ViewPoint Museum. Legendary is available only on the Main Mission version of each — open the mission’s AR panel, pick the Main Mission version, then select Legendary.
Second, and bigger: Legendary becomes a Global Difficulty option in Washington, D.C. Set your Global Difficulty to Legendary and White Tusk replace Black Tusk across the open world — taking over Control Points and showing up in Propaganda Broadcasts, Territory Control, Public Executions, Resource Convoys, Aerial Convoys, Rescue Operations, and Supply Drops. Other factions stay, with health and damage raised closer to White Tusk level. Legendary Open World is D.C.-only, Bounties won’t drop on it, and Heroic remains the top difficulty for Retaliation. White Tusk are being tuned to challenge even fully optimized Prototype builds, and that tuning also applies in The Summit.
The rewards keep up with the difficulty, too. The existing Legendary Mission Project now refreshes daily instead of weekly, all four new missions join its rotation, and finishing three Daily Legendary Mission Projects in a week completes a Weekly Legendary Project for a larger loot package. The new Legendary missions can drop Prototype Gear during the PTS, though Ubisoft stresses those drop rates are temporary test values.
Escalation Revamp: No Timer, New Player Rating
Escalation is getting rebuilt. You now choose an Escalation Directive and a Tier separately for every run: the Directive shapes how you play, the Tier sets enemy health, armor, and damage, your Rating cap, and which Prototype items can drop. The run timer is gone across all Directives and Tiers, and the total number of Tiers is being reduced so each step up hits harder. Higher Tiers offer the best Prototype Gear chances and rolls.
Your personal Player Rating — graded I through V, and yours alone even in a group — now drives your Prototype Gear chances from both regular drops and Targeted Loot. Consecutive kills, headshot and grenade kills, kills from outside cover, revives, healing, buffing, and destroying weak points all raise it; getting downed lowers it. To unlock the next Tier, finish a run at your current Tier’s maximum Rating.
Three Directives are planned for launch. Marked is built mainly for solo play, with a personal marked target and Hunter stacks. Core Build plays off your build’s dominant core color — Red, Blue, or Yellow. Collaboration is role-focused, built around Resolve and clearing the new Wounded state from teammates. Ubisoft recommends focusing PTS testing on Core Build, as Marked and Collaboration may be buggier in this build.
And one small quality-of-life win the stream teased: an Open All Caches button is coming to the cache menu, so your stack of Field Proficiency Caches no longer has to be opened one at a time.
Prototype Schematics Put You in Control
Prototype Gear is being overhauled to end the reroll lottery. Random Augment rerolls are replaced with direct selection: in the ProtoLab, use Select Augment, view what’s available, and pick the Augment you actually want for a fixed Prototype Core cost. Your Augment level now belongs to the item itself, so it stays when you switch Augments — no more losing your upgrade progress to experiment. Upgrading an item to Prototype quality still requires Expertise Level 30, and you can now donate Prototype Cores in the Expertise menu for Proficiency.
The headline addition is Prototype Schematics, a new system that replaces standard Recalibration and Optimization for Prototype items. A Schematic can add a Bonus Attribute, replace an eligible attribute (Slot Recalibration), set an attribute to a percentage of its max value (Slot Stabilization), or replace a Talent (Talent Recalibration). Each item can hold one Schematic at a time, named attributes and Talents are protected, and Core Attributes are off-limits in Y8S4.
Schematics live in a Library under Mod Inventory, are unlocked account-wide, and mostly come from caches at the Prototype Requisition Vendor, with others earned from missions or dropped by bosses on Legendary difficulty. The system is built for exactly the complaint Prototype players have had since Escalation launched: your build, your choices, instead of praying to the reroll.
New Gear: August, Forward Observer, and Field General
Spearfall adds a new Exotic assault rifle, August. Its talent, Convergent, builds a stack for every two body hits; at 25 stacks (10 in PvP), your next reload consumes them for +100% Accuracy and +150% Headshot Damage (+25% in PvP) for 10 seconds. It ships with stacked mods, including +40% Headshot Damage optics and a +20-round magazine.
The new Exotic mask, Forward Observer, pulses and marks enemies you aim at for 1 second (2 in PvP). Marked enemies take 10% Amplified Damage from all sources, and when one dies, every ally involved in the kill gets repairs equal to 10% of their Total Armor (20% in PvP).
The new Field General gear set is a team player’s dream: +15% Weapon Handling at 2 pieces, +10% Total Armor and +1 Skill Tier at 3, and at 4 pieces its Helping Hand talent marks the last enemy each ally damaged, lets you deal 40% Amplified Damage to marked enemies, and pays out Skill Efficiency, Bonus Armor, Damage to Targets Out of Cover, and a free Armor Kit for the whole group every 60 seconds on assists. There are also four new Named gear pieces — Magnet and Siphon with +30% Incoming Repairs, Thrive and Hearty with +50% Health — and two Named weapons, Blackout and Power Spike, built around the new Technophobia talent, which deals extra Amplified Damage to Skill Proxies and mechanical enemies.
A Big Balance Pass — and the PTS Caveats
Underneath it all is a major gear balance pass. Ubisoft has published it as its own separate breakdown covering tanking changes (including weapon Threat), updated Gear Set bonuses and Exotics, and the PvP values for Prototype Augments and Schematics — it is linked in the Source line below, and it is worth a full read if you have a favorite build, because very little is untouched.
Ubisoft is also upfront about this build’s Known Issues: the Schematic list may show Schematics meant for a different weapon category or slot, Territory Control gear stashes can fail to award loot on Legendary difficulty, and Escalation’s Player Rating and objectives can vanish from the HUD when starting a new run after finishing one. PTS characters get a save template loaded with maxed Prototype gear, and all modifiers are unlocked from the start, so testers can go straight at the new systems.
Spearfall’s full Season 4 launch date has not been announced yet — this weekend’s PTS is where Agents decide what survives the test. The Division 2 Spearfall Y8S4 PTS opens Friday at 8:00 AM ET on PC. See you in D.C., Agents.
Source: Ubisoft — Y8S4 Spearfall PTS Patch Notes and Y8S4 Gear Balance Updates | Video breakdown: RogueGold
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