The Division 2 bug is making certain skills unusable
A recently discovered bug in The Division 2 causes deployed skills to have a much shorter use time than intended.
Players on The Division 2's subreddit have been exchanging stories about the game's various skills misbehaving.
Skills in The Division 2 operate on set cooldowns when they're not being used. When deployed, most of them are able to stay active for a relatively decent chunk of time before they self destruct and the cooldown timer kicks in again.
The issue, as players report, is that something causes them to be deactivated just a few seconds after they're deployed. For the shield, one of the skills in the game, this can be disastrous. The shield is designed to absorb damage so it needs to stay active for as long as possible, unlike others skills which can only be deployed for a limited time to prevent abuse.
Strangely, when this happens, the cooldown timer is not completely reset, but instead drops to 15 seconds. Players tested this in many situations, to ensure the skills weren't getting destroyed by enemy gunfire, or self-destructing due to inactivity.
The same problem can also happen to new characters, which could indicate that the bug is not related to certain pieces of gear or weapons. So far, Pulse, Chem Launcher, and Firefly appear to be safe because of their fire-and-forget nature. Things like the Drone, or any skill that needs to be active for some time to function, can suffer from this bug.
Some suspect cooldown reduction perks on certain mods may have something to do with it, but no one is really sure.
For more on The Division 2, check out our new guides on how to recruit staff and unlock the Dark Zone, and this one for where to find those pesky faction keys.