The Division 2 PTS reveals story difficulty, matchmaking for Dark Hours raid
It looks like The Division 2 will soon enable matchmaking for the raid, but seemingly only in the new story mode.
The Division's latest PTS build is now live for players interested in testing some major upcoming content. This particular test revolves around title update 5, and the new content coming with Episode 1.
Outside of the obvious pieces, however, Massive tucked in a big change to the Dark Hours raid. You may remember many in the community furious they might never see the raid thanks to the lack of matchmaking, despite the developer promising it pre-launch.
It now appears Massive wanted to compromise, and title update 5 is going to bring that to all players. There's a new 'story' difficulty for the raid, which is essentially an easier version of the same activity. This not only allows players who don't have the time to get raid-ready to actually experience the raid, it also comes with matchmaking enabled.
In other words, Dark Hours can now be played like all major strongholds in The Division 2 - albeit obviously being a more complicated, longer version. The new story difficulty was actually listed in the PTS' patch notes, but Massive did not bring up matchmaking.
Reddit user Google-1234, however, spotted it while playing earlier.
It's very possible the rewards for the story difficulty will be different from the prime version, but it's not yet clear how the two will diverge.
Dark Hours has a few Exotic weapons and gear sets associated with it, which Massive could take away from the story version's loot table for balance. The raid itself doesn't come with a gear score increase, anyway, so anyone jumping into story will just be doing it to see the new content.
Title update 5 does not yet have a release date.