The Division 2 is gearing up for its year 5 roadmap, but the next big content drop will be season 11, due at an as yet confirmed date in “early 2023”. It can’t be too far away, since the PTS for it went live on PC on January 13.
The PTS is the first chance players have to experience what will be coming in season 11, including new gear. While there are new brand sets to play with, the most interesting piece of gear revealed so far isn’t yet available.
It’s called the NinjaBike Messenger Bag, and its talent sounds particularly intriguing. This one piece of gear could potentially make for some serious build diversity, and I think it’s going to become a vital piece beyond just collecting all the exotics in the game.
What’s so good about the NinjaBike Messenger Bag?
To be clear, all this is based on what I’ve read in the PTS patch notes (opens in new tab). But it stood out to me like a shining beacon, because I’m already convinced it could be the missing link in making a number of my builds stronger. Until we can actually try it for ourselves, just how good it is will remain a question.
It all hinges on its unique talent:
- Talent “Resourceful” – Slots in with any equipped Gear Set and/or Brand Set item to fulfill a requirement towards unlocking a Gear and/or Brand Sets bonus. Allows to unlock bonuses from multiple sets simultaneously.
Simply put, if you have a bonus with a requirement of say, two pieces from the same brand, the NinjaBike Messenger Bag can be that second piece. But it can also be the second piece for multiple brand sets, so in theory, you could stack two-piece bonuses from five different brands at once with this one piece of gear.
The first part of the talent would make it useful if you were hoping to trigger a bonus but you really didn’t have a piece of gear that made sense to use in your build. But the second part of it really makes it interesting. In essence, it gives you more freedom to unlock brand-set bonuses without having to necessarily sacrifice another.
It could turn out to be really powerful. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. So often I’m putting together a build I really like, but I feel like I’m missing out on bonuses because I’ve had to prioritize something else. This new exotic could make these decisions a little less stressful to make.
So, how do we get the NinjaBike Messenger Bag?
Until season 11 drops or it’s added into the PTS, right now we don’t know anything about how to get it or what sort of stats we can expect it to roll with.
There is, of course, already one NinjaBike exotic already in the game, the knee pads with a very different type of talent. Once you’ve unlocked these for the first time they can enter the loot pool to drop from sources such as exotic caches. But initially, they were only available inside the Dark Zone.
The new exotic backpack could well follow suit, or it could have a quest attached to it. Or, if we’re really lucky, it’s just one of the seasonal rewards on the new season 11 battle pass. Let’s hope it’s the last one, shall we?
