The Division: How to Rank Up Fast and Get Better Loot in the Underground [Guide]

Now there are two steps to get better loot in the Underground: One is to rank up fast and the other is to earn Underground caches quick. However, increasing the rank of your agent and getting as much caches quickly is not that simple as the higher your rank goes, the steeper the XP hill that you will climb. So, is there any other way? Nope. There’s no other way! But there’s a way to level up efficiently and we’ll teach you how to do it in this page.

But before we go into the details on how to rank up efficiently, let’s check out first the XP you gain per Level so that you’ll have a clear understanding on how tough the hill you’ll climb, and how important the tips that we will give you in this page.

If you are wondering how we manage to get these numbers. The formula below will do the explaining.

x= Rank/Level
XP Required to Rank/Level= 20x² + 10x + 470 

Just by looking at the table above, you will determine how hard it is to eanr those Underground Caches especially when you are at mid to high rank. One tip that we could give you is DO NOT RUSH to opening all of those caches that you’ve earned. You should consider saving them until you get a higher Gear Score, since GS of the items found in the cache depend on your GS when you open the cache.

These results indicate that you should save up those Underground Caches until you are at least 220 Gear Score (maybe higher) to increase your likelihood of getting 229 weapons and 268 gear. While you are saving up your caches you need to be able to increase your Gear Score through other ways. Here are some ways to increase your Gear Score without opening those Underground Caches.

More specifically, we suggest that you save your Underground Caches until you reach at least 220 GS or higher. In this way, you’ll increase your chances on getting 229 weapons and 268 gears. Now to help you out, below are some ways to increase your GS without opening those Underground Caches:

High-Value Targets (High-Risk Targets)

• Bosses drop 268 gear and 229 weapons
• Activity completion awards you 268 gear and 229 weapons

Dark Zone bracket 201-230

• DZ05-DZ06 have a chance to drop 268 gear and 229 weapons
• DZ01-DZ06 Named NPC’s (bosses) – drops 240 gear (guaranteed in DZ06)
• DZ03-DZ06 Supply Drops – drops 240 gear

Dark Zone bracket 231+

The key to ranking or levelling fast in the Underground is choosing the right difficulty setting and derivatives and all times. On normal difficulty, you’ll get 10% XP gain boost per directive which is quite good but, the thing is, there are several factors that could slow you down just like if cooldowns on your abilities. If these directives slow your progress, then you might as well consider dropping them. 

So what is the purpose of the directives?

Save them up for now. Using one directive will give you a piece of gear (low item level for normal mode). Using two directives will earn you a weapon instead (low item level for normal mode). As you use more directives at the same time, your reward appears to increase. It is expected that using all 5 directives at a time may earn you a guaranteed gear set item, but that has yet to be verified. This is the reason you want to save your directives. They are not useful for XP but they will eventually be useful for loot (in challenge mode or higher).

In addition, higher difficulties may give you more XP but the fact is, these difficulties also take time to complete. It may grant better XP and loot but in the end, it is much better to stick with normal mode which will give you 500 XP. Our main objective here is to level as fast as we can to get the most from the Underground Caches. See the tables below to know the difference.

Note: XP Reward increases linearly while Average Clear Time increases exponentially

Note: Reach Rank 40 with fewer hours played by doing Normal difficulty

If you are having troubles in clearing Underground Operations however, then here’s a few quick tips on how to finish it under three to five minutes:

• Don’t kill all enemies unless your objective says so.
• Destroy the Alarms before they are activated to stop spawning more enemies.
• You can sometimes predict where the door will open by looking at your mini map for grey space.
• Use abilities that are good for mobility. (Pulse, First Aid, Sticky Bomb, Seeker Mine)
• Never restock ammo. You won’t need it and there is a restock before you get back on the train.
• Run straight through the “traps” between enemy areas. (use heal as you do it to clear debuffs so you can sprint again)
• Only do Normal mode Operations with no directives.

Can you gain XP faster by playing with friends? 

Underground Operations are designed to scale with the number of players in your party. This means that if you go in solo your enemies should have lower health (or there should be fewer enemies) than if you went in with a full squad of 4 players. The goal here was to determine how effectively they achieved balance in tuning these Operations to Scale with the number of players. The theory should be that more players make runs go faster because abilities synergize well (Pulse) and players can split up to clear rooms faster. Here is the data for Normal mode operations.

The good news is that playing solo or with a party of two is perfectly acceptable. You can choose to play with the exact number of players that you want without feeling penalized for playing with fewer party members. There is a small advantage to playing with a larger party size but the advantage is not substantial. Larger party sizes could improve their efficiency slightly more than this with good communication and strategies (such as: player A always clears the left of the room while player B always clears the right) Notice also that the clear times are highly variable due to the randomness associated with randomly generated missions).

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