The Caduceus is the brand new exotic available in The Division 2 Y8S2 Into the Dark, and you can turn it into an absolute nightmare for enemies. If you have upgraded to the Premium battle pass, chances are that you already have it added to your inventory. Owners of the free pass will also be eligible for it later in the season.
Let’s find out how to build the best possible version of this assault rifle.
Best The Division 2 Caduceus build
The Caduceus is an exotic AR that offers Assault Rifle Damage and Health Damage in the first two Core Attribute slots. The third slot result will always be random, but you can tinker with it if required. It comes with the following attachments.
- Optics: 10% Critical Chance.
- Magazine: 40 Rounds.
- Underbarrel: 5% Critical Damage.
- Muzzle: 5% Critical Chance.
The right Caduceus build will depend heavily on its Talent, which is an interesting one. All Critical Hits will repair you and your allies by 3% of the hit’s dealt damage. Hence, a good build will rely heavily on two factors: critical hits and damage. The more critical hits you do, the more heals you (and your allies) get. The amount of heal will also depend on the damage of your weapon.
Aside from damage and critical hits, we will also want to emphasize accuracy (you don’t want to miss your hits) and unrestricted shooting. Let’s now get down to the loadout.
- Backpack: Striker’s Battlegear is a great choice without you having to lock down the slot with an exotic. It offers a better rate of fire and weapon handling, and Striker’s Gamble will increase the total damage by 0.65% that can be stacked up to 100 times. If you have the Striker’s Pack, the Risk management talent will raise the damage to 0.90% per stack.
- Chest: You can go for the Palisade Steelworks armor if you can manage to trigger the two-piece bonus that gives you +10% armor on kill and +60% health on kill. Otherwise, the Equalizer named chest plate also works well with boosts to critical hit chance and critical damage. Perfect Obliterate will increase the weapon damage by 1% for 10 seconds, and this can stack up to 24 times.
- Holster: You can opt for Salvo or the Unit Alloys piece. It offers a +5% Rate of Fire and +20% Assault Rifle Damage. Other attributes should ideally enhance damage, critical hit chance/damage and rate of fire.
- Kneepads: Go with any Striker Battlegear option that raises the weapon damage and critical hit chance/damage.
- Gloves and Helmet: Add a second piece of Unit Alloys and a Striker’s Battlegear. Look to add critical hit chance, base damage, and critical damage as much as you can.
Here are my choices of two gadgets for this build.
- Slot one: Reviver Hive is great to help you come out of dangerous situations. Since this build completely ignores armor, it’s good to have the Reviver as a backup if things go south.
- Slot two: Go with the Defender drone as it helps you to retain your health by deflecting some incoming fire and mitigating its impact.
Since this is a DPS-focused build, I went with the Gunner specialization. Pay special attention to improving assault rifle damage if you’re yet to max out your branch. I have also opted against using any modifiers (this could change as we roll deeper into the season).
That’s mostly all it takes to get the best out of your new exotic assault rifle. However, there’s one more exotic we can unlock this season from the scout missions. The challenges for week one are available as of writing, and we have the first HVT of the season to take down.
