The Division 2 Expertise Explained: Level vs Grade

Expertise is the endgame system that lets you permanently push a weapon or piece of gear past its base stats by spending materials and combat time on it. It sits on top of an item’s own rolls as a second progression layer at max level, and it’s why a max-roll item can still keep getting stronger long after you stop finding upgrades from drops. Developer Massive Entertainment and publisher Ubisoft built it as a long-term sink for high-end resources, tied into the same Tinkering Station you already use for crafting and recalibration.

The confusion starts because the system uses three terms that sound like synonyms and aren’t. Here’s what each one actually controls.

Expertise Level is the agent’s level with the Expertise feature, while Proficiency Rank is how proficient you are with a specific type of items, maxing out at 10 ranks. Grade covers individual item upgrades and displays on your item, for example “Lady Death, Grade 2.”

Getting the most out of your gear takes planning, and to earn Expertise Level you need to gain Proficiency Ranks by using an item, brand or gear set in combat, or by investing resources into researching them. Both routes feed the same bar. Playing with a weapon equipped ticks its Proficiency up passively while you do whatever you were already doing — story missions, Countdown, control point runs. Donating materials through Research does the same thing without requiring you to actually carry the item, which matters for weapon types or gear sets you never plan to use in a real loadout. Once you reach the maximum Proficiency Rank for a piece of equipment you become Proficient with it, and you may only improve the Grade of items, brands and gear sets you are Proficient with.

There’s a third, quieter route: donating spare copies of the same weapon or gear piece you’re farming, and Ubisoft’s Intelligence Annex on Expertise confirms you can donate any item that matches the one you want Proficiency with. Duplicates from high-value target loops, control points or a Classified Assignment such as McMillan Reservoir Assault are worth feeding in.

If you’ve spent time away from the game, the current season, Red Horizon, is a good moment to check where your Proficiency ranks landed. Expertise is not frozen: Ubisoft has said Season 4 will change it again (see below).

Nobody at Ubisoft has published a materials-cost table for any of this, so the honest way to size the grind is in the system’s own units rather than made-up hour counts: every item type needs its own climb from Proficiency Rank 0 to 10 before it can even be upgraded, and every single item you care about then needs its Grade pushed up separately, all the way toward the Expertise Level 30 ceiling. Treat 30 as the ceiling hoy rather than a permanent one: Ubisoft’s own description ties the maximum to how many items exist to become proficient with, and it has moved upward as seasons added gear. There is no official total hour figure for finishing this account-wide — treat any number you see elsewhere as a guess, not a published fact.

Year 8 tied Expertise to its newest gear tier. Ubisoft’s Rise Up season post (April 2026) says an item can be converted to Prototype Gear only at Level 40 and at maximum Expertise level, for 1 Prototype Core, and that reaching Expertise Level 30 was made less demanding by a lower upgrade cost. The post gives no percentages, and per the same post a Prototype item can no longer be optimized or recalibrated, so finish the base item first.

Expertise also decides how strong you are in the Dark Zone. Since Red Horizon the Blackout Dark Zone removes stat normalization, so your Expertise upgrades apply in full, while the Balanced Dark Zone switches them off. The variant-by-variant table is in our SHD Watch guide.

More change is announced but not dated. At Gamescom on 26 August 2026 Ubisoft said Season 4 reworks Prototype Gear to rely less on RNG and that “the changes will touch Expertise, Augments”. No details or date as of 11 October 2026.

Why Grade Upgrades Never Wear Off

A Grade point applied to a specific weapon or gear piece stays on that item. It isn’t a consumable buff or a seasonal bonus: it is a stat on that copy, which is why the game prints the Grade number on the item’s name. Ubisoft’s 2021 Intelligence Annex gave each Grade +1% base damage on weapons and +1% base armor on gear, flagged as work-in-progress values; no 2026 post restates them.

Why Expertise Level Is the Shared Bottleneck

Even if a weapon is fully Proficient and you’ve stockpiled every material it needs, you cannot Grade it past your current Expertise Level. That’s the part that trips people up: Proficiency tells you an item is eligible, but Expertise Level tells you the actual ceiling, and it’s shared across your whole account rather than tracked per item.

Grade Is Not the Same as Rarity

Grade is a separate axis from an item’s color rarity; Gear Score itself no longer exists in The Division 2. A high-rarity drop with no Grade upgrades performs at its base stats until you actually spend materials on it through the Tinkering Station — the loot rarity and the Expertise Grade don’t move together automatically.

Hitting Proficiency Rank 10 Doesn’t Auto-Upgrade Anything

Reaching max Proficiency Rank only unlocks the option to spend materials on that item — it doesn’t apply any Grade increase by itself. You still have to go back into the Expertise tab and manually choose Upgrade for each Grade point.

This Isn’t the Same System as SHD Watch

SHD Watch and Keener’s Watch are two names for the same system, which turns XP past level 40 into stat points. Expertise is separate: it upgrades individual weapons and gear. They get mixed up because both are long-term account progression tracks. If you’re trying to sort out watch attributes specifically rather than weapon and gear Grades, that’s covered separately in the SHD Watch guide.

Sources and Confidence

This table separates what the studio has confirmed from what comes out of press previews, and what is still just circulating. Every link below was fetched before publishing.