The overall difficulty is adjusted via the All tab on the map.
Agents who have purchased The Division 2: Warlords of New York will notice a new option at the bottom of their map when they start the game: Global Settings. What the Global Settings option allows them to do is set a global difficulty for the game content. By choosing a global difficulty, each activity in the game will sync with whatever the agent chooses.
Let's say you feel like you're ready to upgrade to Hard difficulty, because Normal is a cinch now. You go to the All tab, hold down the Global Settings button, select Hard, and then confirm your choice. Then everything in The Division 2 will be set on hard difficulty, including the Clear Zone events. This will force a few things: All players in the world will respawn in the Hard version of the world, all completion in the world will be reset, and any unclaimed loot will disappear.
This new feature does a few little things that are worth it. First of all, this will place every checkpoint in the game at that level, meaning you no longer need to clear events to boost them to the difficulty you want (however, you can still boost them as you wish. did before). Second, the loot rolls are better the harder the difficulty, so aligning the whole game to one difficulty makes whatever you do more rewarding. When you feel that a certain difficulty has become too easy, just go to the global settings and increase the overall difficulty.
Missions can still have their difficulty manually changed without resetting the entire map, though Agents don't want to reset their progress every time they choose to tackle a mission with a higher difficulty than their overall preference. You can also attach guidelines to this new setting if you're looking for an extra challenge and more experience.
UPDATE 03/09/2020: While Massive said in an early feed that you can reset checkpoints by changing the difficulty, that doesn't appear to be the case. Apparently, checkpoints are reset when an enemy faction takes over them, as they did before the expansion. That said, some players are reporting that it doesn't work as expected.
This is how to change the overall difficulty. Play the entire game now however you see fit, but keep the reset in mind whenever you change the setting.
For more The Division 2: Warlords of New York guides, check out our guides hub.
-
