I’ve been thinking about the state of the game at the moment quite a bit, and I think I have come up with a few ideas that would make the game feel better overall.
The first and perhaps most important change that needs to be made is scaling the damage of action skills and grenades. Honestly, this should have been the case from the start. Shields don’t need to be scaled because mayhem mode doesn’t affect enemy damage. This is obviously not the case with AS and grenades. Un-scaled damage does absolutely nothing to enemies with x126 hp. It feels like a large piece of the game is just missing and it seems really odd that the fastball grenade does 1/3 of the damage of a single blast from the yellowcake. The same holds for pet damage and melee as well.
Second. I understand why gearbox decided to not make chests scale with mayhem modes. It is meant to prevent people from farming easy chests for mayhem 10 guns fresh out of the 1st play through without needing to fight a single enemy. I do however find it odd that chests, a huge staple of the borderlands games, feel absolutely useless. I think one way to rectify this would be to increase the rate of non scaling items spawning in chests, AKA relics, class mods, and shields (as well as grenades if they continue to be unscaled). Finding a few legendary mods and relics from a series of chest feels a lot better than finding a ton of blue guns that do 1/50th of the damage the gun you are holding does. I would also consider raising the quality of chests based on mayhem level and cap it at mayhem 4. That would help people who are just starting to play mayhem mode without making it exploitable in the top end of the game.
My third change would be to give specific types of legendary relics and class mods specific bosses that drop them, exactly like how the grave drops from the graveward. As it is, trying to find the exact combination of modifiers on class mods and relics is ridiculously difficult. You basically have to stumble upon them at random. There is no way to speed up the process and it makes the player feel helpless. Even if they dropped from specific bosses, it would still take a large number of kills to get the best result possible. It would definitely not make the process too easy, and it would give players the sense that they are working towards something.
The fourth would be to simply improve the incentive of the Maliwan Take Down. As it is at the moment, a mayhem 10 run of the take down takes as long as farming Captain Traunt 30 or so times. At the end of the day, the 15 or so legendaries that drop in the take down don’t compare to the 50+ legendaries you would find from farming bosses. Let alone the fact that farming the bosses can net you the powerful mayhem 6 exclusive weapons.
The fifth is a far out idea I had. What if there were relics that improved the chance of weapons having a specific element? They could be the secondary effects of legendary relics. For example: Greatly increase the chance of guns being the incendiary element. This would hopefully drop the number of farms for the specific gun you are looking for from 200+ runs to maybe 50 or so runs. Seems like a reasonable inclusion.
Then a little bonus addition that isn’t directly linked to mayhem mode would be the inclusion of three legendary shields that are immune to fire, corrosion, and cryo respectively. This is already the case with the transformer and red suit, and they certainly aren’t game breaking. This would open up new and interesting strategies with the elemental projector relic. The only concern I have is that the pain is power assault rifle might be a tad to strong with fire immunity as it would essentially become a higher powered infinity. However, I doubt this would be stronger than the current highest tier guns we have at the moment like the OPQ and yellowcake.
Sorry for the long and ramble-y wall of text guys. Just had a lot of thoughts on my head and wanted to throw them out there. I’m eager to see what all of you think of my ideas and if you have suggestions of your own.