Big Problem with the Anointment Re-Roll Machine

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Heya Buddies, I have seen a lot of players farming Eridium lately to either get into the raid boss lair or Re-Roll Anointments and that made me think. How long would it take on average for a player to get an anointment of their choice from the Re-roll Machine.

Click Here for a Video Showcase & Explanation:

So I want to first start off with some quick Math:

There is a total of 70 anointments you can get without special events active. That means to get one particular anointment it would be a 1.4% chance (1/70). With this number we can then use this formula: (1 - chance_to_get) ^ (number of tries). So when using that formula it looks like this: (1 - .014) ^ (number of tries). So lets skip a couple of tries and just go to this number which will allow us to reach a 99% Chance of getting what we want. (1 - .014) ^ (321 tries) = 99% (Rounded up)

So right off the bat we can see that the amount of tries you would need to do on average to even get your desired anointment is a crazy number. If you take that number and times it by the amount of eridium it takes to Re-Roll (250) we then get a total of 80,250 Eridium cost to get just one particular Anointment.

Because of this I wanted to suggest some alternatives that could allow the community to get their desired anointment whilst keeping the core vision of the Gearbox developers in mind. Right off the bat most people would assume an decrease in Eridium cost would solve some problems but the desired outcome still remains the same where we see a ridiculous amount of tries to get what you want. Then on the other side of spectrum would be to increase Eridium cost but allow players to either decrease the pool of anointments to roll into to but this runs into the problem that the Gearbox Team hasn’t ever done something like this or even anything remotely similar to this in any game & Gearbox wants to still have this machine act as a secondary way to roll the dice so I don’t believe this is a likely solution. Instead I would like to recommend a solution that would keep Gearbox’s Core Belief of RNG & would reduce the number of attempts it would take for a player to get what they want, and that is to make the Re-Roll Machine only give the player Vault Hunter & Universal Specific anointment depending on what Vault Hunter is currently being played. What I mean by this is if you were to Re-Roll Anointments and you are playing Zane you would only then be able to roll into a pool that is Universal Anointments any character can use (IE Consecutive Hits) or Anointments only Zane can use. This would allow the Machine to still be a “Re-Roll” but still reduce the RNG Factor. There are still problems with this solutions as well where you could no longer use this machine to get the perfect anointment for another Vault Hunter currently not being played but I feel like this could be a minuet point. Nevertheless what are your guys opinions about the machine? And if you could change anything about it what would you change?

I believe that covers everything, Have a great day everyone :slight_smile:

Feel free to add any tips you think will help another player in the comments, you will probably help a fellow vault hunter out & strengthen us as a community.

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#2

There is a difference (quite large one) between “average number of tries to get desired outcome” and “number of tries that ensures desired outcome will occur with 99% probability”.

Translation - it’s not as bad as you present it. Plus - you are using this machine ‘wrong’ :slight_smile: - if you aim for the better anointment, it’s a godsend. If you are looking for the perfect one - hope you have enough patience and decent chunk of eridium. Just like winning jackpot in a state lottery :slight_smile: .

2 Likes
#3

Agreed, I stop rolling when I hit a usable anointment that’s better than the one I had. Probably only spent like 5k total on all my characters.

#4

There is around 50-52 different anointments that can spawn on weapons without Bloody Harvest. On shields/grenades around 10.
250 eridium is still too much for single roll, especially on weapons.

3 Likes
#5

I think people forgot a little too quickly how it was before the machine existed, quick example: you found a one shotter ( :smiley: yesss!!) it’ s a bad anoint :rage: (shiiiiiiiiiiit!) and there was NOTHING you could do about it… NOTHING. Similarly people are now obsessed with their eridium stock, but before there was not much to do with eridium (no one used gun gun) and it stockpiled.
For me this machine is something I never thought I would one day see, and it has done tons of good things for me, sure it is RNG and you can’t win every time but it s nothing particularly shocking compared to others game that have similar systems

7 Likes
#6

Same here but when it cost me 20,000 eridium to get a sent cryo annoint on my radiation redistributer like it did today then thats a problem.

2 Likes
#7

The reroll machine shouldn’t roll the same anointment twice. That alone would improve the chance of getting the desired anointment.

12 Likes
#8

I have issues with it because it is RNG. I get the rationale behind it but for me it doesn’t change the end result if I’m after something in particular, it just increases the time it might take to get that result, especially if I have to farm eridium which isn’t exactly fun. What I’d like to see is the ability to deconstruct and recombine all variable gear attributes, not just anointments. At its simplest, this could be a screen opened from the bank that, for an appropriate cost, lets you swap component parts, elements, skill boosts, bonuses & anointments between 2 compatible items allowing the player, though an iterative process, to combine the best bits of their farmed gear into a top tier item. Unlike the re-roll machine idea, you shouldn’t be able to buy parts you don’t already have so this will still encourage farming but make the process more forgiving and more enjoyable than farming and gambling eridium. I expect it’s too late for this game but worthy of consideration for BL4 perhaps?

2 Likes
#9

The same people would then complain about the RNG involved in farming multiple versions of the same part.

At this stage, borderlands 4 will need to be Two games: one for the crafters and one for the rogue-like fans.

1 Like
#10

I thought that they said that it wouldn’t roll the same anoint when they were first talking about the reroll machine. Just the other day I got the same anoint pop up 3x in 8 rolls.

2 Likes
#11

Maybe they meant the same anointment that you started with?..

#12

If this is the case (I have no reason to doubt it), then the OP’s math is off, as you pick the item to reroll. So if there are only 10 options on shields grenades, it’s 1/10, not 1/70. Likewise for guns, it’d be 1/52.

Also, as @charmlessbee said, there’s a huge difference between a near guarantee and simply an average.

If the chance is 1/52, then odds are very good you’ll have gotten it by the 52nd try (but you could possibly try hundreds or thousands of times and not get it, as the OP points out).

That said, whether or not the cost to reroll is appropriate is its own matter (but obviously tied to how the machine works).

#13

It was the same anoint that I did start with. I had a n2m rad on a skullmasher. Lol I ended up just keeping it after the 3rd time it rolled with n2m rad again

2 Likes
#14

The idea of rerolling is not to go on until you have the perfect anointment, it’s going on until you have a decent or good anointment. There are tons of anointments that are perfectly fine to use. So it’s not a chance 1 in 70, but a chance of 20 in 70 or something.

If you keep wasting eridium, that’s your fault.

#15

No, the point of it is simply mechanical. It allows you to change annointments, for whatever reason you might want to (a better one, a specific one, a worse one, whatever). The problem is the game ignores that you may be rerolling for a specific reason, whatever that reason is. There’s no way to curve or influence things even in the general direction of what you want, even for a specific VH, playing endgame, at the highest mayhem levels.
If they could figure out a way to make it work without bricking half the game, I’m sure they’d have made it so you could roll any anointment on any item (a Zane shield anointment on a Vladof pistol) because it’s not enough that there’s RNG, it has to be tedious to the point of being oppressive and frustrating.

3 Likes
#16

Yup and you know theres a bunch of people on these forums( not me) that prefer to keep it that way. For people that play on last gen consoles it cripples the experiance. Load screens kill farming abilty. So for us this recroll ability is the best way to get what we need for builds.

2 Likes
#17

You speak as though there is no way to roll for free…

#18

Of course there is, but then it depends on what you define as game boundaries. I’ve heard there is also a way to obtain any gun that exists (or may be even does not) with any anointment you want - but is it still the game or a crafting/hacking project?

Save/quitting and other ‘exploits’ are somewhat outside the game universe, IMHO.

1 Like
#19

You never save/quit farmed for quest rewards in BL2. For example, the Pimpernel, or the Sandhawk?

#20

Never. Boring AF, and kind of distracting. I’m much more of “play with what you got” type and consider getting occasional lemon part of the game.

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