Can we have uncapped mayhem scaling please?

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Hey whomever (but hopefully Gearbox)!

I’ve been playing BL3 for the last seven months and soloing M10 for a while, and it was super satisfying at first: fighting these super threatening bosses and hordes of badass mobs (especially during the Cartel event, omg); getting piles of new legendaries; tweaking my builds to get incrementally more effective in each engagement; running straight into crowds of enemies pouring out of portals or drop ships, and barely surviving while absolutely destroying everything in explosions and flashes and screams - y’all know what I’m talking about.

But once you hit M10, there’s a serious cliff where the content all becomes easy and the loot farms unsatisfying. Can we please have mayhem without the maxed out level? Letting mayhem scale indefinitely could mean the engagements are continually more thrilling, with stronger, deadlier, and more concentrated groups of enemies. And at the end of an M15 fight (or however high we can go), the loot drops are more relevant (higher drop rates of dedicated loot please) and more plentiful.

There’s so much variability in the loot and build options that players are regularly coming up with new ways to deal more than a billion points of damage or ways to chain status effects, destroying dozens of enemies at a time. That is absolutely thrilling, and it would be incredibly fun to see how far we can take it. Imagine players competing for how high a mayhem level they can master for certain arenas or bosses. Play styles and weird build quirks can shine in that sort of environment. Groups can leverage extreme builds for particular roles in a more coordinated raid-style fight.

Some things to consider, of course, are caps to weapon damage, and shield and artifact benefits. Naturally, capping these at M10 levels is what makes the subsequent levels so challenging. Allowing those to scale prevents the difficulty from scaling (unless enemies always scale more than the loot).

But with the upcoming introduction of more loot and new skill trees, there’s an opportunity for the game to indefinitely scale in challenges and achievements. There’s only so much the dev team can accomplish to keep the player base happy. New content and new mechanics take time to develop, and it’s during those times that players churn out. Please, give us another reason to keep playing and dreaming up unique builds and play styles and farming for that perfect loot.

Also, please fix Evil Lilith. That fight has some excellent art and narrative power, but the fight kind of sucks, and it’s so annoying when repeatedly dropping zero legendaries, or a single world drop, or spitting legendaries out of the arena. We need way more rewards to motivate farming those load screens and health gates.

Thanks for an awesome game so far!

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#2

I totally agree*. BL3 desparately needs a way for the difficulty to ramp up in the end game, so give a purpose to our farming and character progression. I’ve got a pretty good build now, though there are still some juicy gaps I’d like to fill, like a COM with my preferred god roll…but why? I already one-shot most mobs, and the only reason Wotan and Scourge take more than a minute to kill is because of their extended immunity phases…so what exactly am I farming for? Why should I look forward to that god roll drop, or for that matter that 4th skill tree? I don’t need any of it, because all the existing content is too easy as it is.

Some way to ramp up the challenge so we can actually test our new builds and gear would be great.

*Except for Evil Lilith. I hate her long immunitiy phase, but otherwise I enjoy the fight, and her drop rates seem fine to me. I also watched a zkarmaa video where he did 1000 runs to reveal that her dedicated drop rates are all around 10-15% which seems fine for me.

I’ll also mention that she drops a ton of cosmetics, if that’s your thing. I’ve been farming her for the Muse, but in the meantime I’ve picked up the new skins, heads, and emotes for most of the 4 VHs, as well as a few room decorations and echo skins.

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#3

Yeah, I saw that video too, and I’m probably being too hard on Lilith. But I must have the worst luck because I seriously get no legendaries on half the runs. And the other half are typically shields and sages. Anyway, my Lilith complaint was an afterthought. I really hope Gearbox expands the mayhem scalability to make room for greater build diversity and more exciting engagements.

#4

I drown in savage beasts and prompt criticals when I farm her, though it’s no good to me as I only want muses, which seem a lot harder to come by.

Anyway, I really hope this upcoming new mode gives us something along the lines of what you’re asking.

You hit the nail on the head: there needs to be a point where the enemies keep scaling but you and your weapons stop scaling. Otherwise they’ll just keep adding harder and harder new content that seems bullet spongey at first, until you start to get the next-level drops, when it becomes trivially easy like the rest of the game.

Meanwhile, the endless scaling cycle will continue to wreak unintended havoc on the general balance and push various older guns/gear/builds/playstyles into obsolescence.

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#5

Isn’t this true for older guns even when you have uncapped scaling? Those older guns will still be useless at higher mayhem levels and uncapped ones.

#6

I don’t think so. I still use guns from the base game in my rotation.

#7

Endless scaling… can you imaging the screen pollution from the amount of modifiers that would be added to that scaling. (You know they won’t give that without adding something you hate… look at M2.0 all together, complete opposite of what was asked for)

M20 will fry your system and give you seizures.

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#8

Honest question: why?

I was under the impression that the thing people disliked about OP levels was refarming gear and bullet spongey enemies, not gear and skill scaling. Some of it may be accounting for changing tastes since 2012, but I can’t for the life of me understand why people want us to stop scaling for endgame.

Stuff like that works in diablo or other ARPGs because they maybe 20 weapon classes with the same base stats and the only things that change are the special effects and passive boosts. But Borderlands has 6? weapon types, and even within those types there are wildly differing damage numbers (compare a Jakobs AR to a Vladof). Nothing is starting from a consistent baseline, so bumping up the difficulty will just leave entire weapon classes in the dust (bandit pistols, hyperion snipers in BL2).

Unless I’m really misunderstanding what people disliked about OP levels, scaling was never a concern for anyone before BL3. I’m curious as to why there is this sentiment now that endgame needs to stop us from scaling.

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#9

no mayhem just have dmg reduction slider and everyone is happy

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#10

Honestly yes, that would do it.

DR adds far more EHP to enemies that just bloating health. It also would apply equally to action skills and weapons, whereas in the current system action skills scale better than most guns (base game).

#11

I think the idea of scaling is kinda weird. I wanna call it dumb and nonsense. And that adds up refarming the same gear for the same effect.

Let’s say level 50. You raised the cap to 55.

  • You scale the enemy to the same level
  • You farm the same gear at the same level
  • You are doing the same story and challenges

What essentially has changed? The ratio is about the same.

Now let’s do it for 57, 60, 65?

I get it you can farm for new gear. But essentially you’d end up at the same ratio.

Some variety with this scaling is op guns, op skills, op enemies but more or less same ratio of mayhem.

We keep scaling numbers. Maybe we should scale strategy, tactics, and AI instead? Easier said than done though.

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#12

Literally every RPG has scaling. It’s how you progress and get stronger through the game. Yes, it keeps the difficulty proportionally similar, that’s the whole point. How exactly does one change tactics from Lvl 1 to lvl 2? This is mainly a game based on math, a strong build can power through pretty much anything.

Scaling doesn’t become weird or dumb simply because GB implemented it weirdly.

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#13

Well that’s exactly scaling in this game ia weird because GBX implemented it weirdly. I’m not saying scaling in general is bad. My context is BL3.

#14

Well that’s really nitpicking. You know well I don’t mean low levels. We’re talking about higher levels, endgame, M10 or whatever is the ceiling now.

#15

There is endgame from M0-M10. Mayhem is an optional difficulty, you don’t need to be in any Mayhem let alone M10. I think people on the internet really tend to forget that when having these discussions.

M10 is important, but if we (general we, not anyone in particular) are going to keep telling people “you don’t need to play on M10 if you don’t like it”, then we also shouldn’t turn around and want the entire game balanced around the M10 meta that we’re telling people they don’t need to play on. That’s just going to further incentivize people to play on M10 even if they don’t like it and complain about it.

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#16

Infinite scaling…
Now you can farm till the day you die… litteraly. Then you can continue farming in the afterlife :rofl:

At some point people will have to accept they have beaten this game and either drop their op weapons and try lesser stuff or move on to another game

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#17

Sorry, I don’t understand your question about the older guns and uncapped scaling (not sure if you mean uncapped scaling of enemies or player).

But anyway I’ll rephrase myself to try and clarify my point.

I was essentially referring to what has happened this year with the accelerated scaling (of both enemy and player) that came with multiple level cap raises and (especially) mayhem 2.0:

They give us guns that scale with mayhem, so they give us enemies that also scale with mayhem. Those enemies are super hard to kill, so they give us OP cartel weapons, and crazy new +200% annoints. Now the players are OP, so they give us a new guardian take down with even tougher enemies… Etc. Etc. Etc.

As we saw, scaling both enemies and the player led to things quickly getting out of control. They kept raising one to compensate the other, and anything not explicitly accounted for quickly got left in the dust: melee, grenades, pets, iron bear, etc.

Then, when it became apparent that too many things were left behind, they compensated by scaling those things back up (action skill damage, melee, etc). But now, certain things were stretched seemingly beyond their intended design, as damage numbers continued to mushroom and the multipliers affecting them grew more numerous. For example, Ties that bind was now double-dipping so many damage sources (combined with mayhem-level guns and mayhem-level action skill damage) that whole rooms were being cleared in one shot. Meanwhile, huge anointments that were brought in to mitigate the massive enemy scaling were now overshadowing the weapons, grenades and shields themselves. We’re now playing a game that I don’t think is balanced how anyone a year ago would have intended. Gearbox let the game run away from them.

I don’t know the full solution to this. Obviously there needs to be some measure of scaling for both the enemies and the player. But it seems clear that the scaling on both sides was too much and too fast, and perhaps the scaling on the player has been especially excessive. If there was a point where the enemies’ rate of scaling slowed, but yours slowed even more, I think that would help. You would start to feel that you were making progress because you were incrementally acquiring better gear (ie. Finding great gear with great rolls over time), and not just because they introduced a new +500% damage annointment that instantly blew everything else into obsolescence

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#18

At the end of the day it’s all software. I can tell this is a sign they are monkey patching code because they can’t fix the root problem.

The problem with monkey patching is exactly this. The monkeys keep coming until you lose control of the jungle.

As a programmer how do I know what to fix really? If someone tells me a symptom that these guns are underpowered, my quick code fix is increase the damage but that simplistic solution is bound to produce side effects. Here we are…we see the problem.

But most of the time programmers really just follow the business needs and rukes. So they might really know what to solve but the solution might need an overhaul. It’s probably costly to do a code rewrite than to monkey patch.

Edit:
I see the same exact problem with project I am working on. We’ve lost control of the source code. We just keep monkey patching stuff. A client needs a popup here. Another needs a downloadle file there. Another user needs list of accounts. The system isn’t ready to accept all these requests. But we got to do what we go to do. Monkeys to the rescue

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#19

TBF, that is one thing that is pretty much unchanged from M0 to M10. Yes, TTB was nerfed a bit in July but it’s been double dipping and 1 shotting groups since M3, Mayhem scaling doesn’t have as much to do with that than the design of the skill itself.

That is simply because of how they scaled Mayhem. You can’t have sensible scaling when your endgame goes
200-400-600-800 _____________ 200
1500-3000-4500-6000__________ 1500
8000-10000 __________________ 2000

The jump between Mayhem 4 and mayhem 5 is almost as much as the previous 4 mayhems combined. You have massive spikes in scaling starting at mayhem 6 and really exploding from M8-10.

I really don’t think it would take much more than smoothing out the mayhem health scaling. That way, everything else would be adjusted with it. Just have it go

1000-2000-3000-4000-5000-6000-7000-8000-9000-10000

Now everything scales at a consistent interval and there aren’t massive spikes. For most of the mayhem levels the scaling goes up or remains the same. From there adjust the scaling down. That way it effects all mayhem levels relatively equally. Even if you kept the current scaling formula, action skills for example would scale

4-7-10-13-16-19-22-25-28-31

rather than the

1.6 -2.2 -2.8 -3.4 -5.5 -10 -14.5 -19 -25 -31

we have now.

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#20

I absolutely love this game. I’ve been playing since launch and even with 1000+ hours, I still have a million things I want to do in this game. The content is spectacular… just finished DLC3 again last night on a new Siren using only Hyperion SMGs… the Bitch, Cheap Tips, Oldridian, and Handsome Jackhammer. Even on M10 you can make all of those guns work with good synergistic gear choices, a solid build, and smart play.

I agree with you that I’d like the ability to turn the Mayhem level up as much as I want. They can lock the enemy damage, but let us scale up the health, dedicated drops, and experience like you said. I’d love that. My strongest builds can handle general M10 gameplay quite easily, and I’d love to be able to turn up the enemies to choose my own level of difficulty.

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