I’m surprised this is there first I’ve heard of this.
Look up Axton or Zer0’s healthgate builds on YouTube, that should give you a better idea of how it works.
That specific type of healthgate build only worked in the higher OP levels where turtles shields took away almost all of your health. For most of the game you would do fine with stacking health and health regen, using Moxxi weapons for a quick heal if need be.
I agree and disagree at the same time.
I agree because, in this case, Zane and Amara have lifesteal, so right now their meta is to stack damage because lifesteal, so they don’t need to spec in defensive skills in their green trees at all. And that’s a bit sad.
But if they remove health gate, Fl4k and Moze would be in a much worse situation (or not, Moze has Iron Bear and Fl4k has their pet).
Is implicit that this will require a huge balance change.
I disagree because right now Borderlands 3 combat is really reckless, you go in, kill a bunch of stuff and you have fun, you don’t have to worry that much about dying because you have health gate and FFYL. If you had to worry about your enemies and the risk of being one shotted, the game would be a lot slower, and you would need to think a lot more about your actions and how to face each combat.
I don’t know what is the best solution, I think that health gate and lifesteal promotes a lazy balance (they gave to Moze a life steal com to “fix” her survivability issues instead of improving her skills and survival) but removing both will also remove the fun of the game.
Random side fact: In BL2 Bosses and raid bosses especially had attack and damage values that went far beyond anything any character on that level could ever dream to have in shield and health. I remember something regarding a level 72 Terramorphous doing over 50 million damage with his stomp attack. Without healthgate that would have meant instantaneous Fight for your Life every time.
I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.
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FFYL has diminishing returns so each time you go down, the FFYL time runs out faster - to the point the FFYL is reduced to like 0.3 seconds which makes it near impossible to kill something in that time
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FFYL often means you run out of your damage buffs (like anointment, Anarchy stacks etc) so you often lose like 80% dps and it gets really hard to revive yourself by a kill. Especially if you don’t have the blue guardian rank abilities unlocked. If you think your gameplay is too easy, just disable guardian ranks.
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It’s VERY easy to die if you’re not actively cheesing the game - ofc you get nigh unkillable when you use the most OP gear/cheeseskill combinations ever recorded. There are some skill/item combinations, especially for Amara and Zane, which literally make you an unstoppable snowball
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90%+ builds are not even mayhem4 viable. Just look at Amara and honestly tell me she can comfortably do anything in mayhem4 without a DRIVER mod. Phasezerker will come closer if we ever get another level cap increase, right now it’s STILL doing less damage while also being more fragile (because you need to go all the way down blue tree to get Avatar, and you don’t have enough points to grab both sustainment AND helping hands, you have to choose lifesteal OR damage reduction - and without that damage reduction, Amara dies in like 2 shots)
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Health does not scale properly (same with shield). Any flat HP / shield capacity you get on gear (relics and class mods can roll it), is IGNORED by any %hp modifier (such as on shield or in passives) - those ONLY affect the BASE value (~12k at level 57?). Which already means any pure HP build (using Rough Rider or Adrenaline Initiative) has a hard time competing. You can have up to 5400+ HP on gear that just doesn’t scale, so there’s no way to get your HP above some 28k. Which is kinda stupid because with SHIELD (which doesn’t scale properly either, but has more diverse items affecting it) you can get 200k+ shields (at least on Moze, but pretty high on other VHs too). Which is why these 0 capacity shields only work on Zane, who has abilities with 75%+ damage reduction. Otherwise, getting shot once or twice (especially with incendiary bullets) will kill you.
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Lifesteal has TRAVEL TIME (very long travel time at that if you shoot at range) and is WASTED if you receive it at full HP. There’s no buffer to it, you can receive a 50k+ heal that goes fully wasted since you’re on full HP and die the next second. That’s why builds utilizing lifesteal urge you to use weapons like SMGs that have small, but rather CONSTANT damage, so you have a stream of small heals coming your way at all times. Good luck using Lifesteal if you use a one-shot-kill weapons like shotguns, snipers or heavies. It was made even worse for those kinds of weapons by stripping the ability to lifesteal off of DoT grenades (Hex, Quasar, Storm Front, etc). Literally the only grenade that heals you with lifesteal (somewhat), is Cloning Maddening Tracker (and even that doesn’t heal Amara too much since it’s kinetic. Only ever heals partially if you convert much of your damage to action skill element). The most terrible thing you can see is when you are in FFYL and you just see that extremely high lifesteal globe slamming into you and do NOTHING because you cannot be healed in FFYL.
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Healthgate is a nonentity in the game. Unless you fight against melee mobs ONLY. Most mobs with weapons shoot BURSTS or full auto. 1st bullet gets you to few HP, the next bullet puts you to FFYL. Lifesteal takes sometimes even 5 seconds to arrive and is wasted in 90% cases. The only use of Lifesteal is when you run an smg sitting practically in enemy faces, so you get lifesteal quickly and constantly. Even then, if you take more than a second acquiring another target to shoot at, you will die.
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for concern about Zane and Amara being unkillable without taking defensive passives, that’s right ■■■■■■■■. Zane gets his near-immortality from the near-constant use of Barrier (which is massively OP as action skills go, it’s why I’ve never seen a Zane build without it). In case of Amara, it’s because 99% builds use Driver class mod and that ■■■■ is just BROKEN AF. It has defense, it has speed, it has unrivaled damage. But it’s also Amara’s only option for Mayhem4. Switch to ANY other class mod and Amara gets so bad it’s not even funny. I’m running phasezerker because I refuse to cheese the game with a driver, and the highest I can comfortably play (without being instakilled by any mob with a gun) is mayhem TWO.
tl;dr:
Most of the game’s balance can be fixed by simply disabling Guardian Ranks and not using ultra-OP item or ability.
2 Likes
No - most of us don’t like being one-shot.
The game provides many build combinations, both overpowered and truly weak. That people might only use the most powerful meta to make the hardest available content a cakewalk, and then complain that the game is too easy doesn’t sound like a game issue to me.
If the game had a gun that could one-shot Wotan and users complained that the game was now too easy while ignoring the other billion guns that make the combat challenging, I would have a similarly hard time blaming the game design.
That the game has an apparently exploitable tank mechanic that people are using to make the game easy similarly rings hollow. If the game is too easy with it, don’t use it. If you want to steamroll the game, then do.
1 Like
Lots of folks have comments on the mechanic itself, I want to touch on the philosophy from my standpoint.
Is Borderlands a simulation, or a game? It’s a game.
There are many fine shooters that are much closer to simulations, Sniper Elite series, CoD, and many others. You get shot, you die, just as if you were in Real Life. Big enough gun, and down you go, no protection from that sniper’s bullet.
BL is a game in a fictional universe. In this game, you die, you get a second chance. Took me a few deaths to figure it out, but I like it. And here, a hidden sniper cannot take you out without you having a chance to defend yourself. Boof you get hit and say Oh my, need to react and on you go.
You’re in a game, so there is more emphasis on keep going, have fun! vs. a simulation model You’re in real combat, you failed, you’re dead.
I prefer playing a game usually, though I’ll drop into the Sniper E world every now and again for the pain of dying.
–RoA
4 Likes
If the remove Health Gates they need to spend alot of time rebalancing enemy damage and player health values across the entire game. In addition health regen %, and other healing methods would need to be adjusted. Sounds like alot of work for something that may not even change up the gameplay much.
3 Likes
Disagree.
As long as there are bosses and anointed enemies with immune phases, then it’s only fair that we get to keep healthgate. If I can be one-shot by an enemy, then I should be able to one-shot any enemy provided that I have enough damage potential.
That said, how often does healthgate really save you? Chances are if you get healthgated by one projectile, then there is another projectile immediately following that will take you down the rest of the way (cough badass rocket spam cough).
For me, the majority of times I end up in FFYL were through heavy DOT. I’m pretty sure healthgate doesn’t help there.
2 Likes
That’s 100% wrong. I used an Elementalist Class Mod to solo M4 Takedown and a Phazerker to solo TTD, comfortably. A Driver COM is not required at all.
1 Like
I think health gating could be removed, but as others have said, it would require a significant change to the game itself, and not just how damage is handled.
We’d need the ability to apply tactics. Currently, in many areas mobs don’t spawn until you’re practically on top of them. We’d need the ability to scout around, target them at a distance, and thin their ranks. This might actually make sniping fun again.
Movement would also have to be improved, allowing us to roll and dodge, perhaps with some combination of move+jump/duck. Gears of War has some interesting mechanics with moving around and over obstacles that could be applied.
And speaking of terrain, LOS (line of sight) should be more meaningful for enemies, not just players. I’m amazed enemies can see and hit me with shotguns and melee weapons at ranges where they don’t even show up on the mini-map. Plus even when I move behind cover, they can track and target me without fail. In that same vein, they also possess some sort of arachnid-based detection ability, as they will often dodge my sniper fire at distance.
Incorporate these changes in conjunction with damage balancing and scaling encounters, and I’d be happy to see health gating go away. But for now, players have the option to disable perks and or all guardian rank bonuses. They also have control over their skills and gear. So if anyone feels the game is too easy because their build is invincible, they can always water it down.
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Er, does the gameplay really need fixing? I think it’s pretty good overall
5 Likes
The only thing I’d love to see changed with game play, is the addition of double tap to dodge… or wall dodging… or both…lol… a la Unreal Tournament 3.
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I like that you can’t just get one-shot, but ever since I played this series from the beginning I did think the mechanics around it all is very poor. Basically for all the hardest stuff, the amount of shield or health you have basically don’t matter because everything just hits through it all almost instantly anyway which is probably why health-gating and such are needed in the first place.
RIght, because it’s fun to die instantly to an attack you can’t avoid. Good luck ever moving anywhere in mayhem 4 when enemies have x2 projectiles.
2 Likes
If removing healthgate means that we actually get a difficulty that isnt resolving around exploting healthgate like OP10 borderlands 2 then by all means.
The only issue I really have with Healthgate is that it’s very detrimental to things like Moze’s SoR tree, which pushes ultra-high shield amounts while keeping your health at 1 hp for max benefits from Desperate Measures. But with no good way to regen shields (outside of 1 COM that requires Vampyr to heal well), abilities like Tenacious Defense and Stop-gap not working with 1hp builds, and many enemy attacks destroying shields in 1 shot no matter how high they are (100k+ shield amount? HA! Still dead in one shot!)
The tree is just flawed in its design as it goes against the very systems of the game itself in order to be effective.
health gate is great because its a “behind-the-scenes” mechanic that helps you out, and it feels great to just barely survive an encounter with low hp
its only a problem when we’re aware of it and rely on it to survive due to balancing around it. having “one-shot” attacks take out the magic of health-gate
2 Likes
No, the game is fine as is. Most of the discussions are around the fact that removing health gates without a rework of the game isn’t feasible or desirable. There are enough ways to make the game more challenging.
There is a lot of this in Diablo 3, people asking for stuff like SSO (solo self-found) when a player can just do that themselves without any need for more code. And Borderlands doesn’t even have leaderboards so there’s less reason to “even the playing field”.
I enjoy the game as it is. With maybe a little tweaking of the anointed enemies to make them more interesting rather than hard-to-hit bullet sponges. But health gating s fine. Maybe it can be removed in BL4, but then many of the suggestions need to be considered as a replacement. As has been stated many times, very few people enjoy getting 1-shotted by unavoidable or detectable attacks.
3 Likes