Did the Cartels Event Get Tougher for Anyone Else?

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Moze, M10, Xbox
Maybe it’s just a mix of random issues, but the Cartels event is kicking my butt today. I ran through this last night with ease. Same character, same build, same gear, same modifiers. Now, I can’t even get past the second gate.

For some reason the Mega Death Spheres just have my number, not to mention the Bad Ass Cartel operatives in the hoods. Before, there were maybe one or two Badasses that might have taken a couple more Yellowcakes. But everything could be cleared out with a few mags from my Recursion.

It’s really weird and I can’t think of anything that might have changed. Even IB, while never a source of DPS, could at least tank against incendiary enemies just fine. Now he’s melting into slag almost as soon as I jump in. Maybe I was just lucky before or unlucky now. It’s very frustrating with the number of BA enemies and their seemingly endless toughness (OPQ barely moves their shield) has got me on the ropes. Considering that drops have been declining in frequency and quality, and surface mini-bosses don’t drop anything anymore, I guess I’m done with this event.

It’s just absurd how much harder it is today than it ever has been.

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#2

I’ve had that at various times. I think it’s just the RNG of what types of enemies spawn in on the beacons. Sometimes you also get a bad mismatch with the minibosses too - the pyro one (Roaster?) has high fire immunity, but guess who had mostly fire weapons when she kept spawning in? Made it ‘interesting’, to say the least!

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#3

Anecdotal, but just had to relaunch the game because hotfixes weren’t applying properly (easy test: my L55 Lob was sitting at ~1,000 damage on the card). Also playing as Moze funnily enough (that one’s definitely just a coincidence).

The “hotfix applied” sign was up, but the Cartel details on the menu menu were not. Restarting the game fixed it.

@VaultHunter101 - I’ve grown to hate the Roaster as Moze :smiley:

#4

I’ve played enough that I am pretty sure I hit all of the combinations. And while the Maliwan guys are a bit tougher, it’s never been like this before.

BUT!

I went back to the area to get some video of the unmoving shields, and noticed that the spheres that had been causing me issues had buddy drones with them, as well as the various dogs. But a recursion or two and all of the drones were down and I finished up with Fishslap (my normal toughest miniboss).

So I’m not sure what happened, but I wonder if there was a glitch making the buddy drones and general Immunity thing, invisible to me. /shrug.

It went from feeling like my first time there thinking I’d just walk in and get some M10 gear with my M4 hand-me-downs, to the normal experience one would expect when they hand Moze a yellowcake.

/shrug

There’s RNG, then there’s…gremlins?

#5

I had the same problem a couple of days ago, but I think that it was just ugly RNG. A lot of the spheres were badasses, and it seemed like an unusual number of badasses for other enemies as well. It required me to burn a lot more ammo than usual, so I know it was harder. A day later, it seemed back to normal.

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#6

My only issue is flying orbs usually. Once theyre gone ita amooth sailing. Mayhem no mayhem. Theyre capable of almost killing me with a rake beam.
Though its like that in takedown too.

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#7

RNG remains the toughest boss I have to fight. The drops have been awful in terms of quantity (volume of cartel items) and quality (parts or annoints)in the last week for me.

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#8

Thank you all for the feedback. I really felt I might be going crazy. I’ve never had such a huge change in difficulty. And coupled with the possible Buddy System display bug, I was about to pack it in.

RNG is one bad mofo.

If RNG were a boss, I expect it would be a flying teleporting boss, that can pas through walls. After taking a random amount of damage (1-25% health) it would enter an immunity phase of 30 seconds to 3 days. Every 5-10 seconds it would have a random elemental immunity and reflect any matching elemental damage back at 180% damage.

It’s attacks would chain to other players regardless of where they are on the map, and have a random chance to spawn a ball of insta-death purple goo into the game of someone on your friends list. Any game, not just BL3.

When (not if) it kills you, a random piece of gear is destroyed. There is a small chance that when it kills you, it kills you so hard that your enter game progress is reset, as Hyperion had to go back to your original save file to bring you back.

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#9

Same here, my FFYL time is disappearing much faster too.