xirmi
(A book of unspeakable horror... the Nibblenomicon!)
#1
Generally speaking, the odds of getting a particular item + a particular anointment are simply so low that it often takes hours to get a desired item. This is a problem, because:
The acquisition of a desired item in almost all cases requires a player to repeat a particular fight many times. The lesser the odds of getting a particular item, the higher the risk that the farming experience locks the good parts of BL3’s end-game behind a wall of dull and trivial fights. (Fighting Gorgeous Armada in DLC1 for a Heartbreaker twenty times is bearable; fighting Gorgeous Armada over a hundred times for a corrosive Heartbreaker with an uRad anointment is not. The more specific our wants, the more tiresome the game becomes.)
This problem has multiple causes:
The anointment pool is not efficiently designed:
2.1. For instance, there are six Gunner anointments dedicated to improving the damage of one of Iron Bear’s weapons. Note that, for each of these anointments, virtually every item that drops with these anointments (beyond the first) is useless. These anointments are ideally used when Moze is piloting Iron Bear, and when piloting Iron Bear, it does not matter whether the anointment is on a white rarity weapon or a legendary weapon. Note, further, that these six anointments could have been one, enabling buffs for combinations of different weapons.
2.2. There are many non-damage boosting anoints which are simply never used. For example, at Mayhem 10+, Moze does not need minor buffs to fire rate and crit damage, or weapon handling and reload speed, or 8% magazine regeneration when Auto Bear is active. She needs buffs to damage. Generally, we simply do not pick up items that spawn with these anointments and others like them.
Farming for weapons and farming for anointments are identical processes, when they do not have to be.
3.1. This ensures that, whenever we get the right item to drop from a loot source (call this the first dice roll) we must roll again to determine whether that item is useable. (As per point 2, this roll does not favour us).
3.2. As an example, I wanted a Multivitamin Plus Ultra for a pilot build. (I did not need it). This requires a Plus Ultra shield to spawn with two additional health components. I do not know what the real odds of getting one are, but I have seen roughly two hundred Plus Ultra shields but only one Multivitamin Plus Ultra. This this did not have the anointment that I desired (75% increase to shield and health), meaning that a good item was not usable (considering that I had other PUs with that particular anointment) due to rolling poorly the second time. (This is obviously an extreme case, but many cases are like it in principle.)
3.3. This can be avoided by letting us farm anointments separately from gear. For example, we could use eridium to buy anointments, or anointments could drop as an item in the world (like cosmetics, with the best anointments being legendary, and the worst, white, etc.) or raid bosses could drop tokens (like lootograms) that let us anoint gear. There are many ways to do it which seem at first glance much less punishing and tedious than the current system.
Thoughts? I am personally finding less and less reason to play on endgame due to time constraints, and have stopped trying to take manufacturer allegiance runs to M10, simply because ending a run with a couple of dozen hours of farming just doesn’t feel good.
IMHO there is no need to farm a specific gun (element+anointment) to handle 95+% of content on M11 (I’m avoiding M10). Took at least 4 allegiance/restriction characters to L65 on M11 recently, never farmed with any of them - game showers you with drops.
This is further amplified if you don’t own DLC5 and can’t use 1/4 anointments you see on weapons.
Does anyone actually use the new anointments added with DLC5? Outside of oddball builds or “until I find better anoint” situations. Can any of these be incorporated in any VH’s current META?
@xirmi When level cap went to 65, I farmed for close to 2 weeks to get a URad Plaguebearer, Reflux, Light Show, and Monarch, which were the 4 key weapons I needed for my URad Fl4k build. And I play BL3 quite a bit, so it’s safe to say that 2 weeks was at least 35-40 hours of play time. I am insane for doing that, methinks, but I still did it.
But that is the kind of insanity that BL3’s anointment system promotes. It is one thing to farm for the weapon drop, but something completely different to farm for the weapon, the element, AND the anoint. I don’t farm for specific weapon parts in BL3, but if you did, that would be one more variable to farm, assuming you were a min-maxer. It multiplies the RNG required exponentially.
Either the trash anointments need to be removed or they need to allow you to pay some resource (eridium, cash, or possibly even XP that would have gone toward your Guardian Rank?) to remove anointments from undesirable weapons that have the anoint you want and apply them to other weapons that are desirable. But I feel like we are all beating our heads against the wall on this one for BL3. This seems like a pretty basic thing that should have been considered when they were developing BL3.
I doubt gearbox will do it, because it’d be a huge task, and the game is passed the peak point where it might draw in a lot of customers (either buying the game or DLC), so they won’t want to invest.
I think you make some great points, and if the system was reworked, players would be a lot happier and more people would play and/or buy new DLC, but I’m not sure its enough for gearbox, who seems pretty bad right now, at identifying problems in the game and improving it (cough mayhem 2.0 cough).
For me, the two biggest issues with the anointment system are these:
There’s too many character specific anoints. Most of them can only be used by one vault hunter, and often only one build with them, like the multiple iron bear weapons anoints, when a universal anoint would work better, like action skills do +X% damage. Or like the sntl cryo, GB rad, auto bear incendiary anoints, which could be while using an action skill +X% elemental damage (the element would be random). So many anoints can be combined, for a small pool of options, making it easy to get the one you want.
Luneshines were better. Anoints focus too much on damage, meaning not having a damage anoint massively cuts your damage output (to a quarter in the worst cases), and none of the utility anoints are worth using 99.9% of the time. But cut those damage bonuses by 90%, and the utility anoints feel usable, especially in certain builds. Compare 300% damage to a small reload speed boost and nobody touches the reload boost, but a 30% bonus? It’s still better, but heavy weapons would work better with a reload boost. My point is that the smaller the damage bonus, the easier it is to balance utility anoints, and the more of the loot pool becomes worthwhile.
The new anoints show just how removed from real players this gearbox team is.
Take the “While action skill is active, +200% damage” anoint. It was fine, and almost any character can use it (forget Moze, unless you have the new skill trees). Gearbox added a bunch of character specific anoints that worked while their specific action skills were active (like phasegrasp, gravity snare, etc), meaning these new anoints are less useful as they work exactly the same but have a high chance you can’t use them. And what did gearbox do to compensate for them being less useful? They gave them all HALF damage (100, instead of 200).
I could fix every one of them, easy. Either increase the damage above 200 (250 or 300 would be fine), or better yet, add a second effect to each that’s worth 100% damage. Like being immune to damage for a short time after activating an action skill, or having crit hits spawn a ball that flies to the nearest enemy and deal the same damage to them, or taking damage boosts your damage output for the duration of the action skill, or deal additional bonus damage during an action skill based on how low your health/shield are, or have them emit a nova every time you fire the weapon during an action skill that deals damage equal to the shot, or reloading during an action skill fires a homing missile that deals damage equal to however much you did so far since reloading. Or, just ANYTHING, so that its not just half as good and less usable.
But, instead, gearbox has a bunch of worthless anoints, wasting people’s time and driving players away.
I’ve been playing the same as you, multiple allegiance builds, and it’s draining. I enjoy the leveling up process, and working out how to get the best from each manufacturer, but trying to get the best weapons for these builds with the right anointment to make them viable is far too much effort.
I currently need four seperate Hyperion guns in corrosive with uRad. I can’t see myself getting them.
We need a way to reroll annoints, or they need to be turned into “components” to atach into the weapons.
Grim Dawn has a system like that, you have these “components” that drop from enemies (high lvl stuff can only be crafted, but they use the common ones), and you atach them to your items, in end game i would say they make about 50% of your build’s power, kinda like some annoints in some guns.
This make the game very fexible, because even if you get a not so good item roll, you can fix that with the right component, while in BL 3 if you don’t get the right annoint, you have a potentially useless item that cannot be “fixed” in any way.
If GD used the same system as BL3, can just imagine the horror of farming for a Decree of Aldritch (Aether damage item), and after all the time it coming with an Eye of Dreeg component (Poison component), them having to run Port Valbury all over again lol (one of the longest dungeons in the game).
Or even more nightmare inducing guys, just imagine Borderlands 2 with annoints xD.
Buuut, saying all that, at this point into the game life, turning annoints into separate components would be a lot of work, so the reroll option is the most “realistic” one, and they should try to do it, or something as close as possible.
Games like this relied on farming as end game since the start and everyone love(d/s) it…
This game however is just bad… Legendaries are way overbuffed and anoinments make that problem even worse… Throw in the broken mayhem system… And voilà… The game is only fun when leveling a new character. End game sucks or rather is pretty much non existing at this point