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.