FL4K Mayhem 2.0 Feedback Thread

Borderlands 3 FL4K the Beastmaster
#1

Hello everybody,

Since Gearbox has said they are reading the forums and collecting feedback, I believe it would be a good idea for us to stat collecting people’s likes, dislikes, new bugs, and suggestions for FLK specifically in Mayhem 2.0.

While I understand there are strong views about Mayhem 2.0 from all sides, let’s keep this thread directed towards provided feedback rather than discussing the various issues with the implementation of Mayhem 2.0 since there are several dozen threads on that already. Also, let’s keep this as character specific as we possibly can and be ABSOLUTELY CRYSTAL CLEAR about what it is we would like to see implemented. If the FL4K community clearly lays out what our concerns are, then we’ll know we’ve done everything we can on our end to positively affect the development of the game.

1. LIKES

2. DISLIKES

3. SUGGESTIONS

4. BUGS

1. LIKES

2. DISLIKES

3. SUGGESTIONS

  • Gamma Burst’s rift should be movable on a cool down, or the AOE should be increased.
    • From gelboy - We need to be moving constantly in Mayhem 2.0 to avoid novas, elemental pools, Death, and other effects. We can’t utilize the Gamma Burst rift if we need to constantly move out of it’s range. Allowing us to move it or making it larger would increase its usability drastically. It should also have the visuals decreased somewhat to make it easier to see through.
  • Make Rage and Recover a Hunter Kill Skill.
    • Echoing the suggestion in this thread, Rage and Recover would be more useful and synergistic with the Stalker tree if it’s health regeneration could be boosted by Big Game. As it is now the skill gives a fairly low amount of missing health per second, meaning the higher your health is the less effective this skill becomes. Considering the capstone of the stalker tree requires full health for maximum effect, this skill would benefit from any boost it could get to its regenerative abilities.

PETS

  • All pet skills that don’t give a bonus to FL4K (Ferocity, Psycho Head, Sic Em’, Go for the Eyes) should be buffed.
    • FL4K’s pets have struggled as damage dealers for the entirety of the game, so it has always been a suboptimal choice to spec into their damage alone. The bonuses listed above need to be improved to be worth taking over skills that give both FL4K and the pets a buff.
  • Scale pet health at half of the enemy health instead of 1-1.
    • From narfkeks - “Having the pet’s health increased that much also increases the impact of health increases by skills, which is why I thought about having Who rescued Who? and how that skill would loose value if you scale pets that much stronger than weapons. So again, having pets only get half the health bonus would keep that skill useful and also, it would not make Lick the Wounds too reliable.”
  • Let pets scale from more aspects of our gear.
    • From Space0ctopus - “One of the big parts of borderlands is looting cool new gear to find crazy combinations that improve your character, and this is a problem for the pet because beyond a couple class mods and the interactions they have with splash damage there is no way to improve them with your gear. Even indirectly letting pets benefit from Fl4k’s gear like giving them the melee damage vs cryo enemies bonus or letting the pet benefit from the effect a roid shield or have a chance to use the effect of an equipped melee artifact would at least give pet builds some way to use gear to help their pet out.”
  • Increase the passive bonuses of Tier 3 pets (Countess. Eridian Skag, Gunslinger)
    • From Space0ctopus - “I understand that the intention was second tier pets were supporters with better bonuses while third tier pets were damagers with better attack commands but the difference between the two is massively in favor of the second tiers since pet bonuses are very powerful with only a few points of investment in barbaric yawp and attack commands are still weak even with as many points into pet damage as possible. The third tier pets need their bonus increased in some way, either by increasing their unique 5% bonus or giving them an improved version of the basic pet’s bonus.”
  • Change the way He Bites works to make it scale better with Mayhem mode.
    • From Space0ctopus - “Instead of reflecting the actual damage the pet should have taken it calculates what percent of the pet’s max health the attack would have taken, and deal enough damage to reflect whatever 15% of that in the attacker’s max health is. So instead of pet takes 100 damage enemy takes 15 it would be pet loses 10% of his max health enemy loses 1.5% of their’s. That would make the damage independent of scaling so it would work equally well on normal and every mayhem mode.”
  • Add more skills and mechanics that incentivize pet kills like Eager to Impress.
    • As an example, @Space0ctopus created this suggestion for “Predator skills”, a category of skills that mirrors Big Game and focuses on buffing FL4K and their pets through pet actions.

DOMINANCE

  • Remove Dominance as the capstone of the master and move it up to tier 3. Make Psycho Head on a Stick the capstone ability. and buff it.
    • This has been been suggested before, but it seems even more sensible now. Dominance isn’t a terrible idea on it own, but its place in the tree is what ruins it. A capstone ability should augment the themes of the tree or tie everything together, and Psycho Head does a much better job of that than Dominance. We suggest the skill be buffed to have some kind of survival perk for FL4K and the pet to accentuate the themes of the Master skill tree and encourage synergistic play between them. Suggestions for possible buffs to Psycho Head here and Dominance here.
  • Add an indicator/timer to let us know when enemies are Dominated.
  • Add an extra effect to Dominance to make it more useful for other styles of play. Rework Dominance to activate via attack command instead of melee.

4. BUGS

  • Headcount is currently bugged with Rakk Attack cool down. It doesn’t decrease cool down even when scoring critical hits.
11 Likes
I'm concerned about how the dev team views FL4K's pets
Pets from the Foundation: Passives, Attack Commands, and Anointments
#2

Gamma Burst Rift NEEDS to be movable with a short cooldown (think the blue bar on Zane’s clone)

Mayhem 10 is absolutely chaotic, and being on your toes in key. If you could replace the rift, it’d make for a smooth gameplay experience. I could clear a zone of enemies, speed to the next; and press F again to resummon the rift. Make the animation for resummons faster as well. A simple point could work.

4 Likes
#3

I’ll start off by commenting on the state of pets in Mayhem 2.0.

Pros

  1. It seems that Gearbox has added either immunity to or severely reduced damage from AOE effects for the pets. Thanks to @janejana for testing this. This is something the community has been asking for a long time, so I’m thankful that it’s been implemented. It will make pet survivability much better throughout all levels of play.

Cons

  1. The obvious elephant in the room is the lack of scaling for 6 additional Mayhem levels when we weren’t even balanced for Mayhem 4. Thankfully the pet’s “resistance” against AOE damage means that they still have use in the higher Mayhem’s since they won’t need Gamma Burst to survive. However, the damage of pets has been lacking for the entirety of the game’s life so far, and this mode made an already severe problem astronomically worse.
  2. Once again, no new gear or anointments were introduced for the pets. For the Halloween event we had the terror anointment that gave pets 50% bonus damage as fire. That anointment has been powercreeped into impotence, but it was a step in the right direction. Not including a pet specific anointment in this Cartel event is a massive missed opportunity to give pets some form of gearing to scale them for the current Mayhem levels.

New Bugs

  1. There are two Very Hard modifiers that effect critical hit damage: Not the Face and Holy Crit. With the Go for the Eyes ability, pets are granted a guaranteed critical hit on their first melee attack on any enemy. Even though they are hitting critical hits, pets are not receiving bonus critical hit damage from Holy Crit. However, they are dealing 75% reduced critical hit damage from Not the Face. This is totally unfair, extremely inconsistent, and needlessly punishing. If crits are reduced from one modifier, they should be boosted by the other.

Suggestions

  1. The biggest obstacle for pets in Mayhem 2.0, aside from scaling, is that they are only dealing 33% of their potential damage because cryo is not boosting their melee. My Attack Command build, which has enough damage to get through M4, would have enough damage for M5 and possibly M6 if pet melee actually received the cryo multiplier. It would also give us a lot of interesting build choices if we were able to build around it.
    It seems that the way pets attacks are classified is full of holes. Melee attacks seem like they aren’t really melee, and crits aren’t really crits. These issues need a serious looking over so they can addressed and pets can benefit from these bonuses.
7 Likes
#4

Speaking of the healing rift, it really needs to have something done with its graphic effect as standing inside it can often just blind the player. I think it really needs to be a more subtle effect, like a transparent dome.

The rogue lite mayhem mod also is absolutely brutal since it applies to Fl4k’s pets too, who often go down very quickly. Honestly, with the way it is currently set up I don’t see anyone ever settling with that mod unless it has some huge offset to counterbalance it, like a huge increase in damage that enemies receive in turn. Also makes for potentially mandatory friend bot as the class mod.

Easiest solution I feel for pet damage, outside base damage modification would be allowing all player effects and anointment effects to directly benefit the pets.

#6

BTW, it’s safe to say that all of the suggestions listed in this thread still stand as well.

@Ratore @plenipotence @darreltan2004 @Spacerobots @megadethwm Anything to add? I’m still going through the modifiers to check for any more foolishness.

3 Likes
#7

The -75% crit modifier is completely stupid and broken. It seems to be applied as a * .25 which means your basic no crit bonuses gun will do half of its bodyshot damage when you crit. With that modifier, hitting crits (and megavore!) is literally a damage loss. Terrible implementation of a modifier that should never have existed in the first place. It messes with all the crit focused synergies in our character

9 Likes
#8

Pets still instantly downs to agnoizer’s saw blades, wotan’s shield and weird enough, Gidian’s heart explosion when the boss dies in DLC2.

Headcount doesnt seem to resetting right? I have a x16 garcia and im getting less resets than a x9 sandhawk, this is on dummy test. (Although may be sandhawk’s auto function helps it).

Also tr4iner and dominance NEED TO BE REWORKED, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. Give us multiple pets including their bonuses and make a mod based on that.

Both of those are already awful on M4, imagine on M10. I dont want to pick up a legendary mod thinking it gives me $40000 vendor money.

3 Likes
#9

I’m just bummed out that melee FL4K doesn’t work well at M10. You can scale your gun damage with getting higher Mayhem level guns, but unlike in BL2, you can’t scale up your melee by getting higher damage roid shields. M10 shields don’t seem to be a thing, and even if they were, roid shields use percentage-based boosts in BL3 so a higher level roid shield doesn’t buff melee any more than a low level one.

I’ve had a blast doing the melee FL4K build and it worked fine at old M4 but right now it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to get it to work well at M10 unless something changes with how melee scales or some new gear gets added that makes melee work better at high Mayhem levels.

On the plus side, I had a super fun time using a gun-based Gamma FL4K last night (I am LOVING the new “while action skill is active” anointments for Gamma FL4K!), the chaos of the new modifiers was really exciting, the cartel event is amazing, and I lost my ■■■■ laughing at Big-Head Graveward and Big-Head pets are adorable. I’m just sad that my fav build seems to have gotten shut out of M10 with no way forward to get it there yet. It seems like everyone with melee, action skill damage, grenade damage… everything not guns isn’t in a good place with high Mayhem since there’s no way to scale it up like there is with guns. And that takes away a lot of creative build options.

I would love to see a way to scale melee, action skill damage, and grenades to M10.

4 Likes
#10

The lava floor test on the pet isn’t definitive. The pet could just not be affected by the Mayhem modifier.

1 Like
#11

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s definitely taking far less damage in AOE effects than before. I have also been seeing accounts from people on reddit and youtube that the pet is able to survive novas and pools in M10 while they can’t. It’s anecdotal, but there does seem to be something to it so far. Something’s definitely changed.

#12

With all the effects I’m not sure they can always tell when it’s a Mayhem modifier and when it’s something like a barrel or cov rocket blast. Making pets immune to modifier would be smart. Otherwise you end up with Deathtrap with a love-thumper x10. You would die so much because of your pet.

#13

I’ll take another look and see if they still take regular damage from AOE effects in Athenas. Still, immunity to the modifiers would be a great addition nonetheless.

#14

I do need to update some stuff on the thread, but most points still stand, while some actually worsened, and others got better. The things that got better are very few though. GITM for example is one, but not exactly for the reasons we’d expect.

1 Like
#15

What are some changes that you would like to see mechanically to FL4K that would specifically assist them in Mayhem 2.0?

Moving the Gamma Burst Rift is a good one since all of the explosions, Death, and elemental pools mean you can’t stay still. At least the AOE should be increased dramatically.

What else would we need?

Rakk Rework-Some Opinions
#16

I would like to see a good portion of fl4ks skills fixed or reworked just came back to the game after a break hoping for some fixes but they seemed to be lacking. I guess in higher levels pets can still proc frenzy while doing no damage. But it seems like the green tree has issues yet

#17

Any skills in particular? What problems would you want addressed by a rework? What are the problems you associate with the green tree?

I want to make sure we are 100% clear on everything we propose here so there is no shadow of a doubt what the community’s feeling are.

#18

For the blue tree the cap stone is lacking. I like the concept but it’s a waste going that far down that tree for the capstone. And the radiation aura skill augment from gamma burst does not scale properly. Gamma burst base damage feels too low and doesnt scale well. I think being able to recall gamma burst using the same function as activating it and then moving it until duration ends would be a nice utility change. And I’ve noticed for the green tree when trying to utilize skills that make fl4k “hidden” they tend to not do that at all and that’s been around for awhile. As for pet damage I do not think you should have to use every possible skill to buff pets to make them just viable.

I’ve been gone for a bit so trying to rework builds is difficult amongst obtaining new gear for mayhem levels. It doesnt help that staple skills or items dont work properly either. I’ve been interested in rakks but I’ve read that they are underwhelming too. I just dont agree with investing so many points into one playstyle ex: pets, rakk damage etc and then that one playstyle is barely viable

#19

I think gamma burst’s actual casting speed could do with being sped up so it activates as quickly as Rakks. Aside from the obvious stuff like pet damage and more survivability, I think pets need an inherent run and attack speed increase. The pet ranged attack for those that are not the jabber, also need to either be quicker, or have the damage drastically increased due to the slow moving projectile being likely to miss and generally hit less often. Like treat it like a rocket hit vs the normal melee hits.

#20

Dominace is an utter waste, how many OP 8-10 viable Maya builds used Thoughtlock? Turning enemies into allies hasn’t ever worked in BL games due to player/enemy health/damage balance.

#21

I take a bit of issue with the Thoughtlock comparison though.

  • Thoughtlock made the peak stupid easy.
  • It synergized perfectly with Subsequence Phaselock, granting increased duration for no penalty.
  • It also utilized the aggro mechanic correctly. With Converge, it brought all enemies right to the controlled target, guaranteeing they would attack each other. Everyone would be slagged and confused, leaving you to destroy the whole group effortlessly.

Dominance doesn’t have any of that. There is no connection to the rest of the master skill tree, it’s incredibly inconsistent, and it fundamentally works against aggro mechanics since you have to get up close and melee an enemy multiple times to control them. So you are close to your target, who is also probably close to enemies, and the other enemies are still spread out from both of you. They are still just as likely to attack you as they are the thing you just slapped. You have to use singularity grenades to pull enemies close to the dominated target so they attack it, and singularities don’t have the same level of pulling power as BL2. If anything they fling enemies further apart.

It’s not just the mind control effect of dominance that makes it bad, the skill has no support from the game at all. At least Thoughtlock had that in spades.

1 Like