I honestly cant take the Annointed enemies anymore. I cant. They are making me not want to play the game

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Honest to god words cant describe how these are the absolute worst designed enemies I’ve ever played against in an fps game in my entire life .

It’s like their entire point is to grind the game play to a HALT and make the game as tedious and as unfun and annoying as possible .

I used to say "well only the Militant is bad , the others are ok "

Well now I take that all back. They are all designed to be as annoying as possible with little to no strategy or skill involved .

One constantly shrinks to the size of an ant that is extremely hard to see in all the chaos and runs around at random directions … adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay, adds nothing to strategy or tactics , just becomes extremely small and quick and runs around to make him as annoying and as much of a literal pest as possible

Another shoots a big,slow , looooooooooooooooooong lasting orb that sloooooooooleweely hovers and follows you around. Doesnt sound bad right ? Well what about if that orb touches you or you are anywhere near it when it explodes , its instant death regardless of your build ? So now you have to completely stop what you are doing , ignore everything single other enemy, item , or any semblance of strategy or tactics you have planned , and run away as far as you can and in circles like a headless chicken just to wait it out until the orb is gone…and do it all over again in 5 seconds when another one shows up

Militant … well we all know about this guy that, for whatever reason only Randy Pitchfork would know, turns completely immune every single time you take a pot shot at him. His fire AOE attack , just like the orb attack from the other guy , requires you to drop everything you sre doing to run around like a headless chicken to hide and wait it out . On M4 this is the absolute SINGLE reason why I dont play on M4.

That’s it. Just this one guy. If I run into him on M4 and even on M3 I just quite and restart the game . There is no motive or incentive for me to spend 10 minutes of my life taking pot shots at an exceedingly poorly designed bullet sponge that requires zero strategy or skill to beat other then the ability to withstand pure boredom .

Now let the shills come in and defend all this crap. GBX sure as hell likes to nerf all our builds but seems to think the annointed are just fine and dandy

Their mere existence in their current state is the #1 proof to the rumors that the devs dont even play their own damn game .I mean look how long it took them to realize they were completely immune to cryo for no apparent reason

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My First Experience With Mayhem Levels
#2

Agree with every word above.
I was hoping in the beginning that you can shatter the orb somehow or if you melee it it’ll bounce back.
Nope. Just creeping death.
But this is soooomewhat manageable compared to invincible dude that just burns you to death.
And there is no complicated, but elaborate strategy to defeat them, no ‘shoot his left nut during invincibility - it is his weak spot’ thing. You just slowly empty mag after mag after mag after mag into it.
It seems that the QA played just the first playthrough with no Mayhem.
This is why we’re stuck with half of skills not working, 80% of legendaries unfit to even M2 and invincible mobs that can cross-spawn by 3 at any given area (Eden-6, the Forge is a neverending nightmare).

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#3

I was farming Sky Bullies yesterday on M3. They seem it increase in number with each restart. I did not have one run where there wasn’t at least 3 of them in the little jail area.

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#4

Cross posting again…for reasons explained below.

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Annointed enemies ruin solo gameplay
#5

Lulz.
They kinda are trying to be the dark souls of shooters by the looks of it. Before anyone mentions boss melting and op builds being a thing in borderlands, that is a thing in dark souls as well.
With only love in my heart, I feel the pain of the annointed but we all just need to git gud.
PS wouldn’t those thusters from the preseqaul be great for them anointed?

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#6

Besides the Annointant, my only complaint about Annointed in general, are the constant teleporting… I wish they only teleported if they were too far away from you.

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#7

Ok. So on the hardest difficulty of the game you expect to breeze through? Can someone explain what is the difference between “annoying” and “very difficult, but fair”? Because I do not want the game (or other games) to be easy on hardest difficulty - if it is says “difficult”, I expect it ot be difficult and not to lie to me to make me feels better.

Do anointed have to be tweaked? Yes. But how much?

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#8

Imagine replacing strategies in chess with ‘move every pawn a 1000 times’ to win

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#9

Best reply this week…

#10

If you’ve ever worked with junior game designers, a majority of them have this weird complex where they think that their job is to annoy, harass, and ‘win’ against the player. Every design is in service to trolling the player and degrading the gameplay experience for the player because it’s ‘hard’. If they’re not giggling maniacally at the thought of your annoyance, they don’t feel like they are doing a good job.

That’s what the design of the annointed feel like - they’re what you get when you take a junior game design intern and tell him to make ‘mini-bosses’, without any supervision from someone who knows what they’re doing.

What game designers figure out as they become more mature and experienced is that your job isn’t to ‘win’ or annoy the player, but to craft a fun combat conversation between the player and the enemies. You want to build interplay, counters, and back and forth. You build difficulty by creating circumstances for the player to learn from and then take what they learn to counterplay and prove their superiority to the game.

The annointed are not that. They all have 4-5 different abilities that seem to randomly choose from, none of them have real counterplay other than dropping everything to concentrate on it, and they apply non-stop pressure while doing so. Because they have so many abilities and they act so randomly, you can’t get a rhythm to fighting them. They teleport and change size to force you to maintain target lock, except that the game’s visual effects and general chaos make that impossible. Same with many of their attacks, which can be hard to track and will just plain one-shot you. Almost all of the ‘counterplay’ that people suggest here on the forums is to just be so overpowered that you kill them too quickly to care, which is super great advice for the 95% of us that don’t have the free time and trade discords of a twitch streamer.

There’s no gameplay conversation. It’s your angry uncle yelling at you and throwing bags of poop at you telling you to be a man while the rest of your family laughs. Sure, you can beat the crap out of him, but it’s unsatisfying and you wonder what the point of it all is.

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#11

Certain builds may have to drop everything to deal with anointed but you ignore how mind control/confusion, phase grasp, and taunting all exist hell even shoot the head off of a goliath and they’ll eventually cross paths with the anointed.

#12

Really the only one i take issue with is the militant and the immunity shield. Its annoying at best but once you get a good fire damage weapon anointed go down pretty fast. Its the teleporting that also makes them incredibly hard to pin down especially the zealot. The anointed daddy goliath is also awful with that nova that seems to go across the map and destroys your shields. If i see militant or daddy goliath its iron bear time and he makes short work of them both. If you hate anointed i would definitely stay away from the anvil, that place is loaded with them.

#13

Just spacing their immune phases out, maybe shortening them? It’s not that they can’t be dispatched without issue or are too hard to kill overall, they’re just jarringly boring in an otherwise fast-paced game given how frequent their immune phases are.

Many players seem to have an issue with them, ranging from ‘too hard to kill, complete nerf pls’ to ‘meh, don’t change them’, but I think this little tweak would leave them in the game with their combat mechanics unchanged (because I do think they’re great fun to work around as is) while not forcing us to disengage from combat to the point of tedium.

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#14

you don’t have to do anything like that, you can literally slap a tracker puck on them, give yourself some space, and let auto aim and the annointed’s own stupid AI where they waste their time doing nothing threatening to you for long periods of time take them out.

That’s not hard or fun. That’s an ammo sink and a time waster.

Having 4 Badass Tinks spawn at once is infinitely harder than dealing with 4 Anointed Tinks IMO but BA enemies require me to actually use FPS mechanics like movement, dodging, weighing the risk of maxmizing my damage output against my ability to escape focus fire w/o going down, I use at least two weapons to quickly dismantle their 3 differing health bars

Anointed? next time I get multiples i’m going to do the tracker puck thing and see if I can make a sandwich in the next room while I hold down fire with one hand. i’m 99% certain i’ll get away with it. that’s how badly they are designed.

#15

If that’s how you deal with them I know a few people that would love that Idea. Even if you don’t have tracker pucks or the abilities required to get an easy open shoot, am I being to rough when I think the solution is to just got gud?
I’ve never felt the need for anything other than basic stratigies, outside fighting the militants.

1 Like
#16

I play an Atlas allegiance: tracked shots are fantastic for keeping them under fire when they teleport, but when they’re in an immune phase, well, that’s still sandwich time. I get that there’s some hyperbole here, but if I’m snacking while eating and I’ve whittled down a mob to a militant anointed who goes into an immune phase, that’s when I put the kb/m down and have a bite.

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#17

Running with that notion because why not: apart from BoC (which Miyazaki publicly apologized for), have you ever seen an enemy so poorly designed anywhere in SoulsBorne?
I swear they’d never have made it past the concept stage.
Militants can be dealt with but as a game element they’re just an embarrassment.

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#18

Well they did throw overly sized statues in the smallest rooms possible.
Hell Bloodborne had those annoying octopus ladies that stole insight.
I will admit the militants need a ■■■■■■■ cool down in their skills.

#19

Exactly. They can and do teleport every few seconds. Instantaneously somewhere else, not getting shot, whenever they want. The shrinking to ant-size is basically the same thing. It’s one thing to give an enemy a ton of health and/or make him have a very strong attack. But the teleporting every 7 seconds is just stupid.

As was said, it is just a tedious unfun grind.

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#20

Not okaying their behavior but I noticed they tend to do the repeated teleporty thing when you put a DOT on them.

I don’t think every anointed should have the teleport move. Seems strange the tink and some of the others have that power. Like the Anointed version of a Psycho forget it’s name, how does it make sense he can teleport lol. Zealots I get for sure they use magic but not those 2 in particular.

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