#23

Normally I’d agree, but the sentiment about FL4K’s pet is very wide spread and easily searchable on any other social media site. Just google “FL4K pet build” and see how many posts complain about the poor scaling of pets. You’ll find the same on steam, youtube comments, discord, and just about any place where people talk about the game.

10 Likes
#24

@boombumr I think you should know that I believe that a wide swath of the Fl4k playerbase agrees with what you said here, and I was not trying to imply otherwise - sorry if I did. I was just stating that as a general proposition, you just have to be kind of careful with how seriously you take the opinions on the forums - sometimes. LOL. People get carried away with themselves on here some times.

1 Like
#25

Well no, I think you you’re right - the voices here probably don’t represent the community. That was partly what I meant in my initial post.

The idea of a guy refuting a tweet that probably took its author 15 seconds to constuct by posting a huge, well-written and cogently argued post of thousands of words - complete with detailed analysis of the game’s complicated mathematical damage equations - is so far removed from the abruptly shallow world of social media as to be almost comical (albeit also saddening).

I think those of us who appreciate the thoughtful, longer-form types of communication that threads like this can provide are clearly in the minority. Which is why I think Gearbox seems to increasingly (though not completely) ignore what we have to say.

I can’t say I can entirely blame them, since they need to go where their customers are, and their customers are increasingly not here. But the cynical side of me also thinks that it must be a lot easier for them to conduct their PR in an environment where no one’s going to dive deep and dissect their game’s mechanics in front of them…and even if they did, no one else would be paying attention for long enough to notice.

6 Likes
#26

Well gee, when you put it that way :sweat_smile:…

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#27

This is exactly what I think as well.
I like the way Fl4k’s pets work because I’ve never tried to focus on a pet build, but the fact that there are so many pet damage related skills makes me think the devs have lost control over their own game a long time ago.
I think our vault hunters weren’t supposed to produce so much burst damage in their initial vision, so pet’s dps was more important and doubling or tripling it had more of an impact, especially against big hp bars.
Now many things fall into the useless category because they simply don’t do enough burst damage, and pets are just one of them.
The sad thing is that, imho, it’s too late to go back and the game is snowballing into absurd numbers and one second boss kills more and more…

2 Likes
#28

Your comments remind me of a time when Moze was considered weaker than the other characters and Gearbox said they were looking into reworking some of her skills. I was happy because I knew that you could find really incredible player suggestions here on the forums. Players who really spent a lot of time with Moze would write up really thoughtful and thematic ways to turn her useless, underwhelming, and uninspired skills into something really impressive that would fit Moze like a glove. But the problem is I was being naive to think these ideas might actually make it into the game. Gearbox did rework some of Moze’s skills, but (and I’m not trying to be rude) in a very… cheap, kind of “band-aid” type of way. Torgue Cross-Promotion got some splash damage pasted onto it, which did make it 1000% more useful, but if I’m being honest it’s still a very flawed, frustrating skill. Moze got some life-steal on Rushin’ Offensive, Force Feedback got some shield recharge added, Behind the Iron Curtain just got its numbers buffed, Click Click got its numbers buffed, etc. I wanted Gearbox to really get into the gritty stuff with the players and find robust and inspired solutions, but they just ended up doing it the least interesting way possible. Because let’s be clear, a lot of the criticism of Moze’s skills weren’t just “the numbers need to be higher,” they were fundamental critiques of the designs themselves. And you know what? Many of those critiques still stand; but now the job’s been done and those skills probably won’t be revisited again. Don’t get me wrong I’m glad Gearbox made those changes, but they could have been so much more.

It’s like they heard players but didn’t really listen to what they were saying.

7 Likes
#29

In almost any situation this isn’t what we are looking for with pet buffs. There are several situations that if had been capitalized on would have placed pets in a much better place.

• Bonus melee/crit damage vs frozen enemies, this alone could nearly cure pet damage shortcomings.

• The Rakk Slag annoint, this should also buff pet damage. Again this could nearly cure the pet damage issues.

I’m no coding wiz by a long shot, but these 2 changes would mean the world for pet builds. They still won’t 1 shot bosses, they still won’t play the game for you.

I don’t think base damage is the issue, rather the lack of interactions outside of skill points.

5 Likes
#30

You dont know HOW MUCH on these forums have been suggested and completely ignored. Something that just came to my attention from my tweet at grant, was that he made it sound like it’s so difficult to work something in, and i actually call BS. What im saying is, in the past moze got skill CHANGES not TWEAKS in HOTFIXES. But sure adding additional bonuses for flaks pets is difficult sure, anyway let me go rewatch joltz solo an entire takedown with autobear and literally leave the room to go to the bathroom while auto bear killes the valkyries. I find his double standard frankly annoying.

8 Likes
#31

Well written and well structured and well argued, @boombumr :fire:

1 Like
#32

seems to me that he’s answering in past tense, and stating the reason for why there has been a lack of pet focused(and IB focused) annoints upto this point. he also state that the reason for why they decided against it is no longer a major concern.

i expect them to continue with providing us ways to focus and build around our actions skills through annointments in the future. they’ve already added scaling and skill damage to coms. we just need to be patient and not forget that they’re still probably working from home.

2 Likes
#33

The aspect of pet Anointments always confused me as that was potentially the easiest aspect to get right without sacrificing player agency and importance of Fl4k themselves.

Here are my ideas of pet-related Anointments, which would go on grenades and shields to keep more options for gun damage open for Fl4k:

  • While Gamma Burst is active, Fl4ks pet deals +200% damage
  • On action skill end, the pet gains +100% bonus elemental damage (of any 1 element) for 15 seconds
  • When Fl4k kills an enemy the damage of their pets is increased by 150% for 10 seconds
  • Fl4ks pets deal triple damage against bosses and takedown enemies
  • Enemies damaged by pets suffer +75% more damage from all sources for 10 seconds
14 Likes
#34

Still upset about force feedback. I did RESEARCH for that post

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#35

Very good post.
It just goes to show how ignorant the devs seem to be about their own game.
There is obviously a lack of communication, or even a shared vision, about what Borderlands is supposed to be.
And if they can’t determine it on their end, how can they provide a cohesive and understandable game to the players?
I was way wrong back when I thought they were a good, sensible dev team.
All I can do is shake my head and move on to other things…

4 Likes
#36

I want you to be a game developer

4 Likes
#37

“Not having afk gameplay”

I assume good ol’ Grant here didn’t watch Dakka Bear Moze or Zane clone in action lately.
I know, you can’t have a fair comparison between a pet and an action skill, but when you make such a statement you better know how your game works or you turn into a meme.

I always cringed a bit when people here used to say devs don’t understand their own game, but I’m seriously starting to think they actually don’t. This tweet let me speechless

3 Likes
#38

To be fair, that tweet reads as the initial design they had for the pets. While I heavily disagree with it (among other skill tree design philosophies…), “but that principle can be relaxed some now” reads as something they changed their mind on.

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#39

I am not particularly shocked by what he said, on a design principle point of view , but as usual I think they went overboard in the implementation, there is a fine line between not allowing Fl4k to be a “summoner” archetype and rendering the pet offensive capabilities completely useless.

3 Likes
#40

For the sake of my sanity that should not come to be, but I like theorizing and have conceptualized dozens of different concepts, a handful of which were Borderlands themed. At some point you get good at feeling what a game you play a lot needs^^

Also, something that could make the pets overall more fun and interactive would be to just increase their attack command base damage significantly (like, double it). That way players would be conditioned early on to use the commands to one-shot badasses and that would also make the pets as a whole more effective, especially if you have invested in Eager to Impress and Sic’ Em. Also, I would increase the bonus per point from Sic’ Em from 10% to 16,7%, so that we get 50% bonus damage for the 3 points. Add to all that immunity to self-damage (which the Gunslinger Jabber desperately needs!), the Boss anointment I mentioned above, additional damage bonuses from a full-on pet build and you could easily one-shot Traunt at Mayhem 10 with the Gunslingers attack command.

6 Likes
#41

Would have been great if they hadn’t ninja-nerfed them awhile back.

3 Likes
#42

It’s not a principle that needed to exist in the first place though. They designed the tree so that wouldn’t happen, so why are they deciding to ease up on something that can’t exist?

I just see threads of the implementation of Mayhem 2.0, where the devs left our action skills without scaling for 2 months (presumably to address the concern that scaling skills would allow players to skip to Mayhem 10 immediately) yet eased up on it later. It’s silly that the team is so afraid of us having powerful pets/action skills that they will intentionally gut their power, and then decide at some arbitrary whim when to restore it when they feel that some imaginary safe point has been reached. I uninstalled the game when they pulled that last time, and if it weren’t for the announcement of phase 2 I wouldn’t have bothered again. I’m not going to continue waiting patiently for them to decide it’s safe for me to have an effective skill while they dangle the carrot in front of my face to keep me playing.

6 Likes