the pictures don’t mean anything. I’ve asked before and you’ve been unable to answer but I’ll jog your memory again: how did OP weapons like the Hellfire ruin the original game, and how come BL2 lasted as long as it did despite you thinking it was doomed to failure because of the Sandhawk etc?
You can draw as many graphs as you like, but real world examples trump theory every day of the week. OP guns do not harm the game, as has been proven.
just because people still play it? (using the same weapons all over)
i bet, streamers who still play bl2 today would say that they wished they had more choices of viable weapons to use for endgame content
people are still playing D2 20 years later and complain about weapons like grief being OP and leaving no alternatives if you want to be as powerful as possible
a good game can have balance issues that can be demonstrated and still be a good game
This is quadruple-ly true when you consider this is just PvE, all this weapon nerf’ing and tuning really doesn’t need to be done. I swear to all things on high that GB does not/must not have anything resembling a test environment in-house. They must not have anything at any of their sites that involves testing, equipment or people.
If they’re reading this and they actually do I wish they’d say so, one way or the other. The nerf’s are one thing, but the major issues are another. Stop putting out “new” content until you get the original content working as it should.
You’d think they would have learned their lesson from companies like Bungie or Ubisoft, in that adding difficulty doesn’t mean "add a ■■■■ ton of HP to the enemies/bosses. You know what doing that amounts to, a huge, big assed slap in the face to your players.
Fix your ■■■■ already.
Then why in the name of all things holy in gaming does GB/Activision not understand this???
I forgot. If anything it adds fun and excitement to the game for 99.8 percent of the players who aren’t professional streamers or have god-like gaming skills. Let us have our OP weapons and other gear and we’ll be very happy. Isn’t that what it’s all about in the end anyway?! Oh, stupid me, that’s NOT what’s it about with these companies, it’s about the mother f’ing $$$$.
Sorry, I haven’t had my coffee yet.
The bigger issue is I don’t think Gearbox has clue 1 about what “balance” is which is why arguments that they are “balancing the game” are frankly comical. I doubt GBX has a design principle that says every SMG should kill:
A mob type enemy in X seconds or Y% of one clip with a Z% +/- range of variation.
A bad ass type enemy in X seconds or Y% of one clip with a Z% +/- range of variation.
If you have standards like that balancing should become insanely easy because you have a handful of variables to play with and automated testing should allow you to test hundred of variants to find some “right” answers that you then put into human hands for the feel of the weapon.
so you’re explaining away why OP gear didn’t hurt the previous games by saying you bet streamers would want more choices? So your theories are in your head more accurate than what actually happened? You don’t think that’s maybe a tad arrogant?
The graph shows your theories, which as I’ve already demonstrated are bogus because Borderlands has never suffered ill effects from having OP weapons in the past.
As much as you’re attempting to pigeon hole me my irritation at how GBX manages weapon nerfing has nothing to do with how much damage is involved. It’s to do with taking something away because somehow players who enjoy those items are somehow “wrong.” The arrogance of it all, by both GBX and you, is breathtaking.
how dare us :<
i hope we can continue with this ignorant path because you really dont seem to understand or even try why horizontal progression is better than vertical progression
Also, balance is impossible in this game with four different VH’s that interact with weapons in different ways. To balance a weapon because it’s Armageddon in one of the VH’s hands very possibly destroys the gun altogether for the other three.
I’m detecting a pattern here: you’re constantly avoiding questions which you know you have no logical answer for
You are mistaking the nature of the argument. We all know the Kaoson did more damage than other SMGs. The thing is it did a better job of feeling like the right damage output. With my god roll 4600x2 100% SNTL Cryo gun I was at basically one clip per mob assuming whatever my average hit rate was. That is a sweet spot for me for killing trash mobs. The problem was not that, the problem was that my similarly annointed Hyperfocus took 3-4 clips to kill the same trash.
Now that is my idea of balanced and fun, maybe you like using 2-3 clips because it feels more challenging and that is the root of this argument.
Once Gearbox decide to stop making the minorities happy the community will be far happier as a whole and if they don’t manage it, what’s left of the community will be happy but matchmaking may take a while. 
uh, ask again?
because i am pretty sure i did answer to all of your questions
i think its pretty easy to see when 1 smg has like 2000 damage on its card and the other one has 7000 
no vault hunter will make the former work better than the latter
i have also repeated this several times
it comes down the the idea that some people want mobs to fall down in a second and other want a challenge because mayhem 10 is literally the end and you want to work on your build and squeeze out the numbers of dps and if everything dies in a second, there isnt much progress to be felt
so some have to be moved down and a lot obviously have to be moved up
where that line is drawn is obviously a question of taste
but as i said, mayhem10 is the highest and the most difficult and it should deserve this spot
however, i would also like to return to mayhem1.0 and just have a slight difficulty increase without weapon scaling so everything can play with the same weapons and adjust difficulty to their liking
I don’t understand people defending nerfs really.
I can understand people prefer challenge/easy mode and so on. But the must be some kind of progress in game.
Crappy gear/build – lower Mayhem levels >>>> better gear/build - highest Mayhem >>>> perfect gear/build ----Takedowns. That was my assumptions, based on how BL2 was progressing.
Now, what can I tell from my personal experience:
I have Amara/Zane with perfect cookie cutter gear and Moze with more than plenty of gear to choose, so I prefer on my main Gunner.
Before nerf - breeze through normal content, Traunt dead in 10 seconds. Steady farm on M10. TD - pretty easy, nice pace, good progress, TTD way harder, Wotan being a real challenge for me.
After nerf - normal content done slower, Traunt needs 30sec - 1 min to kill. Slower farm. TD done 3 times slower pace. TTD - I gave up around Valkyres.
New Takedown - Don’t enter if you’re not Amara or Zane with a lot of time.
This is NOT right atm. Weapons pool is narrower and narrower with content being harder and harder. I’m sure if I mained Amara I wouldn’t be so vocal on forums but it is getting ridiculous. When you go TD/TTD/GTD you can choose between Monarch or Recursion. And ofc with the right VH and perfect gear.
i think we have tracked down the problem
No you really haven’t answered it. You’ve taken a pose that you are upholding all that is good and virtuous in a game by wanting a challenge while the rest of us want enemies to die just by looking at them.
That is a nice straw man but it isn’t what anyone is saying. As I said, you might want to spend more time killing trash mobs but I would strongly argue that shooting them with 60 bullets isn’t more challenging than doing it with 20 and doesn’t materially change the difficulty of the game but does change the velocity of a game series that has always been kinetic as opposed to tactical.
It also doesn’t answer anything about why the buffs GBX did still did nothing to make those guns viable or equivalent of the Kaoson- because they do not know what balance is. Nor does it provide an answer for why Kaoson and not OPQ, Backburner or Monarch (which go figure is the newest meta).
dude, i have no idea?
they are obviously overwhelmed with problems, stability, bugs, tickets, complaints and are just starting to adjust the most obvious things
i was repeatedly stating how some guns are still completely useless in this game and need a buff to even be looked at
but that doesnt change the fact that other guns are simply making the whole character building and BiS farming aspect of the game completely irrelevant because they are already at max-dps
(kill traunt in 10 seconds) without any useful build or good stats
you need space in this game because there are so many perefct stats and multipliers that you can farm and increase your damage with just the same gun
My goodness I left BL3 like 6 months ago making these same arguments to people. That leave the OP weapons so more players have more choices on how they want to play the game, but the same 4 or 5 people just wanted balance.
Been skimming the forums and its still those same people making the same tired argument against a lot of people with the quote “This is this persons first time posting” Turns out people like feeling strong still yet GBX still making the same mistakes
Good on you shure for sticking around fighting the good ol fight, I just didn’t have the motivation anymore. See you in DLC 3 or whatever where I will play through and drop the game till DLC 4
Well, maybe the 2k is crap and needs to be brought up to be viable. I don’t really understand what you’re driving at here. This exists now and that 2k SMG is garbage, sooooo…I’m not picking up what you’re putting down here.
Well, that weapon may be god-like for one VH but not so much on another…depends on the synergies with skill trees. But to “balance” that weapon because of how it works on one or even two VH’s while making it trash on the others is not balance.