Looks like the Red Card shield will continue to be just as super awesome as it is now. So you can run, slide, smash into an enemy, drain all your shields and end up vulnerable, disoriented and on your arse, to do… less damage than a bullet.
Enemies too bullet spongey? 1200 bullet maximum not enough? No sweat! Just pack a Red Card! It’s the next best thing to having 1201 bullets!
Obviously the kids working over at Gearbox took a look at this situation, and said to themselves “looks good to me!” 
I’m hittin’ the scraptrap nest (seems to have become the new barroom brawl) and leveling up to 60 before I start the new DLC. I don’t want any underleveled new DLC gear heh.
Shields SHOULD scale at least a bit. I mean it’s basic logic that while the enemies don’t do more damage, they TAKE FAR, FAR more damage to die thus inflicting more damage to the player before you can kill them and thus stop their damage output. This is basic relativity and reason. They shouldn’t be anywhere near the 2.5 or so weapons get but a boost would keep a lot of weaker players alive in higher mayhems. I play Zane so I could care less, I have my shield up pretty much 24/7 but it’s still nice to think of the overall game.
I agree. There are many more enemies at the higher mayhem levels so you’re getting hit with a lot more damage, even though each individual enemy isn’t doing more damage.
For my education - are there more enemies actually spawning (which would be counter to frequent claims of “artificial MH10 difficulty from bullet sponges”), or do they stick around longer, since, well, they are harder to dispatch quickly?
I just realized something incredibly irksome.
How in the ■■■■ is this dev talking about Friendbot pet damage when that has been bugged since launch? Gearbox is aware of this issue, right???
this is the exactly the reaction I had to that bit. how much do you want to bet friendbot won’t be fixed?
My expectations were already low, but come the ■■■■ on. How are we getting another patch scaling pet damage with no fix to this? We’ve filled out bug reports, it’s in the bug thread, I’ve been directing people to Demonite’s video on the subject since October, how is it possible that no one has noticed that this doesn’t work?
In my experience both. Thereare more and they soak up a lot more damage. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. Could seen like now because they just don’t die.
Post got moved while I was typing so this might have a few continuity issues.
I generally don’t participate in threads like this, I read them and move on. Yesterday however felt like a sucker punch to me, so I thought it best to re listen to what was said and give a bit of commentary on why so much of it left me in shock.
So lets unpack some of the key points. I’ll be grabbing time stamps from the following video if anyone would like to double check what I’m referring to.
There probably won’t be much coherence here as I want to touch on key points of what was said and not everything.
22:52 This is a minor point of concern regarding yesterday and more concerns overall direction, but I wanted to talk on the level cap going to 60. If we get a level raise before each DLC like we have 3 out of 3 times now, this leaves us on course for level 63 or 64. I personally think that’s way over bloated for how weak the bottom half of so many skill trees are.
I’ll motivate this with a Moze example, consider this level 65 spec. This spec from a pros perspective is already peak Moze. Its a no sacrifices build that hits all the key points. What isn’t touched in red is almost entirely gun damage skills. If as Timmins says you want min maxed math Gun Damage is really no loss here. You can fill that void with the use of Pearl, consecutive hits or even a roll on a class mod. This of course ignoring that the spec already has 162% and doesn’t need more. There isn’t growth for Moze if we get close to this spec, min maxed specs are all going to land here because the current game systems make gun damage dirt cheap to find elsewhere.
Moze’s peak variety in my opinion is at level 57, where the trade offs are major between specs and there’s pro’s and cons to specs. By the time we reach 63 it will be easy to play with no Experimental Munitions and 4 Drowning in Brass, Moze won’t play any differently to that 65 spec and the trade offs of building differently are not favourable at all. This does not bode well for Moze going forward.
24:30 The new Guardian Ranks. Again I can’t help but think this is going wrong.
Ground breaker: The motivation for this perk is great, the issue is the math is likely going to make this perk another case of power creep. An overkill enhanced Ion cannon shot likely does enough damage to give this perk a massive base damage. This alone isn’t scary, the issue is that this base damage is going to receive bonuses. It will get v1, v2, splash and probably some bonus elements. So in the end it will way exceed 25% of the last 5 seconds damage, Moze will probably get it to at minimum match the last 5 seconds damage per hit. Fl4k will likely be showing off boss 1 shots on anything without immunity.
Dead Man Walking: Aren’t we already near invincible with too angry to die? FFYL has been a meme since the last round of Guardian Ranks. This is just going to make everything work anywhere.
Lead or Alive: This is nice, I like this one. I disagree with Timmins, this is the least impactful of them.
31:16 Scaling of Friendly AI Health seems innately flawed to me. As they say damage does not increase with Mayhem levels, there is no reason for pet health to. If the pet is dying at M10, thats not an M10 problem, thats a pet problem that Mayhem 10 is making obvious because pet aggro draw is about all we have been able to use pets for.
Specc’d properly and playing well neither Auto Bear or Fl4k pets should be going down. However there exists 1 shot mechanics that the pet has no protection against. Diadems in Guardian Takedown are the most recent example of this. The pets not going to survive this attack unless they buff health by an absurd degree. Survival in Borderlands has never been about the max health, its always been regen. MH scaling Health won’t change this.
32:00 Of the 3 he lists here only Do unto others isn’t already top class. Short Fuse and Remnant both scale off player damage and are capable of double dipping their respective characters biggest damage multiplier. Short Fuse has been Moze meta for ages and has a significant damage advantage over other specs. Remnant has suffered from the Amara meta not favouring 1 shot weaponryrecently however it is still mega strong. If you want proof that Moze meta is Short Fuse have a read through the builds recommended on the official discord server, as of the time of writing 3 of them use Short Fuse. With regards to Remnant you can look at this demonstration of scaling I did with Remnant Math.
I’m glad they realize double dipping occurs but it scares me that there was ever the thought that Remnant or Short Fuse needed additional help scaling. These are comfortably among the best skills on their respective characters. Buffing these skills while leaving the weaker damage skills untouched further strangles the meta and defeats their purpose of diversity.
34:36 Talking of Action skill scaling I am concerned for Iron Bear. Educated guess has led me to believe Iron Bear is treated as an entirely separate character which GBX has hand selected buffs for. This to me explains why Iron Bear gets splash but doesn’t get Action Skill damage from the 25% On Grenade Throw Anoint. Moze gains action skill damage but that doesn’t transfer when she gets into Bear. I hope Gearbox has remembered this quirk of their own design and we aren’t about to find Iron Bear totally unbuffed for another month.
35:00 Friendbot pet damage? Sorry? Is he talking about the bugged com that doesn’t provide pet damage here.
35:10 If Skag Den actually provided good damage or benefited from TCP maybe I’d agree, but this is peanuts at M10.
This rounds out the major stand outs to me. What shocks me is that in 20 minutes of talking about changes that should be universally appealing they have shown a lack of awareness of what the community is managing. Their choices and approaches to balancing look to only be cementing the current choices in as the permanent go to’s.
A single point on its own here wouldn’t bother me, but its the accumulation of points and examples that don’t line up with the results achieved in game that boggles my mind. The last time I thought the player base and GBX were this out of touch was October last year. Yet here we are with a bunch of candied talk that comes straight out of dreamland.
Its funny the first time you see someone joke that the local math nerd understands the game better than Gearbox, it becomes less funny when that joke gets repeated endlessly. The joke dragged on for a month as Gearbox worked post M2.0 and on the night of this interview it became depressing when you realize it was never a joke and people are beginning to believe it.
why would anyone think this was a joke?
Very well spoken. The negligence becomes more apparent with almost every patch/hotfix at this point.
You’d think by now people would be excited for every patch/DLC. It has literally become such a let down that most players(very passionate ones at that) have left. I mean who do you even see posting on the forums anymore or even playing the game from your friends list.
Only the community really seems to listen what the community is saying.
Well, IMO they didn’t completely scale the weapons, they just relabeled them, since M10 weapons are no different than M6 weapons. They actually just nerfed them all down several levels.
It’s like trying to complete the Guardian Takedown with an M10 Woodblocker, damage of 5000, and an M6 Woodblocker, damage of 4950, lol.
Ive learned to stop expecting good things from that show as the interviewers never ask good questions the commmunity wants to hear or say.
I now look towards Seeing that guy change Scarfs every show.
He changed it twice this episode! Totally worth it.
Until you get to wotan or scourge then bam lights out all pets go to heaven.I hope im wrong but idk.
I too would hope they are on top of that, but I have no such expectations with Gearbox. I would not be surprised if action skill damage as a passive bonus on gear had zero effect on Iron Bear and if anything, I’ve been going under the assumption of that being the case ever since they first announced AS damage as a passive bonus on gear.
It’s why I believe that Iron Bear will continue to be Moze’s single biggest issue for a long time to come, not because it’s her only action skill, but because Gearbox have a bizarre perception of many things in their own game, and the very concept of Iron Bear as we know it presenting a weird dilemma that no other vault hunters suffer from.
Either Iron Bear is deliberately made to be weaker than Moze (as has always been the case since launch) or he can potentially be just as powerful as Moze, if not more so. If the latter were ever to become true, that would then beg the question: if Iron Bear becomes stronger than Moze at her peak performance, why bother building Moze for an infantry role or even looting weapons in the first place when the best overall option is take the looter out of looter shooter?
I do not think there is anything wrong with IB being more powerful Moze as long as you need to build for it. However considering Gearbox’s track record, I do not have high expectations of this happening.