#62

To add to that, I am genuinely intrigued by the idea of an M6 run now. I wonder if the game might be in its “best” state at M6. Here’s my reasoning:

  • You have the largest pool of viable items and builds

  • Annointments are not game breaking but some may be slightly OP,

  • There’s a sense of reward and excitement because the majority of what drops could potentially be useful, regardless of annointment.

  • The Eridium gun and mission items from Earl’s become fun again, because of the increased pool of useful items.

  • There are no items exclusive to any Mayhem level above M6.

  • You have a solid balance of modifiers. Not too few, but not so many that you need to spend an hour rerolling.

  • Forum trading becomes all but unnecessary because of the increased pool of viable items.

  • Edited to add: This is hypothetical, but it may be that the game is “balanced” around the lower or middle Mayhem levels, which is why we see so many issues at M10. It would almost make sense, with M8-10 being left to only those meta and god-rolled builds.

#63

I think that’s the issue though. It isn’t the default difficulty, it isn’t meant to be, and there is no reason to feel compelled to play there.

I’ve been using my Killer Queen build on M8 using M4 gear. It strikes a great balance for me: my guns can still take out trash but I need to use the pet for badasses. I’ve also tried the build on M10 with what M10 weapons I have and it works just as well if not a bit better, but I just don’t want to play on M10.

@Adabiviak is a great example of this. He uses the difficulty settings of the game to tailor it to his liking. While the gear should be balanced to work across every mayhem level, I think that as players we should understand our likes and limitations and take it upon ourselves to play the game in a way we find enjoyable.

To be crystal clear, I’m not saying to avoid playing on M10. I’m saying that we shouldn’t be playing on M10 because we feel like it’s the only place worth playing on or that the rest of the game isn’t worth it. It’s a silly way of thinking and just constrains the fun you can have with the game.

#64

This right here. My wife has been a Borderlands fan since BL1 and plays exclusively on Mayhem 1. Her build is all over the place, she uses whatever gun she likes, and she has an absolute blast.

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#65

And she can still push her builds and weapon choices to M10 if she can put the build together. That’s what separate difficulties are great for. If M10 is the “default” then it has to be vanilla because that’s where everyone plays. It’s too easy for the hardcores, but too hard for the casuals. No one wins like that.

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#66

Heck, you can fire the gungun on eridium and get m10 gear.

Sometimes I feel every decision made was not only rushed but also intended to please the casual player.

#67

I think it just shows how little thought was behind a lot of the decisions made and how much of a hurry.
It‘s almost a year now and they still haven‘t figured out yet wat they want their endgame to look like. I mean come on, that‘s one of the key components when developing a game.
But the thing I understand the least is how they ignore the obvious wishes of their players and keep being stubborn. They keep telling us random modifiers are great fun when everybody is spending hours to get a combination of modifiers that may not be fun but at least endureable. They keep ignoring raid bosses, which made previous borderlands titles what they are. And at last, who was thinking damage anointments were a good idea…it‘s self explanatory that nobody will use „on action skill end, gain improved accuracy“ when you can get 300% damage instead. Grenades are another great example, most of the time it doesn‘t really matter which one you use as long as it has the right anointment. It should be about the items first, not the anointment…
It really makes me sad, because it‘s not about the guns or skill trees anymore but solely about the goddamn anointments. I just wish they got eid of them completely, the game would be so easy to balance…
Just my 2 cents tho

6 Likes
#68

Is that a bad thing? It was horrible when M2.0 came out and the only source of on level gear was enemy drops. Personally I’ve got no problem with having a few dozen sources of loot, it makes it so any activity you do in game is rewarding somehow.

#69

I wholeheartedly agree here. The absolute last use for a grenade in this game is damage. They don’t scale well and really aren’t all that useful regardless of Mayhem level. There are some edge cases for specific builds but for the most part, you only carry a grenade mod for the annointment.

2 Likes
#70

It has a lot to do with the framing. When I play games like Persona, Doom, or Yakuza, I won’t hesistate to toggle based on what I enjoy more. In BL3, I feel a fear of missing out, so I play on M10. Well, I also find it the most fun but that’s not the point. I think the mayhem modes are framed in such a way, that you have to play at the max mode.

M10 has the best rewards, highest numbers on weapons bc of gear scaling, and Gearbox keeps talking about players working their way to M10. If you enjoy playing the game exclusively at >M4, you’re missing out on the M6 loot. I think the concept of mayhem mode is at its best if the player is encouraged to freely choose which level they want. That’s just not what the game does though, and that’s why so many people want to play on M10. Then we get these weird balancing issues to overbuff gear just to support it, which effects the lower levels- that are arguably more balanced.

#71

What GBX created with the various MH levels is a mess.
Other posters recently have been promoting playing lower MH levels such as 6. This does help the anointment problem a bit.
But on the flip side, there currently is not enough storage to have multiple VHs and multiple levels of weapons. Inventory becomes a mess. For a while I had run my Fadeaway FL4K at MH 8, with the others at 10. Weapons started getting mixed up.
The whole gear being tied to level is a large pandoras box.
GBX really messed up with their implementation.
Even at M6 there are regular weapons that still perform subpar, even with the weapon being an M10 version LoL. That is just sad…

For now I am enjoying other games.
I will check in each Thursday to see what, if anything of significance has been addressed.
The game is such a mess…

1 Like
#72

Tsk tsk tsk, well there goes your good name gearbox.

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#73

ill be on BL2…let us know when yall get done helping them finish 3

#74

I’m sorry you feel this way. I made the thread to discuss improvements. I’m actually really enjoying this game. :slight_smile: Good luck out there. I hope you find one you enjoy!

1 Like
#75

alot to like…but still feels like its in uat mode

1 Like
#76

Modifiers are the ONLY reason I’m not playing. And until they are gone completely I will not boot up.

3 Likes
#77

Thought I would update this in case anyone else was curious. After the hotfix last Thursday I would up doing some experimentation with Gamma Burst Fl4k at M6. I shelved all of my gear except class mod, shield, and artifact. Went to the vending machine, bought some decent-looking M6 weapons and paid no attention to the annointments.

Mobbing and bossing felt great. I didn’t feel over or under powered. Along the way I picked up various weapons to see what worked and didn’t. The end result is there were still some trash weapons but most purples and legendaries were at least viable. The game felt significantly more balanced. I felt like I had a broad range of choices in what weapons I wanted to use and I didn’t have to rely on any specific annointments like URAD.

What killed it for me was hopping on Clone Zane to test out the boss drop rates during this week’s event. This time was at M8. I was swiftly reminded of the insane power imbalance between Zane and Fl4k. It could be my skill level, play style, build preference, or a lack of understanding on how Gamma Burst Fl4k works. Maybe I’m terrible with Fl4k for some reason and I don’t care for Fadeaway builds.

Whatever the reason, Clone Zane runs circles around Fl4k. Damage, survivability, annointment choice, and weapon variety are all much better and more balanced. There is almost no comparison. Overall it left a bad taste in my mouth. Combined with many other issues I have with BL3, I have decided maybe it just isn’t for me. I am taking a break until at least the next DLC or major event.

1 Like
#78

This is because of the Action Skill boost that happened a couple of weeks ago. Zanes Action Skills (Drone and Clone) now do a large amount of damage.
FL4Ks Action Skills really did not get much out of that patch. His pets do better damage, but the Clone alone will outdo FL4K in sheer damage due to the AS boost.

1 Like
#79

Zane has nothing on Amara right now. She is 100% busted and makes the game trivial right now. Mayhem 2.0 completely ruined the game for me. The game was balanced so well up until then

2 Likes
#80

I did similar testing last night on Moze. Everything from a Z system to a Unending Magnificant had a place. They didn’t melt bosses but they all felt somewhat valuable, while guns like a M6 kaoson I picked up still absolutely destroyed.

What stood out to me is that I almost feel like guns overall dont proportionally scale with mayhem. Some of them seem to scale fairly well until some mayhem level or another, but then they fall off dramatically. For example, Atlas ARs work until around m7, while Thunderball Fist feels like a god gun at mayhem 3-6, but then fails miserably by M8.

I assume a major problem the dev team is facing is that they can’t just buff a gun like the Fist because it’ll be insane at M0, but barely work at M10. The scaling not being linear with M level scaling seems to be throwing everything off in the transitionary mayhem levels between zero and ten.

The scientific next step if anyone had the time would be to try to map out where the guns all seem to peak in viability. I think most of us agree it’s not at mayhem 10. It’s sounding like it might be 6 or 7, honestly.

Finally, this whole thing doesn’t even account for action skills. I honestly had to refrain from jumping in ironbear because it just changes the whole game. He’s linear scaling to each mayhem level, so he performs the same, and therefore makes it harder to test. Zane and Amara would cause the same problem when testing I’m sure.

Honestly, Fl4k may be the best class to just test out weapon viability in various levels since their class is so item dependent.

You’re right but we’re kinda describing the difference in the speed of light and speed of sound when turning on a flashlight. The sound hits your ear when when you flick the switch, so the average person can’t really tell the difference. The sound hitting your ear and the light hitting your eye are both insanely fast by our experience.

Edited: clarity.

2 Likes
#81

You have highlighted yet another significant issue in the game. Scaling is all over the place. There’s a weird combination of linear, exponential, half scaling and zero scaling. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

EDIT: I’m suspicious that some of the weapon imbalance comes from trying to convince people they need the latest DLC to have the best weapons. It would explain why the latest DLC weapons always seem to be the meta, while older weapons get nerfed or mysteriously don’t scale well past a certain Mayhem level.

It’s not even like action skills scaled one way, enemy health another, and weapon damage another. Some action skills scale well with Mayhem, others don’t scale, and still others scale to insane levels. Then you have pet damage, which for some odd reason doesn’t even scale the same across different pets. Some weapons have good scaling, others scale to insane levels, and still some others don’t seem to scale hardly at all beyond M4 or M6. Then you have shields, which don’t scale and grenades that might as well not scale because they don’t do damage anyway.

I don’t have the time or motivation to put together the numbers from each weapon, action skill, and enemy health pool at different Mayhem levels and see just how badly the scaling is off but if someone does, it would be interesting to see a comparison.

I can think of a couple of ways to solve this and none of them are things I expect Gearbox to do. These are also only ideas and don’t take all factors (like annointments) into account:

  • This is the simplest. Drop scaling on everything except enemy health, armor and damage and rebalance the game for that. In this system, difficulty goes up with every mayhem level but player power does not. That makes mayhem a true difficulty increase.
  • Rework scaling to make everything the same. You could break this down into categories to add balance but it would still be something like “all weapon damage increases by x per Mayhem level, damage dealing skills scale by y, player healing scales by z”, etc. You could even add depth by making it different for each Mayhem level, but keep it consistent for each category. Scaling for M1-4 could be one value, 5-8 another and 9-10 another. Ideally enemy health, armor and damage would scale faster than player power, so the difficulty does increase as mayhem levels go up.

Either way, the mind-boggling scaling should be looked at along with game balance in general. I think the majority can agree that bullet-sponge enemies are a bad idea, but so are boss fights with multiple immune phases to arbitrarily extend the length of the fight. It also gets boring fast, for me, when boss fights last less time than the loading screen.

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