Mayhem 2.0 is too easy. Mayhem 2.1 will be even easier :(

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

First off, I want to give a big kudos to gearbox for the news update that dropped today. Mayhem 2.0 is cool but came with a lot of flaws. You’ve listened to us about those flaws and it looks like you’re aware of and actively fixing just about everything everyone was complaining about. I love the transparency about the upcoming fix schedule, and the quality of life improvements are a nice cherry on top.

Among the mountain of good news though is one thing that quite concerns me: you’re making the enemies less tough in higher mayhem levels. I’m sure some players will welcome this. But I’m certain there are many like me for whom this might actually wreck the enjoyment of the game.

Here’s the thing. Mayhem 10 is already too easy. And no, I’m not saying that because I’m so hardcore/badass/masochistic. It’s just genuinely a lot easier to kill enemies than it was in the old M4.

I think this point has too often been lost in all the discussion about gear balancing, action skill scaling and loot drops. The fact is that in many situations, mayhem 2.0 is indeed too hard: melee/pet/iron bear builds, when using most older guns, or in the context of grenades or nova shields for example. And also in the case of some of the bigget bosses, in relation to their drops. And naturally the most vocal complaints have been around these frustrations.

But if you forsake melee, action skills, and use mainly newer guns like yellowcake or OPQ, then the majority of the game is ridiculously easy on M1-M7 or so, and still pretty easy on M10. To me it doesn’t feel like an uber-challenging endgame that I slowly inch towards as I pick up better gear. Rather, it feels like a pretty normal way to play the game that seems to involve less struggle than the old M4 ever did. I’ve seen this said by others many times, though like I said the point gets somewhat lost among the more frustrating grievances. But I’d argue that at the heart of most of those grievances was a problem with balance (or effort/reward ratio) not with difficulty per se.

Once you scale up the grenades, action skills etc., M10 will be even easier. And if you slightly nerf some of the newer guns while significantly buffing many of the older ones (which I’m inferring from the news post is what you’ll do) then it’ll probably become easier still (albeit harder to just cruise through the entire game with nothing but the yellowcake). And of course then will come more juicy weapons with future events and DLC, and M10 will become easier still.

So while I overall look forward to the upcoming changes, I really hope you’ll reconsider making the higher mayhem levels easier than they already are. If your vision is that M10 is something that hardcore players aspire to, while those who just want to have some fun play on lower mayhem levels, then I believe you’ve already let your vision down with the first release. Hardcore players were diving into M10 on day 1 and were doing just fine. Complaining about drop rates and balancing, yes, but doing fine.

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#2

Gearbox did say they are looking into weapon balance - and that they will be nerfing weapons. Pretty sure what this implies is the likes of the Yellowcake, OPQ System and some of the other M6+ weapons will receive the necessary balancing to compensate for reduced M10 health values.

All this means is we now have a more diverse set of viable weapons at M10, and I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

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#3

no no , you r missing something, its opq yc being op than m2.0 being too easy

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#4

Hardcore players have no problem on m10. I myself have absolutley no issues with any vh on m10 but everyone who plays bl3 is chasing better loot lots of ppl are having issues playing m10. I feel like m10 was fine just for optimized builds. Others dont see it that way nobody is satisfied to just sit at m6,7,or8 so they complain its to hard. Its meant to be hard! I think its a great idea to buff more weapons most need a buff but not so much to nerfing enemys.

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#5

I think what you’re saying will probably end up happening…M10 will be easier, but I think this will be the first step in balancing out all the factors that should play into what makes characters, abilities, and weapons etc balanced as a whole and then they will add more mayhem levels to up the challenge down the road…or they will find that they can revert or even up the buffs to enemy shield, armor, and health values to make M10 more challenging.

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#6

The issue with M10 isn’t the enemy scaling per se, it’s the fact that the new guns are grossly OP compared to most old guns and M10 was balanced around the new stuff.

Lots of things that used to be viable (and fun!) but not god-tier - Star Helix, Crossroad, Trevonator, Juju, and most Jakobs items all come to mind - are now nearly obsolete in M10.

Other items are overshadowed by new items that are extremely similar - Dictator vs Monarch is the best-known example.

I’d say the solution is to buff a bunch of old items without nerfing M10.

M10 should require well-designed builds with high-tier anointments, but it shouldn’t destroy build diversity.

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#7

Yeah I think in a round about way that’s what they are doing and I think it will allow them to then add more mayhem levels in the future once they’ve nailed down the balance and get the build diversity back in the game. I would love to see them end up doing something similar to how Diablo 3 does it’s end game with greater rifts where the difficulty just keeps scaling up infinitely…so you can constantly push your builds.

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#8

M10 is too easy for me and I haven’t fired a shot with these weapons, and they stay in my bank…

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#9

I completely agree (as I said somewhere in the ‘dev update’ post).

Mayhem2.0 was made to offer a very wide spectrum of difficulty, so that all players can find some enjoyment in the end-game. The old m4 was a joke for a lot of players, and it removes any kind of fun from the game if a new DLC drops and you just slaughter your way through it without even being close to dying…

So, offer a wide spectrum of difficulty, so everyone can choose depending on how they play the game, the mood they are in, how good their build is… etc… This sounded AWESOME to me.

For all the people who want to play a certain build (as example, a real pet-build for fl4k)… yeah, that build doesn’t have m10 damage: so you turn the mayhem level down and enjoy the game on how you want to play it.

The only problem with this idea, is (in my opinion) the people whining that they can’t play m10 (with their build with their gear, with their…). It’s not meant to be for everyone!! There is a reason they put the special guns in it from m6 and up… so you don’t have to play m10 to get everything… you can play m6.

If you like the modifiers, go pick a level with 4 modifiers… if you don’t, stay at m8 or something where you have way less of them but still healthy enemies.

The fact that there are people ‘already’ ripping through m10 (a lot… even me and my friends and we’re not hardcore at all) says that they made m10 too easy. It’s meant to be a difficult to archieve level.

Buffing older guns or reducing health or enemies on m10 will have the same effect: make it easier for a lot of people. I don’t think this is the way.

Maybe they should’ve made a ‘custom game’ option, where people can tweak the modifiers and health-boosts and everything themselves, to create the game they enjoy… and behind the scenes there is a ‘score’ calculated for the game-settings you have chosen that changes the rank of the gear that drops.

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#10

“The game is too easy” : This argument is painfully ridicule cause the game “difficulty” have never been modified too much : Enemy still hit as hard and you’re still has tanky. As for the additionnal modifier, some of them genuinely make the game harder or not.

What they will change with the following patch is make the game more balanced, meaning you won’t have only 10-ish weapon in the game that can manage.

Abusing OP weapon to clear the current content don’t make the game easy, just poorly balanced

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#11

One can add 1000000000000% health to enemy and you will take hours to kill a pup skag but the game still won’t be difficult. Making things unnecessarily long and tedious does not mean difficult it just means long and tedious.

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#12

No, it’s not a hard game, you are right. But like Hall and Oates, I think you’re out of touch with the general audience. I’m not saying your concerns aren’t important, but you might want to trying using a non-meta loadout. Also, you might want to wait until the raid drops before making an assessment about end game difficulty.

#13

Wasn’t this topic already beaten to death in the other thread? Wait until the upcoming patches are released before you decide that it’s too easy.

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#14

There are so many underperforming weapons to pick from. I honestly don’t see why OP is having a problem with difficulty.

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#15

While i generally see your point.

I think in this game specifically where bosses without immune phases are 1 shot fairly consistently its a pretty valid way to increase the difficulty.

When a boss or other enemy has mechanics, but you do so much damage that he never gets to attack more than 1 or 2 times if at all. Then obviously adding enough health to make him live longer gives him more opportunities to kill you.

Killing things fast before you can make mistakes is a fairly common strategy to trivialize content in a lot of PvE games. So yea, adding more health does mean more difficult in a lot of scenarios - especially against monsters that actually do have mechanics and damage that could eventually kill you (your skag pup is - i think intentionally - chosen in a way where it is obviously not possible for it to kill you no matter how long it is alive)

tl;dr: If bosses / superenemies have mechanics that you can entirely ignore by killing them before they get to act then adding health is a reasonable approach to making combat more interesting.

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#16

Well precisely, it is the bosses that may need specific rework/buffs not the general mob health pool.

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#17

yea thats very reasonable

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#18

The problem is even if you fight them a while, it is still very hard for you to still die. x2 Projectiles was a step in the right direction from M1.0, people hated it, but it meant you could die in one to two shots depending on the enemy. Zanes would complain because it went through barrier,… but who cares, you can’t be invulnerable forever. I don’t even use barrier because of how easy it makes it. Grenade and clone is my fun now.

This is an example of 2 below, one prior to build adjustment and one after. Regardless it would be hard for a player to die:

36 sec: (yes this was posted last week because of the awesome drops Traunt has)

vs 19 sec:

#19

Mayhem mode is anything but easy. I have mostly M6 and M7 hardware and I still have a hard time with it. I got destroyed last night over and over just trying random mobbing.

The game needs more balance and having action skills, class mods, grenades, class mods and relics be effective is a must going forward.

1 Like
#20

Indeed, instead of adding health there is always (I can’t believe I’m going to say this but) immunity phases.

Would put the dampener on the 1 shot videos for a while at least. :rofl: