On Class Mods:
There are currently 65 or so different stat bonuses that can roll, 36 of which are brand-specific.
Take all the individual manufacturer-specific rolls for class mods and combine them into brand specialist suites.
So instead of having separate possible rolls for, say, Maliwan gun damage, Maliwan Accuracy, and Weapon Charge speed, you’d have a single “Maliwan Expert” roll that would have bonuses to multiple aspects of Maliwan weapons. Adjust the numbers so they make sense together.
This would keep all the bonuses in the game while reducing the pool of stats by 25. We can go a little further:
Grenadier: Combine Grenade Damage, Radius, and max capacity.
Demolitionist: Combine Splash Damage and Radius.
Deadeye: Combine weapon Accuracy, Handling, and Critical Damage.
Showoff: Combine Action Skill Cooldown and Action Skill Damage.
Stormtrooper: Combine weapon Fire Rate, Reload Speed, and Magazine Size.
Tough Guy: Combine Health regen and +max health.
Aegis: Combine Shield recharge rate, delay, and capacity.
That’s 11 more. This cuts the pool of class mod bonuses by more than half, greatly increases the average quality of the mods, and it makes a lot more of them actually interesting.
On Artifacts:
We can do something similar here.
Take the three different types of elemental-related bonuses (damage, resistance, DoT chance) and combine them, so you’d have a single ability that increases your Cryo damage, Cryo resistance, and Cryo efficiency.
Fit it on the item card by either giving it a fancy name (“Ice Queen”) or writing something vague like “Cryo Elementalist +20”.
On Anointments:
You know what we’re doing here. All the anointments for “when sliding” or “while airborne”: just combine all those into a single anointment. While sliding or airborne, fire rate, accuracy, handling, damage, and crit damage are all increased by (let’s say 30)%. That could be an okay thing that people might enjoy finding and might change their playstyles for.
All those “anointed Operative” bonuses? Just make a single “Anointed Operative” anointment for weapons. You can’t have all the bonuses active simultaneously anyway because they depend on your equipped action skill, so just do away with the RNG and put them all on the same item.
Similar things could be done for other class-specific anointments. Fl4k can only equip one action skill at a time, so it’s harmless to have his “while gamma burst is active” and “while fade away is active” and “after using Rakk Attack” all on the same weapon.
Throw the Attack Command ones on there too. Just do it. Adjust numbers as necessary.
Take the lackluster generic shield anointments like increased movement speed, health regen, action skill cooldown rate, etc. and just combine them into one.
A lot of these combos would have lots of text that wouldn’t fit on the item card. That’s fine, because you can just give each of these packages a name. “Anointed Operative”.
“Anointed Enforcer”, “Anointed Survivalist”, whatever. Don’t tell me that doesn’t work, because we’ve been dealing with ‘red text’ for over a decade now.
This approach simultaneously improves the underperforming modifiers and stops artifically diluting the item pool with lame and unexciting things.
