Problems with Guardian TD

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

I just played the new Take Down map today and I can’t help but feel very frustrated and disappointed at the current state of the raid and the game as a whole. I have seen multiple threads in this Forum discussing Mayhem 2.0 and its issues. I fully agree with the points that the community has raised so I won’t be discussing them here. Instead, I want to address why the new Guardian TD might be the worst raid map I have ever played in the BL franchise.

  1. Enemy Scaling, I played the raid after the hotfix downscaling enemy health in the raid. But I still feel confident to claim that this minor change was inadequate to address this issue. Enemies are still extremely tanky on M10. Although overpowered Cartel event weapons such as SandHawk, OPQ and Yellowcake and still be effective in this raid, bottlenecking the player to only 3 or 4 weapons in a game that is branded with having “bazillion” guns is just ridiculous. I, like many players, have builds that can melt in Maliwan TD in M10 True Takedown Mode. But I found myself unable to quickly kill mobs in the GTD to survive some of the ridiculous mechanics in this raid. I decided to use a bit of modding to determine exactly how much health the different mobs have. I found that on average a guardian mob has about 49-63 million health. I don’t know about you but I found this to be absolutely ridiculous. This means that even with an Amara meta build you cannot quickly remove mobs to consistently get through phases such as the three crystal puzzle. This problem would further confound the issue with anointment as I found, on my zane build, all my guns without sentinel cryo or ASE anoint obsolete even when I love to use those guns. Simply put, this issue of extremely tanky enemies makes the game feel more like a chore to farm for specific weapons rather than being enjoyable.

  2. The overall level and mechanic designs: They are bad. First of all, I appreciate the dev putting more diverse terrain and more verticality in the game. But this raid is not the map to do this. With a raid having only 2 checkpoints that are separated but roughly 20-30 minutes of mobbing and bossing each, the vertical platforming becomes a freaking nightmare. Out of all my death in this raid, about 90% percent of them are me being knocked off the map or yeeted myself off a platform because I am playing Zane [gotta go fast! du du du, oh crap…]. Simply put, I do not believe this game is designed for platforming. 2 out of the 4 VH [Zane and Amara] are centered around speed and quick play, while Moze and FL4K lack the same mobility skills that make them a pain to do platforming in multiplayer as well. Platforming can be fun during map exploration, but in a raid map where death can mean losing 20-30 minutes of progress, platforming is a real game breaker for me. At least allow us to have multiple checkpoints or, better yet, do not make falling off a map an instant death but put you back onto the platform with a health and shield penalty.

  3. And then there is the two infamous three crystal phase. I get the dev is promoting group play by designing levels like these. But when you have a single-player option, please consider reducing the difficulties in these parts for players who want to solo the raid. I cannot imagine a worst game mechanic in this game for solo play beside these three crystal levels. For one, the extremely tanky mobs are nonstop spawning from every direction. This means you need to either have god-like damages and kill them quickly or move away from the small circle because you will be overwhelmed in a matter of seconds. And with a character like Zane who relies on constant mobility to trigger his damaging skill [violent momentum], staying in one place would simply make this character less viable in solo play during these parts. Sure they are not undoable but I don’t see anyone consistently passing them every time during their solo play. This level design is just awful.

  4. The loot. They are just not worth it. The guns and gears you get from this raid do not make the raid easier in any way, you are better off farming Monarch. Why would I suffer through all these problems to play a raid that would not yield satisfying awards?

These are just my opinions but I hope the devs can listen to their community and make the right changes to this raid. Because if this is the end game they can come up with, I don’t see myself coming back to this raid anytime soon.

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#2

Main buzzkill for me is the loot, or lack thereof. The Asclepius shield seems somewhat promising, the Globetrottr is fun(be prepared to kill yourself), but outside of those it’s pretty much just for the hell of it.

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#3

Tried a couple of solo True Takedowns after today’s patch and the balancing is still pretty bad.

Many of the weapons that got buffed just aren’t up to par for the Takedown, even the most op gun ever created for a Borderlands game, the Complex Root . The Crystal portions are still horrendous and encourage players to just find a way to skip them. The frequency of spawns, sheer agility, and tankiness of the possessed creatures is just too much. I ended up throwing on a Recursion again with Amara and it crashed my game lol.

#4

Tried it recently too, even tried doing it at mayhem turned off just to complete and it was still awful. Whoever is in charge of balancing and designing the takedowns seriously needs to be fired or moved to a job that has no say at all in the gameplay design. The takedowns in my opinion are by far the most frustrating and unfun content in the game. The guardian takedown is everything wrong with endgame design in Borderlands 3. It is long, with few checkpoints, lots of cheap or otherwise untelegraphed deaths, lots of enemies and bad mechanics (having to charge the crystals artificially extends time to complete and results in death at failure) as well as bosses with incredibly large amounts of immune phases that again delay your ability to progress and force you into fighting everything at the designer’s pace and not your own. It doesn’t matter how strong your gear is if every 10 seconds the boss forces you to stop fighting and execute their fancy script. To top it all off, the extreme difficulty barely rewards you at all for completion.

Honestly, I’m glad there’s not much good loot there since it means I won’t have to torture myself by running it let alone multiple times.

#5

I finally beat it on mayhem 10 will never do it again ever i hate this guardian takedown so hard for what the weapons suck the smog is good on zane and thats it i hope the next one is alot better.

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