I still say no, any time you have any kind of PVP you have balance issues, just don’t do any. I even want them to get rid of duals.
Not every game needs to be PVP, Borderlands is made better by not being PVP. There are plenty of PVP games out there, Borderlands doesn’t have to join that. I want them to get weirder not more normal.
I wish more developers/publishers realized this.
I’m just going to vote no to PVP and keep insane character skills and weapons.
Borderlands 3 can learn from The Division and Destiny by not adding PvP. Didn’t play The Division much, but with Destiny the failure of mixing in PvP with PvE has meant:
Sniper rifles get massive flinch for the wielder because crybabies like to challenge snipers with auto rifles outside of their intended range etc. This just makes PvE content like raids and strikes tedious than difficult. Many of these crybabies would be failing The Warpriest battle in King’s Fall if the flinch increase came sooner because these people usually have the game IQ to clear ‘adds’, which is why they get picked off from snipers too easily and cry. There’s a reason why shotguns are the dominant special weapon in Destiny during the highest level of play. To illustrate how much Bungie has handheld crybabies, two exotic sniper rifles give off scope glare - the No Land Beyond, which uses iron sights, and Patience & Time, that cloaks you as its exotic feature, making its cloaking feature pointless for PvP.
Range of shotguns’ OHK range mean they’re uninspiring to use in PvE. So you might as well overuse a sniper rifle. The Golgoroth boss fight in King’s Fall was designed for shotgun use, but the range required for shotguns and damage output meant that you could only use The Chaperone for all six fireteam members, an exotic that is not too widely available. Other shotguns will just fail this stage.
The Vex Mythoclast was pretty outrageous in PvP during the first few weeks of Destiny but nobody serious uses it in PvP or PvE now. Continually nerfed partly because people who were killed by it don’t have it.
Guns like Thorn get left behind with the introduction of higher level caps so that it is not used in Trials of Osiris and Iron Banner. So you can’t even use it in current PvE if you wanted as its damage is too low. This was a powerful gun but so was The Last Word, but that got nerfed far later than it should have been.
Continuing to use Destiny as an example of how difficult it is to balance PvE and PvP, there are a few key issues that come to mind:
Weapon and class balancing is based off of performance in PvP, and only rarely based on PvE reasons. So if you have a weapon or particular skill or ability that is performing well above the average in PvP you can expect to see a re-balancing to bring it in line with other weapons or comparable skills (e.g, Super, melee, and grenade). The overall goal is to let every player feel like they can compete with any weapon or subclass that they choose. While there are always going to be outliers that become top tier, I think it’s largely been successful for PvP but has really made specific aspects of PvE much more challenging, in particular the Raids.
Bungie balances with a general time-to-kill and specific range/role for each weapon in mind. For example, they don’t want primary weapons killing so fast that you have zero chance to react and/or recover from getting hit first. So they lower the damage (precision and body) or damage falloff so that you aren’t using a weapon outside of its intended range. Another example is when they first addressed sniper rifles dominance in PvP they looked at the percentage of kills they constituted in the most competitive playlist and addressed them by reducing Special ammo drops during matches as well as sniper rifle reserves. This really had little impact on PvP and ended up hurting PvE even more directly than was intended.
They factor in popularity and/or complaints as a basis for balancing. The goal is to make the player feel like they can take any weapon or class into PvP and be successful. They do this even if it goes against their own intentions behind the design or purpose of a skill or weapon. For example, a Sunsinger Warlock’s Burn damage (DoT) defined the subclass with the purpose of being able to push back and disrupt a high Armored or aggressive opponents health recovery and ability to get back into the fight. It forced retreats as well as opened up counterattacks. Even though the subclass’ success was mostly limited to one playlist it was gutted completely mostly because of player complaints.
When I play Borderlands, I want to experiment with a lot of different skills and weapons and essentially come up with some overpowered combination that is fun and exciting to use. This would never happen in a Borderlands with PvP unless Gearbox completely simplified character and weapon design for the sake of maintaining fairness in a PvP environment.
RIP Achlyophage Symbiote, the only Gunslinger exotic worth using in year 1. Same thing happened to Young Ahamkara’s Spine when it got buffed to make it a competitive choice, but the tripmine grenades got nerfed as a result. Apparently, enough Warlocks don’t see an imitation patrol beacon in PvP to dodge them to justify their nerf.
Regarding Sunsingers, I think their main problem was that Bungie allowed repeating subclasses in Trials of Osiris. Bungie could have increased the tick rate to damage over time with firebolt grenades. The thing is that triple Sunsingers were too powerful in Trials of Osiris. Their win rate was something like 84%, which is a tad ridiculous. More frequent balances could have meant smaller steps to prevent nerfs being overdone.
That’s simultaneous PVE. Why not just do it for high scores? Also, having damage taken be a factor would be terrible. Tanks and evasion would be impossible to balance. Time would have to be the main factor
Noooooooope. They’re probably going to innovate, but they don’t need to. Presequel hate was due to to a lot more than it not changing enough things. Actually, through the Grinder, cryo, oz, and lasers, this game changed a lot. Not that people necessarily liked although I loved it all. I love everything. Everything’s great
Eh, I want them to remove duel based items, but I’m okay with them. Good way to settle bets, who gets what item, how OP Krieg is, etc
High scores would lead towards just a leaderboard feeling. I was hoping for a mode that would recreate a TFTBL experience where two rival gangs are chasing a vault key or something valuable.
Im no game developer, just trying to say PvP could be a viable option in a Borderlands game. Well my hopes for it anyway.
Ah okay. I read later posts where you mentioned interactions and that could be interesting. Like if you could trigger a trap to make your opponents fight something or move on faster yourself
But as we both discussed last night, things such as supers are either far too weak, or too strong. Even the conspiracy theory still hits like a Mack truck if you hit that first initial shot. Then of course you have the lower rate of fire autos and pulses not being able to keep up with say scouts or other weapons in their archetype. There is definite balancing issues in Destiny that are still not being looked into thorough enough. Even ROI hasn’t addressed it as much as it should. I do think borderlands after I’ve really thought about it needs to stay away from direct pvp gameplay. I would like to see a boss rush mode or something, or survival.
To me the grinder was a big mistake and it shouldnt come back, ever.
There’s probably some good debate about it. I thought it was pretty cool but it changed the game a lot. It made farming Iwa right after I got the VibraPulse with a messed up Athena build amazing though. That’s how I got all of my legendary COMs
Strongly disagree. Grinder was awesome. Take unwanted gear and throw it in there for something better and/or different. A lot of players wanted something like that.
Well it’s all good to disagree. I just know from experience what I pulled from it and to be honest, after playing BL1 for quite some while now, think the vendors from that game were much better than even 2s are.
