Realization about Annointed Gear

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

… I hate that gear annointments exist. (Hear me out)

At first they seemed like great ways to change up how gear work, change how builds work … However I’m realizing that they are the problem, not the solution.

  1. Gear drops aren’t exciting… Because even if you get the gun you want, if it doesn’t have the annointment you want it’s a vendor item.
  2. Just adds another level of RNG to gear drops to make it less likely to be what you want
  3. Makes weapon balancing 10 times more complicated. Example: adding weapon damage vs bonus elemental damage. Weapon damage is additive while bonus elemental is multiplicative. So it drastically changes how the weapon performs instead of how it is used
  4. All annoints are not equal, which means instead of getting the gear you want and playing in a new way because of the annoint, you just trash it if it doesn’t have a good annoint.

In theory it seems like a great idea to add some variety to the game… In practice it made the game take another path down less viable gear and builds available

27 Likes
How to balance anointments in BL3
#2

if they provided only small bonuses in 20% range it would not be this disasterous and it does not have to be tied to god damn action skill ends or starts or jumps, anointed gun same as regular just deals 10% more crit or 20% more damage or whatever. no anoints is perfect tho. sice bonus elemental damage just wrecks and breaks the game far worse than just additive gun damage.

13 Likes
#3

Or they could add a way to reroll anoints on items. My Beaatmaster sits over cap of money and like 25k+ eridium at this point. If they add a way for us to reroll anoints I would grind less overall, and our gear anoints would be easier to achieve. But it feels like they don’t care about the player base sometimes and the abysmal drop rates on a lot of good items in the game just make it more and more frustrating.

3 Likes
#4

i thought we all know about this , since the exact same point been made 3 million times

3 Likes
#5

Absolutely agree… I mean you compare the bonuses on annoints to skill points and class mods…and it’s insane.
Ex1 elemental: Zane’s conductor class mod gets +50% elemental damage (when both skills are active and at full duration, scaling down as they drain) and his tier 7 skill trick of the light gives +36% cryo damage bonus… Comparable annoints… Sentinel cryo gives +100% consistently while Sentinel is up… +150% radiation if you are below half health, +125% elemental on next two mags for an action skill to end.

Ex2 gun damage: Zane skill Confident competence gives +35% gun damage based on how full shields are, Donnybrook give +30% when two kill have been done recently, double barrel gives +25% for swapping with your clone… Comparable annoints… +200% weapon damage while an action skill is up (200% to have clone up, vs 25% for being actively using the clone… Always blew my mind) +300% for enemy health over 90%… +200% for constantly doing damage (consecutive hits)

Annointed weapons give 10 times the bonus that skill points do… And are easier to activate and keep active. RIDICULOUS. The proportions are awful.

9 Likes
#6

Nope, get rid of annoints… Rerolling doesn’t fix the issue that you care more about the annointment on your weapon then the skill points or class mod stats or which weapon it is that dropped.

The only way to keep annoints is to nerf them to be comparable like what @Hexxusz0r said. They should be small bonuses not blow up the game necessities

8 Likes
#7

I’ve said it before, but anointments should not modify damage in any way. They should be little quality of life changes.

6 Likes
#8

it is about to get worse with buffed ase splash and ase next two mags reaching 200 and 100% respectively.

at this point your build and your gun is just anointed damage delivery tool, you can ignore all gun damage buffs in your skill tree in favor of having easier access to anointed damage like triggering ase or activating as as many times as possible in short duration. this is worsened by the problem of actually having no choice since best option is always pretty clear. i have played gamma fl4k and clone swap barrier crit zane all my days but if i was ever asked to to hardest content on demand first try, i would always swap to bonus cryo/ dopplebanger ase setup… and now since ase is way ahead of bonus elemental damage anoint of each character and even far ahead of 50/150 there is absolutely no choice since ase 100% to mags +shield +nade 50% or 200% splash respectively is far stronger than whatever 100-120% bonus elemental damage you gain for having AS activated. therefore gearbox should either ring values down or increase the ASA ones and we all know what is going to happen, it is the later option…

3 Likes
#9

Not sure why they, meaning GBX strayed from gear having prefix’s like consummate or flying to having anoint’s. I can see how they are trying something new and implement them but drops not anoints are the issue. If they could appoint dedicated drops better and adjust drop rates that would be a good start.

2 Likes
#10

See the problem with that is they have only been buffing/nerfing anoints. So them getting rid of them will never happen. So just let us rng reroll them and try for what people want on them. D3 let’s you reroll stuff so why shouldn’t BL3? As such all the currency I have means nothing in this game where in D3 it actually does.

1 Like
#11

Annoints have broken the game from a balance and a farming standpoint. Do the math on trying to get a +100% SNTL Cryo, Corrosive Monarch and it is just depressing. The problem is anything else is obviously only about ~50% as effective for my build.

Now balance the game. Was my 4500x2 Kaoson OP? No. Is my 4500x2 +100%SNTL Cryo OP? That is a whole different story but how do you balance the game? Do you balance to the card damage of the guns or To the guns with the best possible annointments?

The annointment system should have been a lot less “meaningful” in terms of damage but also a lot more universally used. No annointment should be worthless (see reload on swap which is worthless to 75% of the characters and even in theory and 100% useless in practice) or ridgedly situational (sliding I’m looking at you).

+5, 7.5, or 10% bonus damage.
-10,-15,-20% damage while used
-20, -25, -30% recoil.

You might get suboptimal but if I got a Shock Monarch with +5% incendiary damage that isn’t optimal but I still feel good about getting the gun but people who want to chase the perfect gun still have the shiny to chase.

7 Likes
#12

I would LOVE to see all offense annointments MASSIVELY nerfed. I think 50% on all character specific annoints is a good place, 25-40% for generic annointments.

Then, reinstate M4 and BAM! You have some tough content with modifiers that most players agree on.

5 Likes
#13

@engulfeddarkness get rid of annoints Nd bring it all back to mayhem 1.0 and start balancing guns and characters for the content at that level.

@Dalbuc absolutely agree the amount of RNG to get a decent gun is insane… Did a post on it Here

@vCarpeDiemv I agree . Or better yet, remove annointed gear all together, go back to Mayhem1.0 and then see how hard the content is and start buffing and balancing character/guns from there. Way too much focus on annointments and not enough on the core game.

5 Likes
#14

It really blows my mind that there is as much damage in some annointments as there are some entire skill trees.

2 Likes
#15

I genuinely liked how TPS did anoints, in the form of luneshines. They were small bonuses (5% grenade damage, 10% critical damage, 1 in 3 chance to bypass shields, 3% max shields, etc) that were hard to obtain and altered the way you used your gear in some cases, without too much focus on damage buffs. Sure, you wanted luneshine weapons, but a good roll on a weapon without it would be just as good as a bad roll with it.
The only drawback was that the easiest way to get them was using the grinder, meaning most people wound up farming the grinder instead of playing the game. If they’d made them more accessible within the game, they’d have been pretty perfect.

6 Likes
#16

There were so many nice QoL features on TPS. It never got the credit it deserved.

6 Likes
#17

Very easy solution… give us the means to change anointments via Eridium. Problem solved

4 Likes
#18

All anointments should be nerfed to about 30% maximum, and bonuses that are easiest to gain (like consecutive hits, ASEs, etc) should be on the lower end at like 5-10%.

Anointments create a massive crutch and buffing them only creates more of a crutch and a huge amount of number bloat–something that this game is massively suffering from more and more with each update. Then you could buff individual weapons, skills, abilities without having to worry about the whole “well, if we buff X then someone will just use Y anointment and 1-shot everything!” excuse.

1 Like
#19

Anointments are busted to an extent that’s difficult to overstate, and cover up for a lack of variance in the actual gear itself. There are sixty weapon anoints, factor in that you have to get a weapon to drop at all, then have to hit a usable anoint, and this completely destroys even the vague semblance of pacing. All of which covers up for the gear being the least variable gear in a main BL game to date (there’s at least one weapon that only has two potential damages, two!)

1 Like
#20

remove the annt gear
ty

2 Likes