I really think that rebalancing the anointments is the best way to fix most of the problems the game has right now. I like anointments as a concept and wouldn’t want them removed completely, but as long as enemy health was lowered to compensate, I would like it if they weakened the damage boosting ones, and wouldn’t mind if they removed some of them. Enemy health would need to be reduced a lot since anointments do most of our damage on mayhem 10 right now, probably cut in half at least. Weakening anointments and balancing around unanointed/support anointment gear would also make action skills, pets and any type of damage with few/no anointments to boost it much more viable and easy to balance. I am neutral on whether this new system would involve rerolling anointments or not since the only reason rerolling anointments is such a necessity right now is because anointments are way too important relative to every other aspect of your build.
In the pre-sequel we had luneshine, which was a lot like anointments except that there were only 8 and almost all were minor defense or support bonuses, the only gun damage boost was +10% crit damage so while there were players who grinded for the perfect parts+luneshine it never defined the game’s balance the way anointments do. I think anointments should work more like that – gear having your favorite anointment should be an exciting bonus on a weapon you’d want to use anyways not a prerequisite for it to be worth picking up.
There are so many interesting anointments that do things other than a % damage boost you could use that are completely nonviable because every weapon needs an anointment that gives it over 100% bonus damage just to keep up with enemy scaling. Fl4k is infamous for their bad survivability but has an anointment that gives 30% life steal on pet attack command. While Zane’s clone is out he can regenerate ammo and never need to reload, when his barrier is out he can have no shield delay and pinpoint accuracy with any weapon and he can go even faster when SNTNL is out. Amara can stack damage reduction and movement speed, charge weapons almost instantly and combine weapon ASA novas and shield phasegrasp novas for an on demand flame of the firehawk. Moze can not consume ammo, massively increase her shield size, cooldown iron bear quickly and have almost no recoil for 3 magazines. All these anointments would be more interesting to use than a massive damage boost yet every single one of them is trash since we need hundreds of % damage from anointments to make a weapon usable. That’s not even counting any general anointments, things like how fl4k can make great use of ASE healing pool with rakks. We also have some interesting damage anointments like 1% consecutive hits, stacking 5% and reload speed on kill or any airborne or slide anointment that will never be used because they can never compete in raw %.
Turn anointments into seperate items that can drop = anointment tokens. You still have to farm the tokens based on RNG like other items. You can redeem the token and apply the anointment on your weapon of choice. The anointment can be overwritten by another anointment token.
Nerf anointments to a point where they are bonuses and not the sole focus of this entire game. Gear should be the exciting part and the anointment should be a bonus that doesn’t ruin the effectivity of the weapon if you don’t have the right one. Anointment DMG should be nerfed to 10-30% max so that other anointments (that right now nobody is using) become viable again.
So much yes to this. This is a staple for Borderlands and they are being used for triggers not function.
ASE annointments (I’m assuming) were supposed to be a bonus “oh crap my action skill is on cooldown . This will help me stay in the fight”. Instead we have people using glitches like cancelling or purposely missing their action skill to keep ASE annoints constant… Action skills aren’t even used…
I’m very surprised in a positive way by the poll results. I thought people would switch off when they hear the word “nerf” and be against anointments nerfs. I’m glad most people here see the bigger picture.
Thanks to all responding… Please feel free to spread the word on this post. I had 400 votes before I closed my last poll. I hope to beat that on this one and maybe get it the proper attention
Good luck, less people are playing,… hell I don’t even play right now because other games are more fun.
My glimmer of hope fades with every patch and my friends have long past that part and already deleted the game.
(and for those saying I have a negative outlook,… I am just joining the crowd. At least I speak and try to still help keep this game to be a speck of its former self when it was fun)
I don’t mind the principal of anointments but the current implementation is poor. They have far too much impact upon the game, where they should just add something extra, and they dilute the loot pool so much that getting what you want is too much of a lottery.
Destiny 2 has a mod system, which you can tack onto gear to give it extra properties, but they have a fairly small overall impact, generally speaking. Not saying GBX should do something identical but I quite like the idea of keeping the anointments separate so that they don’t interfere with drop rates.
As the Op says, in may ways the anointment is more important than the weapon and that feels wrong somehow. It’s completely disproportionate. Having said that, I don’t think tackling them in isolation is the way forward. They are definitely a problem in the game but removing them would probably create a greater imbalance and quite frankly I don’t trust GBX any more to get it right. If they removed Mayhem 2.0 and the anointments in their current form, and had a Mayhem system without scaling, then I think the end result would be much better than just nerfing these. People have invested time and effort in creating builds with specific anointments and it would be wrong just to yank that away. I think I’d feel different it was part of a larger re-design, however, as their gear would still feel strong with no Mayhem 2.0
TL:DR yes I think current anointments are bad but I wouldn’t want to see GBX do something to them without looking at the bigger picture.
A combined 55% want anointments to be nerfed and I completely agree.
25% want to remove anointments from the game altogether… I think we all know this ain’t gonna happen. I don’t think Gearbox would remove them and personally I don’t think it’s necessary if you nerf them.
35% want to nerf anointments but without rerolling feature. If you nerf them but the grind stays the same… wouldn’t that make the grind too hard for the reward that is given?
I’m among the 20% that voted for nerf + some way to change anointments. Imo that would be the perfect solution.
yea kinda
it would just not be so important so people would not be encouraged so much to farm for the perfect gear and just let it be fine with a suboptimal gun
i think the major complaint is just that without the gun+right anointment, your bujild is simply trash
so when the game is again balanced arund guns and not about anointments, its not so important to find the perfect anointment, you can still kill everything
I have gotten to the point where I have exactly zero hope of this game ever being balanced. And with every new content they add, they make it worse. Vehicle combat has always been horrific in this franchise, and the next DLC vehicle combat heavy. And if you think that the new vehicle will make any difference, well you have more faith than l. I truly don’t think that the developers handling post game content have any idea what they’re doing. I’ve never been so frustrated with having spent money on a game as I have been with this one. As it stands right now I will never ever buy another gearbox game again.
Allowing rerolling would not make farming pointless. You would still need an anointed legendary (granted, not too hard to get), and we would then farm eridium, something that is infinitely more fun and open-ended than grinding the same boss over and over. I suppose players would figure out the easiest eridium farm pretty soon (I remember farming normal mode Iwajira a good few times in Presequel), but being able to make progress even if you don’t do that particular activity would help a lot.
Not to mention there’s ways to encourage mobbing and “farming” WITH the reroll system (have reroll tokens drop from proving grounds bosses, have anointers show up in random places in the galaxy, etc)
