Hello everyone! Let me preface this by saying I don’t mean to come off as arrogant by making this thread or pretend to have all the right answers. I’ve been fascinated by game design my whole life and have playtested many games with RPG mechanics. Grim Dawn and Torchlight 2 come to mind.
What I’ve really learned to do though is listen to both the developers and the community. And what I can be sure of at this point is:
There is nothing that will please everyone. Some people will always be vocal about the drop rates being too high. Some people will always be vocal about them being too low. Some people will always complain that certain builds are “over-performing” and some people will insist that everything else should just be buffed. Some people will say some aspect of end-game challenge content is too difficult, others will say it’s too easy.
So with this understanding it’s important not just for the developers to listen to their community and compromise to some extent, but also for them to have an original vision and intent of their content in mind, and to have some bottom-lines they draw for what they want their players to experience and not to experience so that we don’t see an endless stream of compromises that please a vocal minority but alienate everyone who was already enjoying things as they were. Developer vision matters because it allows them to enjoy what they’re producing and to let their vision find fans in its natural audience of people who appreciate it. I will update this opening post with other common issues I see being described. That being said I’ll now give my take on things.
The Hotfix
This felt like a stop-gap band-aid for a wound that needs surgery. Or rather a hotfix to prevent players from gearing up too quickly and easily when really a deeper patch is what is appropriate.
I do NOT feel that the drop-rates were an issue. I think the issue is how easily you could reach the point you get those drop rates. A couple of builds (I’ve only done the end game Moze and Fl4k setups this far so can’t comment on the other two characters) could use easily acquirable gear to slaughter the end-game on TVHM Mayhem 3. There is also the porcelain pipe-bomb, the way Fl4k can kill bosses through their invincibility phases etc.
I think the issue is not the amount of loot we were getting but how easily and QUICKLY we could clear content to get that amount of loot. Bosses dropping so few legendaries is lame as hell. But them dying in a split second is also lame as hell. I think Bosses being challenging on high Mayhem is a good thing, because some of them are very mechanically fun, they each offer some unique rewards to collect, that’s all good! And the players being able to insta-kill them, while amusing in the short-term is very poor form for enjoying the game longer term. I want to go through a tough fight, and then get rewarded highly!
There is an issue of how the trash mobs/non boss characters getting scaled too highly will make that aspect tedious though. So what would probably be ideal is if bosses and minibosses got separate bonuses on-top of the overall bonuses enemies receive in mayhem. Trash mobs becoming bullet sponges like in BL2 is not something I’d like to see happen, personally.
The Torgue sticky grenade nerf was fair though. They’re still insane on Fl4k which is a whole other issue I don’t know how to address. I think we can at least agree that what feels terrible right now is that bosses don’t feel rewarding in mayhem 3. This is especially punishing for builds that aren’t min-maxing, people that aren’t power gamers. Again, we have to consider that with millions who will get Borderlands 3, different types of gamers will enjoy different things about the game.
Maybe when raid-bosses are introduced again things will be better but I still think it’s a shame that boss drop rates are so darn low now. They die too quickly and so the drop rate seems fair to the level of challenge, but I rather them go back to dropping a few legendaries on average on the highest difficulty but be challenging and take a while on the highest difficulty.
Loot Tinks dropping a few legendaries is GREAT! But they should be a lot rarer and have many potential spawn locations so that it doesn’t feel good to just farm one. It should be something that only feels good to rarely experience organically, but when you do see one you get EXCITED.
Build Diversity
Something I want the players to understand before I get into this is that you cannot have challenging content AND build diversity for that challenging content without some level of homogenizing the player builds. That is to say that if you want the characters and their builds to FEEL mechanically unique and different from each other in any way, then there is going to be a RANGE of performance between them in the hardest content. You can’t have both.
What you could have though is acceptable levels of drop rates on a lesser challenging mode. For example if you imagine that they added Mayhem 4 and 5, that maybe they could make the drop rates on 3 “good enough” and the drop rates on 5 be fantastic for the handful of builds that can still feel good there.
Ideally the skills that we can agree are something you would never pick could use buffs, tweaks, or reworks to at least feel viable in middle-challenging content.
As for balancing the various gun brands, it’s too early for me to comment on it.
Mayhem scaling problems
The three main things I’ve noticed so far are just the following:
- Player-driven vehicles die so easily in mayhem 3 it’s not fun. They should get damage resistance that increases with mayhem 3. I don’t mean that a vehicle should feel as tanky in 3 as it does in non mayhem mode, but it shouldn’t be made of paper either.
- Fl4k pets need the same treatment as above. Even if I spec into pet stuff I find my pet dying all the time. Maybe someone will correct me and let me know I’m doing something wrong but it feels useless as opposed to doing a gun build.
- Multiplayer mayhem 3 feels punishing. Even playing with 3 other people using good builds somehow the game is much much slower with 4 people than it is with 3. I don’t mean harder I mean slower. Enemies become so tanky that slogging through the trash monsters is a chore, but bosses still die super fast thanks to the exploitative or at least OP builds. It’s definitely taking a lot more than 4 times longer for me to kill one monster than it did in solo. I feel like I am punished for playing multiplayer in mayhem 3 at this point and that’s not good.
The difficulty
I think we can mostly agree that this is, as other people are commenting, the easiest Borderlands so far and that’s not so good. It’s not that every build is so easy but rather that there are a multitude of ways currently to completely demolish everything solo even on the highest difficulty. At least the circle of slaughter can be rough solo for squishier builds.
I think people want an option that isn’t hyper challenging but feels alright to farm, but also an option that’s hyper challenging and extremely rewarding if you’re a top player.
other gripes (feel free to respond with more and I’ll update this thread as I have time)
- The bugs obviously.
- The Vaults friggen suck
- unskippable cutscenes need to become skippable ASAP if I’m to make at least 3 different builds for every character, 12 saves total.
- Rotating, zooming, moving the map is all weird and clunky and slow
- clicking a fast travel on the map is sometimes hard because the cursor selects a vehicle station or something close to it instead. The fast travel should always be “on top” of the other icons and have priority when you’re cursor is clicking near others.
- 50 spaces in my bank is a joke. I’m going to have like 5 mules at this point, and that’s BEFORE the DLC adds more stuff that’s fun to collect.
