There are a few coms that are almost entirely focused on defense, either via skills or their special attributes. There’s a fundamental problem with them, one that I don’t think the devs realize.
There’s a limit to how much survival you need.
That’s it. You need to get to a certain amount of survival boosts, and from that point on, anything more is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful, because it means you’re not investing into killing the enemy.
Think about it; if you kill an enemy, they can’t even start to hurt you. But if you don’t kill them right away, the amount of damage they deal goes up exponentially. By investing too much into survival, you hurt yourself more than you help.
See, Class Mods give the unique ability to overlevel an ability, up to doubling its effectiveness. But the only thing that is truly important, the only thing in actually limited supply, is damage. You see this especially when people farm for special modifiers on COMs: You don’t want damage resistance, you want that illusive +45% crit bonus, AND damage for your weapon type, AND damage for your weapon manufacturer. Or fire rate, or crit damage. Never survival.
There are two exceptions.
One is single-point skills. If, for example, the Techspert class mod gave a damage boosting skill, people would still likely want a 4/1 mod with Very Expensive Jacket, just because it gives such a huge bonus for such a small sacrifice.
The second is skills that improve exponentially as they near max level. Grit, from Borderlands 2, for example. 5/5 points gave you a 60% chance to go down at low health, while 11/5 points gave you a mere 12% chance, functionally a 500% increase in the skill’s effectiveness. Probably the best example of that in this game is Vampyr, which can get up to restoring 40% of the player’s health with one grenade. Given that the health gate is at 5%, and the survival point is 50%, 5 points in Vampyr is also about 500% more effective.
But skills like Ready For Action? Like a Ghost? Rise to the Occasion? They’re functionally useless, skill bonuses that nobody will ever in their right mind take. Not unless the other bonuses of the class mod make it worth taking on its own, and the skill bonuses are just a cherry on top.
Just change them out for skills that are actually useful when boosted above their level cap, and those class mods might actually become useful.