Okay, I am a bit confused here. I am going to assume that you’ve done little research for building in this game. Mayhem 2.0 did ruin a lot of Action Skill based builds, and Amara’s questionable Melee build. BUT its not unplayable at all.
A major concern I see people complain about is mainly lag/crashes, but that’s mostly your system. If a hot fix says it fixed reported crashes in this place or during this quest, those actually work. Any other crashing is from a system that has too much going on and therefore crashes. It is the hardware issue. That’s the “unplayable” aspect of this.
Moving on to Fl4k comment? Fl4k’s Master skill tree is actually used a lot, still in Mayhem 10 as well. Its pretty strong, it had a rough start near the start of the game, especially once players started to get into mayhem, but they fixed it and added more damage for the pet. Once that happened I used Gamma Burst in Mayhem 4 (before Mayhem 2.0) all the time and used the Tr4iner classmod which at one point my pet converted like 4 people in a row and I had a tiny army on my side. THE only thing that is terrible about that tree is the capstone skill Dominance, but I’ve left a giant “buffs” post in my own thread already, so won’t get into that here.
Yes the balance was shaken in this update, I get that. Most of the 200% anointments just made the old 100% range anointments useless, but people have actually not mentioned that one at all. The best anointments so far that seem to work for all characters, are the “while below 50% health gain 150% bonus radiation damage” and the “deal 300% weapon damage to enemies above 90% health”. Why? Well any bonus damage is good, but radiation is a really good element in this game and it helps with high damage output. Plus Moze and Zane get really good use out of it due to their ability to keep shields at full, meaning they can get away with using Front Loader and Deathless without fear of dying. The 300%/90% anointment is actually broken as hell and I think that will get changed in the next update. Right now this anointment affects ALL damage you do as you hold the gun. Today I watched a build where a man was using Amara and just having her nova shield cause a train reaction to deal up to a couple BILLION damage, yes, Billion. It was 1-shotting everything and anything. Yes, on Mayhem 10, you know, where things have 12500% more everything. Just dying to a nova shield.
This update was new and the first few days were a mess, I hated it and was upset by it. Some people instantly went into whining mode, like myself. Others decided to stick by it and figure things out for everyone else. Yes, the new Cartel drops are all very strong other than the Iceburger, but that seems like a novelty weapon like the Long Musket (I wish it wasn’t because a flamethrower weapon would have been awesome). The Mayhem 6+ drop weapons are also very strong. To the point that at first we whiners figured that if you didn’t have any of those two groups of weapons, you couldn’t do anything. But that’s not true. SNTL 100% cryo is still very strong on a lot of weapons. Gamma Burst anointments, splash damage for Moze, Amara still broken, but that’s a different story. A lot of old and new anointments are still very strong, but the builds have to shift a bit.
In conclusion, yes the game did get a huge imbalance. But it isn’t so bad that it isn’t unplayable. It’s very playable. Some characters got stronger during the patch, others weaker, but all have builds that shred enemies at Mayhem 10. You just need to find them. The last Mayhem update they had to change the damages of action skills and pets, so I figure they’ll end up doing that again. Plus some nerfs to some of the current anointments. But Mayhem 10 is doable. So doable that my Zane can use a Bitch with the 50% health adds 150% radiation, and it melts. Yes, the Bitch, one of the weakest SMGs. I think you fished too much for the negative feedback that this game seems to get every time someone reads Borderlands 3, instead of looking up ways to help you figure out a good path to take in order to do Mayhem 10. Also if you jumped into anything higher than Mayhem 4 the moment it came out, that might be your issue. Previously weapons at level 57 worked in Mayhem 4, but after the change the damage scales to be stronger in each Mayhem, which means you have to do a slow progression and grind up to mayhem 10. My friend and I went from 4, to 6, to 8, and are now on 10. And we spent long periods of time farming for a full kit of gear before moving on, because the damage is that important. Its just a more time consuming grind, much like the older, crappier, grinding for BL2. Sorry for the long post, but I just don’t think you did much research and you are part of the “whiner” group that I was once a part of.