Unannounced Mission Difficulty Changes?

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#1

Hi all,

We’re seeing some unannounced changes (at least, I don’t remember seeing mention of them). Many PvE missions are much, much more difficult in 5-man advanced now.

I’m pretty sure there were changes, because, for instance, in Sabotuer, the first boss has a completely different fight.

At any how, we’re getting our rear-ends handed to us in Heliophage. Can’t even get to the final part. I suppose we’re just terrible … we have beaten this probably 40 times now, but are getting completely stonewalled today.

Could be just us, but I thought I’d post and see if we could get an official comment.

Thanks.

#2

To clarify some things …

We also noticed differences in Saboteur and Archive. We know mob spawns are somewhat random, but we got around 15 Brutes right after Chronicle opens the door in Archive, and 2 concurrent Disruptors in the final protection fight in Saboteur. There also seem to be many more mini-bosses, like Thrall Bonecrushers, where I don’t recall seeing them before.

And I did want to add - the changes to the Shift Supervisor Varl (sp?) fight in Saboteur were a great surprise and I think it’s very cool that Gearbox is still adding things. We’re open to having to find new tactics, and we’re very glad things remain challenging - there’s nothing worse than farming the same trivial content over and over and over again. We were just surprised and slightly concerned when met with three straight mission failures - I can’t recall that happening before in my ~300 missions.

#3

That’s happened to me both before and after the recent patches. When you get an unlucky spawn with a bajillion Brutes (or one with 3-4 Enforcers), it’s the RNG giving you a hard time. Afaik, each of those spawns is independent of the others and I have a feeling that there are some spawns that are specifically designed to be harder than others.

The exact same thing can happen in the Henchman room in Algorithm: I’ve had groups get swarmed by something like 10-12 Ronin and had other groups see none whatsoever (truly massive amounts of suicide bots and minion bots, though).

Something to keep in mind with the Chronicle door is that a lot of those enemies spawn at some point after the anchor hits the ground. If you destroy the anchor immediately, the enemies won’t spawn, which can be very helpful when it’s a Brute anchor (which will just drop 2-3 more Brutes down when you manage to kill the first 2-3).

They actually didn’t add anything. His script was bugged so that he wouldn’t leave his little nook until he was hurting badly (or just knocked out of it with a push) and he has always spawned those drones (he spawns them at certain hp %s and only when he’s in a position where he can actually have the drone appear without something else being in the way; as such, he didn’t spawn the drone that often since most people ended up killing him before he got too far away from his little nook). All they did was fix a bugged fight so that it actually occurred the way it was intended to occur.

#4

I confirm. The Saboteur’s first boss (was announced), changes in mobs on the last defense there too, changes in mobs in the Archive after the door.

#5

It wasn’t “not that often” for me, I’ve played that map 30 times, and no one in my 5-man 100-level group had ever seen it before either :slight_smile: We all thought it was new.

Same for the other stuff, really. No one in my group had never seen Bonecrushers in the first area of Heliophage, or a double-Disruptor spawn in Saboteur. I suppose it’s possible we’ve had some streaky RNG, but surely the 5 of us have played over 1,000 missions combined. That’s a long streak.

We’ll end up giving things another go this weekend, and I’ll post back here, but I’m leaning towards thinking that even if we’re wrong about some of these things, at least one of them is likely the case just based on the minuscule chance of not rolling them at least once during our hundreds of previous runs. We’ve seen ridiculous mass-Brute, mass-Ronin, etc. stages many times, we’ve just not seen this extreme amount of top-level baddies / minibosses / whatever before.

Thanks for your post.

#6

I’ve seen waves with multiple disruptors in final Sab fight at least 2-3 times during Lootpocalypse.

#7

Yeah, it just seems like RNG is no longer in your favor.

#8

5 man was already hard?

I mean compared to two man.

#9

But there are changes in mobs. There are multiple Veil walkers on the third defense in the Saboteur now, much more than before.

#10

In Algorithm, they added a turret to the room with Henchman a patch or two back, unless I played that mission 60 times without it spawning. Why couldn’t there be changes this patch?

If it was just me, I probably wouldn’t have said anything, but remember - everyone in my 5-man 100-level PvE group was noting the same things I was. If all five of us have done 50 runs of those stages (some have done more), the chances of us cumulatively never encountering even a rare, 2% chance spawn would be a 0.06% (zero-point-six-percent) chance, and we saw changes three maps in a row. The chances of that are 1 in 300 million.

I’m not saying we’re not wrong about some of the things, I’m just saying it’s very unlikely we’re all wrong about all of them. At the absolute least, perhaps they increased the odds of some low-probability encounters.

#11

I remember fighting that turret back during the Lootpocalypse. It’s just a single stinger turret up on the top floor so it dies pretty fast and isn’t much of a threat. I’ve only seen it show up in 5 man runs and only some of the time. It’s entirely possible that it’s been able to spawn all along and it just tends to get destroyed by errant AoEs or amidst the rush of everything else without really paying it much attention.

[quote]At the absolute least, perhaps they increased the odds of some low-probability encounters.
[/quote]

If anything, I think this might be it.

Something to keep in mind is that there are a lot of details and events that occur that people don’t really notice or remember until someone else brings it up even when they’re right in front of their faces (if you’re a martial artist, you’ll understand the ideas of black dot and white dot focus and how people generally have to be trained to achieve white dot focus). A lot of stuff just slips through our attention, especially when we’re focusing on other stuff more heavily, like keeping the sentry alive as opposed to tracking every enemy that happens to be in the area. I know that I’ve had a few 5 person runs through the Archive where the other people in the group didn’t realize that 3 Bonecrushers had spawned because they were on the other side of the fight dealing with a pair of Enforcers (who I didn’t realize had spawned; the guy in the middle trying in vain to fend off a pair of beastmasters summoning adds in a constant stream didn’t realize that either set of micro-bosses had appeared).

#12

We need to keep in mind things do get Gearboxy in advanced mode.
It’s the Unreal Engine so…Serious Sam!

#13

Yeah - a patch or two back was Lootpocalypse :stuck_out_tongue: That’s when I first saw it as well, after not seeing it for dozens of 5-mans. If Gearbox calls them updates or something else, perhaps “patch” wasn’t the correct term. I meant “a change to the game”.

As an aside … for you PvE lovers out there - I know Algorithm has the most bosses and Isic’s cool voice acting, but for the love of something holy, please vote for a different map every now and again! :dizzy_face: :wink:

I absolutely believe this is as well, and though I can’t vouch for my teammates, I’ve spent part of my professional career in the gaming industry, the rest in UI design and architecture for Internet applications. It’s still possible I missed these things, but I’m generally detail-oriented.

I’ll agree, then, with this, as my skeptical baseline. If I see any other concrete changes - I’ll report back here.