Let me make a “for instance”… let’s say you wanted to run an experiment and you decided to run through Maliwan Takedown twice. The first time you used Moze with a wagon wheel, a red card shield, a red queen grenade and a rocketeer com. The second time you ran Amara with a driver com, a transformer, and a recursion. Both on M4.
Likely, the first run you would think the game was hard af. The second time you might think this game isn’t too hard at all. So, it’s the same game, both had all level 50 legendary gear, both M4, but the “difficulty” was wildly different for you. So, we decide that we can make the game “too easy” using a specific combinations of class, mods, gear, etc…
They can do a certain amount of balancing to fix that… making crap weapons better, op gear and exploits less better… etc… but ultimately there will always be gear combos that make the game easy. But you can use whatever gear you want.
Maybe mayhem 2.0 will give everyone what they desire as far as challenge and higher difficulty for those that want it… or it could just be added modifiers and nothing more. Who knows?
How about for instance we talk about real builds, I’m pretty sure the first Amara solo run was done by phasezerker not driver. Or a r4kk build that uses a Maggie, brainstormer, lyuda or craps, and a cutsman, aside from how effective the brainstormer is on beefed up enemies nothing is gimmicky there.
I don’t think it is really healthy except towards the end of the dev cycle where everything is in a good place, as it wastes limited dev time and manpower that could instead be spent on stuff that benefits the 99% majority who don’t care for that sort of content. The game and vault hunters are still far from balanced or in an entirely ideal state, and truly challenging content and not stuff that is just cheap or hard and frustrating in the wrong ways in my opinion relies on a good baseline to accurately judge the difficulty.
I just described it, swap nades out for ase elements and keep your crit damage above 100%, I use a stopgap with cryo on ase and a last stand Otto idol,either a good hunter or stalker mod work well. The only reason Wotan is still somewhat hard at all for the build is that my lyuda isn’t anointed. Depending on the strategy they use after splitting the fight takes a few minutes or several minutes and I’m not.
The only I made this build is because I saw all the driver builds wrecking without good gear and I told myself I had to reach a level where I could compete with that mod.
UVHM, I’m sure, is on the way and the new enemy HP bloat will make it feel difficult again… then everyone will complain about the difficulty until the new builds and gear get sorted out then people with the better builds will complain that it’s too easy again.
Just think about this, the glass build I described and a gammaburst build destroy the raid together in a humble 15 minutes. If we had a CCC Zane freezing adds and a phazerker Amara or a , I think, firehouse Moze the raid would have to over double in difficulty to challenge them and quadruple if every roll on every piece of gear was perfect. The worst part is these are solid builds that would have synergy with each other, not melt bosses in a blink gimmick builds that aren’t good outside of a specific activity. I love making new builds but I hate the thought of my best builds gathering dust so other people feel a sense of achievement.
Think golden rule allows Amara to debuff with 3 extra points in laid bare, that is just one way teams can build synergy with ease.