#1

I think the weapon skills in Borderlands 1 are really a very nice feature. I never understood why they got removed from the game since BL2. But it seems like the majority did not care. I mean does it break the game balance or is it such a massive work to implment this. There are countless items and skills that modificate almost every number in the game mechanic, having one that improves weapon useage with gained weapon experiene would only be another way of improvment by gameplay.

I wonder, was this feature such a big fail in BL1 that you devs though, this mistake we never do again or something? Are my preferences of usefull features really so exotic when i find this feature good?

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#2

It was replaced with BadAss Rank in BL2/TPS and with Guardian Rank in BL3.

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#3

But guardian only works after you finished the game the first time right? So far it didn´t for me. Alright.

I still remember my very first BL playthrough with the Siren, had the luck to get an SMG with ammo reg early on wich made my SMG skill rocked in the sky early on giving me a huge advantage. Both BadAss and Guardian only start to really become noticable effective at the second, third or fourth playthrough.

So it doesnt really feel like a real similar replacment, more like removing 123 and adding XYZ

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#4

It’s not the same exact system, but still it wasn’t erased from the series, just changed to different one.

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#5

From memory, GBX wanted a system like BL1’s but that wouldn’t arbitrarily cap, and would cover more abilities than simply weapon stats. Which is where BL2’s BAR came in. That had it’s own problems, such as the random/not so random choices offered for where you could spend your rank tokens as you gained them. Which is where GR came in.

There’s pros and cons to each system, basically. I think BAR makes a little more sense since the action skill categories/COM boosts in BL2 don’t really fit into well defined roles they way they do in BL1 (pistol/sniper Mordy, SMG Lil, etc). I’m still trying to figure out the thinking behind BL3’s GR system though.

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#6

I liked the weapon proficiency system too, but it had the downsides of making it harder to swap weapon types (if you played with shotguns for ages and then used a pistol, you’d get no bonuses and might swap back), and also not affecting other characters (so if you start a new game, you lose all your bonuses).
The BL2 system was good in that it gave general bonuses that affected all weapons (so you can swap whenever you want) and those bonuses carried over to all characters. The only downside was that it rewarded challenge completion and not direct gun usage, which can feel disconnected (to increase my reload speed, I need to find some hidden symbols and climb a tower, etc), though most of the challenges were focused on gun usage.
The BL3 guardian rank system feels closer to BL1, since it’s based on xp, which matches more directly with gunplay. If the challenges had just given xp (like BL1), as well as eridium maybe, it would have fit nicely between BL1 and BL2. Complete challenges or just shoot stuff and your gun gains bonuses over time.

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#7

I view it as an extra skill tree that is common to all characters, is customizable (you can tweak all individual ‘skills’ ON/OFF, not passives, though), and most likely extendable.

It provides an additional progression ladder, which I like (still have ~1.3 trees worth of tokens to work towards on my Xbox profile, even more on Epic). Basically rewards you for playing more. :slight_smile:

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#8

One think that I really preferred about BAR over GR is that if you had a load of BAR points to redeem you could spam enter to redeem them randomly over all the stats as the selection if stats was random each time and not split into the three categories like GR is, just for me I don’t want to invest in just one of the three GR trees now that I have everything unlocked but it’s just a pain to slowly select what you want rather than just spam redeeming

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#9

This is the way I have come to view GR Perks in BL3. I believe they wanted all 4 VHs to have a certain skill set in common, thus the GR Perks.

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#10

My thoughts:

I like the idea of gaining experience for weapons used (ala BL1) . But I do prefer the ability to spread progression bonuses across all characters (ala BL2/TPS, BL3), so I am not certain that you could effectively combine the two. Unless perhaps the weapon specialization was an add-on progression specific to only that character while more generic progression bonuses still applied across all characters?

I know that I also liked how BL1 had weapon skills as part of class skills, so that certain VHs were better with certain types of weapons. It makes more sense to me from a Role-play perspective that each class would have different strengths and weaknesses regarding specific weapon types. I would like to see that come back as well. Maybe a solution could be to allow weapon specific bonus progression on a per character basis as mentioned above, but for only specific weapons that pertain to that class…? :thinking:

Since these progression bonuses would be character specific, they could be activated on your very first character (and every character afterwards) without having to wait for an initial completion of the main storyline. Also, as separate bonuses, by re-introducing weapon-specific skill bonuses in this manner, it could be a way to add progression-based skills to characters without impacting skill trees. Something for the devs to consider for BL4, perhaps?

I am on the fence regarding random assignment of spending bonus points versus pick and choose (BL2/TPS vs BL3). On the one hand, having a randomizer makes the process less stressful in terms of choices to be made when I just want to level up everything. On the other hand, there are some bonuses that I care more about and so sometimes I might want to focus on only those for a bit. I suppose the ability to randomly assign as an option would be cool so that you could have the best of both worlds, depending on your mood.

I kind of like BL3’s additional bonuses/perks that get unlocked at certain thresholds (though the cosmetic ones are lame to me). I also like BL3’s ability to turn on/off those perks as desired. Now if we could just get them to do the same for Mayhem Modifiers! :wink:

And last but not least, in terms of the name of the progression bonus modifier system, for me Badass Rank tops them all. :grin:

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