If I’m enjoying my time in game, how long it takes me to kill an enemy does not enter into consideration as long as it’s reasonable: after I played for an hour (assuming that’s all I have available) I don’t look back and ask how efficient I was or what TTK I managed to achieve.
It looks like you approaching it from the angle of efficiency, and some people don’t.
To your original question: I used to go for M4/M8 to minimize # of modifiers, but recently decided that M11 is a sweet spot for me: once character unlocks Mayhem after main story, I crank it up to 11 and head to DLCs. Keeps visual pollution minimal and drop rates are more than sufficient for me.
An AI overhaul of enemies could indeed yield a much better system to increase difficulty. But at what expense?
Environmental damage gains Mayhem scaling, including water conducted DoT’s and the dreaded barrels. How much deadlier do they need to be?
This I will 110% agree with, bloating enemy HP is without a doubt the laziest way to increase difficulty.
I play on M11 for the simplicity. No modifiers to worry about, my game runs more smoothly at M11 than it does with modifiers and I don’t have to worry about a prized modifier roll being scrambled from lobby migration. Do I miss Speed Demon? Absolutely, however this prize wasn’t worth the sluggish FR and visual pollution from modifiers.
As for the loss of loot, play all 5 rounds of Slaughter Shaft on M11 and see if you notice any less orange on the ground.
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chrisdechent8
(We are aware of it, so we can look into it, but not fix anything, at this time.)
#25
For world drops. Dedicated drop rate stays the same. A lot of the best weapons are dedicated drops, and the reduction in droprate for world drops isn’t nearly large enough to cause a noticeable difference.
suddenly he’s moving WAY faster and dealing more damage as a result!
Zane already has more gun damage than he knows what to do with. With the amount of skills that boost his gun damage by a ridiculous amount, any bonuses gotten from speed demon will be negligible at best and outright unnecessary at worst.
M8 you don’t need to deal with buddy system, dazed and infused, not in the face, any of those.
That’s a lie and you know it. M8 gives one “easy” modifier and one “very hard” modifier. BS, D&I, NTF, RL, etc. are all “very hard” modifiers.
Holy Crit is also a net reduction in time to kill as long as you can aim, and with plenty of builds which give free crits left and right even if you can’t.
The 25% crit bonus isn’t worth the 50% non-crit dmg reduction, especially when multiple characters already have skills that buff crit dmg. Additionally, buffing gun dmg inherently buffs crit dmg as a result. Holy Crit is a noobtrap modifier that is unnecessary at best and actively counterproductive at worst.
I just don’t get why you would want it to take more than twice as long to accomplish any given task in exchange for fewer rewards, personally.
You keep saying this, but we’ve already established that this is verifiably false. Honestly it’s starting to sound like your build just isn’t very good and you don’t want to admit it.
Oh gosh and I forgot (since I haven’t played other than M-11 for a while) the MAIN reason why I don’t like to play with modifiers; Excessive Visual Pollution
It just gets to the point of not being able to see anything and firing based on the mini-map.
Getting rid of extra visual pollution made M-11 the only one I want to play.
“That’s a lie and you know it”… You know Mayhem modifiers can be freely rerolled, without penalty and without limit, right? Once set they persist across all zones and multiple play sessions. There is literally zero need to ever play with a modifier you don’t like at any given mayhem level. So no, not a lie.
“Holy Crit is a noobtrap”… Nah, not so much - crit damage is multiplicative with gun damage, and though most characters have gun damage for days, crit damage is less common and provides greater damage benefits than might be apparent at first glance. As anyone who knows their damage calculations is aware, buffing gun damage by 25% and buffing crit damage by 25% are NOT equivalent things. This statement is blatantly and demonstrably false, but also contradicts your premise that you’re redmisting everything regardless. If they’re all being one shot and you have damage falling out your ears, then what would it matter if you’re dealing less damage on non-crits? First, why aren’t you hitting your crits, and second, I thought you were redmisting regardless? What happened to your damage?
“Starting to sound like your build isn’t very good”. Hey, maybe not. I mean I never get downed, kill all enemies easily regardless of mayhem mode, and swiftly and easily accomplish any tasks I set out to do. My damage figures are in the millions and I typically have 200k shields but yeah, I’m probably just a newb who has no idea what they’re talking about, and as such the points I raise are inherently worthless, right? Me being bad would somehow make your arguments that you have more than enough damage to deal with the extra health regardless and… something else I’m sure, far more valid and compelling
I play on M11 because I can’t stand any Mayhem Modifiers even on something like M8 (which is where I played exclusively until M11 came out). Also because at M1-M4 every enemy just insta-explodes when I shoot them even on my less powerful builds and that isn’t fun to me. I like just a little bit of resistance to make victory feel a little sweeter. That being said, if M1-9 had a NO MODIFIERS option like M10 has, I would settle a little lower because almost all of my characters are running something nowhere near as powerful as the meta, which means currently a lot of my builds are out of their league. Usually it’s not a big issue, but when you fight certain boss enemies (like in DLC4) it’s very clear that I can’t meet the DPS expectations. M7 is where I would likely fit the best but anointments aren’t guaranteed on items at that level so I’d just raise it to M8.
My build gets ■■■■■■ over by modifiers of all levels. I use an attack command build on FL4K.
Speed Demon - Makes my pet move so fast I can’t control it anymore and I lose damage
More than OK Boomer - The grenade for some reason insta-kills or severly damages the pet
Not The Face - Lowers pet crit damage which is much bigger deal with purple
Holy Crit - Lowers pet crit damage which is much bigger deal with purple
Any elemental immunities - pets have 2 bonus elements (fire and rad) on top of a base element, so 2 or 3 of the medium mods ■■■■ you over
I’ll take no modifiers any day. Clear speed is the same, but I don’t need to worry about my pet damage getting ■■■■■■.
If they’re all being one shot and you have damage falling out your ears, then what would it matter if you’re dealing less damage on non-crits?
Because the non-crit 50% damage reduction is a reduction of your total damage, not just gun damage. While this might not necessarily make enemies unkillable, it’s certainly a very significant and noticeable difference.
First, why aren’t you hitting your crits
Some weapons can’t crit at all (facepuncher, Lob), melee amara ends up with a 50% dmg reduction for literally no reason, it’s anti-synergistic with Mindsweeper unless you take PTHP (but even then it’s only a 30% chance to not have your grenade damage cut in half), some weapons (boom sickle, monarch, etc.) have spread patterns that make it functionally impossible for all of your pellets to hit the crit spot unless you’re literally kissing the enemy, and some legendary gimmicks and action skills (plaguebearer, backburner, ember’s purge, kaos, BotD, Boogeyman clone, drone, phaseslam, phaseflare, punchbear) either can’t reliably crit or can’t crit at all, causing a massive damage reduction for a 25% crit boost that you can already get from your skill trees.
M11 because I like no modifiers and having less world drops. It makes it feel a bit more like BL2 or BL1 in that regard. I would lower the drop rates even more if I could though because legendaries are just way to common. And unless they allowed modifiers to be hand picked which would make M10 better in every way and simply far to rewarding for the effort you put in I see no reason to go back to it. Some may disagree with me and others will agree but so be it. That is the honest truth in my opinion!
All of what you post is true, though incomplete, but the biggest thing you are seeming to miss is this - difference in Effective Hit Points are the same, whether due to increases in Enemy HP or reductions in damage dealt. Comparing Mayhem 8 with Holy Crit to Mayhem 11 without, enemies have 61/101 health, which means if you’re dealing half damage to them, or 50/100 normal damage, you’re effectively dealing 82.78% “normal” damage, while +25% crit damage means your crits are dealing 125/100 on those hits divided by the same 61/101 health modification, or 206% normal damage on those. (And yes I know it’s not actually 125/100 but at minimum it’s 165% “normal” damage just from the EHP change alone)
You are arguing simultaneously that nearly halving your damage through moving to M11 is not a big deal, and that halving your damage on non-crits is a big deal. As though those weren’t effectively the same. Anti-synergy with Mindsweeper doesn’t matter anyway if everyone is instantly vaporized such that differences in their EHP don’t matter, and if differences in EHP do matter, then playing on M8 where the EHP is lower and the rewards are higher makes sense.
Edit: Also just want to point out, if you’re running a build where crits are not a primary component of your damage such as Melee Amara, you would then just run “not the face” instead, which at that point has basically no impact. Whichever is more advantageous to your overall damage figure based on your mix of crits vs non-crits for damage.
Playing M11 on all chars. Don’t see the point myself in going lower, Speed Demon isn’t worth dealing with other annoying modifiers (even though I love Speed Demon), and the game is already baby’o’clock on highest difficulty. I don’t wanna fall asleep while playing video games \o/
Originally i was only playing m10, got my build strong enough to handle most of it, but holy crit was hindering it from completing true takedowns (melee builds)
I tend to play on the “highest difficulty” possible in games. So I jump straight to M4, then M10 when released. Now I do M11 because performance issues removed when there are no modifiers.
And as others have mentioned, clearing areas “efficiently” is not really why I play Borderlands, especially when the difference in TTK between say…Mayhem 6 and Mayhem 11 is "do I need to shoot once or twice after using my Action Skill? Do I need to shoot at all?" Taking twice as long to do something does not matter all that much if the effort involved is fundamentally low.
Likewise, given the way world/dedicated loot drops work, the difference in rewards between Mayhem levels reaches levels where doubling them no longer feels meaningful. In terms of rewards, Mayhem 11 gives me 20 guns I won’t use, while Mayhem 10 gives me 40 guns I won’t use.
I just stick with Mayhem 4. At first I just stuck with Mayhem turned off but after a while it got the point where I was blowing everything away almost comically fast, Mayhem 4 seemed to be the best way to give the baddies enough girth while not adding too much and also have the fewest amount of modifiers possible. Even though I’d rather be able to go without modifiers at all (And frankly that’s an option that shouldn’t be exclusive for those running with M10 enemy buffs) but the Slayer and Healing Drone ones are about as vanilla as I can otherwise get which is fine by me.
The downsides are that I won’t see a Sandhawk or a Monarch without outside help, but I have zero interest in fighting baddies with 100x their base health/shields/armor. More power to those that enjoy M10 and have managed to conquer it, but it just ain’t for me.
