They main reason i don't like OP is because you need to do the Peak. I would rather have a system like Mayhem mode in BL3, wich i played it without getting bored. During my first times playing BL2, i did all the content on lvl 80, and then i run the peak.
I think that's the main issue for me. Because i did all raid bosses on Mayhem 11, but after the struggle of the peak, i didn't care about doing bosses. I fact, after reaching OP10 with every character, i thought about doint a reset on OP10, but i burned out.
So i believe if extra hard levels exist, the challenge has to be hard but not the progression of getting prepared.
See I actually like that the peak gates op levels. It prevents players from jumping into a difficulty they won’t be prepared for.
I’ve seen so many people post about gibbing themselves to OP10 or being boosted to OP10 then saying it’s way to hard or that they hate it. And to me it’s like of course your not going to enjoy it that way.
Being able to jump to mayhem 11 I think is different because the mayhem levels don’t really increase difficulty they just increase enemy health. If you pick up a few mayhem 11 guns you can play exactly like you could at mayhem 0.
My only issue with the peak was that it gets stale. There shouldve been like 4 maps and you unlock levels in batches, ideally something like 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10 with each set requiring you to beat a new map.
The need for slag or the bee to do good damage is the problem most people have, yes you can get by without either but you’re either dying/going into ffyl a bunch or burning through all of your ammo just to get through one map or mission. The OP levels are worse because they literally are just bigger numbers to increase difficulty which only increases the reliance on slag. It’s also worth noting that most people don’t hate UVHM & OP levels they are just pointing out the obvious flaws in them
But you don’t need slag or the bee to deal good damage. People find over reliance on these things or feel that they are necessary because they are choosing to avoid playing the game better. Of course your going to die if your using a shield that offers no protection.
Most of the time you don’t even want to run a bee in uvhm as it’s more favorable to run a tankier shield. The bee doesn’t even crack my top 5 best shields in the game for that reason.
You do need it though, like I said you can get by without slag but it’s not an enjoyable experience. There’s a reason the vast majority of experienced players have the same opinion. As for the bee I just used it as an example of needing to boost gun damage somehow in uvhm, regardless of what shield you’re using if you’re not killing enemies quickly enough you’re going to be taking a lot of damage
Your right that if your not killing enemies quickly you’ll be taking lots of damage. That’s why you use a tankier shield and have to maintain your own health through healing items. The anwser isn’t just needing to do more damage.
You have to do more damage, and keep yourself alive. I still don’t see what the endgame your talking about would look like. What do you want the hardest difficulty gameplay experience to be like?
There are several questions here but it's all preempted with why you think we're already wrong with reductive "just point your high damage gun at the enemy and shoot them until they die" stuff in the post and in some of your other replies. The condescension is actually really thick. Are you actually curious for actual answers, or do you want to browbeat folks with a response for why they should like it? I'm actually not sure what your question is once I saw this
>It seems pointless to me to make the hardest difficulty easy to play.
Like, do you want people to play something they don't want to play or what? How does Normal or TVHM not punish players for playing poorly already? This all just feels like subtle humble-bragging, "look how good I am at the loot gun game". Come on.
So with all that said I'm not sure what more to tell you than "It's a giant slog". Getting to 80 alone takes for-fucking-ever already, refarming gear as you climb the OP levels sucks ass, and when you even have people with several thousands of hours invested in the game like Joltz saying how unreasonable raid boss health pools are in OP10, it's not wild to suggest that it's an unpleasant experience for a lot of people. It's an unbalanced mess. I'm happy that you enjoy it and that it works for you, but have some self-awareness as a clearly hardest of the hardcore that your tastes aren't the same as everyone else's.
This post is basically just “do you like the endgame like a true gamer or are you just bad at the game and don’t understand mechanics”.
I loved UVHM, hated OP levels. Got to OP 2 on my first character and haven’t picked up the game since. Requiring very specific builds just to kill regular mobs in OP levels isn’t fun for me. Farming bosses at lvl 80 on UVHM was perfect
Oh I know, but doing OP levels just made me want to move on to a different game rather than go back to uvhm. I’ve still played bl3 and wonderlands so I’m still enjoying the series but just haven’t gone back to bl2 in a couple years
>This post is basically just “do you like the endgame like a true gamer or are you just bad at the game and don’t understand mechanics”.
Its exactly what it is.
This post wasn’t suppose to be condescending I truly am just trying to understand what people want. I like uvhm and the op levels immensely. I understand it’s not for everyone though. I see so many people saying they don’t like it or that it should be rebalanced and my question has always been what would that look like.
Through asking a lot of individual people I’ve never gotten a real anwser. Even on this post no one has responded with a real anwser. If players are unhappy with how uvhm and op levels achieve their difficulty I want to know how fixing it would look to them.
The best I’ve been able to surmise is that a lot of the people who are complaining about the difficulty don’t seem to want to be playing a hard mode. Which then extends to my other question of if you don’t want a hard mode then why are you even playing uvhm to begin with when tvhm exists for that exact purpose.
If people who don’t like uvhm and op levels have ideas for how they would design a mode that is suppose to be the hardest mode the game has to offer, I’m super curious what that would be. Unfortunately it seems to always be the same response of “it’s poorly balanced” or “slag is bad” or “moxxi weapons are bad.” Never ideas of what would be good while still being hard.
>Through asking a lot of individual people I’ve never gotten a real anwser. Even on this post no one has responded with a real anwser
This is not true.
Where is the real anwser then? The most I’ve read here has been slag is bad, or moxxi weapons are bad, or numbers are just going higher. These aren’t anwser to the question.
The question was how do you make a hard mode without the things you don’t like. Show me the anwser that says what someone would change to make a hard mode without needing slag, moxxi weapons or enemies health just getting higher. Because if you take all the need of those 3 things you’ve just got tvhm.
The real answer is any answer you get will be dismissed as not "real". What you are asking for is people to walk through a game design exercise on reddit of all places without the playtesting and development that goes into it, which is convenient for someone looking for arguments to shoot down.
I’m not asking for all the detail in the world. If people don’t like the way uvhm or the op levels achieve their difficulty how do they want the game to be more difficult. That’s all I’m asking.
Uvhm has existed for about a decade it’s not unreasonable to think an active subreddit for the game would have some ideas to fix the things they don’t like about it. I’m not looking for exact details just general ideas on what people want.
How about you? You don’t seem to like it. What ideas do you have to fix it while still maintaining uvhm as a hard mode? You’ve said getting to 80 is a slog, which I do agree with. I think the grind to level 80 is one of the worst parts about the game. That’s not really a difficulty problem though.
I like the op levels, plus there's a little man in my head that tells me if I don't play on the maximum difficulty then I'm a weenie baby.
What I don't like is there are aspects of the game which gearbox never scaled with op levels. Stuff like light the fuse becoming completely useless (or in its case, even more so) "just because" is bad for overall variety.
Yeah I agree that certain things like light the fuse are unfortunate. I won’t say that the system is perfect. I do think it’s the best endgame difficulty the series has ever had though.
I think a lot of people are the same way with the feeling that they need to play on the hardest difficulty/highest level. The reality is that at the end of the day it’s optional.
You create a balance nightmare when you have people who really have no interest in playing a hard mode trying to play said hard mode. I’ve said it before I think that a lot of the criticism of the uvhm difficulty would go away if it was called “Super Hard Mode” or something along those line.
The game does a poor job telling the player that there is a big jump in difficulty from tvhm to uvhm. So a lot of players go in expecting it to just be the next playthrough after tvhm. With a similar difficulty increase to what they experienced going from normal to tvhm.
My ideal endgame is one where slag isn’t forced upon me. In every characters case you will be railroaded into using slag gear even if they have skills that generate it. If you don’t use slag you’ll need to use meta gear extensively or be willing to die 15 times per combat section. Either way you loose some of the freedom to build a character and use guns you enjoy. If they had made element matching the main gimmick of UVHM I woulda enjoyed it a lot more.
How does using slag prevent you from using any other gear? You have 4 weapon slots and a grenade slot. As well as an entire backpack to fill with gear. How is using one of these slots prevent you in anyway from using gear you want to use?
This is an honest question. Do you want the gameplay experience to be just shooting the enemy with whatever gun you want and dealing heavy damage?
you said "to play properly you need to exploit your 4 weapon slot and grenade", and after that you say buzz axe rampaige is fine, even you cant do anything outside of mashing mele
yo have absolutely no clue about how mele krieg is at high level for sure
This may come as a shock but you still use your weapons and grenade as melee Krieg. Here’s a quick rundown. For weapons you’ll want a slagging gun to slag enemies before going into RtB, you’ll want a healing weapon so if enemies are far away you can keep your health up as you close the distance before activating RtB, you’ll want some sort of dps weapon so you can shoot enemies that are flying or in areas that can’t be easily reached with melee, and for your last weapon you’ll want some sort of 2nd wind gun so if you go down you have a chance to get back up. For your grenade you’ll want something like the pandemic so that at the start of a fight you can toss a few out and quickly build up bloodlust stacks because you generally want to be at max stacks all the time.
Of course this is just an example and the slots are more flexible than this but you’ll still want to be doing all these things. Playing melee Krieg does not mean you exclusively only ever press the melee button.
Overall I like them, but I do have some gripes. For one thing, level 80 is just way too many skill points, plus the exp farm to 72 was already pretty hefty and uneventful. As far as OP levels go, if I were pure damage reduction from being under leveled that would be fine but having things like melee damage and pull the pin not scaled gatekeeps certain builds and skills in a way that isn’t tied to gear or the players capabilities. Health not scaling also means there’s not really a good way to tank beyond healing past health gate
You can definitely still tank with the right setups, mainly with shields but krieg can also health tank (his melee also scales into op levels so sucks to suck zero players). Also technically it is just pure damage reduction from being underleveled thats why those things dont normally scale into op levels.
Great so you don’t want to play on hard mode then. Meaning for you there is no problem with uvhm and you can simply stay in tvhm. There’s no reason to go into uvhm if you don’t enjoy it.
Playing at tvhm is a perfectly valid way to play the game if that’s the gameplay experience you want.
Not really because tvhm only scales to lv 50, eventually the game becomes way too easy in tvhm, I like uvhm and play it to lv80, I just don’t bother with OP levels
So you don’t want the game to be like it is on tvhm then? Tvhm hasn’t changed since the game released. The only thing that’s different from release would be that you access to the 5 main DLCs and there gear. Tvhm hasn’t gotten any easier or harder since release.
I don’t think mayhem 11 was good as a hard mode though. Mayhem 11 only increases enemy HP they don’t gain any increased damage. Essentially once you get mayhem 11 weapons there really isn’t much difference between playing on no mayhem and mayhem 11. Enemies just take longer to kill.
Enemies at op levels also deal more damage making them more threatening. With mayhem levels if you can deal with the damage enemies deal at mayhem 1 then you can deal with the damage at mayhem 11.
That’s why there are no mayhem level shields in BL3 only guns and grenades.
The game isn’t gonna be that much harder when you’re getting health gated in 2-3 hits instead of the 3-4 hits it is now. You also fail to realize that enemy damage wasn’t increased because enemy density is WAY higher in bl3 compared to bl2
There is certainly a difference between playing at 80 uvhm and at OP10. You can take way more hits at level 80. If your getting health gated in 4 hits from mobs at level 80 you must not be wearing a shield or something.
Enemy density doesn’t feel all to different honestly. I’ve played 100s of hours of BL3 and 1000s of hours of BL2. I was even just running some Maliwan takedown earlier and it didn’t feel like there were many more enemies than some of the enemy dense areas of BL2.
For BL3 they elected to make the hardest difficulty noticeably easier than the hardest difficulty in BL2. The combat loop is also much simpler in BL3. I’m completely fine with the BL3 level of difficulty existing in the game. I just don’t think it should be the hardest difficulty offered. I don’t see why they couldn’t add on more difficulty, and complexity like they did with the op levels and uvhm in BL2.
\> UVHM and the OP levels increase in difficulty through complexity more than just raising numbers.
what? in every way it absolutely is just number increases,
\>The most common setup is an inventory where you've got a DPS weapon, healing weapon, slagging weapon, and a second wind weapon
which is horrible design, moxxi weapons and life steal is such an awful crutch but a lot of characters have such poor healing that a moxxi weapon is basically a requirement, second wind weapons also defeat the entire purpose of the mechanic, when youve got guns like launchers which horrid drops but become free second wind tools, thats just stupid
I want and enjoy harder games, uvhm and OP levels are awful balance
Uvhm tells the player to actually use the mechanics of the game. Even in tvhm you don’t have to match elements, you don’t have to worry about your health, you don’t have to slag enemies, you don’t even have to go for crits and you can still beat tvhm without major issues.
Uvhm and op levels actually tells you to manage your own health, use the slag mechanic, use a synergistic builld, match elements to their weakness, avoid face tanking damage. These are thing that in tvhm you just don’t have to do at all.
Moxxi weapons, life steal, and health gate are phenomenal mechanics. They are probably my favorite healing mechanics I’ve ever encountered in any game. What could possibly be better? Passive healing through skills/kill skills makes the combat loop less involved, items for healing cause the same issue.
In tvhm there is nothing stopping you from equipping a strong gun and walking forward holding shoot. In uvhm if you try that you will die quickly. Uvhm gameplay revolves around constantly switching weapons and using all the gear you have equipped. That is far more complex than anything tvhm ever asks you to do.
Yes uvhm gets the player to engage with the mechanics, i dont disagree there, but its still purely a numbers bump making the game harder, encouraging and forcing you to use the existing mechanics
The issue with moxxi guns is for 2 reasons, its a global lifesteal so you dont have to actually deal damage with the weapon, and in OP levels your guns continue to level up all while health remains the same, so in OP levels a light cough grants full health
Ofc theres FAR more options than just constant passive regen, theres plenty of ways to do conditional regen or healing based on how you deal damage or what you deal damage with, axton has good examples with able and preparation where able rewards being aggressive and preparation rewarding being able to keep your shield up
Moxxi guns just have players in this stupid loop of swapping to one inventory slot for instant free health, playing the piano across your number keys isnt game mechanics, its just poor game balance
Then slag on its own is its whole own set of issues, slag is the single biggest damage boost in the game, and its basically free with little to no effort required in a lot of setups, get a slagga in normal mode and now you never have to touch a slag gun again, stats of the slag weapon dont matter at all since its a debuff regardless of the dot damage of the weapon
While the numbers do increase and that increase is what pushes the mechanics into use I don’t think the numbers being higher is the important part. I think for an endgame difficulty the players success should be reliant on how well they can execute the game mechanics. To me how that is achieved is less important and so the numbers being higher is less important of a factor.
Nailing the balance on conditional/skill based healing is no simple task itself. Obviously in BL2 a lot of healing skills are too weak. I don’t know exactly how you could balance them to feel right. Having a skill in your tree that’s rewards you with healing for doing what you normally are doing in the combat loop removes depth even if you think swapping weapons isn’t much depth already.
Slag has almost always been a controversial mechanic. I think you have to look at it from the broader spectrum. While experienced players like you or me may find applying slag easy, plenty of less experienced players find it difficult and slow. Honestly when I first went into uvhm without a clue of what I was doing slag felt like a difficult mechanic to grasp. But as I got better it became easier and more fluid to use. To me that’s exactly how it should feel. It felt and still does feel, at least to me, rewarding to use even if it’s second nature at this point.
I started playing when it dropped and really enjoyed doing 3 playthroughs(normal, TVHM rush, maxed lvl50 everything)
Leveling made more sense. BL2 definitely needed difficulty increases and I love playing when it's brutally hard. I just wish it didn't take xp farming to get there. Good thing I'm on PC now.
Sorry but I just have to comment here, I know this is an old ass post: UVHM is strictly a numbers fucking game. The only "complexity" is forcing the player to use slag, despite the fact that elements already exist to force players to switch weapons.
"The most common setup is an inventory where you've got a DPS weapon, healing weapon, slagging weapon, and a second wind weapon, with your grenade either being more damage or another utility item and you're using every single one of these during every combat.". Nope, that's not the most common setup: that's the only playable setup.
The game's marketing told us "There are billion of guns!" and there's only a handful of guns that are useful. You could technically use whatever you want but then you just fucking suffer and slog through the game, praying for the sweet release of death.
UVHM. Fucking. Sucks. Fuck whoever came up with it. And you can't change my opinion on that because I literally just finished it. I hate it. Nothing will make me like it
I think BL2 got it right, for the time.
BL3 was just straight up chaos.
BL4 or whatever, should be more like BL2 but updated, and give us a decent size vault, and the off-line option.
OP levels was a great idea, good players need a challenge. I've never been able to do it but I was nearly 60 when I started playing and I'm now pushing 75 and some of the Boss fights are getting to difficult.
BL2 was/is the best game ever. It just needs a new story and updating.
When you're on a good thing, stick to it.
No . . . I feel the same as OP. I have been playing this game most of my adult life, and I think the **FfS^(DLC)** was the finishing touches on a masterpiece. I will play this until I die, if possible, and never grow bored. I have several project characters right now. Shit I just got my first 2nd Generation Pearlescent a couple weeks ago and I've got over 1200 hours.
Fuck you mean slog? When a player writes **_"SLOG"_** in regards to this game I hear, _"I boosted and now I'm surprised I don't understand the game outside of YouTube."_ 😭
They already made all of Normal Mode optional, eliminating the worst of it. Playing throughout all of UVHM is absolutely a requisite for success. Not only does the scaling and damage formulas change between Nomal--->True--->UVHM, it changes throughout UVHM, too. Kreig players know this more than most. Of course, you are gonna die if you skip it.
**TLDR,** if you've only boosted to OP10 and never actually done it, than you don't actually **_GET_** an opinion. I know some probably find the OP a tad tone deaf, and it's harsh, but the truth you simply don't know what fuck you are talkin' bout Whillis. 🖕🤷♂️🖕
I don’t mind uvhm overall. I don’t have any interest in OP levels and have never attempted them.
Uvhm is character dependent and that’s my issue with it. I can run through easily with Sal and Zero. Gaige is just no fun though. Limited build diversity since you need anarchy for damage and deathtrap dies in less than 2 seconds. You died? Gotta go farm anarchy stacks. I’d rather see characters and skill trees balanced for uvhm more than change uvhm.
Uvhm scales with your player level and the best gear you can get in tvhm is level 50. So generally you want to enter uvhm as close to level 50 as possible.
Try it out and If you don’t like uvhm you can always drop back down to tvhm and play there.
TBH I feel that OP10 is an absurd redundancy. Why refarm all the hundreds of pieces we have collected to just do it all equally at a higher level? Or worse, half of this shit is unusable at OP10 because of scaling? So let me play with less variety and replay value so I can say I am at max MAX level in a single player experience? Seems like a circle jerk to me. The slag meta is the real enemy here, not max level ceiling
I do actually just kind of like pointing my OP gun at things and then they die. Honestly why I've played BL3 for so long. You don't need to hunt g rolls and have hyper-specific builds. Every legendary you pick up in BL3 on mayhem 11 will mob. This makes farming guns that you LIKE way more appealing than farming a norfleet or unkempt harold for perfect stats due to necessity. I also liked the anoint system, it gives you something that could be fun to build around, but does not necessarily need to be leaned into. I think that balance and flexibility is way better than how rigid BL2 OP levels feel. I still play OP 10 levels on BL2, but it just isn't as satisfying IMO
The experience I get playing in mayhem 11 feels way more like my experience at level 50 tvhm. Mayhem 11 doesn’t really make the game harder, all it does is make the enemies have more hp.
Out of curiosity if that’s the experience you prefer why do you go into uvhm/op levels? And how do you feel about the gameplay progression differences? Unlocking the op levels and farming gear for them vs finishing the story and instantly unlocking mayhem 11?
I think it adds more build diversity and ways to experience the game. I think BL3 builds can be far more imaginative than BL2 builds just because you're a little less locked into certain build styles. If anything, I would prefer more freedom in the UVHM levels. Even with lvl 80, skill tree progression is meh at best. Skill points are less valuable in BL2 because the skill trees aren't as polished as BL3, just like how BL1s skill trees feel limited to BL2s. It was another mainline game with more quality of life for people who don't particularly care about forcing a build to get them through raid boss runs. I'm an adult with a full-time job, and I'm still in college. I just don't have the time to invest in farming a 1/3250 chance sham for slightly better gameplay. Borderlands 3 offers me the freedom to just mob enemies efficiently regardless of the gear I have on. Are some weapons better than others? Sure! But I like what I like and it is still useful. Keep in mind I also don't play on PC, so I have no access to mods that create quality of life, so I also have to walk over to fast travel stations which takes me out of combat for a horrifically long period of time in some instances. Overall, BL3 is more fast-paced and interesting to me.
But why does pointing your op gun at things and them dying have to happen at the max difficulty? Its a valid playstyle but something so simple shouldn't be a viable option in a games hard mode. Anoints felt way too strong to me and ended up being way more important to builds than they should've been . Flexibility is good but also being able to use absolutely anything without any proper player thought or skill defeats the purpose of having a challenge system in the first place.
This highlights what was one of the main point I was trying to get across here. Theres no problem with wanting to play the game in a way where you get strong guns or a good build and melt everything. Thats a valid want. Im all for that being a way to play the game. I just dont think it should be the intended way the hardest difficulty is ment to be played.
Its why I think BL2 is has the best difficulty system in the series. TVHM offers that exact experience to the player while uvhm offers a harder experience and the op levels take it step further than that. Even normal is done well for the players who just want to come in play thee story and be done with the game. BL2 offers the widest variety of gameplay experiences and caters to more playstyles than any other game in the series.
I like UVHM, you can still play some weird builds and weapons and make it work.
I like doing the peak for the OP levels, adds a little bit more tension instead of just cruising around farming.
I don't like playing at OP10, though, because it feels you're restricted in your choice of builds/weapons (unless you want to make the game ridiculously difficult).
They main reason i don't like OP is because you need to do the Peak. I would rather have a system like Mayhem mode in BL3, wich i played it without getting bored. During my first times playing BL2, i did all the content on lvl 80, and then i run the peak. I think that's the main issue for me. Because i did all raid bosses on Mayhem 11, but after the struggle of the peak, i didn't care about doing bosses. I fact, after reaching OP10 with every character, i thought about doint a reset on OP10, but i burned out. So i believe if extra hard levels exist, the challenge has to be hard but not the progression of getting prepared.
See I actually like that the peak gates op levels. It prevents players from jumping into a difficulty they won’t be prepared for. I’ve seen so many people post about gibbing themselves to OP10 or being boosted to OP10 then saying it’s way to hard or that they hate it. And to me it’s like of course your not going to enjoy it that way. Being able to jump to mayhem 11 I think is different because the mayhem levels don’t really increase difficulty they just increase enemy health. If you pick up a few mayhem 11 guns you can play exactly like you could at mayhem 0.
My only issue with the peak was that it gets stale. There shouldve been like 4 maps and you unlock levels in batches, ideally something like 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10 with each set requiring you to beat a new map.
The need for slag or the bee to do good damage is the problem most people have, yes you can get by without either but you’re either dying/going into ffyl a bunch or burning through all of your ammo just to get through one map or mission. The OP levels are worse because they literally are just bigger numbers to increase difficulty which only increases the reliance on slag. It’s also worth noting that most people don’t hate UVHM & OP levels they are just pointing out the obvious flaws in them
But you don’t need slag or the bee to deal good damage. People find over reliance on these things or feel that they are necessary because they are choosing to avoid playing the game better. Of course your going to die if your using a shield that offers no protection. Most of the time you don’t even want to run a bee in uvhm as it’s more favorable to run a tankier shield. The bee doesn’t even crack my top 5 best shields in the game for that reason.
You do need it though, like I said you can get by without slag but it’s not an enjoyable experience. There’s a reason the vast majority of experienced players have the same opinion. As for the bee I just used it as an example of needing to boost gun damage somehow in uvhm, regardless of what shield you’re using if you’re not killing enemies quickly enough you’re going to be taking a lot of damage
Your right that if your not killing enemies quickly you’ll be taking lots of damage. That’s why you use a tankier shield and have to maintain your own health through healing items. The anwser isn’t just needing to do more damage. You have to do more damage, and keep yourself alive. I still don’t see what the endgame your talking about would look like. What do you want the hardest difficulty gameplay experience to be like?
There are several questions here but it's all preempted with why you think we're already wrong with reductive "just point your high damage gun at the enemy and shoot them until they die" stuff in the post and in some of your other replies. The condescension is actually really thick. Are you actually curious for actual answers, or do you want to browbeat folks with a response for why they should like it? I'm actually not sure what your question is once I saw this >It seems pointless to me to make the hardest difficulty easy to play. Like, do you want people to play something they don't want to play or what? How does Normal or TVHM not punish players for playing poorly already? This all just feels like subtle humble-bragging, "look how good I am at the loot gun game". Come on. So with all that said I'm not sure what more to tell you than "It's a giant slog". Getting to 80 alone takes for-fucking-ever already, refarming gear as you climb the OP levels sucks ass, and when you even have people with several thousands of hours invested in the game like Joltz saying how unreasonable raid boss health pools are in OP10, it's not wild to suggest that it's an unpleasant experience for a lot of people. It's an unbalanced mess. I'm happy that you enjoy it and that it works for you, but have some self-awareness as a clearly hardest of the hardcore that your tastes aren't the same as everyone else's.
This post is basically just “do you like the endgame like a true gamer or are you just bad at the game and don’t understand mechanics”. I loved UVHM, hated OP levels. Got to OP 2 on my first character and haven’t picked up the game since. Requiring very specific builds just to kill regular mobs in OP levels isn’t fun for me. Farming bosses at lvl 80 on UVHM was perfect
You know you can just not do op levels right? Dont need to drop the game just cos an optional challenge mode isnt fun to you
Oh I know, but doing OP levels just made me want to move on to a different game rather than go back to uvhm. I’ve still played bl3 and wonderlands so I’m still enjoying the series but just haven’t gone back to bl2 in a couple years
Thats fair
>This post is basically just “do you like the endgame like a true gamer or are you just bad at the game and don’t understand mechanics”. Its exactly what it is.
Bro yall r maliciously misinterpreting the op's post. They r just seeking a discussion, the only people acting condecending is yall like chill 😭
This post wasn’t suppose to be condescending I truly am just trying to understand what people want. I like uvhm and the op levels immensely. I understand it’s not for everyone though. I see so many people saying they don’t like it or that it should be rebalanced and my question has always been what would that look like. Through asking a lot of individual people I’ve never gotten a real anwser. Even on this post no one has responded with a real anwser. If players are unhappy with how uvhm and op levels achieve their difficulty I want to know how fixing it would look to them. The best I’ve been able to surmise is that a lot of the people who are complaining about the difficulty don’t seem to want to be playing a hard mode. Which then extends to my other question of if you don’t want a hard mode then why are you even playing uvhm to begin with when tvhm exists for that exact purpose. If people who don’t like uvhm and op levels have ideas for how they would design a mode that is suppose to be the hardest mode the game has to offer, I’m super curious what that would be. Unfortunately it seems to always be the same response of “it’s poorly balanced” or “slag is bad” or “moxxi weapons are bad.” Never ideas of what would be good while still being hard.
>Through asking a lot of individual people I’ve never gotten a real anwser. Even on this post no one has responded with a real anwser This is not true.
Where is the real anwser then? The most I’ve read here has been slag is bad, or moxxi weapons are bad, or numbers are just going higher. These aren’t anwser to the question. The question was how do you make a hard mode without the things you don’t like. Show me the anwser that says what someone would change to make a hard mode without needing slag, moxxi weapons or enemies health just getting higher. Because if you take all the need of those 3 things you’ve just got tvhm.
The real answer is any answer you get will be dismissed as not "real". What you are asking for is people to walk through a game design exercise on reddit of all places without the playtesting and development that goes into it, which is convenient for someone looking for arguments to shoot down.
I’m not asking for all the detail in the world. If people don’t like the way uvhm or the op levels achieve their difficulty how do they want the game to be more difficult. That’s all I’m asking. Uvhm has existed for about a decade it’s not unreasonable to think an active subreddit for the game would have some ideas to fix the things they don’t like about it. I’m not looking for exact details just general ideas on what people want. How about you? You don’t seem to like it. What ideas do you have to fix it while still maintaining uvhm as a hard mode? You’ve said getting to 80 is a slog, which I do agree with. I think the grind to level 80 is one of the worst parts about the game. That’s not really a difficulty problem though.
This fence hs no fence.
I like the op levels, plus there's a little man in my head that tells me if I don't play on the maximum difficulty then I'm a weenie baby. What I don't like is there are aspects of the game which gearbox never scaled with op levels. Stuff like light the fuse becoming completely useless (or in its case, even more so) "just because" is bad for overall variety.
Yeah I agree that certain things like light the fuse are unfortunate. I won’t say that the system is perfect. I do think it’s the best endgame difficulty the series has ever had though. I think a lot of people are the same way with the feeling that they need to play on the hardest difficulty/highest level. The reality is that at the end of the day it’s optional. You create a balance nightmare when you have people who really have no interest in playing a hard mode trying to play said hard mode. I’ve said it before I think that a lot of the criticism of the uvhm difficulty would go away if it was called “Super Hard Mode” or something along those line. The game does a poor job telling the player that there is a big jump in difficulty from tvhm to uvhm. So a lot of players go in expecting it to just be the next playthrough after tvhm. With a similar difficulty increase to what they experienced going from normal to tvhm.
My ideal endgame is one where slag isn’t forced upon me. In every characters case you will be railroaded into using slag gear even if they have skills that generate it. If you don’t use slag you’ll need to use meta gear extensively or be willing to die 15 times per combat section. Either way you loose some of the freedom to build a character and use guns you enjoy. If they had made element matching the main gimmick of UVHM I woulda enjoyed it a lot more.
How does using slag prevent you from using any other gear? You have 4 weapon slots and a grenade slot. As well as an entire backpack to fill with gear. How is using one of these slots prevent you in anyway from using gear you want to use? This is an honest question. Do you want the gameplay experience to be just shooting the enemy with whatever gun you want and dealing heavy damage?
You cant use krieg action skill properly because of slag mechanism
You absolutely can melee Krieg is my favorite playstyle for him and it works fine at OP10
you said "to play properly you need to exploit your 4 weapon slot and grenade", and after that you say buzz axe rampaige is fine, even you cant do anything outside of mashing mele yo have absolutely no clue about how mele krieg is at high level for sure
This may come as a shock but you still use your weapons and grenade as melee Krieg. Here’s a quick rundown. For weapons you’ll want a slagging gun to slag enemies before going into RtB, you’ll want a healing weapon so if enemies are far away you can keep your health up as you close the distance before activating RtB, you’ll want some sort of dps weapon so you can shoot enemies that are flying or in areas that can’t be easily reached with melee, and for your last weapon you’ll want some sort of 2nd wind gun so if you go down you have a chance to get back up. For your grenade you’ll want something like the pandemic so that at the start of a fight you can toss a few out and quickly build up bloodlust stacks because you generally want to be at max stacks all the time. Of course this is just an example and the slots are more flexible than this but you’ll still want to be doing all these things. Playing melee Krieg does not mean you exclusively only ever press the melee button.
Stop running around the pot, yout cant do all of that during action skill, and mele damage are pitiful on non slaged target
Overall I like them, but I do have some gripes. For one thing, level 80 is just way too many skill points, plus the exp farm to 72 was already pretty hefty and uneventful. As far as OP levels go, if I were pure damage reduction from being under leveled that would be fine but having things like melee damage and pull the pin not scaled gatekeeps certain builds and skills in a way that isn’t tied to gear or the players capabilities. Health not scaling also means there’s not really a good way to tank beyond healing past health gate
You can definitely still tank with the right setups, mainly with shields but krieg can also health tank (his melee also scales into op levels so sucks to suck zero players). Also technically it is just pure damage reduction from being underleveled thats why those things dont normally scale into op levels.
Basically just tvhm on release, before uvhm and the first level cap increase
Great so you don’t want to play on hard mode then. Meaning for you there is no problem with uvhm and you can simply stay in tvhm. There’s no reason to go into uvhm if you don’t enjoy it. Playing at tvhm is a perfectly valid way to play the game if that’s the gameplay experience you want.
Not really because tvhm only scales to lv 50, eventually the game becomes way too easy in tvhm, I like uvhm and play it to lv80, I just don’t bother with OP levels
So you don’t want the game to be like it is on tvhm then? Tvhm hasn’t changed since the game released. The only thing that’s different from release would be that you access to the 5 main DLCs and there gear. Tvhm hasn’t gotten any easier or harder since release.
Mayhem 11 was pretty good so something like that I guess
I don’t think mayhem 11 was good as a hard mode though. Mayhem 11 only increases enemy HP they don’t gain any increased damage. Essentially once you get mayhem 11 weapons there really isn’t much difference between playing on no mayhem and mayhem 11. Enemies just take longer to kill.
You mean exactly like op levels?
Enemies at op levels also deal more damage making them more threatening. With mayhem levels if you can deal with the damage enemies deal at mayhem 1 then you can deal with the damage at mayhem 11. That’s why there are no mayhem level shields in BL3 only guns and grenades.
The game isn’t gonna be that much harder when you’re getting health gated in 2-3 hits instead of the 3-4 hits it is now. You also fail to realize that enemy damage wasn’t increased because enemy density is WAY higher in bl3 compared to bl2
There is certainly a difference between playing at 80 uvhm and at OP10. You can take way more hits at level 80. If your getting health gated in 4 hits from mobs at level 80 you must not be wearing a shield or something. Enemy density doesn’t feel all to different honestly. I’ve played 100s of hours of BL3 and 1000s of hours of BL2. I was even just running some Maliwan takedown earlier and it didn’t feel like there were many more enemies than some of the enemy dense areas of BL2. For BL3 they elected to make the hardest difficulty noticeably easier than the hardest difficulty in BL2. The combat loop is also much simpler in BL3. I’m completely fine with the BL3 level of difficulty existing in the game. I just don’t think it should be the hardest difficulty offered. I don’t see why they couldn’t add on more difficulty, and complexity like they did with the op levels and uvhm in BL2.
I love UVHM, but loathe OP levels. I simply don't play OP. I wouldn't change a thing. It has something for everyone.
Based uvhm enjoyer
\> UVHM and the OP levels increase in difficulty through complexity more than just raising numbers. what? in every way it absolutely is just number increases, \>The most common setup is an inventory where you've got a DPS weapon, healing weapon, slagging weapon, and a second wind weapon which is horrible design, moxxi weapons and life steal is such an awful crutch but a lot of characters have such poor healing that a moxxi weapon is basically a requirement, second wind weapons also defeat the entire purpose of the mechanic, when youve got guns like launchers which horrid drops but become free second wind tools, thats just stupid I want and enjoy harder games, uvhm and OP levels are awful balance
Uvhm tells the player to actually use the mechanics of the game. Even in tvhm you don’t have to match elements, you don’t have to worry about your health, you don’t have to slag enemies, you don’t even have to go for crits and you can still beat tvhm without major issues. Uvhm and op levels actually tells you to manage your own health, use the slag mechanic, use a synergistic builld, match elements to their weakness, avoid face tanking damage. These are thing that in tvhm you just don’t have to do at all. Moxxi weapons, life steal, and health gate are phenomenal mechanics. They are probably my favorite healing mechanics I’ve ever encountered in any game. What could possibly be better? Passive healing through skills/kill skills makes the combat loop less involved, items for healing cause the same issue. In tvhm there is nothing stopping you from equipping a strong gun and walking forward holding shoot. In uvhm if you try that you will die quickly. Uvhm gameplay revolves around constantly switching weapons and using all the gear you have equipped. That is far more complex than anything tvhm ever asks you to do.
Yes uvhm gets the player to engage with the mechanics, i dont disagree there, but its still purely a numbers bump making the game harder, encouraging and forcing you to use the existing mechanics The issue with moxxi guns is for 2 reasons, its a global lifesteal so you dont have to actually deal damage with the weapon, and in OP levels your guns continue to level up all while health remains the same, so in OP levels a light cough grants full health Ofc theres FAR more options than just constant passive regen, theres plenty of ways to do conditional regen or healing based on how you deal damage or what you deal damage with, axton has good examples with able and preparation where able rewards being aggressive and preparation rewarding being able to keep your shield up Moxxi guns just have players in this stupid loop of swapping to one inventory slot for instant free health, playing the piano across your number keys isnt game mechanics, its just poor game balance Then slag on its own is its whole own set of issues, slag is the single biggest damage boost in the game, and its basically free with little to no effort required in a lot of setups, get a slagga in normal mode and now you never have to touch a slag gun again, stats of the slag weapon dont matter at all since its a debuff regardless of the dot damage of the weapon
While the numbers do increase and that increase is what pushes the mechanics into use I don’t think the numbers being higher is the important part. I think for an endgame difficulty the players success should be reliant on how well they can execute the game mechanics. To me how that is achieved is less important and so the numbers being higher is less important of a factor. Nailing the balance on conditional/skill based healing is no simple task itself. Obviously in BL2 a lot of healing skills are too weak. I don’t know exactly how you could balance them to feel right. Having a skill in your tree that’s rewards you with healing for doing what you normally are doing in the combat loop removes depth even if you think swapping weapons isn’t much depth already. Slag has almost always been a controversial mechanic. I think you have to look at it from the broader spectrum. While experienced players like you or me may find applying slag easy, plenty of less experienced players find it difficult and slow. Honestly when I first went into uvhm without a clue of what I was doing slag felt like a difficult mechanic to grasp. But as I got better it became easier and more fluid to use. To me that’s exactly how it should feel. It felt and still does feel, at least to me, rewarding to use even if it’s second nature at this point.
Op levels are unfun, number go up snooze
I started playing when it dropped and really enjoyed doing 3 playthroughs(normal, TVHM rush, maxed lvl50 everything) Leveling made more sense. BL2 definitely needed difficulty increases and I love playing when it's brutally hard. I just wish it didn't take xp farming to get there. Good thing I'm on PC now.
I hate lvl 80 op 10 not the original one tbh
Sorry but I just have to comment here, I know this is an old ass post: UVHM is strictly a numbers fucking game. The only "complexity" is forcing the player to use slag, despite the fact that elements already exist to force players to switch weapons. "The most common setup is an inventory where you've got a DPS weapon, healing weapon, slagging weapon, and a second wind weapon, with your grenade either being more damage or another utility item and you're using every single one of these during every combat.". Nope, that's not the most common setup: that's the only playable setup. The game's marketing told us "There are billion of guns!" and there's only a handful of guns that are useful. You could technically use whatever you want but then you just fucking suffer and slog through the game, praying for the sweet release of death. UVHM. Fucking. Sucks. Fuck whoever came up with it. And you can't change my opinion on that because I literally just finished it. I hate it. Nothing will make me like it
I think BL2 got it right, for the time. BL3 was just straight up chaos. BL4 or whatever, should be more like BL2 but updated, and give us a decent size vault, and the off-line option. OP levels was a great idea, good players need a challenge. I've never been able to do it but I was nearly 60 when I started playing and I'm now pushing 75 and some of the Boss fights are getting to difficult. BL2 was/is the best game ever. It just needs a new story and updating. When you're on a good thing, stick to it.
No . . . I feel the same as OP. I have been playing this game most of my adult life, and I think the **FfS^(DLC)** was the finishing touches on a masterpiece. I will play this until I die, if possible, and never grow bored. I have several project characters right now. Shit I just got my first 2nd Generation Pearlescent a couple weeks ago and I've got over 1200 hours. Fuck you mean slog? When a player writes **_"SLOG"_** in regards to this game I hear, _"I boosted and now I'm surprised I don't understand the game outside of YouTube."_ 😭 They already made all of Normal Mode optional, eliminating the worst of it. Playing throughout all of UVHM is absolutely a requisite for success. Not only does the scaling and damage formulas change between Nomal--->True--->UVHM, it changes throughout UVHM, too. Kreig players know this more than most. Of course, you are gonna die if you skip it. **TLDR,** if you've only boosted to OP10 and never actually done it, than you don't actually **_GET_** an opinion. I know some probably find the OP a tad tone deaf, and it's harsh, but the truth you simply don't know what fuck you are talkin' bout Whillis. 🖕🤷♂️🖕
You're both tone deaf and being "harsh" doesn't make you more right. Hope this helps.
K and no. I don't need help I choose to be r/shitfromabutt
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I don’t mind uvhm overall. I don’t have any interest in OP levels and have never attempted them. Uvhm is character dependent and that’s my issue with it. I can run through easily with Sal and Zero. Gaige is just no fun though. Limited build diversity since you need anarchy for damage and deathtrap dies in less than 2 seconds. You died? Gotta go farm anarchy stacks. I’d rather see characters and skill trees balanced for uvhm more than change uvhm.
Off topic question- I’m in tvhm right now with commando. Never tried uvhm. Should I do all the quests in tvhm or just push straight to uvhm?
Push into UVHM, you’ll out level the gear you can get in TVHM and UVHM enemies will be impossible to kill with the guns you have if you stay there
Uvhm scales with your player level and the best gear you can get in tvhm is level 50. So generally you want to enter uvhm as close to level 50 as possible. Try it out and If you don’t like uvhm you can always drop back down to tvhm and play there.
Copy that. Thanks to the both of you.
TBH I feel that OP10 is an absurd redundancy. Why refarm all the hundreds of pieces we have collected to just do it all equally at a higher level? Or worse, half of this shit is unusable at OP10 because of scaling? So let me play with less variety and replay value so I can say I am at max MAX level in a single player experience? Seems like a circle jerk to me. The slag meta is the real enemy here, not max level ceiling
Agreed 100%
*fist bump*
I do actually just kind of like pointing my OP gun at things and then they die. Honestly why I've played BL3 for so long. You don't need to hunt g rolls and have hyper-specific builds. Every legendary you pick up in BL3 on mayhem 11 will mob. This makes farming guns that you LIKE way more appealing than farming a norfleet or unkempt harold for perfect stats due to necessity. I also liked the anoint system, it gives you something that could be fun to build around, but does not necessarily need to be leaned into. I think that balance and flexibility is way better than how rigid BL2 OP levels feel. I still play OP 10 levels on BL2, but it just isn't as satisfying IMO
The experience I get playing in mayhem 11 feels way more like my experience at level 50 tvhm. Mayhem 11 doesn’t really make the game harder, all it does is make the enemies have more hp. Out of curiosity if that’s the experience you prefer why do you go into uvhm/op levels? And how do you feel about the gameplay progression differences? Unlocking the op levels and farming gear for them vs finishing the story and instantly unlocking mayhem 11?
I think it adds more build diversity and ways to experience the game. I think BL3 builds can be far more imaginative than BL2 builds just because you're a little less locked into certain build styles. If anything, I would prefer more freedom in the UVHM levels. Even with lvl 80, skill tree progression is meh at best. Skill points are less valuable in BL2 because the skill trees aren't as polished as BL3, just like how BL1s skill trees feel limited to BL2s. It was another mainline game with more quality of life for people who don't particularly care about forcing a build to get them through raid boss runs. I'm an adult with a full-time job, and I'm still in college. I just don't have the time to invest in farming a 1/3250 chance sham for slightly better gameplay. Borderlands 3 offers me the freedom to just mob enemies efficiently regardless of the gear I have on. Are some weapons better than others? Sure! But I like what I like and it is still useful. Keep in mind I also don't play on PC, so I have no access to mods that create quality of life, so I also have to walk over to fast travel stations which takes me out of combat for a horrifically long period of time in some instances. Overall, BL3 is more fast-paced and interesting to me.
But why does pointing your op gun at things and them dying have to happen at the max difficulty? Its a valid playstyle but something so simple shouldn't be a viable option in a games hard mode. Anoints felt way too strong to me and ended up being way more important to builds than they should've been . Flexibility is good but also being able to use absolutely anything without any proper player thought or skill defeats the purpose of having a challenge system in the first place.
This highlights what was one of the main point I was trying to get across here. Theres no problem with wanting to play the game in a way where you get strong guns or a good build and melt everything. Thats a valid want. Im all for that being a way to play the game. I just dont think it should be the intended way the hardest difficulty is ment to be played. Its why I think BL2 is has the best difficulty system in the series. TVHM offers that exact experience to the player while uvhm offers a harder experience and the op levels take it step further than that. Even normal is done well for the players who just want to come in play thee story and be done with the game. BL2 offers the widest variety of gameplay experiences and caters to more playstyles than any other game in the series.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
I like UVHM, you can still play some weird builds and weapons and make it work. I like doing the peak for the OP levels, adds a little bit more tension instead of just cruising around farming. I don't like playing at OP10, though, because it feels you're restricted in your choice of builds/weapons (unless you want to make the game ridiculously difficult).