[BL1/Borderlands 1] Character Skills Balance Patch 1.1

[King_Tadpole (df)]

Wishlist for a PC mod, patch or a remake.

Lilith the Siren

• Hard to Get - Cooldown reduction: 3 seconds PL --> 2 seconds PL
• Mind Games - Daze chance per bullet: 5% PL --> 4% PL
• Spark - Elemental chance: 5% PL --> 7% PL
• Resilience - Elemental resistance: 6% PL --> 8% PL
• Enforcer - Kill Skill Accuracy Bonus: 7% --> 12%
• Blackout - Cooldown reduction per kill: 1.2 seconds PL --> 0.8 seconds PL

Notes: Her main pro

Mordecai the Hunter

• Caliber - Sniper damage: +4% PL --> +5% PL
• Smirk - Additionally, +4% Critical Hit Sniper damage PL
• Swipe - Additionally, amount of money dropped by all enemies: +20% PL
• Lethal Strike - Lethal strike bonus: +100% --> +150%
• Riotous Remedy - Health regen per kill: 3% PL --> 5% PL
• Out for Blood - Health leech via Bloodwing: 7% PL --> 5% PL
• Bird of Prey - Additionally, raises cooldown time for Action Skill by 0.8 seconds per level.

Notes: Bloodwing can be a bit overpowered and Mordecai shouldn’t over-rely on it.

Brick the Berserker

• Iron Fist - Melee damage bonus: +6% PL --> +8% PL
• Safeguard - Shield boost: +8% PL --> +10% PL
• Prize Fighter - Applies at all times (not just during Action Skill)
• Bash - Additionally, melee attacks have a +2% chance (per level) of inflicting +200% damage
• Unbreakable - Shield regen per second when depleted: +3% PL --> +4% PL
• Endowed - Explosive Damage Bonus: +3% PL --> +4% PL
• Rapid Reload - Reload speed: +4% PL --> +8% PL ; Recoil reduction: -6% PL --> -10% PL
• Cast Iron - Explosive damage resistance: +8% PL --> +10% PL

Notes: His Blaster tree needed some support so there’s incentive to build in any tree.

Roland the Soldier

• Action Skill Cooldown: 100 seconds --> 80 seconds
• Sentry - Scorpio bullet damage: +7% PL --> +8% PL
• Scattershot - Additionally increases Shotgun magazine size by +1 PL
• Assault - Additionally, Combat Rifles deal +4% more damage PL
• Barrage - Additionally, increases your fire rate by +4% PL
• Grenadier - +2 grenade capacity when fully upgraded
• Cauterize - Healing damage percentage: 6% PL --> 12% PL
• Revive - Scorpio revival chance: 14% PL --> 20% PL

Notes: Specialized skills oft need more benefits than versatile ones. Reduced cooldown for Action Skill inherently makes Scorpo-based skills more viable.

[samuraith]

Question, is this a wish list for the rebalancing, or what? You’d think if there was a major patch for this game Pitchford or something would’ve made a big deal about it.

[King_Tadpole (df)]

Wishlist, for a PC mod or for a potential remake.

[Lumpy_Chumpz (Luh Chum)]

Idk about this. Im all for wishlists, but its sorta tricky for me when it comes to characters and guns preformance. Since we are dealing with gearbox, asking them to re visit things like skills and guns might lead to some things nobody ever wanted. Think kunai and death mark. Although if youre saying this could mainly be a modding resource, id be lying if i said that i dont have things id change about skills and characters. So…

Action skills

Hunter: Make bloodwing able to attack the same npc consecutively if no one else is around. Increased elemental effect chance. Health stolen during fight for your life doesnt get lost after you get a second wind. Make bloodwing deployable in fight for your life by default.

Siren: Phasewalk jumping? You can fly off edges anyway, why decide nobody can handle phasewalk jumping instead of giving players another aspect of the game they can master?

Soldier: I think this will be pretty obvious, seeing as the exclusion of these features made the scorpio turret the worst action skill in the game by far. I dont care that it doesnt rotate, but the turret would be so much better if you could reclaim it, and it didnt die when you entered fight for your life. Also, the cooldown is balls. As if it was really so much of a priveledge to have this thing out that it needed a 100 SECOND COOLDOWN! You finally get to deploy it after a 100 second wait, and you really need it in the heat of battle. You deploy it, and immidiately get knocked down. 100 MORE SECONDS, PLEASE! So if these changes are able to be implimented, thats awesome! Make the cooldown 60 seconds still though. If they cant be, give me a 40 second turret.

Brick: Dont touch my running speed.

Skills

I only really have a few complaints about skills. Endowed could be 5% instead of 3, because its kind of pitifful considering caliber is 4%.

Riotous remedy is the worst skill. If you wanna be a melee mortecai, good luck finding a good way to get health back, because this skill will never be it. The easiets way to fix this skill would be to get rid of that chance ■■■■. Theres a CHANCE your kill skill could give you health regen on par with the bonus roland ALWAYS gets from stat. And even of you get a good amount of health regen, as soon as you kill someone else, it resets to another level of health regen. It doesnt even stack.

Enforcer isnt really ever worth the points with just 2% damage for a kill skill, i mean high velocity is twice that, and thats always active. The accuracy doesnt help, because we all know accuracy is overrated anyway.

Radiance would be ok if it had a bit more damage, and they always lasted as long as the longest DOT’s can last.

Inner glow kinda sucks considering you cant be in phasewalk to heal. Having a max of 5% per second would mean you need 20 seconds of phasewalk to get 100% health. Thats too much. Even if you get a class mod with 4 to inner glow, thats still 9 seconds of phasewalk. No class mods boost Hit & Run, so you will just never gett all of your health back with this skill.

Other than that, the one thing i would take over all of this would be for fixes to broken class mods. I have made a post about this before here

Although id say if there was one thing id like fixed the most, its the many blatant bugs the class mods have. The hunter’s cooldown rate doesnt work. The gunslinger has the wrong magazine size skill on it. The peace keeper’s shield recharge rate doesnt work. Both of the ranger’s secondary effects are bugged. People arnt sure if find rare items even does anything. And these are just for mordecai. Class mods are so important, it just boggles my mind that these were never adressed in the first place.

So thats all i have to add. Id say i agree with you regarding the philosophy that brick needs skills that are only active during berserk to be active at all times to increase his versatility, like blood sport should just be a melee activated kill skill. So if gearbox reads this and decides to change some things, please stick to things youve heard at least a few fans of the game say would be better. I think any changes to skills and characters should be done with extreme caution, and maybe dont ignore negative feedback if you get it.

[King_Tadpole (df)]

thanks for your feedback. i added some of the things you proposed.

i prefer to go light on the changes so they reflect an overall trend rather than risk a skill being overpunished or one class being better than the others. and, too radical of changes would result in more disagreement within the community.

[Lumpy_Chumpz (Luh Chum)]

Oh, i didnt see those notes to nerf action skills before. You see, i get that some things are too overpowered. Nerfing the evil smasher was the right move, and nerfing the rosie was understandable. But You also have to realize that part of the game’s fun is being overpowered in your own way.

I dont think bloodwing deserves a nerf, especially since the hunter clas mod has never worked properly with cooldown rate. With lilith, unless you kill 2 guys, you would need some class mod bonuses to get that cooldown reduction to allow near instant phasewalking. And at that point you are sacrificing damage, so it sort of balances itself out.

It just makes me uncomfortable when i see people requesting nerfs. I just imagine a gearbox employee scrolling past hundreds of threads that suggest constructive things and very needed buffs, only to see a nerf and go “this is the only guy that gets it!” Then proceed to piss off the entire community. They seem to think the majority of people play borderlands competitively or something, so they focus on nerfs waaaay more than buffs and fixes.

[King_Tadpole (df)]

Overall, I proposed more buffs than nerfs. I don’t think any of my nerfs were severe, discriminatory or retributive. Most nerfs are by 1-2%, coupled with slight buffs on adjacent skills.

Bloodwing doesn’t really deserve a nerf, but Out for Blood is a bit excessive compared to Mordecai’s lesser healing skill. I also buffed Swipe.

Lilith’s skill should have less cooldown time than others since its a shorter skill, but allowing too frequent re-use overpowers the skills based around it and lets the player evade damage a majority of the time.

[Lumpy_Chumpz (Luh Chum)]

Im not saying they arnt fair points, its just the last thing id want to see happen would be for a new update to come along with a next gen release, only for gearbox to have cherry picked every nerf on this list without putting in any of the buffs/improvements. I dont think anyone would want that, but gearbox doesnt exactly have the best track record of listening to its paying customers. Thats why youl usually see me only focusing on improvements and buffs.

[bryanswpaulsen]

I’ve spent well over a thousand hours with Brick, and my suggestions center around making his Melee and Rocket Launcher play styles more viable. As it is, general gunplay with Titan or explosive guns with Blast Master make other play styles pale in comparison.

For Brick:

Brawler Tree:

Iron Fist: +6% -> +10%. No class mod boosts it and given melee really suffers at endgame compared to gun play it’s needed. The extra 20% at 5/5 would be helpful without being overpowered.

Endless Rage: Don’t touch it.

Sting Like a Bee: Don’t touch it.

Heavy Handed: +12% -> +15%. This is boosted by class mods, but in order for it to be competitive with the combination of Master Blaster and Revenge this very much seems called for.

Prize Fighter: +5% Critical Hit Damage with melee attacks in addition to enemies dropping cash prizes. It would really fit the skill name and give a reason to invest in this skill at endgame.

Short Fuse: Don’t touch it.

Blood Sport: Don’t touch it.

Tank Tree:

Hardened: Don’t touch it.

Safeguard: Don’t touch it.

Bash: +10% -> +12% Daze Chance with melee attacks. Mordecai’s Bloodwing grants 100% chance at 5/5 and Lilith’s chances to daze in multiple skills are 100%, so I see no reason Brick should not be able to achieve around the same rates they do (96-108% chance at 8-9/5 with Skirmisher class mod).

Juggernaut: A cosmetic change. The actual value of Juggernaut is 12% per point, so the skill should say so instead of the 10% shown.

Payback: Remove the elemental DoT damage increase as it does not fit the character at all. As it is only Bullet Damage gets the full 8%, so increase Melee Damage and Grenade Damage from 7% to 8%.

Diehard: Don’t touch it.

Unbreakable: Don’t touch it.

Blaster Tree:

Endowed: Don’t touch it. A 15% multiplicative damage increase is fine, especially with the way explosive effects work in this game. With a 100 damage sniper rifle hitting at a x4 multiplier that 300 explosive damage becomes 345. That’s a seriously big deal.

Rapid Reload: Don’t touch the Reload Speed increase. Fix the Recoil Reduction, because it is currently bugged and actually increases recoil. Also, increase the +6% to 8%, so that the skill can single-handedly cancel out the recoil from weapons that do not possess a stock at 5/5, and almost entirely cancel the recoil of a weapon with Barrel 4 and no stock at 9/5.

Revenge: Don’t touch it. Some might think the fact it doesn’t buff Rocket Launchers to be a bug, but it’s more a feature. Rocket Launchers use Grenade Damage, and if Revenge triggered Grenade Damage his actual Grenades would make Roland’s Grenadier a joke.

Wide Load: Don’t touch it.

Liquidate: Don’t touch it.

Cast Iron: +8% -> 12%. It is resistance to one kind of damage, making it very situational. Secondly, if you’re going to be throwing rockets around this will help make the play style less suicidal. Juggernaut might be on-kill only, but it provides 12% protection against all damage, so this should at least match it.

Master Blaster: A cosmetic change. The actual value of Master Blaster is 15% per point, so the skill should say so instead of the 12% shown.

Finally, this isn’t his skills, but it’s worth mentioning: the Blast Master class mod is the only one with the same fifth line regardless of being material 2 or 3. That should change. Material 2 should be Explosive Damage Resistance (therefore stackable with Cast Iron, and being comparable to Axton’s Grenadier and Claptrap’s Sapper), and Material 3 should be Explosive Elemental Effect Chance. By doing this Blast Master could have more of an emphasis on Rockets with Material 2 while still being gun focused with Material 3.