Does leveling up take too long?

Borderlands 2 BL2 General Discussion
#1

Hello everyone.

I’m new to the forums. I bought a Borderlands bundle not so long ago when it was on sale, and since then I’ve played Lilith up to level 40, Axton to 50, Maya to 72 and Athena to 35. With Maya for the last levels I needed more than half an hour per level, I farmed the Beatdown Bar over and over and it was extremely boring.

The reason I forced myself to farm was mostly because of “treasure turns trash”. Meaning when I find a rare gun I really like, it will be underleveled in just a few levels, and I’ll be forced to replace it with blue or green gear. This gun will end up be thrown away, maybe stuck on a level 1 char. So I wanna be max level to find weaponry which I will actually keep. This may sound like a contradiction, because when I’m leveling so slow I’m using the gear for a long time. But I simply don’t like the fact that the gear loses, so I want to get past it as fast as possible.

When I compare the 3 games now, I had the impression that I leveled up way faster in Borderlands 1, the progression was very satisfying and way more fun. Also Borderlands 1 and TPS both seem to have a much lower scaling, I had a level 12 gun with Lilith while being around level 26 and I still did decent damage. Since TPS came after Borderlands 2, I hope that they realized the scaling was too much in B2 and for B3 they take a similar approach to TPS. Also in TPS there are all these loot boxes which cost moonstones, so I find similar gear to the one I like. (I hope they keep this mechanic as well.)

But Borderlands 2 has the most content for now. And when I reached 72 with Maya, someone showered me with legendaries, and I thought “Wow this gun is so cool, no use for Maya, but supercool with Zer0, I want to try it with Zer0!” and Zer0 is… well. Level 0. Do I have to level up for 100 of hours just to try this? Do I have to cheat? Or just give it up? Also I like Jakobs weapons most, and at some point I googeled who’d be the best char for these, and it turned out to be Zer0.

I do have some proposals to solve this problem.

  1. Let the characters level up faster in Borderlands 3. Normal mode levels up to 66% of max level, skip true vault hunter mode, and directly into UVHM.
  2. (I suggested this already to the Diablo 3 devs because it has a similar problem) Implement a mechanic to “level up gear”. But (especially when it’s legendary) it cannot be as cheap so you’ll be able to play through the entire game with only one gun.
  3. Let the 2nd and following characters level faster than the 1st. “Profit from his experience”. For example, everyone starts with an (non tradeable) artefact doubling the experience with a max level requirement matching the level of the 1st character, instead of min level. Such an item could also be dropped by the end boss.

What are your opinions/suggestions about this?

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#2

In short, no. Leveling doesn’t take too long apart from in UVHM of TPS. This kind of question is indicative of how lazy gamers have become in recent years. It doesn’t take 100 hours to go from 1-72, not even half that amount of time, but because people these days want pay to win stuff and are lazier than in previous generations, people want immediate gratification.

This isn’t a dig at you though, it’s just my general opinion.

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#3

Well, please keep in mind that I’m not a hardcore gamer any more. If I want to try 2 or 3 characters, needing 50 hours (and a bit longer for the first one, because I’m learning the game), that’d be between 150-200 hours just to get to the point where my loot doesn’t become trash after a few levels. I think that’s quite a lot. It was more satisfying for me in Borderlands 1, where it felt faster.

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#4

My opinion is that the leveling up can be fun. If you are not enjoying the Bar Room Blitz, then do something else. With the Handsome Collection, you have all of the DLC, so there are plenty of different ways to gain XP while enjoying the game.

Leveling up helps me learn how to play the characters in different ways by changing their specs and using different mods.

Another option is to use the Moxxi’s Endowment Relic (reward from The Good, the Bad, and the Mordecai) which gives more XP.

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#5

Moxxi’s Endowment Relic has about +10% at level 72, which means you need to be level 72 to carry it, which is ridiculous. Also 10% (only for kills) isn’t much, this could be outperformed by a relic giving boost to your action skill cooldown. Especially in UVHM, where you relay on it to slag.

Just to make sure, I’m not particularly lazy, I simply think, the way is too long. 3x story and most of the side quests just for one character… I’ve done it with 1.5 characters, that should be enough. It’s like having a 2 hour walk to and from school every day, and when you complain about it, someone responds with “pupils are too lazy, and with that I mean you”. (Which is an insult by the way. Not particularly nice). Also I’d be more ok with it, when your gear doesn’t need to be replaced each 5 levels. And also again, I’m ok with it doing it for the first character in normal speed.

-redacted by PH-

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#6

Please check the forum rules before posting about mods, unless on PC, but no talk of gamesaves at all here, thanks.

#7

Just my two cents:
BL2 is good because of gameplay. Loot is icing. To structure the game around loot as the primary motivation would reduce it’s quality. As an example I played Diablo 2 a lot. I was done with D3 before the first expansion because the development strategy focused on the loot and the gameplay suffered for it.

Different folks have different preferences. Thankfully there is sufficient variety in devs and publishers to meet most of them.

3 Likes
#8

I’m down for something like this. Once you have a character, say Zer0, who completes some play mode, say Normal; you get the option to start subsequent characters of the same type at the unlocked mode. If you spin up a second Zer0 in this case, you can either get to True by replaying Normal or skipping straight to it. You have to earn the option to start similar characters at that mode, and that option doesn’t transfer between characters.

I have proposed this on the occasional, “ideas for BL3 threads”. My sample price (in BL2 parlance) was the equivalent value of Eridium obtained as if you had tried to re-farm that weapon from the boss. You still have to put in the time, but instead of being a grind against the same boss forever, you could play whatever you want that nets you Eridium, then go buy the upgrade (either in level or parts). For the sake of argument, say the cost was 100 Eridium to level up a weapon and 50 to replace a part. You could “farm” entire maps for Eridium and do something different than re-killing some boss over and over to roll those dice. Maybe farming individual bosses repeatedly works for you: if you don’t get the part set you want after a zillion tries, but the boss dropped enough Eridium to buy it, this would put a limit of sorts on how long it took someone to get the weapon they want.

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#9

Cool.

Your generalization of generations is way over the top, sir.

There are a lot of reasons why leveling can look “too long”:

  • Nowadays, there are way too many great games out there. If you want experience everything, you can’t sit with one game too much (not gonna say if it’s bad or good, it is how it is);
  • Some people might be impatient;
  • Some people do not realize BL has RPG elements in it;
  • Some people do not have a lot of time;
  • Some people love gameplay, but do not like leveling.
    You name it.

I like all characters (more or less), but I can’t stand doing “NVHM->TVHM->UVHM->OP8” for every character. After playing main game 10+ times, I can’t do it any more. Now I just 72->OP8 via Digistruct Peak and then everything else. [REDACTED] But it’s just my preference.

[It is not ok to be an a♥shole. Previous sentence is inapropriate, sorry about that.]. Be well.

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#10

Again, save file transfer is against the rules, and we DO NOT talk about it here.

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#11

…and that’s enough of the personal comments already.

Please read the forum rules, folks.

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#12

Very common suggestion in the BL3 ideas threads. Though I think it might screw with the way Gearbox does DLCs - correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t BL2 and TPS release with just two playthroughs to hit max level, with UVHM released later as DLC content? So they only look like they’re built around three playthroughs (or possibly four for TPS…) to max level for those of us who wait for the final bundle of everything before we buy. :slight_smile:

Not to demoralize you, but Steam says I’ve spent 804 hours in BL2, and I have three characters at level cap (OP7, OP4, and OP1, if you’re counting Peak progress) with the other three at 60, 53, and 48. But I allocate my time for fun rather than speed-leveling, so that may not translate to how other players do things.

Also a very common suggestion.

There are faster and more entertaining alternatives. For just xp farming, the farmhouse in Tundra Express is very good - get varkids to go into their pods, shoot pod, get big chunk of xp, repeat until all varkids are dead, quit, load, repeat.

Or replace it with a higher level version of itself. This is the other way that Beatdown farming becomes unnecessary. My Maya leveled mostly with Hammer Busters in the mid/late 60s, so she spent a lot of time in the Dust looking for tubbies, killing McNally, and killing Mobley & Gettle (optionally also doing the back valley for the Black Queen and more tubby-hunting). Other characters might repeatedly hit Ol’ Slappy for a new Striker, the teenage mutant ninja rats for a new Storm Front, etc. That’s one of the nice aspects of UVHM, legendaries aren’t “rare gear”, most of them are things you can farm pretty easily and use as standard equipment.

Jakobs works fine on any character. And Sal says hello about the “best with Jakobs” argument. :cowboy_hat_face:

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#13

I imagine it might be possible to find a public lobby where someone is into power leveling other player’s characters. Park your Zero there and after however long it takes, you have a level 72 Zero. Blow thru normal and TVHM just doing the story mission and my guess is that in 6-8 hours (depending on how long the PL takes) you could have a Zero in UVHM. As has been mentioned some of your ideas for speeding the leveling of characters has been mentioned by others (myself included, as I’ve had thoughts along similar lines). Unfortunately except fpr power leveling there isn’t any legit shortcuts to this, although for my money fighting the Ancient Dragons of Destruction has been my preferred method of power leveling mules- takes maybe 2 and a half hours to max out their bank and backpack (from eridium farming) while reaching at least level 38…

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#14

It only takes a few warrior runs to have you leveled up.

#15

A few of my thoughts:

I personally don’t think BL1 and BL2 take too long to level up, but TPS does seem to grind to a halt once you hit UVHM. Combat XP almost seems nerfed. Honestly, I’ve yet to hit the level cap with a character in TPS! Getting close with Athena, but still.

BL1 has linear scaling whereas BL2 and TPS have logarithmic scaling, with TPS having a gentler curve. The developers intentionally designed BL2 that way to force you to change gear every few levels because of the very fact you could come across an awesome gun in BL1 and use it for most of the game. They wanted you to explore different guns and tactics for using them. There’s some Gearbox ‘Inside the Box’ (I think it’s called) article that explains their rationale. (Edit: here’s the link. http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/2013/09/inside-the-box-evolution-of-loot/ )

Personally, I like TPS’ level scaling. Hits the sweet spot that I feel comfortable with. You can use that awesome gun a little longer than you can in BL2, but it’s still gonna turn into junk after a while. I just wish more XP was awarded in UVHM!

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#16

My opinion:

Leveling up does not really take too long and I like how I get to experience the leveling up process as a new class to get a soft entry into their skill tree.

But I also think that this this 3 different difficulties with 2 of them being necessary to reach the 3rd is just BS when it comes to sub-sequent characters. My favorite way of handling it would be that if I’ve taken a Siren to UVHM once I can start all of my new sirens at lvl 50 UVHM with some general loot and some money and upgrades to send me on my way. You’d still need to learn it and earn it but it would make it a lot more accessible once you’ve done it once for everyone.

I’m also an advocate of not having 3 different playthroughs. Just give me lvl 1 UVHM, thanks.

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#17

Having done a ton of power leveling in TPS (Myself and Others), Combat XP is nerfed, as soon as level 50 is hit the Combat XP drops to almost Half of what you were making before hitting Level 50.

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#18

I wonder if that’s a feature or a bug. Given how in BL2, once you hit 50 in TVHM, XP is nerfed so you have a lesser chance of being overleveled compared to your gear once in UVHM, and thus entering a world of pain. But in TPS perhaps, they accidentally extended the nerf (at least regarding combat XP) to UVHM by mistake.

1 Like
#19

Yes, to level all six characters to OP8 (and then another later all the way through, because I wanted to play a totally play style with a character from the ground up) like I did is an enormous grind. Fortunately methods not to be discussed on the forums on PC can help you avoid that if you don’t want to.

It’s a very long grind and if that’s not what you are into, the game is not setup for you.

One thing though, with weapons and levelling, is that it takes away the incentive to farm deeply, which I like, since I hate farming. No point in farming for just a couple of levels, so just get some decent gear, rock that, and in a few levels try to get something else good to drop. The useable gear list doesn’t drop off sharply until the later OP levels and if you’re @Adabiviak it never drops off at all until OP4. Therefore, although it sucks to give up that treasured legendary, let it go and maybe that purple you got from a red chest can get you through a couple of levels.

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#20

Leveling characters up to 72 in BL2 is definetly a grind, for the fact that a single run in UVHM probably does not mean actually hitting 72. (Edit: the amount of playthroughs nescecary actually caused a burnout I’m stil not out of over a year later)

The Pre-Sequel has it alot worse though, I don’t recall the details but XP gain in UVHM there is reduced.

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