A Brief History of Violence
For many years we’ve all been playing this awesome game and the community has seen many changes and evolutions over time. Over this time a lot of people have come up, famously with tons upon tons of builds! As time has gone on players and even the game itself has evolved, but the biggest change has really occurred with the Unofficial Community Patch. The skill changes fundamentally changed the way certain build worked, by changing and improving skills that were underwhelming or almost unusable in the past. That in a way re-birthed BL2 itself. The UCP was an absolute blessing and I thank whole hardly everyone involved for their hard work, innovation, and dedication. Unfortunately an older mentality still exist in build construction even with the augmentation of the skills. I also feel like this old mentality has shaped the manner in which skills were augmented. This is one of the few games in history, especially on the market now that has such a vast loot system, and even more rare that it is not PvP. But in watching builds and gear over the years the community is still crippled with the same 30-40 pieces of gear tops (ROUGH ESTIMATE), when there are literally thousands of different options to choose from. These choices aren’t the fault of the players, but the fundamental flaws of different characters and their skills. With a few challenges, input from other players, and testing I have concluded that a lot of builds don’t hold up without extremely specific gear, and that’s a problem. But let me stress again, it’s not the player’s fault, but a fault of design. So I believe that buffing or even possibly retooling (if possible) some skills will not only greatly change the way people build/play their characters, but what gear they use to play this game.
For those who are new i proposed 2 different challenges in the forums previous to this thread, which I will post below. My conclusion is if your build doesn’t hold up to this challenge, it’s not a good build. The purpose of all of this is to get accurate data of what skills are working and which skills need improvement. Of course this is a community effort so feel free to express any input, but the true point of this thread for me is to help the UCP with proper insight, and I don’t think that is possible without a solid foundation. So I request the community test your builds with the challenge, post your results, and offer your input on what skills you feel need help if at all. Good Luck!