Difficulty Misconceptions

Borderlands 2 Gameplay Discussion (Spoilers!)
#1

Ok so apparently “is UVHM too hard” is still a question… VynilicPumaGaming made a video last year I believe, where he IMO completely missed the point of bl2 campaigns.

First off this game has no traditional difficulty settings, so some people make the mistake of viewing TVHM and UVHM as an automatic progression from NVHM. They are not, the one you choose basically decides what difficulty you wish to play at. I see so much hate for slag and quite a few people saying they wanna just shoot the enemy and do full damage… Well imo that’s what the lower difficulties are for. UVHM and the OP levels are designed to make you do more to succeed.

I saw a particularly idiotic comment on a YouTube video saying that an auto slag option should be added, so whenever you shoot an enemy they get slagged regardless of what element you use. I don’t need to explain why that’s dumb as it’s just pure laziness.

To summarize;

  • UVHM is meant to make you try.

  • NVHM and TVHM are for more casual play.

  • Slag may seem tedious but it adds another layer of depth to combat.

  • Basically difficulty is based on how much effort you wanna put in to using game mechanics.

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#2

A lot of players, myself included, got a reality check when we first stepped into UVHM and got smacked around. If I was Gearbox and had to do it all over again, I’d be all over the marketing department to make it clear that the difficulty in this DLC is next level.

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#3

They should have made a clear distinction between NVHM, TVHM and UVHM as actual difficulty choices imo. UVHM only seems hard at first due to TVHM being fairly trivial.

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#4

I do find UVHM genuinely hard and always do when I step back into it with a new character, despite n+1 number of hours in game. When I learnt the update history that brought us UVHM, it helped me understand the challenge it poses a lot.

I picked up the game late so I just assumed the DLCs were developed in a planned order; the narrative I learnt when I started frolicking around on the forum is that the devs really didn’t intend Borderlands 2 to have such a high demand for ongoing challenge and endgame content. So they delivered, with UVHM, which uses slag as a means to ramp up the difficulty.

I totally see the point that slag is an annoying mechanic and that argument has been had on the forums, and I like how the Pre-Sequel did away with it - UVHM in that game feels more sequential / considered, which fits with the narrative of having to improvise after the popularity of 2. Slag isn’t ideal, but it is a means of delivering an additional difficulty level that lots of players wanted. I know great players who stick to TVHM to get their fix, which doesn’t mean they’re any less hardcore, you can just play differently there.

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#5

Not hating on people that choose to play in NHVM or TVHM, do what you find fun, I was just triggered by people saying UVHM should be easier and slag should be removed. I personally like the extra challenge level and I’m sure a lot of others do too, and like I said that’s why NVHM and TVHM are there imo. For example I’m not great at call of duty so if I choose to play the campaign i go with lower difficulties but I don’t complain that the higher ones are too hard overall, they are just too hard for me.

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#6

I would absolutely love if slag could be removed from UVHM. I think it’s a tedious mechanic and demands you build a certain way (there are still a lot of ways you can do a build that caters for slag, hence I still love UVHM, but people’s objections are legitimate in my opinion). I love the difficulty of UVHM in general though, and slag was a way for the devs to give us that difficulty, so having taken stock of that development cycle I’m very glad it’s there!

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#7

Everyone’s opinion is valid of course(unless it’s something absolutely insane :smirk:). Just wanted to give my view on things I guess.

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#8

You can’t ignore the fact that if you want to reach level 72 you have to step into UVHM. You can’t stay at TVHM difficulty forever, so the criticism towards UVHM is valid because there wasn’t really a choice. You either adapt to new mechanics you might not enjoy at all or stop at lvl 50.

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#9

Stopping at level 50 is a perfectly valid option that a lot of people actually take

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#10

But what if I want to reach level 72 without having to deal with UVHM difficulty? There should be a choice to everyone and there wasn’t.

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#11

That’s down to gearbox to decide I guess. my point is though, difficulty is subjective and just because something is too hard for me doesn’t mean it’s too hard for others

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#12

I understand your point, but I think you missed the point of most the criticism towards UVHM. People are not complaining about the game being too hard, they are complaining about the full game experience being blocked behind mechanics and a difficulty they don’t necessarily like.

Edit: Even the guy with the idiotic comment has a point about slag usage

1 Like
#13

No, this was aimed at the people who say UVHM is outright too difficult to be playable and an “auto slag” option is idiotic and lazy. I can understand the argument to remove it but making it automatic is essentially like using cheat engine to add another element to your gun. Which I’m sure is possible anyway.

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#14

Slag is a somewhat clumsy mechanic; I’d say the reason TPS handles things better is that cold is a more interesting debuff mechanic.

As for people not understanding the different playthroughs, all I can really say is “what subgenre do these people think they’re in?” My understanding is that this design model of multiple playthroughs, with a significant difficulty step at each is standard and arguably part of the definition of the ARPG subgenre.

I’ve been playing Grim Dawn for the last several weeks, and they do exactly the same thing (they call their TVHM “Elite”, but Normal and Ultimate even have the same names as here :slight_smile: ). The difficulty step seems to be mainly on the damage-taken side rather than on the damage-done side like BL2, but same idea. The only complaints I see are of the “I would prefer only two playthroughs to reduce burnout from repeating the same quests over and over” variety, which I agree with, but this genre likes triple repetition so it is what it is. Well, except for TPS with their de facto 4+ playthroughs due to borked UVHM xp, but that’s the reason so many of us bail on TPS in early UVHM… :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve seen people refer to BL2 as a FPS rather than an ARPG, so if they’re coming from that direction I can understand the confusion. Probably. I haven’t played FPS in literally decades (1995, I think?), but I can believe that three playthroughs/difficulty steps is not a thing over there.

In an ideal world I’d like for these games to get you to level cap in one playthrough, and you set the difficulty separately when you create a character (I think of this as the Mass Effect model, since that’s where I experienced it). But that either requires a truly massive amount of content, or a very very fast character progression, so I can see why most games don’t do that. And since ARPGs are also all about loot-farming for top gear a significant amount of repetition is already baked in, so looping through the story a couple times is a reasonable solution to maintain a normal pace of character progression.

My sympathy for this is largely limited to people like knighm, who gets roadblocked partway through UVHM because he’s 70 years old and has even worse reflexes than the rest of us. :slight_smile: Otherwise, if people want those last 22 skill points they need to adjust to UVHM; if they don’t want to deal with UVHM they don’t need those skill points.

This “auto slag” nonsense is indistinguishable from someone simply editing their character to be level 72. There may be ways to do it, but I don’t see why anyone should pay attention to these people.

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#15

Last thing you said but first thing I read :wink:

A lot of people I think come in expecting a more simplistic FPS type game

It does handle it better but the game itself is meh(another topic altogether though). Without slag there would still need to be a debuff of some kind in UVHM or everything would take forever to kill. So either increase base damage of everything by 150-200% or reducing enemy health.

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#16

Agreed (and with all you said!) although I think the step up from TVHM to UVHM can take even veterans of the genre by surprise. It really is gruelling when you start, especially before you get up to a second capstone… I personally relish that, despite my ambivalence re slag, but I know a few players who were turned off. I’m not judging whether that’s a good or a bad thing; I was committed (ok, addicted) so kept on with it and learnt the details you need to to prosper. But the jump did surprise me, especially because I did the Pre-Sequel first, and that’s a lot more manageable.

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#17

Play gaige where capstones don’t matter :wink: but ye capstones take a while to get to but that’s also part of the fun to me

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#18

UVHM is a learning experience, once you experience it once or twice it isn’t so bad. The OP levels are meant to be difficult.
Auto slag would the laziest thing i can think of in game
And technically you can buy all the dlcs except for the level increases and play like that(well not the handsome collection)

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#19

Exactly…

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#20

Well, the OP levels offer a lot of flexibility that UVHM doesn’t, which is why I’ve come to love them (thanks Ad). Getting to OP8 is cruel is a whole different way that’s quite antithetical to Borderlands in my own feeling; one of the reasons I love this game so much is there’s really not much penalty for screwing up, it very rarely makes me rage quit. Digistruct Peak sure is a challenge but it’s also a massive slog and failing makes me so pissed off lol. That’s the kind of difficulty I don’t find in UVHM, so though I understand people’s complaints about it it’s never put me off.

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