How much do BAR stats really do?

Borderlands 2 BL2 General Discussion
#1

The other day, I decided to do a run without my BAR active. Since I have +40 % across the board, I thought it would be a big difference. But I can’t say that it was. I noticed that it took one more shot with a sniper to kill some enemies, but that was in the very early stages of NVHM. As soon as I started getting some better gear, I felt that I could dish out damage almost as per usual.

The only stats where I really felt that it was a lot worse were Recoil reduction and Reload speed. The Accuracy loss was barely noticeable.

I remember seeing the gun damage (with the BAR bonus) somewhere, but now I can’t find it. It would also be interesting to see how the rest of the stats are calculated with, and without, the BAR

EDIT: Since I got sidetracked on this, I never realized how much BAR actually does. You may disregard pretty much everything in this post.

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BadAss rank prioritization
#2

The biggest difference might be in the OP levels- that 40% at OP8 could be a real life saver…

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#3

I mean perception will only go so far. My stance on BAR is “the less your character has of something, the bigger of a difference BAR makes”. So grenade damage on Maya, shield capacity on Zer0, critical damage on Axton, etc… tends to be a big multiplicative bonus to their overall build. Where as fire rate on Torch Krieg means much less.

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#4

I’m only packing 20%; I mostly feel it in the reload speed and fire rate.

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#5

I think that BAR is very useful for OP8. Reduces scaling problems on that level of difficulty. As for other difficulties, they’re plently easy without any BAR boosts.

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#6

It is proving a little elusive, yes! It wasn’t included explicitly in @Sljm’s guide, and there’s not a whole lot of specifics in most places that discuss BAR. So far, the only comment that seems relevant was “it’s the last thing added”

Like others here, I’ve played with BAR off (mine is almost 21% across the board now) and not noticed that much of a difference generally. IIRC @LunaticOne has his stats up around 40% of so, where it does make a difference?

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#7

I play with it on when I’m solo’ing raids and stuff at OP8 (I’m around 450k with bonuses between 30-40%). I definitely notice the fire rate and reload speed BeeHawking, the other stuff not so much.

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#8

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I experience it too. But I could also see an increase in recoil on especially Jakobs snipers.

I was mostly curios too see if anyone had the math behind those stats. It would also be interesting to find out if there’s a point where an increase in stats no longer serves a purpose. Pity that you have to level all of them up so as not to get a selection of Maximum Health only after a while. :slight_smile:

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#9

I think you can get away with it if you only focus on a selection of the perks - say 7 or 8 - but you might need to cancel the assignment and try again a few times on occasion.

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#10

As a melee Zer0 player I can say that my flat-20%-across-the-board is a real pain for shield recharge.

Otherwise it’s the same deal for me : there are things that you just can’t notice in combat, like shield recharge rate, elemental chance or crit damage. The recoil and reload are obvious.

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#11

In my ealy days of this game, I wasn’t interested in melee at all, so I never raised it. After a while, I got the “only-max-health” option, so I had to start raising melee too. It’s possible that they’ve changed it after that, so that you can skip one stat. This was, after all, in the very first edition of the game. When the level cap was 50, and the Bee was married to the Conference Call. Aaaah, those were the days! :star_struck:

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#12

Same here. At end game those are what I notice most and I’m at about 43% across the board with BAR stats.

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#13

I’ve stayed away from it almost from the beginning, fearing that buffing a stat for one character’s benefit might be bad for a different character, or adversely affecting gear stats. I may rethink this tho, given what y’all have said about OP and that I’m having a bit of a struggle getting Maya past OP 7 (specifically Dukino’s Mom…bitch…).

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#14

Hmmmm, :thinking:

that depends on what stats your talking about, the last time I put out my stats was here,


my “Gun Damage” stat I know off the top of my head it’s 97%, the others that I’ve picked (again see the link) range between 30ish% to 80ish.
between 30% to 40% is when you can really start seeing a difference in "Fire Rate, Gun Damage, etc

9 is my guess (at least that’s what I have in TPS) and that’s so each time you have a BAR token to spend, at least One of the things you want in the Perks will show up each time

that’s the drawback of just using that method to spend BAR Tokens. You (only new players or ones switching over from 360 :cry: can do this) need to pick the ones you want to use the most to match how you want to play.

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#15

I just turn off BAR for Zer0. The only BAR stat that helps him is melee damage ; but that 20% will add maybe 1% to the total damage. I don’t have any other cross-character conflicts.

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#16

Pretty sure BAR Gun Damage is just added to regular Gun Damage, like from skills.

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#17

I can notice it. Started a fresh sal awhile back. Been playing through with the bar off for a change. Definitely feels like more of a challenge. Nothing crazy, but i notice it.

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#18

OK, here’s some numbers taken on a level 72 Axton (OP 0) with no skill points assigned, and the only non-elemental guns I had on that character (!). BAR stats are:

  • Gun Damage +20.7%
  • Critical Hit Damage +20.7%

First, with no boosts from any gear, comparing card damage with shown values for body and head shots on the dummy with BAR off and then on:

Weapon Damage Body OFF Critical OFF Body ON Critical ON Body Diff Crit Diff
Earnest Lady Fist 72764 72764 1309000 88056 1621000 21.02% 23.83%
Skookum Tresspasser 320461 320000 1666000 387000 2177000 20.94% 30.67%
Razor Hammer Buster 250164 250000 575000 302000 840000 20.80% 46.09%

Second, with Legendary Soldier boosting Gun Damage by 30%:

Weapon Damage Body OFF Critical OFF Body ON Critical ON Body Diff Crit Diff
Earnest Lady Fist 72764 94884 1707000 110000 2028000 15.93% 18.80%
Skookum Tresspasser 320461 417000 2172000 485000 2724000 16.31% 25.41%
Razor Hammer Buster 250164 326000 750000 378000 1051000 15.95% 40.13%

Checking out @Derch’s DDD Guide which, in turn, references @Sljm’s Damage Formula Guide, the gun damage boosts from the BAR and COM are obviously additive:

Damage = Card * (1 + BAR + COM)

For the values in my data, for example

Damage = Card * (1 + 0.207 + 0.300) = Card * 1.507

These numbers match up with the data in the tables for body shots. Notice that, because of the way the bonuses are combined, turning BAR on and off does not have as big of a relative effect when you have significant boosts to gun damage from other sources.

I’m not as familiar with the critical hit damage stuff, though. If anyone wants to take a look at that to confirm where the BAR critical hit bonus goes, feel free. @DeputyChuck’s detailed breakdown of critical hit bonus sources should probably be consulted!

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#19

(Apologies if you already know this)

When you first start spending your points in various skills, you can really focus on just the ones you want. Eventually, when you have some specific skills up to some value, the system will only allow you to put points in skills that have no/little points yet. There’s a limited amount of variability you can use.

For me, 20% across the board mostly just “takes the edge off”. Your mileage may vary (apparently several heads call 40% good, but I’m skittish about making the game “too” soft, given that I have it softened up in other ways). The thing is: once you spend a point, you can’t un-spend it (barring that one glitch that resets them all). Once you have your BAR where you want, I think it’s a good idea to stop spending points. You can disable BAR on the fly, so it’s basically on or off. If you spend too many points such that it makes the game too easy or breaks some mechanic you like, your two choices then become “broken” or “off”, which isn’t as good.

The incrementation per point gets pretty small by the time you get to values that can make this sort of difference, so it won’t catch you off guard, but it’s worth keeping in mind so you don’t ruin it.

From what I’ve read here, there are two main buffs that people are wont to avoid: Max Health (since it makes healthgate recovery more difficult for players who build around this mechanic) and Shield Recharge Delay (for players who use Roid shields and want to keep the roid damage up as long as possible). I don’t think I’ve heard of other BAR-based buffs interfering with combat mechanics negatively like this.

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#20

It seems like a great many of us treat 20% as the sweet spot. Of course we can’t compare against higher numbers, but let’s just say it feels right.

What doesn’t feel right is seeing all those unspent tokens though.

As an aside, the only other negative I can think of is shield recharge and the FotF. I personally can’t deal with the visual, so I don’t use that shield.

On the BAR / OP front : I would never want BAR to be the reason I can play at OP8.

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