Is Borderlands 1 Overall Too Easy Until PT 2.5?

Borderlands General Discussion
#1

Is Borderlands 1 overall too easy until you hit level 50-69, get into PT 2.5, and maybe start attempting Craw?

Honestly, it seems like for PT 1 and 2, and even most of 2.5, if you put any time at all into levelling, side missions, gear farming, etc, you remove any element of challenge from most of the game.

It seems like the only way to truly challenge yourself would be to stay 3-5 levels, if not more, behind the enemies in every area, and I honestly have no clue how you would do that.

There is a brief difficulty level spike when you hit 2.5 and everything is 2 or 3 levels above you, but hitting 69 ends even that.

What do you all think?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

#2

It scales levels meaning enemies can be higher levels than you but not all the way.
NVHM is the base mode
TVHM Is the base game but little bit harder
TVHM?2.5 is increasingly hard
UVHM is 2.5 3 or the hardest mode to complete
So each playthrough gets harder :slight_smile:
Im pretty sure that game is supposed to be hard. But gearbox probably said why.
Borderlands 2 scales all enemy’s to the right after the story!

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#4

You have to make a very dedicated effort, and it isn’t much fun. There is a razor-thin margin between easy and impossible, I tried to do it (years ago), and I found myself stuck in this loop:

  1. run into a new area with strong enemies
  2. kill a few of them and gain a ton of experience
  3. die because they are too strong
  4. repeat steps 1 thru 3 until you gain a level or two and can limp through
  5. …
  6. Uh, profit?

It wasn’t all that much fun. I thought I would be able to maintain a level of thrilling high difficulty, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Not to mention the end-of playthrough miscalculations - in my one-life playthroughs I’ve been trying to match story level, and even that is borderline impossible. The outrageous amount of experience from Lance and Guardians (especially badasses, holy crap) makes it impossible to fight the Destroyer on-level. You’d have to run past nearly everything in the Fastness, Enclave, Descent, and Promontory in order to level match the Destroyer. At least in PT2 the Destroyer scales…I think?

The changes to the Destroyer fight are pretty cool, IMO. The fundamental problem is that you’re way overleveled in PT1, and that’s as far as most players get - a stupid-easy fight, because you’re at least level 36 and he’s level 33.

Maybe tweaking the formula that changes damage dealt based on level differences would help. Right now an enemy 3 or 4 levels below you basically can’t hurt you, just like you basically can’t hurt things 4 levels higher than you.

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#5

I think bl1 is always easy. 2.5. Whatever. I don’t play it for challange. Sometimes I use green weapons or even white…go without a shield or com…etc…just for kicks. There’s a dead thread around here somewhere called “let’s make our own difficulty slider” or something that I started, talking about this. It really does seem like with a game like this, where making you do more/less dmg and enemies do more/less dmg is just a simple formula away…that they would have added a traditional difficulty slider. 1 thru 10 or whatnot

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#6

I wrote a long reply to this, then hid it.

Bottom line: I still have fun playing.
–RoA

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#7

I was super curious as to what your reply was!

#8

Private messaged it to you.
–RoA

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#9

Not to mention just lobbing bouncing betties into his mouth…

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