I’m still on my first Playthrough with her, using the Cataclysm tree, but man she’s a beast. Does she start to fall back in TVHM or UVHM?
Helios and Backdraft start falling off around TVHM. Blight Phoenix is usually only used for stunning enemies. Cloud Kill does nothing at all. Ruin’s shock and corrosive procs do good damage in TVHM, weak damage in UVHM, but keep it for the Slag. Flicker is a tiny increase to effect chance, but is usually taken over everything else mentioned to get to Ruin. Foresight, Immolate, Chain Reaction, and Reaper, however, are great skills through out the entire game.
2 Likes
Yeah, some of the DoT skills don’t really scale well in UVHM, but she is still a terrific character to play, both solo and co-op. Check out the DDD guide in the old Maya sub-forum for a great summary, as well as suggested UVHM builds. Maya is always awesome! Lots more in the Maya sub-section here also.
1 Like
Maya is awesome. She never stops being awesome, but certain skills gain insanely from scaling later on, while they were overlooked in early gameplay, and to counter that, other skills become about as effective as dirt during late TVHM. Examples: Bad scaling skills: Helios, Backdraft, Cloudkill, Recompense, Blight Phoenix, and Kinetic Reflection. Outstanding scaling skills: Life tap, Restoration, and Ruin (Because it has a 100% slag chance and slag becomes such a necessary de-buff on enemies). Most of her other skills scale just as you’d expect. Also, flicker never loses ability, but it is a terrible skill regardless. (A multiplicative increase works like this: Your weapon says 16% chance to ignite. With a five point investment in Flicker, 1.3*16 = ~20% chance to ignite. For a five point investment, this is horrific, especially since I pulled this number from an SMG. 1/5 chance to ignite is not any better than a 1/6 chance to ignite when you’re shooting 8 rounds per second (the fire rate of the same smg I got the elemental effect chance info from). So that’s a skill that you never want to pick up in any case. It’s a shame that you need to waste 5 or so points in poor scaling skills to get Ruin, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.
1 Like
I wish I could port my Maya save into The Pre Sequel.
2 Likes
Hah! I went cataclysm first on my first (it was a co op play through too!)
She never stops being awesome
1 Like
Maya is one of my all-time favorite characters. I’ve played with her probably 50-75% more than any other vault hunter in the entire series. That being said, in my experience, Maya isn’t exactly ideal for boss encounters. And the bigger they are, the more difficult it is for her to defeat them solo without quasi-cheating/using extremely cheap tactics. (I’m looking at you, raid bosses…) The reason is actually super obvious: her action skill can’t restrain most bosses in any way, shape, or form (which is the most fundamental use of the power) and, if the boss doesn’t have minions, that makes it impossible to engage the handful of powerful skills Maya has that are totally dependent upon Phaselock suspending an enemy for a short duration, making her signature ability extremely ineffective in the kinds of dangerous battles where you really, really need a vault hunter’s action skill. (Though it can definitely still be used to apply slag to most bosses with Ruin and/or grab quick Moxxi weapon heals.)
1 Like
She stops being awesome once you get onto Overpower Level Eight (Hundred and sixty seven)
Wrong. She never stops being awesome.
1 Like