Maybe it was me just hoping but i thought a pet build would be you and your pet working equally since youre giving up insane gun damage and crit to play it, but pet builds are incredibly weak in end game, they work fine in normal and tvhm but in mayhem 3 the pet just cant do enough dmg (and fl4k neither if not using hunter tree) and also cant handle exploding anointed/badasses without dying, currently playing through tvhm on mayhem 3 and these are my two pet builds ive tried
ive put almost all my guradian ranks into cooldown reduction since the pet does a lot more in gamma burst but even in gamma burst he would take 10 minutes to kill a single badass, not sure what can be done but i feel like master tree needs some love (and buffs)
Youāre 100% right. Both of your builds are almost identical to the ones Iāve explored and no matter what I do, even in TVHM, I get so tired of the performance I just roll my eyes and resort back to the Fade Crit build out of frustration.
My biggest issue is that I love pet classes, and given the Master/Stalker combo I honestly thought Iād be the class running around in lazy-murder mode. Iād be happy to control my pet, buff it, execute attacks (just not the aim/hold F to execute an unreliable attack garbage - but thatās another conversation), but at this point in Mayhem only the Fade Crit seems to be viable, or even fun.
The pet build is a grueling, slow, uninteresting, and tedious process (for me). Thatās the whole reason I played Fl4k in the first place. I inched through TVHM and while it was āviable,ā it was insane to see the difference between Crit and Pet builds.
I understand that every game has its flavor of the month builds, and I have a ton of faith in Gearbox, but man they really missed the mark on making a pet class feel good. Unless you like hiding behind a corner and watching your Skag smack a badass for 35 minutes, doing about as much damage as 1 shot of your assault rifle.
Anyways, sorry for the rant, but I totally concur ā I just wanted to add to this since I really, really think this needs attention. Not to mention, the most effective build for the āpet classā is pretty much ignoring the pet outside of the free res.
Yeah you pretty much nailed it, though for me id rather just play another class than play a gun build on a ābeastmasterā, im not even sure what can be doneā¦ pets need huge dmg increase if in masters tree but even then in tvhm almost everything has shields or armor, so it either needs a element augment or something special like being able to damage health through shields
Iām using a similar build myself, it was pretty good early on but falls off so hard late game. Its sad because this game is supposed to have such diverse builds, but with Fl4k a pet build just isnāt really viable despite him being a beastmaster. Imo he plays more like a Ranger class in an mmo, where they have secondary pets they can summon on the side just to distract stuff for them mostly. Its no wonder you see almost everyone running crit builds with him. Hereās to hoping they buff the pet tree a bit, but probably not
I think that statement is the real issue here; this is purely speculative but I kinda doubt the vast majority of people that signed up for Fl4k intended to be a ghost sniper. For the sake of simplicity, if the Stalker is the āMarksmanā and the Master is the āBeastmaster,ā I think thatās fine because it diversifies the class. The problem is the Stalker is insanely OP while the Beastmaster is barely viable.
@Kuri Iām with you ā I donāt really enjoy playing Fl4k at this point either, which is a damn shame. I went hard on a gun build and tbh yeah, you can pretty much obliterate a boss in less than 15 seconds with the right gear but itās literally āhit fade away, click on boss.ā Even when I join other online parties the second I do the fade away thing everyone is like āoh god, here we go again.ā
I like your idea about the pet augment though. Even if there was a way to like, switch elemental stances or something that might be cool. Maybe replace the attack command (gross) with āswitch elementā and it turns Gamma into different elemental types? That could be cool.
You said it. Iām down with some build variety, I think itās great that Fl4k has non-pet options. I just donāt understand why the non-pet options are so much more powerful, not only than the pet options but than almost any other build in game by a very wide margin.
Even Hunter isnāt all that bad, Stalker is the one thatās really stealing the show. Itās OP to the point that it becomes un-fun after a few days of play, it has too much of everything and no real weaknesses except the CD on Fade Away, which can be brought pretty low.
Yeah, and with the proper gear the cooldown isnāt even pretty low; itās almost irrelevant. I watched a few YouTube clips of it refreshing so fast that the lack of health/regen was a non-issue. Fade Away is ridiculous in and of itself. Mobs cannot see you, getting hit/hitting doesnāt break stealth (with the skill), and unless youāre standing directly in the line of fire on a boss fight youāre basically invincible every 10 seconds for another 12+. Meanwhile my pet is ressing me every 15 seconds even with all my health buffs.
No problem, maybe randy actually makes all 3 skill builds interesting to play, not only broken crit build so kiddos can nobrain invest points there to kill whole galaxy. Mmm weird definition of fun randy has.
Flak shares some of the same problems as Axton did. If you focused on Axtonās turret you would eventually reach a point at high levels where it just didnāt do enough damage to be useful, and at that point youāve basically wasted all of the skill points that would have buffed Axton. The problem with Axton then was the lack of an alternative.
At least with Flak they did give an alternative path to relying exclusively on an AI companion, but itās still unbalanced.
Explosive Axton was legendary, Iām not sure what youāre talking about.
Also, he was called the Soldier, not the Turretmaster. There was a blueprint from the previous game that they were following where the turret is used as distraction/support while its owner does most of the damage.
The top pet class in BL2 was the Mechromancer, who has it right in their name, and while Gaige did have some serious endgame issues, with enough work Deathtrap could be made serviceable while mobbing on UVHM.
I do agree that the basic scaling issues are similar, being that flat damage buffs from talents are inadequate to keep pace with endgame, and TPS remedied this to an extent. Even Gaigeās ability to exploit synergies like Make It Sparkle were a step up.
Fl4k represents an active step backward for pet classes in Borderlands, sadly, unless something is done.
Thereās actually a combo for Gaige right now that allows Deathtrap to absolutely smash, involving getting the capstones of BFF and LBT and then equipping a good roid shield. It doesnāt work against raid bosses, on account of Deathtrap not using melee attacks on them, but it puts out some pretty serious damage, and with the recent level cap increase, she can even pick up enough in anarchy to make it a good build.
That said, in general I feel like the Borderlands games have often had issues with pets and similar abilities scaling to end game. Mozeās Iron Bear apparently has issues on higher difficulties as well. I suspect the reason for these scaling issues is that in order the balance the game, the devs want to make sure that gearing up is important. If you can smash everything with your pet or non-weapon based ability, it minimizes your reliance on gear. It would be really nice if they came up with some system where Fl4kās pets (and perhaps Iron Bear) could scale with your weapon/shield rating or something like that.
This is a common problem with pet builds in general across many games, scaling tends to leave them behind because the player sacrifices some of their personal power to invest in their pet, but gear-based scaling often only affects the player.
BM Hunters in WoW have historically had this issue where their performance swings wildly from crap to godly and back again multiple times per expansion, because they keep falling behind with every new tier due to the flat scaling and then getting buffed back up to compete.
Your idea is close to one Iāve had. The game has the mechanism to track a playerās gear score rating, they could implement a scaling buff based on it in theory.
I would also accept more legendaries being designed to work around some of these issues. It would be a band-aid fix, but I care more about the end result (having a viable beastmaster spec)than how we get there.
I was thinking that same thing. Making item score effect their output would be great. I used that build you mentioned for Gaige for a long while when it was possible to use them together and I loved it.
Tim was the same way in TPS. Equipping his digi-jacks with a roid shield allowed them to 1 or 2 shot bosses.
Honestly, I think Diablo 3 has the right idea in this regard. Pets in that game scale off your weapon DPS. They have tons of other multipliers on set items and other gear to keep them competitive as well.
A common thread for Borderlands seems to be that without a specific debuff to help the pet along (Laser Guided in Wolfās case being a 90% multiplier) they need a way to scale off of gear. Normally that seems to be accomplished through shields, but with the introduction of the item score, I donāt see why that canāt be incorporated into a formula to scale the pets. That would have its problems no doubt, but we NEED a way for pets to scale with gear.
There is no reason for a pet in ANY game to be dying constantly on the easiest difficulty. FL4Kās companions are made of tissue paper.
With my current build my pet can tank like nothing. He can even sometimes kill annointed enemies if they donāt outpace his hp regen and down him. But he doe so little damage it takes him forever to kill just about anything even with the points to up his attack. On the upside I got another legendary class mod that makes him taunt constantly while in gamma and I can just waltz up and kill enemies while they all attack him to no avail lol