Amara Phasegrasp range

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

Is there a way that Amara can receive a Phasegrasp range increase? Compared to Maya from Borderlands 2, it seems like they nerfed the phasegrasp range pretty heavily. Can it be like maybe another 20 meter increase?

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#2

Yes BL 2 range was better. +1 4 +range

#3

LOL BL 2 range was like all the way across the map if you use a scope to target it was soo broken. Though it would be nice to see a way to increase amaras range i’m not disappointed they nerfed it.

#4

to be fair, lore and thematically;

Maya uses Phase “Lock”

Amara uses Phase “Grasp”

basically, since the game came out, i always thought of Phase Grasp as almost non-canon, animation-wise, at least, it only looks like Maya’s to help us aim in-game, but technically Amara would actually be “holding” them in the hand itself, actually having them “grasped”

it would kinda make sense for her arm-based grasp to have a shorter range than… well… spoilers

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#5

I wish the range was a little longer. You can’t even hit some bosses with it because of the range. I am grateful though that there are so few phasegrasp immune enemies compared to BL2.

#6

If you have the Fist over matter action skill the fist still slam down even with out the grab. And the way the skills are worded now most of her other skills should still work, though I haven’t tested them all yet.

#7

Not just the range but the general hitbox or hit registration or whatever. It should not be borderline impossible to phasegrasp a frigging rakk.

#8

i’m not sure i agree with this

sometimes i do feel like i should have hit my target and i don’t, so it’s weird

but we can also phasegrasp things that are underneath cover in some situations, which is actually pretty amazing, so i feel like the hitbox is actually pretty forgiving

as to a rakk, i mean, it’s flying around;
you’d still have to shoot it, as in, probably miss a bunch

being able to spam phasegrasp with virtually no downside (low cooldown if you miss, no ammo or resource costs) doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal, to me

worst case scenario, you miss, and it takes you a few seconds to pin it down, while you take damage from it or something else

this is the same outcome if you miss actually shooting it

and they’re typically more fragile than others, so i feel like that’s basically fair

#9

The game has to also be playable on console. It’s a LOT harder to track a flying rakk using Analog sticks.

#10

The main reason I bring it up is because Maya didn’t have any issue phaselocking even the fastest-moving targets. Why make something clunkier than before? Why not just have it be a simple hitscan thing like in BL2 instead of this janky weirdness?

It’s actually a comparatively long animation, time which I could be spending by shooting. Try the creature slaughterdome, if you haven’t already, to see why this can matter a lot.

See creature slaughterdome again.

#11

They could also stand to lower the height the fist grasps the target at, half the time Fists Over Matter misses hitting them outright and its near impossible to melee them without Find Your Center extending your range.

#12

i suppose this is a valid argument, but controller users always seem to struggle with everything FPS-related, so this sounds like a separate concern

to what?
the other characters who don’t get a refund for a whiffed action ability?

the other characters who can’t hard CC mobs with their action ability?

this may be a pve game, but they still should have SOME kind of pros and cons to how the different players interact with the world, and CC is generally one of the most powerful tools you can have in any game

it still is a “hitscan”, it’s just at the end of her hand motion, rather than the beginning of it like maya

as to “why” it’s different, i dunno, you’d have to ask the devs that design decision, i find it weird, but it’s easy to get used to

occasionally it’ll wig out and target something i’m no where near pointing my cursor at, but it doesn’t happen often and i think it’s mostly lag, as i think i’ve only ever noticed it in online sessions

uhh
yea
the rakks that are bloated or whatever that are immune to phasegrasp entirely, so they just take the damage, instead?

they are clearly intended to be air-based targets that are difficult to deal with… hence the fact that they are… literally immune to the grasp’s CC… why else would they be immune to it if they didn’t want them to be the “harder” aerial units?

i still don’t fully understand why it’s a big deal that they’d be intentionally more difficult, if you don’t find it “fun” or “engaging” to have to shoot something flying in an FPS game, that’s a different story than the devs wanting to add some sort of bottleneck for people, whether that may or may not have been a good design choice, the way the implemented it, can be up for debate

again, this literally means nothing

the fat ones are beefier, okay, and?
they’re the “badass” mobs of the sky, as in the elite mobs, as in the ones intentionally harder to kill

like i’m so confused as to why this is a complaint other than “shooting game 2 hard”

i’m not saying that all of these concerns need to go unchanged and ignore “ease of access” for some players, especially those using controllers, but i just don’t understand why they’d really need to be changed in the first place, as they make sense by thematically fitting the game and the concepts they seem to be based around, you play the harder modes for things to be harder, yet you’re getting upset that it’s hard?

this is pretty poorly done on their part, i agree
i hope this one gets fixed if it’s an issue, i don’t use this action skill much, but that’s pretty dumb

as for melee range, it could be… complicated

i wonder if it has more to do on the internal tech side of things

the hitbox for the targets, and such, as obviously larger targets have a larger hand/get lifted up higher

but then it also comes to, what happens if the target is already in the air? does it drop them down to the floor? what if they’re jumping over a gap? do you get a free kill?

i wonder if that’s also an internal issue, where they had to make a choice on how to go through with it, either keep them toward the ground or raise them up a certain amount to keep it from bugging out

-shrug-

that one could have a lot of strange reasons, but i wouldn’t disagree with them making it so you could melee things you grasp easier, if it’s possible on their side

she DOES have an entire tree made for melee, and the whole point of the way this game’s skill trees were set up with the action skills was for you to be able to mix and match things together

#13

Four people in the slaughterdome makes rakk considerably beefier. There’s badass ones and chromatic ones that have legitimately huge mounts of HP.
Missing a phasegrasp+the time before it lets me try again is like a comparatively long reload, and it can happen multiple times in a row. If you think that isn’t a big deal, why does Moze have an entire skill tree dedicated to avoiding reloads? That time you lose that you could have spent shooting instead matters, especially in the slaughterdome. And it adds up.

The badass and chromatic rakk can be phasegrasped. I don’t mind difficult enemies, but as a general rule, things should not be difficult because of bad controls. (And the bloated ones can be worth hitting too, for that matter)
I like phasecast quite a lot, one of the reasons to switch to phasegrasp is to deal with crap like rakk. Except haha, it still sucks against them, even though it’s technically possible to grasp them.
Why give me a CC ability if it isn’t viable against the enemies where cc has the most value? Especially if I have alternatives?

PS: the fact that it’s hitscan at the end of the animation is new information for me. I will see how well I can land it with this knowledge. The ease-of-access of the mechanic is still not very good though, I should not have to find this out randomly on the forum, I should have normal controls that work conventionally, like BL2 phaselock.
Wind-up animations and built-in input lag sucks, why do you think maliwan gets hate?

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#14

The hit scan after animation is interesting. Explains why even on the ground I sometimes grab the enemy behind my initial target.

#15

and if you miss a bunch of shots in your clip and have to reload after dealing no damage?
where’s the difference?

… again…
pros and cons to each player
why does Amara get a hard CC ability and a tree designed for exploiting elemental weaknesses?
why does Zane get a tree dedicated to shielding and buffing his allies?

they’re SUPPOSED to play differently, with different strengths and weaknesses

though, each should have viable builds end-game, and that part… can be questionable… as i’m pretty sure there are a lot of people complaining about Zane and Moze builds at the moment, implying that they’re the weaker out of the 4, but it’s the general idea that the characters should have different aspects to make them appealing in different ways, while still remaining useful

it really isn’t “bad controls”, though, i don’t personally have many problems landing it on the rakks, unless you’re talking about on console, which i’ve said above, can be a separate discussion, because controllers always have these problems in games, specifically aerial combat

also

i did mention that it may not have been the best choice, but if that’s their decision to make something harder, and how they go about doing that, then that part can be discussed, but i wouldn’t call this an issue with phasegrasp on its own

i don’t disagree
it’s very weird, i picked this up really quick on release day when i noticed i wasn’t grasping my intended targets, after playing Maya a lot, myself, so i went and tried to figure out what was going wrong with my aiming

i guess i ignored the fact that other people might not have been able to catch this as quickly, so i do apologies for that part, even if i didn’t specifically attack you for not understanding, i definitely didn’t think of this, at the time

so does CC if it’s affecting you, to be honest
again, it might be a pve game, but… i dunno, again, it’s their decision, whether it’s a good decision or not is different

i do wonder, myself, if they have any real reason for making it at the end of the cast and not the start, i mean, yea, it’s pretty confusing

yea…
it’s really weird to get used to, but often times i wind-up my cast on nothing, just to end on a target

grabbing things behind cover is also pretty neat, i use it often for that, too, you can use it to grab people ducking behind a low wall, or people above you that are using the floor/cliff to block LoS

#16

I only mentioned Moze to illustrate that even a few seconds of downtime every 10 or so seconds matters. If it didn’t matter, the Bottomless Mags skill tree wouldn’t be so attractive. And when you’re trying to land phasegrasps on the frigging Rakk, it can happen a lot more than once every 10 or so seconds. Oh, and if you have Avatar, the best value is to land two phasegrasps in a row. It’s cool, but it’s double the chances to miss and sit there impotently.

Oh, and since Avatar came up: Even if you miss phasegrasp, it counts as an action skill use for the purposes of Avatar. Meaning if you miss the second one, you don’t get to try again (missing the first one has similar results as well: you get to try again, but you won’t be able to cast when it’s on cooldown). It’s a considerably heftier consequence than ~2 seconds of downtime.
Hopefully it’s an unintentional bug which will get fixed, but again, it would barely be an issue if it just worked like Maya’s phaselock.
I don’t even mind the limited range, it’s the janky timing I truly dislike.

Is your point that CC is so powerful that the input lag is justified? So why didn’t Maya have to deal with it then? She arguably had even more CC, her singularity perk was hella strong.

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#17

and… if… hard CC didn’t matter… neither would phasegrasp?
i’m still not understanding this train of thought

the characters are different with different benefits and different weaknesses, yea…

the avatar interaction is questionable, yea, i agree, i’ll wait and see how they feel about this, if we get any acknowledgement of it

“input lag” doesn’t sound right if it’s an intentional delay

and again, that’s a big if

i’m not justifying it being there, and i’m not saying it’s the perfect solution, and i even specifically stated i find it odd that it’s there in the first place

i’m saying if that’s how they wanted it, i can understand it, if they intend to actually balance this game a little better than previous titles

(another big if)

fixing things from previous game titles isn’t crazily out of the question

if something is strong, they’ll make it a little weaker
if something is weaker, they’ll make it a little stronger

that sounds like a simple, generic concept of making a “new game”

#18

With worse controls.

Oh so it’s a game balance thing now? If phasegrasp is so strong, why isn’t it also balanced when fighting regular enemies? Why nerf it specifically against rakk?
Hey, they could make it so the player has to do a 360 airspin and land phasegrasp before hitting the ground for it to work on badass fanatics. I reckon it’d be even more balanced then /s

It’s not related that closely.
The point is that repeatedly missing phasegrasp costs time that is more precious than you made it sound. To understand how precious this time is, you can compare having to constantly reload a gun vs not having to constantly reload a gun. Two different examples with a similar aspect.

#19

a “delay” isn’t “controls”
if it’s intended, it’s a mechanic

okay… what?
i literally have absolutely no clue what you’re even going on about at this point anymore

you’re missing something in an FPS game
you aim correctly, you hit things
you miss, you don’t
the punishment for missing something powerful like a hard CC is, apparently, having to “reload” like you’re saying, and take time before using it again

that part is justified

as to why it’s delayed, again, i’m not agreeing or disagreeing with its existence, but it has nothing to do with rakk specifically

target anything else, a random psycho running around, begin casting phasegrasp, and move your crosshair over another target, you’ll catch the other target, and not who you were casting it on initially

this has nothing to do with rakk in particular

what i was saying before about rakks being “harder to hit”, have to do with the rakk overall, not phasegrasp

#20

I could swallow this “it’s an FPS, gotta aim, bro” spiel if I couldn’t load up Borderlands 2 right now and phaselock the everloving **** out of every single rakk in sight. That required aim too. Why make them difficult to phasegrasp so artificially by gimping the controls?

Fine. It’s a crap mechanic then. What’s more, it’s one that existed in the previous game, and they made it worse. Not weaker game balance-wise either, mind you, just worse and clunkier to use. I see no excuse for that.
I could bring up maliwan guns again. I’ve quite frequently encountered the opinion that they kinda suck now, specifically because of the firing delay. Nobody likes these kinds of delays when trying to make a game do what you want. And maliwan guns have the decency to have the crosshair indicate the charge-up, with nice sound effects thrown in. Phasegrasp, meanwhile, is vague and feels almost random (against nimble targets) until you figure out the underlying mechanic, and even then it still feels vague and crappy.

Only slightly related subject: Phasegrasp also has an annoyingly long recovery time before Amara can start shooting or switch weapons, even though she quite visibly already finished casting it.

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