Were e-tech/alien shotguns nerfed too much?

Borderlands 3 Loot and Weapons
#1

Specifically referring to the Sept. 19 hotfix which reduced their elemental damage from “flesh off your bones” to “a lot”

For reference, here’s the Creeping Death shotgun without the hotfixes:

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And with the hotfixes:

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Now here’s a Hornet for comparison:

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It’s clear that the intent was to bring the shotguns’ DOT damage in line with other weapons but it looks like the base damage was lowered too and now they’re just really weak overall- maybe reverse the base damage nerf but keep the DOTs the way they are?

Unfortunately I don’t have any other screenshots to show but I remember seeing Lobs with similarly reduced damage (can someone else confirm this?)

1 Like
#2

The Lob has always been terrible, and from what I have tested on patch with a cryo alien shotgun they are still really good on Moze at least.

#3

Wow that’s ridiculous. What a kneejerk nerf.

#4

This is very strange, should the shotgun damage be so low?

#5

this is a tough one for me, see when i leveled my first character (moze) i found a E-tech maliwan shotgun with 5x or 6x times more dot damage than any weapon i had come a cross. it destroyed absolutely everything in it’s path, melted warden in maybe 10 seconds. i had it for probably 10 levels if not more. was it fun? uhm, yes! but i think it was the right thing for them to do. it’s kind of an issue if you don’t want to replace it for 10 whole levels. i have one just like it at lvl 50 too and it’s still good, i don’t use it as much because i have way more options now but it’s not really bad.

both of these we see here are dahl and tediore, and imo they should be close in comparison with dot damage - it’s kinda what maliwan should excel at if you ask me.

base damage is waaaaaaaaaaay to low though, definitely !