I really don’t get why everyone just nods along to the threads that want to cut down fl4k’s numbers. I think its dumb. I think its good to be op in a looter shooter and they should buff whats weak instead of cutting down whats strong.
Dudes.
Hold up a second and read this disclaimer before I begin.
Nobody wants your lazer eye comments about how many youtube videos you saw about how dummy thicc fl4k’s damage is. Nobody wants to hear you rant about how you can still kill the heck out of gravetender with the boring pet build. Nobody and I mean nobody wants a regurgitated super mega fl4k nerd guide. I don’t care. Here’s what that nerf to leave no trace did and why I think its dumb to patch this game like its some kind of moba.
I played this game from launch wanting to play with some fancy fine jakobs revolvers. That’s what I did. I had 5 points in that ammo refund skill. Was having some real fun popping heads. Even that nerf to guerrillas didn’t bother me cuz I could still pull it off. Now, this SECOND nerf comes in. So your average revolver has 6 shots. You pop a crit, I get one single ammo refunded…then I plug through the rest of the gun and reload in two seconds to proc it again. These 5 points in that skill are now utterly useless and meaningless. There is literally zero payoff from putting any points into this skill. I didn’t even do that stupid bee combo, I just wanted to have wacky fun times making Jakobs proud. That is no crime.
I played for hours in this way, and suddenly the playstyle is bricked, the guns I grinded and searched for dont feel nearly as impactful, and certainly less viable in mayhem. Like holy heck, I spend half of every fade away cast reloading. Its so lame dude. Stop balancing this game for the geeks that no life this thing like a diablo ripoff. You’re treating a borderlands game like its an esport or like its supposed to be reasonable. A borderlands game, reasonable? Are we playing the same game here folks?
Top notch moan. I think the gearbox guys played a little too much destiny during development. This is the kind of stuff bungo pull all the time and ironically, gearbox following the same thread will send people back to d2. At least when they nerf, they do it with some continuity.
If I go on Galaxy to another map I see the side missions (yellow callsign)
After travelling to this map they disappear but if search and find them they are there
Whats wrong ?
Was Fl4K nerfed again ? Sunday I could easily beat Capt Traut within 15 seconds .
Yesterday I did no Damage at all (same build same weapon)
Diablo wouldnt nerf it this much, particularly the last nerf. They may have lowered dmg moddifiers some but their policy for a long time was buffing the weak builds/sets up.
The crit build as it was is far from an end all build. Ive had easier times on mayhem 3 with Amara and Moze, especially Amara. My connection was down last week so it reverted fade away to pre-nerf duration and I couldnt kill the annointed in a cooldown when my Amara would have with the rest the room.
I doubt they will reverse the changes though, even partially. Unless they release the raid and people just cant clear it or they see fl4k mains bail on the game or something.
I have honestly never heard a reasonable argument as to why GiTM needed to be ‘put in check’. Other than killing Graveward quickly - who can be 1 shot by any class anyway.
In terms of boss killing, it is nice, but every class has their optimized setups that can wipe bosses every bit as fast.
For mobbing, 8s of invisibility + pseudo autocrits is pretty op, but pales in comparison to Amara 1 shotting 6 immobilized enemies at once with TTB, or Moze wiping entire rooms with splash weapons and grenades while being invincible.
And the main reason why there has been backlash against the nerfs is less that certain skills have been nerfed, but that the nerfs are so heavy handed they effectively ruin said skills. If they had just nerfed the crit of GiTM, very few would have complained. If LnT’s nerf didn’t effectively delete the skill, we wouldn’t see the same level of backlash.
if you aim at crit spots while in fade away, fl4k received basically no nerf. As for the leave no trace nerf, the skill was not working as intended. Just put 1 point in it and you have 2 more points to give your build even more damage than it did before the nerfs
Piemanlee
(Goodbye friends and not friends, it's been a fun ride)
#11
12% chance to get 1 bullet added to my mag every 2 seconds if i get a crit? That’s not worth 1 point. If you boost it to 7/3 giving a 84% chance, 1 bullet every 2 seconds still isn’t very good.
Unless you’re using a very slow fire rate gun, the Unforgiven being the only one i can think of, then LnT is basically useless
The 12% chance is for every bullet, so If you have a multi pellet weapon and maybe some ricochet even you will proc the skill pretty much instantly on cd. Therefore I dont put more than 1 point in it.
Fl4k’s damage per shot is already quite high, 2-3 more points is a pretty minimal impact. I also wonder where would you even be putting those points that you didn’t already have specced. An extra 6-8% crit damage from Hunter’s Eye or Ambush Predator? Not a big difference.
On the other hand Leave No Trace was greatly increasing their sustained damage output. It’s a huge net loss no matter how you try to slice it.
I feel like the vast majority of players don’t like the direction Gearbox is going in with the nerfs, and rightly so. I don’t see many people nodding along
There were multiple ways that they could have adjusted LNT to make it less powerful that didn’t effectively make the skill useless. The 2 sec cooldown makes it so bad that it isn’t worth the points
The issue was a result of it applying the chance to each individual pellet. So multi pellet weapon ended up returning a ton of ammo per shot. All they had to do was make it a per trigger pull chance. That solved their issue with it proccing too much on multi pellet weapons, but it also kept the skill at a level where it still functioned.
Instead they rendered it so bad that it’s basically non existent in any current build. Not good form.
Beyond that, it reduced the weapon variety for flak players since having LNT made low magazine weapons far more appealing if you were able to land crits. As it is now there is zero point to using it on low mag weapons since you’re already reloading it by the time the 2 seconds are up.
This has led to comments like “just use a call weapon. Problem solved…”. So the proffered solution is to just use 1 of 4 specific weapons to try to mimic the affect. How exactly is that improving variety?
I’m glad they are trying to buff some of the other builds. But trying to increase build diversity by changing a skill to make it so bad that literally nobody uses it anymore is completely counter intuitive. And further more, it decreased the fun that many players were having
The skill was a cornerstone for leveling. Not just useful for one specific boss killing build
The more natural crit damage you have the less the guerrillas in the mist crit bonus matters since it is a different mulitplier. If you calculate in all the natural crit bonus fl4k gets from his skills and weapons the guerillas in the mist crit nerf barely affects your damage.
I don’t think people were or are even all that upset about the GitM nerf. At least not from a damage standpoint. The complaints I have seen have mostly been that by reducing the time for GitM, you did very little to cut the damage, but you drastically reduced the utility and survivability of using FA with GitM.
And in doing so, they still failed to address his ability to melt bosses in any tangible way. But they did significant damage to his mobbing ability. Not something he excelled at to begin with compared to others
I think that is the crux of many of the complaints. They didn’t consider the full affect of the changes they made and ended up hurting the skills in significant ways while not even managing to address the issue of him killing bosses to quickly
Another thing to consider regarding these nerfs is that they brought them out 2 weeks into the games life cycle. With the claim that it was to increase build diversity. There are 2 major issues with that
There were and still are multiple skills for the different VHS that either don’t work at all or don’t work as they’re supposed to. If you want to have people use diverse builds, there can’t be trees with multiple skills that simply don’t work. People will gravitate towards those that do
To expand upon that, it doesn’t make the players very happy to see a build that they were using and enjoying get significantly nerfed before other options are realistically available to use. And it doesn’t make them happy to see the devs spending time on nerfs that reduce their fun when there are still non working skills and significant technical issues that still have yet to be addressed
The game was 2 weeks old at the time of the first nerf. That is hardly enough time for a true meta to even form. The game was in its infancy. Sure a lot of people were using that particular build, but it was still so early in the life of the game that people had hardly had time to even experiment and try other builds yet.
The correct way to balance should be to improve the other builds and fix the skills so that they are appealing to use. Not to cut off the build people are currently using and enjoying at the knees
With flak, people weren’t not using pet builds because the crit build was too good. People weren’t using the pet builds because they were too bad. That is a big distinction.
Make it so people have multiple fun options to use and people will use them even if they aren’t the most powerful build available. So long as it is viable players will try it
Post release play has cemented it though. Granted, with the changes so far both builds have gotten some sizable changes for the better. Still, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while the gap is closing (and never existed for gun-based variants of Gamma Burst builds and most Rakk variants) there is still A GAP between pet builds and gun builds, and a far bigger gap than any of the other pet classes had in terms of effectiveness.