Rather than spend eons trying to balance every single grenade to not break Vampyr, what’s the problem with just making Vampyr give some percent of your grenade damage back as health?
The players will barely notice a difference, and then all grenades will be balanced as long as their damage isn’t excessively huge, which is something you would probably balance anyway!
Honestly, I’ve got no idea why it was set to 20% of the player’s health per hit in the first place. Effects that activate on-hit have been broken since the Bee in Borderlands 2, we should have learned something from this by now.
The re balance to grenade mods has little to do with Vampyr. The Hex has its duration and damage gimped beacuse it over preformed and was so easy to use. We are going to see lots of grenades like the Hunter-Seeker and Widowmaker be changed because of mayhem mode. Life steal for a portion of grenade damage would significantly cause far more problems as they need to factor in Grenade damage, Splash damage, and elemental modifiers in Mayhem mode if applicable. This would also mean the talent could go from balanced to worthless depending on Mayhem Modifiers. Being that this is one of Moze’s few healing utility skills it would throw here our of wack. They have far more pressing issues like the abuse of Bloodletter (COM), Thin Red Line (skill), Deathless (relic)and The Front Loader (shield). Having over 50k Shields is ridiculous and makes her nearly unkillable. Vamper can mix in to this combo but it is hardly the main problem. I’m not saying Vampyr can’t become stupid OP but you need several pieces of other gear and skills to get there, contrary to Thin Red Line not needing much of anything else to cause Moze’s survivability to skyrocket.
No, the change to grenade mods was because of Vampyr, as Vampyr with a beam grenade gives you upwards of 20k health and shields per second. Without that grenades aren’t particularly useful, especially now that the Hex and Firestorm’s damage has been brought down.
And Zane and Amara both have skills that give life steal for certain damage types despite Mayhem modifiers introducing variance into that, giving Moze life steal on grenade damage would be totally in line with how other classes get their sustain.
Also, there’s only one Mayhem modifier that affects grenades, and none that affect splash damage.
The question is why would you just be standing there letting him hit you? 50k is over double the max amount of HP and shields any other character can get and they all do just fine with there skill sets. Moze has Iron Bear for a quick heal and invincible if your using the right talents. The issues affecting Vampyr are un usual as GBX knows players would call it out. If it was intentional I have a feeling more changes will be made soon. Thin Red Line can over stack to 7 of 3 with the right Bloodletter COM I’m not saying the skill with a few points is broken it’s the fact that with enough points it drastically exceeds other skills if they could get the same amount of points. Vamper at 9 of 5 is good but not that good and it it farther down the Demolition Woman Tree then Thin Red Line.
I feel like part of GBXs issue with the Demolition Woman sheild builds is how they are so much stronger then a shield of retribution build. Add in that most of there feedback and player experience revolves around Demolition Woman they likely have little in the way of stats on how strong or weak other Moze Builds are.
Again what has happened to Vampyr sucks. I don’t think the skills was outright broken or to OP. It was its interactions with other skills and items that had already created a broken combo that could lead to the train of though that it was the root cause.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re standing there letting him hit you, the point is that without a way to regenerate your shields having a lot of them only serves to prevent one-shots, it doesn’t actually help your sustain. Moze isn’t tanky with a Shield of Retribution/Bottomless Mags build, despite having 50k+ shields, because she has no way to regenerate her shields. In Slaughter Shaft those shields will be gone in under ten seconds.
Having big shield capacity with a Shield of Retribution build is still useful, but only because at 1hp you no longer have health gate and are susceptible to one-shots. If you have 50k shields that’s not a problem any more because nothing will deal that much damage to you all at once.
And Thin Red Line really doesn’t give you that many shields. You have 6.5k max health at level 50, so 7 out of 5 (not 3) only gives you 9.1k shields, which for most shields leaves you with less than 20k. You have to grab a Deathless and points in Vladof Ingenuity to get that above 50k.
PD isn’t required for 50k shields. The max shield i’ve reached without stacks of PD is 52k. With PD stack I’ve hit near 120k shields. Thin red line can give 120% hp into shields, Front loader gets to about 13k shield cap with the extra 60% hp gets convert to shields (This can roll turtle x2 80% shield cap with a 20% max health decrease), Vladof ingenuity can offset the lost shield cap due to the max health decrease the double turtle gives, and the deathless is the icing on the cake for upto 50k+ shields.
The Hex wouldn’t be a crutch if Vampyr was grenade life steal, and it can still be spammed infinitely as long as you’re shooting at something, so if screen clutter was the impetus for this change it has absolutely failed.
Don’t accept blatant reductions in build diversity just because you don’t like the item.
2 Likes
roboteconomist
(Probably the dumbest Moze player...)
#10
I’d say the opposite is true – I’ve only increased my build diversity since the change. I still use cryo hex (because 1000% cryo efficiency = yes), I just don’t rely on Vampyr for regen as much.
sammantixbb
(I guess no one goes here anymore)
#11
Throw two black hole contact grenades at a crowd and get full health
What you suggesting doesn’t really fix or change the current problem. It’s not the fact that Vampyr restores a percentage of your health that makes it broken, it’s the frequency that some grenades allow it to be procced. As we saw after the stealth nerf to beam nades, pretty much anything with multiple projectiles completely breaks the talent. It’s just a poorly designed talent that seemingly wasn’t tested with a large portion of the grenades in the game.
Sure it would. The grenades that hit many times in Rapid succession, also do less damage per hit. If it were just a percentage of your damage as lifesteal, then while they would heal you more often, each individual healing tick would be much smaller. As long as the damage of each grenade was within a reasonable boundary, the scale would, by default, be balanced.
Except that would require rebalancing every single grenade in the game for one skill on one VH. Just look at the difference in proc rates between something like the Fastball and a Tracker. I have a tracker that has a chance to explode 18 times with one grenade toss. That means it can proc Vampyr 18 times . With your suggested change there would be no way to balance that without gutting that grenade(and the many many many others like it) damage to a point that it’s useless outside proccing Vampyr.
If a grenade explodes many times, then each explosion will do less damage on average. If a grenade does so much damage that it completely out classes other grenades, then it’s overpowered by default, and will need to be nerfed anyway.
The number of explosions is irrelevant. All that matters is the total damage output. And that needs to be balanced for General gameplay in any case, so basing your healing around that, will automatically ensure that it is balanced in all cases.
Again you’re talking about rebalancing every grenade in the game to fix one skill on one vault hunter. That’s insane.
All they needed to do from the start was to put an icd on Vampyr and MoD(just the grenade portion) and it fixes pretty much every problem they’ve had with Moze so far.
Grenades vary wildly in damage and as well as HOW they do their damage. There is no single number you could stick on that talent that wouldn’t make it too effective with some mods and useless with others. Which is the exact problem they are having now.
Some grenade mods being better than others does not inherently make lifesteal broken, it just means that some grenade mods are better than others. People will automatically use the grenade that does the most damage, anyway, so basing your healing around those grenades cannot possibly be broken.
Let’s do some math. Lets say the lifesteal is set at 10% of Grenade damage. And let’s use the grenades I talked about above. A 5000 damage Fastball will return 500 health every time it hits something. Now the Tracker. My version has card damage of like 1700. So it can return up to 3k health every toss. Do you see what I’m saying now? Your solution is just a slightly different version of what we already have and it has all the same problems. Just like now there is no way to tune that number to not make it broken with the grenades we currently have. And the only way to fix that is to nerf the damage of the Tracker(and every other similar grenade) to a point that it’s useless. Which is for obvious reasons a terrible way to go about it.
