Interplanetary Stalker skill Bug: Please fix!

Borderlands 3 FL4K the Beastmaster
#1

Since the game released, This same issue has been there. Neither the “Big Game” Hunter skill effect boost, nor the legendary stalker com’s hunter skill power boost, affect the interplanetary stalker’s damage boost. As far as I know, The unique stack bonuses are calculated correctly, such as the action skill damage or movement speed bonus. Even the other skills, to my knowledge, gain the respective damage boost from those two sources, such as frenzy, second intention, psycho head on a stick, the most dangerous game, and strangely even hunters eye, although it isn’t listed as a hunter skill. I have tried relating this to 2k support already, but they didn’t seem to do much about it. I will now provide picture proof of Interplanetary stalker damage not being correctly buffed:

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Base melee damage without any guardian bonuses or skill bonuses. Just a basic unbuffed melee strike. (1338)

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Now we add one stack of Interplanetary Stalker, (10% damage at 5/5) to get 1472. No big game yet, just the skill by itself, which is doing exactly what it should be at the moment.

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Now, we get 3/3 big game, and did you notice anything? The damage did NOT change. Still 1472, which is 10%, rather than the 13% that it is supposed to be at after big games boost.

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Now, we equip the stalker com, which has +3 big game and +2 interplanetary stalker. This puts interplanetary stalker at 14% before big game’s boost and the stalker com’s boost. And what do you know, we get 1526, or a 14% boost to the 1338 base melee! This clearly shows that big game and the stalker com hunt skill boost is not correctly adding their bonuses to interplanetary stalker’s damage. If it were, we would be getting a max of 25.9% per stack, which is after 14% gets the 85% total hunt skill effect bonuses. I’ve tested different damage sources such as the rakk or just an ordinary gun to get the same results. It’s sad, and quite a hard to notice issue without doing deep testing. Odds are, no one even knew this was an issue to begin with! As I said before, the unique stack bonuses get the intended bonus, as I can feel a sizable movement speed bonus when using the stalker com than without. Anyways, if you have any questions or concerns, let me know, but otherwise, please spread the work so gearbox fixes this for all those flaks out there.

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FL4K Bug Megathread
FL4K Bug Megathread
#2

Did you post this in the bug section? I’ll add it to the megathread as well.

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#3

The skill is described as a kill skill –
“Whenever Fl4k kills an enemy, they gain a stack of Interplanetary Stalker. For each stack …, they gain a bonus to all damage.”
So perhaps yours isn’t a correct test? You’d have to kill something then shoot & see if there is a damage increase. Hard to do at the Test Dummy, granted. It would have to be live in the field. Kinda why I’m stingy putting points in kill skills (since it’s not always easy to get quick kills to buff it, especially, for me, in Mayhem 4!)

#4

I see what you are trying to say, however, when in sanctuary, you can spawn a car in Ellie’s garage area. You then can kill the car for kill skills, thus how I got any damage increase in the first place. The issue is that big game and the legendary stalker com are not correctly buffing the damage per stack, nothing else. That is all I was pointing out, and it is clear to see through the numbers I got that it is not working how it should.

#5

Ah, didn’t know about spawning the car in Sanctuary. Descriptions are so nebulous – like Big Game Hunter increases “effectiveness” – whatever that is?! Doesn’t say increases damage – maybe it increases “accuracy” :woman_shrugging:

#6

It increases the various bonuses of the many hunter skills and hunter kill skills. For instance, the reload speed of second intention gets buffed by 30% (30% of the reload bonus, not an additional 30% reload). Frenzy would also have its damage go up by 30%, so the 40% damage at max stacks turns to 52%. Hopefully that cleared stuff up for you so you can better understand how to build flak.

#7

By “it increases” - guessing you mean Big Game Hunter does? Yeah, I spec into that.

#8

Correct. Just trying to make it clear as to what it does.

#9

@deleona144 @CDR_Shepard To be fair to all parties, when deleona posted this yesterday and I read the post, my first question was the same as CDR’s - wait, how did he get the kill skills to test this on the dummy? It probably would read more clearly if the original post was edited to clarify how you got kill skills in sanctuary to test it, because I spent most of my time reading your post wondering that.

If this is really how it works, that stinks. IPS and Big Game are the two skills you want on that COM, and based upon your post, it looks like a COM boosting IPS is pretty much useless.

EDIT: Wait, were you testing only melee damage? I know IPS says “damage,” which obviously would include melee damage, but did you test whether perhaps the COM does not actually boost “damage” as a whole, but only certain types of damage? Like maybe gun damage?

#10

I tested rakk and gun damage as well, and I said so in my post. Sadly the exact same results.

#11

Didn’t mean to offend you. The pictures and bulk of your post talk about melee damage, and there is a quick sentence at the end about gun and action skill damage. I missed that part. I was just trying to figure out some reason this might be the case. The explanation is “because GBX.”

#12

No offense taken. Yeah, I definitely get that my formatting for the post was quite disorganized and hard to digest, so that’s my bad. I just wanted to get it out there since this issue has been bugging me since the game’s release. Now with this issue being made more apparent to players, the devs will hopefully get to fixing it at some point.

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#13

It is frustrating because IPS and Big Game are two of his best skills. And if they don’t work together, that kind of stinks. The Stalker is my favorite COM for mobbing, but I have gotten to the point where I run the Bounty Hunter for any difficult content because once you kill a badass, it’s pretty much just all over. The benefits from a boosted TMDG skill are really just absurd.

EDIT: Also meant to say that I didn’t mean to imply that the info in your post is anything other than great. Really useful stuff, thank you. It is a little hard to read, but you obviously spent a bunch of effort testing. All I would suggest is maybe make it a bit more clear that the COM fails to boost IPS damage from any source, not just melee, since you spend most of your time and the pictures showing melee. I would like GBX to see and address this properly.

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