Where Wotan Failed

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

We are about three weeks after the release of Maliwan Takedown and queues for Wotan are completely dead. YMMV, but the wait time for four people who want to run this are sometimes 10-15 minutes for a single run. So, why have people so quickly lost interest in the first of Gearbox’s added content, and what does it suggest we might expect for future DLC’s?

Quite simply, no one wants to run Wotan because it isn’t worth the time and hassle. To get to Wotan you have to fight your way through multiplayer queues (if you choose to party up), multiple glitches and crashes already listed on these forums, long waits for a respawn if you die… and ultimately you don’t get much for it. Typical comments after a takedown, when I’m playing, are something like “I didn’t get anything”, “garbage”, “waste of time”, etc…

The new guns weren’t really anything to get excited about, ultimately… the class mods are such a rare drop they don’t factor in, and the frequency of additional “world” drops are poor and often not annointed. A player can hit another boss, such as Grave Ward 20 times or more in the time it would take to run the takedown once. Players know this and they know where to spend their time.

Finally, the multiplayer experience is so poor that many players have taken to niche builds to run this solo, rather than get frustrated with the multiplayer mess… and it’s hard to blame them. In the long run though, the loot isn’t even as good as multiplayer so no one is going to bother for long.

So, what are your thoughts on the short-lived, first added content for BL3? What would like to see done differently? How does this play in on the upcoming first full DLC? What can Gearbox learn from their mistakes?

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#2

Most people fell back to niche builds or map exploits to solo raids in the previous games as well. The difference is raid bosses in the previous games were easier to farm repeatedly than other enemies or bosses in those games because they generally had their own set spot usually near a respawn or zone entrance. BL3 made the normal bosses more accessible and easier to farm. The only QoL change I would recommend with the raid is a respawn point right before Wotan after the mob zone before it.

The raid has its own unique drops which atleast aren’t exclusive to playing it on M4. However I think a lot of people think the bosses in the raid are supposed to drop 50+ orange items just because they’re harder. The thing you mention about the raid exclusive drops not being something to get excited over. They’re good IMO. However they aren’t going to add broken OP rewards to it just to listen to a flood of complaints about being “forced” to do the raid for gear progression. If you want a flood of the same old orange rarity junk then yes, go back to restarting your game every minute to kill Graveward.

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#3

Unfortunately, simply arguing that there’s nothing wrong with it isn’t going to get people interested in running it. The queues are empty… the new “raid boss with raid” model is dead in the water, and if nothing changes in future content, there will simply be more raids that no one wants to run.

So, the question is… where did Wotan fail and what could get people interested going forward?

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#4

Hopefully Gearbox will lean more towards raid scaling in future after it’s made available for Wotan this week if it works well.

1 Like
#5

Except your opinion on Wotans drop quality isn’t the same as mine. I completely agree there should at least be a shower of oranges to entertain me as all my Wotan drops are ten gallons, boring guns, woodblockers, and other other non sense legendaries that are never anoited. If you make a raid it has to have raid quality gear with a decent drop rate. If it isn’t going to shower me in woodblockers and boring guns so I can at least giggle don’t drop 10 legendaries that are boring gun, woodblocker, and ten gallon level loot thats also unanoited. Almost everyone I know stopped running it because they weren’t getting anything no matter if it was only ten runs or 100+. RNG I get can be fickle but if you want ppl to raid you have to entice them to come back. If you don’t they move on.

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#6

I think that overall, like a lot of things in BL3 the main problem is that the time investment and effort put forward is not equal to the reward given. Months after release, it is still way more efficient to just kill Gigamind or Grave Ward over and over than most other bosses.

And no, in my opinion the solution isn’t to nerf them. It’s up to Gearbox, to make the other options more attractive to farm. But honestly, I kind of dread what solution they may come up with considering the somewhat lukewarm implementation of dedicated drops.

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#7

The raid should scale reward loot no matter if difficulty scales at all. If my friends solos a impossible to solo raid his reward or chance of should be far greater than my group of 4 if the difficulty does not scale down. If you are going to scale difficulty conpared to player count than the players with 4 teammates should get better loot because of the harder difficulty.

2 Likes
#8

For something that’s meant to be a multiplayer experience it’s incredibly hard to actually play with multiple people:

  • Queuing for a group took way too long even during the first week compared to like, every other multiplayer game on the market. Maybe Fallout 76 is worse idk.

  • The way respawning/checkpoints work is terrible, imagine spending time queuing, the game glitching out so you have to re-queue, finally getting a party together that goes glitch free and then you accidentally back yourself off the map during the first fight after the Valkyries. RIP for like 15 minutes.

  • No host migration so good fking luck keeping a group together after a failed run lol

Trying to play MT in a group is a really good way to not play the game at all, tbh

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#9

Except you also overlook that most people will move on once they get what they want from it also. A lot of loot oriented complaints illustrate that point as they tend to push the point that people just want all the stuff they want as immediately as possible, coupled with the complaints about anything remotely challenging in game it also gives the impression many of them also want this loot handed to them on a platter.

You farm the raid either for the challenge or the chance at the exclusive drops from the raid itself. If you want all the other stuff outside the raid then farm outside the raid the same way you have been. Raids in other games follow this same model. They aren’t meant to be the best way to get all the other non raid stuff in the game. I feel like a lot of people initially jumped into it because they expected Wotan to rain more orange rarity items on death than they could pickup on each kill then became salty when their self created expectations weren’t met.

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#10

You sound like you are arguing just to argue and you also sound like someone who never runs this content let alone solo let alone on M4.

Things like this are just made up and ridiculous and is very far from the actual sentiment of any complaint I’ve seen.

I know a person or two that likes the no checkpoints thing. But personally it’s one of my biggest turn offs for running this Raid over and over. If I die to Wotan or at any point after Valk’s it’s such a slog to get back and I hate it. One checkpoint in this entire raid is not enough.

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#11

Unfortunately it was pretty boring.

Kill this stuff to get the door guy to spawn so you can kil some more stuff intil you get to the boss encounter. It’s essentially the same thing twice. This doesn’t set up an enjoyable cadence, it just makes it repetitive and boring.

The bullet-sponge nature of enemies in these kinds of games is the lowest common denominator of "difficulty’ curves for a reason. The instance can be tissue paper until that one “hard encounter” and suddenly you realise that all Maliwan Blacksite is there for is to soak up a player’s time. While that can actually be fun and profitable and it is in many games, but in the case of Maliwan Blacksite it just isn’t.

The ‘endgame’ in the Borderlands franchise has always been a fun timewaster and that was OK for invincibles because they were just an extention of the timewaster activity of farming the other bosses. The other content was single-player Campaign DLC. Maliwan Blacksite is neither of those things so it pleases relatively few people.

Now that the novelty value has worn off more and more people are realising how basic the content is compared to the modern benchmark for these thing.

Even Anthem gets this more right. They have

  • Kill this defensive position to proceed.
  • Kill X to get the boss to spawn then kill it.
  • Hold this ground and don’t let the enemies in so the timer keeps going down.
  • Collect X of these doohickies to proceed.
  • Pick up the McGubbins and ferry them to their destination.
  • Activate these switches in the right order.

Maliwan Blacksite has “We’re boosting the hell out of everything’s health, kill it to proceed”.

Adding to the old Invincible Boss formula just didn’t work in anything but the very short term because the entire raid needs to be interesting, not just a boss fight, and it wasn’t.

It’s just sub-standard content for this day and age even though it’s technically ‘more than just a boss fight’ of the BL2 styled Invincible content.

Now it’s got the problem that new players who still want to do it have to queue for an overly long time and it’s not long before it’s going to be ‘dead content’.

Team oriented raid-style content for Borderlands 3 was always a silly idea.

9 Likes
#12

Yea but they have to get SOMETHING raid orientated after say 10 raids right? People aren’t getting anything. I get that things cannot be dropped or “given” all at once but there has to be a trickle. Ppl are turning to begging or trading old stuff on the boards for new stuff instead of playing the game because the drop rates are that bad. There isn’t even a trickle for most people I know that actually played the raid over and over. Things can’t be easy but they also have to be rewarding in at least some sort of timely fashion. How often do you think raid legendaries should drop? We can start there.

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#13

it took me 40 mins to beat the valkyries on M4 with my blast master moze (20 mins to get there and 20 mins fighting them lol…) i got zero legendaries. i did not even attempt wotan, already know i can’t solo him with my blast master moze on M4.

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#14

For me Wotan isn’t a fail. Match-making is a fail, and the loot system is a fail, and those things can certainly sour your experience of the takedown. But I don’t think they are inherent to the raid itself

the takedown itself blew my expectations out of the water. Now admittedly my expectations for raid bosses were not high, since previous BL raids have produced some absolute abominations (looking at you, OP10 Vorac) and few fights I found genuinely enjoyable

This raid has a boss fight is actually interesting to me, which is a plus. the mobbing sections are Maliwan which is nice since there were not too many Maliwan stretches of the main campaign. Also we have a few unique enemies, and in general some characteristics and the density of the areas creates some unique build possibilities.

Like my current FL4K build for the takedown, which uses 3-shot fade away. I do not run it anywhere else, but the density of mobs allows me to get almost instant cooldown with brainstormer + megavore, which lets me use 3 fade-away to proc ASE anointments. And this has made me more aware of different ways to use base fadeaway and the different strategic values it has. Overall takedown has really refined my understanding of my character. The first time I beat Wotan holds a significance for me that few moments in the rest of my time in this game have.

There are definitely things I would change, like a few enemies that are annoying, buggy, or overtuned. Jetpack troopers flying into walls and ceiling. Some spheres hit for absurdly high damage, and can shoot through barrier / seem to target in fade-away. FL4K’s pet just charges Wotan and dies… kinda hilarious but they really need to consider how these things will go in a boss fight. I want a checkpoint before Wotan. To give a few examples. And I personally want the loot system to be generous to a point I am not sure GB will ever reach.

But I have enjoyed takedown overall, and then few times I have had a good multiplayer experience it was really fun. Still disconnect at the Valkyries most of the time though…

7 Likes
#15

Great discussion, guys… thank you. :slight_smile:

Remember that the goal of this thread is to get to the bottom of why people aren’t running Wotan after such a short time and why the queues are empty. This is our chance to let Gearbox know why we think people aren’t interested… if you thought the maliwan takedown was spectacular, that is fantastic, but it doesn’t help us solve the problem of why the multiplayer queues are already dead for BL3’s newest content.

Keep up the great discussion!

#16

Honestly, I haven’t been back to try Wotan on m4 because the holidays have slowed my game play time. When I do get to play, it’s for such a short amount of time I just would rather “play around” taking pics, or picking off side missions I’ve skipped.

Plus, I went all out with BH and finished all 15 challenges with all 4 of my TVHM lvl 50 characters. So, after grinding Haunt non stop for weeks on end I got a little burnt out lol. (Loved BH though!)

I’m unsure when the Takedown ends, but I kinda wish it wouldn’t and would remain in it’s own separate area so I can try and tackle it again after the holidays are done. Cause I love the challenge, but right now I just want to turn my brain off and farm a couple bosses on m4, do some random side missions, take pics, and dig into some dlc stuff. :grin:

1 Like
#17

I resemble that statement. :laughing:

I have no complaints about Wotan specifically and mostly no complaints about the raid in general. The only complaint I do have about the raid is some buggy enemy AI (e.g., jetpack enemies and orbs disappearing into walls and pipes). But outside of that I think MT is a fantastic bit of content and one of the best raid experiences GBX has ever created.

One of my favorite things about the raid is one of the things that so many people hate, which is that there is no checkpoint at Wotan. The reason I like it so much is because before MT came along dying has been inconsequential, which is totally cool, generally. But given that this is supposed to be a legitimate challenge for the best builds and best skills I feel like it was a stroke of brilliance on GBX’s part to make dying at Wotan consequential. The raid is making no apologies. It’s either come hard or go home. That is so rare in Borderlands games that I find it quite refreshing. Just so I’m clear, I’m not saying the entire game needs to have this mantra. I’m simply saying that in a game that is mostly easy street it’s nice that they’ve turned up the challenge in one specific area so those who want a challenge have it and those that don’t can completely avoid it.

One last thing. There are many reasons why people are upset about the absence of a checkpoint at Wotan and one of them is that the absence of a checkpoint makes it hard to farm. I’m of the opinion that it was not designed to be as farmable as story bosses. As a matter of fact if you take a step back and look at the big picture and the progression of how we get to bosses in this game it is kinda obvious, in retrospect, that Wotan is the way it is. If it’s possible for you, dear reader, to set aside your cynicism you may find it an interesting thought exercise.:grin:

Let’s begin. At tier 1 we have all the story bosses who are easily farmable. Tier 2 is the proving ground bosses and they are less so because you have to clear a lot of mobs to get to them. At tier 3 there is large difficulty spike in the form of the circle of slaughter arenas and in the circle of slaughter arenas farming bosses is even more restrictive because of the difficulty spike and the MASSIVE increase to the amount of mobs you have to clear before you even get to the boss. And now we arrive at the final tier of difficulty, a raid! And y’all expect a checkpoint? Clearly y’all haven’t been paying attention :grin:.

All that said, GBX will listen to everyone’s cries to dumb down their content (e.g., the nerf to MT coming this week) and the next raid will have checkpoints before the boss and player scaling. Effectively turning raids into glorified proving grounds but with better boss farming thanks to checkpoints. :weary:

7 Likes
#18

My complaints with the raid is these:

  • lack of checkpoints
  • 4-player scaling
  • obsene number of tanky adds
  • crazyfrog dogs (do they even want to engage me in combat)?
  • flying enemies that gets even faster when i shoot them (they don’t, i just like to pretend they are)
  • invisible bruce lee’s
  • every AoE attack in the game
  • Wotan being able to shoot through his shield during the double shield phase (i barely can survive long enough to get close, let alone enter the cone)
  • lack of check points
  • lack of check points
  • lack of check points

these are my opinions, and i know most of them are nitpicking. i also know that a lot of people don’t agree with me on most of them. i do play solo.

from a M4 PoV. i can solo it on M0 (yay)

if he’s not meant to be easily farmed and also has terrible drop rates. what’s the point in going through this whole thing? depending on which class i play on, it can get reaaaaaaaaally time consuming - the lack of check points doesn’t really make the fight harder. wotan is already extremely difficult for me on moze, we’re talking about 20+ mins fight IF i can survive that long (which i can’t so far). if i die, i have to fight through half the raid just to get a second attempt which also takes nearly 20 mins (on M4). it just isn’t worth it to me.

2 Likes
#19

I honestly don’t think this is it at all. People who are “farming” Wotan are using broken builds that clear the entire raid in 10 minutes over and over, they don’t give 2 ■■■■■ about a checkpoint. It’s people who struggle to beat Wotan and die over and over and do 30min+ to get back to him that find it frustrating. IMO

I still can’t quite beat him on M4 solo, I get super close but make some dumb mistake then I die. Then I spend the next however long slogging back to him. I just want to learn his fight, I don’t want to do the same boring mobbing section over and over. It’s not challenging me anymore it’s just boring and frustrating me when I die to Wotan. Granted it doesn’t take me 30 min to get back to him, more like 10 now that the deathballs have become a bit more hassle it used to be less, but it still drives me crazy. And I do know it takes some people that long or even longer for that mobbing section.

3 Likes
#20

I’m not claiming that that is the complaint of the majority. I’ve simply pointed out that MANY people complain about that issue. As a matter of fact my sentence begins with …