I’ll try to briefly summarize my thoughts about the experience of playing Fl4k.
I’ll start out with things which are poorly designed and don’t work as intended, and then I’ll add a few things which I think should work differently.
Flak’s pets are a mess. AI reacts slowly and melee types sometimes miss bites. Attack command has inconsistent delay. The jabber with a rocket launcher has absolutely no regard for it’s surroundings. It’ll pull out the launcher and fire in the direction of the target, even if there are obstacles in the path. I’ve also had the jabber pick up an explosive barrel and walk right in front of my line of fire, causing me damage.
All that could be forgiven, if the pets had decent survivability. There are areas and bosses (Mayhem 3) where the pet will die no matter what you do. I’ve tested it even without damage sharing and all regen skills active (with 5 extra points distributed among them with a class mod). The pet still died. This is very unfair for the character as a whole, because there’s nothing player can do to avoid this. After a pet dies, you can get a really hard hit to stats, depending on how you distribute points; 130% damage, 5% regen, 65% DMG resistance, movement speed and so on.
The best solution would be improving the AI and implementing pet commands (move to mark, attack, retreat, stay)
Alternative, although a little crude and drastic solution would be boosting pet’s hitpoints and damage resistance significantly, while maybe also allowing Fl4k to keep some of the improved stats while pet is on cooldown.
And lastly, having attack command on long-press action skill button is a really poor design choice for something that has to be activated during combat. It’s like having a long press for reload or grenade.
Now to things which I can’t objectively claim are bad, but which I do consider to be bad.
Sic’Em has very little benefit. Poor usability of the attacks, small reduction of an already short cooldown.
Eager to impress has very little benefit given how it works. By the time action skill cooldown ends, all enemies are often dead.
All My BFF’s should give more benefit to pet. Either by giving more regen or adding some extra health.
Not My Circus (Fade Away augment) has a very short range and poor usability. Not to mention duration.
Go For The Eyes doesn’t add and increase critical damage for the first pet’s melee attack, it boosts the damage of the first pet’s attack and marks it as critical. It’s the same effect as increasing damage by whatever amount, but it only does so for the first attack.
And finally, I feel that Fl4k’s kill skills are very situational. They should either last longer, or they should stack up until you activate them (long press action skill would be fine).