Gear that needs some love

Borderlands 3 Loot and Weapons
#1

It’s no secret that not all guns in this game were created equal. However, I do feel that some guns that were meant to be good can neither compete with other guns nor the very game itself. Here’s just a quick list of guns that I think are in a bad spot and could benefit from some buffs.

  • Snipers in general. During your first story playthrough sniper rifles feel pretty decent. They deal a good amount of damage and allow for a viable crit based playstyle. This changes once you hit level 50 and start doing Mayhem modes. There’s only few snipers viable on the higher Mayhem modes and even those are far from being very good. The difficulty I see with balancing them is that they would need a severe damage buff to keep up on M4 (I’m talking like two to three times their current base damage) and this would make it hard to keep them balanced for lower levels or non-mayhem. Honestly, snipers sort of need to get a damage buff that’s propertional to the health increase from Mayhem. They also need a better ammo capacity, btw. Like, Borderlands 2 also had low sniper ammo, but it did have stockpile relics to help with that.

  • The Lob: The Lob is genuinely one of the weakest and worst weapons in the entire game. It’s special effect is to shoot large orbs that slowly pass through enemies, dealing tick damage and exploding when it hits a surface. How would I improve it? Increase the damage considerably (up to at least 2.5k), make the projectiles move much faster and change it so they just hit an enemy once when piercing through. Also, buff the explosion damage, the rate of fire and the magazine size.

  • Malak’s Bane: A Dahl Sniper that has a secondary firing mode that creates shotgun blasts. The sniper mode also ricochets. Sniping uses two ammo and shotgun uses 5 ammo per shot. Malak’s Bane uses way too much ammo for what it actually does, also it doesn’t really deal enough damage. How to fix: Reduce the ammo consumption down to 1 (sniper) and 2 (shotgun mode, or alternatively make it so the shotgun mode uses shotgun ammo, but also no more than 2 per shot), considerably increase damage and crit damage.

  • The Tunguska: After being one of the stronger rocket launchers in Borderlands 2, the Tunguska has returned as arguably one of the most pathetic launchers in Borderlands history. It borderline does about a tenth of the damage it is supposed to do and a single shot of it can easily be outdamaged by pistols, ARs, Shotguns and even SMGs. Considering that Torgue launchers are some of the hardest hitting weapons of Borderlands 3, one really must wonder what went wrong here. Buff the damage, and I mean by a lot. Anything lower than 10k base is just, not gonna cut it.

  • The Bitch: Either buff the damage or the crit. Right now, it simply can’t keep up

  • All COV ARs. The only one that seems to get a little use is the Zheitsev’s Eruption and that’s because of the debuff. They all just need some better stats.

  • Hellfire: Give me one reason, just one, to not just use a Westergun with fire element instead. I’d say buff the damage and considerably increase the fire dot.

  • The Mongol: Just make it drop. Seeing it being used in promotional gameplay just for it being unobtainable in the actual game feels bad.

  • The Bekah: Simular complaint. You can get it exactly once per character. Give her a proper drop source, will ya?

  • The Garcia: The whole point of this gun is the higher mag size, making it somewhat spammable, so please just reduce the ammo consumption down to 1.

  • The Wave gun: I genuinely don’t know why this gun keeps returning, I guess it has to be some kind of running gag at GBX. I don’t really know how to fix this design, I guess you could really ramp up the damage or something…

  • The Baby Maker ++: Uses waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much ammo on reload. And it’s not like the gun itself is good enough to justify shooting it over throwing. Limit the ammo consumed on reload to the guns mag size.

  • Gunerang: It’s just not very good. The reload damage is lacking and it’s very easy to kill yourself with it.

  • Scorpio XL: Doesn’t do enough damage. Deployed turret guns get destroyed too easily.

  • Bearcat: Reduce ammo consumption, improve damage

  • Echo: Deals too little damage, particularily on crits.

  • Sickle: Improve the rate of fire and it might be worth using

  • Magnificent: Too little damage, too little accuracy. Just not ammo efficient.

And that’s just the ones I could think off the back of my head and it doesn’t even include other gear types.

9 Likes
#2

I have 3 bitches just waiting for the day

3 Likes
#3

infact any cov weapon bar the moarr lingoe is just crap.

Tediore weapons get canned, more of a liability now.

Torgue has a lot of hit n miss weapons.

I tend to be a Jacobs/Dahl/Vladof/Maliwan person…and Maliwan isn’t great with its charge ups.

1 Like
#4

Red Suit capacity. Given the transformer is so high capacity and converts shock to shield, the radiation equivalent shouldn’t be so low in comparison.

5 Likes
#5

I’ll disagree with you on this one but it’s prob because I have a double COV pistols with sentinel Cryo that wrecks even on M4 it just chews up ammo like a beast. I also use a pain is power AR for Graveward kills with the relic that deals 90% damage for the element your being damaged by. Not great for mobbing because you will put yourself down quickly. :joy: other than that I agree for the most part that a lot of others are lackluster unless you have a great anointment that has synergy with a certain build.

3 Likes
#6

The Red Suit is a low delay high recharge shield (similar concept to the Band of Sitorak which is the most extreme of that style), it’s a completely different type of shield then the Transformer which is more akin to Re-Chargers and Stopgaps.

3 Likes
#7

I feel like Snipers in general are weak except for the Lyuda and Jakobs snipers.

All alien barrel weapons could use a buff except the Protuberance and Lump RL. The Carbuncle can be useful but the ammo consumption is just ridiculous. It should cost half of the pellets to make it a bit more useful. Given how rare alien barrel weapons are, they should do more with an ammo consumption of 2 (3 with x2 modifier). Alien barrel shotguns (except protuberance), pistols, smgs, ARs and ESPECIALLY snipers just feel weak for the ammo it requires.

The Host (Hyperion shotgun with alien barrel) is bugged for whatever reason. The SNTNL Cryo anointment does not work but all the other anointments work fine. I found out about this when firing a Radiation Host at my feet with SNTNL active and a Red Suit equipped. I die when I do this with a Protuberance.

1 Like
#8

I doubt Snipers will ever be very good beyond boss killing. Who wants to do say a slaughter shaft with x14 zoom.

#9

Snipers definitely need to be amped up, and Maliwan Snipers need to be retooled entirely. The charge mechanic shouldn’t be making them auto-firing at the rate of a machine gun with crap accuracy. If they aren’t going to boost the damage, they at least need to give us more SDUs for it because other than Moze or Zane using the Cutpurse and Face-Puncher on his Digi-Clone, the ammo for it runs dry in minutes.

Atlas and COV need more and better Legendaries, Tediore too. COV has zero Legendary Launchers, Atlas’s Legendaries are all underwhelming except the Ruby’s Wrath and Freeman (Carrier sure but only with the perfect Anointments), and not having elemental tech makes them fall behind sorely since they don’t have the raw damage or crit potential of Jakobs. Tediore only really has the Firesale Long Musket, all its other MIRV variant purples do more than the other Legendaries it has.

While I heartily enjoyed the Handsome Jackpot and all the Legendaries and even Uniques it added, we are sorely pressed for more Mayhem useful Grenade mods. The Hex is still generally the best straightforward bet for anything not Shock, since the Quasar and Storm Front have that covered. And now that the Halloween event is over, there’s no real outstanding Corrosive option for grenades thats farmable.

And we seem to be veering into Legendary Class Mods being not so Legendary, given that so many of them are generally either useless, have bad skill allocations, or both. Amara has two, maybe four good ones if you consider the niche uses for the Nimbus and if you have all the Anointed gear you need for Phaseslam/Phasecast to make the Golden Rule worth using. Zane only has one and its locked behind the DLC so everyone who doesn’t have it is out of luck, and while Moze has some good ones, they cycle around the same sets of skills so her diversity suffers and she still only has one real healing skill that none of her Legendary Class mods have an ability that makes up for. Fl4k is really the only one in a decent spot with those and even he has a bunch of more superfluous ones.

1 Like
#10

I feel like it’s the flow of the game. It hardly ever seems appropriate to use a scope really. It’s more of a hindrance with so many maps having hostiles set to come at you from multiple directions. Necessity of area awareness is the biggest evolution in gameplay of this series in my opinion…

1 Like
#11

The issue mostly boils down to enemies only spawning once you get close enough and at this range, other weapons are already better than snipers.

1 Like