That’s only true to a point. It obviously does matter what the gun is and does, which is why neither you nor I any longer use that really cool level 27 gun that we found in our first playthrough.
But while what you said was a bit of a throwaway rhetorical statement, I do agree with you on the whole: just enjoy the game and don’t feel the need to use anything you don’t have fun with.
Usually, that’s the mentality I have. I mainly play to have fun (rather than hardcore farming or whatever), and use the guns and gear that make the game the most fun for me. I actually almost never use a lot of the stuff that people seem to talk about the most, simply because it doesn’t suit my preferred playstyle: krakatoa, the lob, pearl of ineffable knowledge, most Jacobs or Dahl weapons. I’ve always used heaps of Tediore guns even though they’re weaker than others, simply because they’re fun. I’ve never even liked guns with “On Action Skill End” annointments, even though they seemed to be seen by many as the holy grail of annointments.
But with Mayhem 2.0 there comes a point when certain builds/gear just aren’t feasible anymore. Case in point: Melee Amara, which used to be my favourite build to play. I had a near-perfect melee build, including an artifact that gave me 3 separate different melee buffs and added cryo damage to melee (which froze enemies, making them of course more prone to melee damage). I’d have a blast playing almost exclusively with melee and the Face Puncher.
But then Mayhem 2.0 arrives and I naturally want to explore the game at higher mayhem levels, only to find that melee just isn’t feasible anymore. I didn’t mind being a little bit weaker than my non-melee characters, but no matter how much you like melee, it’s just not fun to have to punch each enemy 100 times each. Even with my ultra-melee-focused build, it just isn’t feasible enough to be fun anymore (2 weeks ago I would have drooled over the new melee fish grenade, but when I got one yesterday I didn’t even bother using it because melee is just so weak) . And then when a gun like the OPQ drops that melts enemies in in 1/100th of the time, melee starts to feel even more tedious.
So the OPQ was the final nail in the coffin of my beloved melee Amara build. I know that melee is a somewhat separate issue, but to a lesser extent the the OPQ’s sheer overpoweredness (and/or the vanilla weapons’ sheer underpoweredness in M2.0) has been a nail in the coffin of many of my other favourite weapons/playstyles too.
Again, I want to stress that it’s not the OPQ that’s the problem, but the enormous disparity between it and just about every other gun. That, combined with the hugely increased HP of M2.0 enemies. It just feels like Gearbox scaled up the enemy HP crazy amounts with M2.0, then freaked out that they’d gone too far, and added some new OP weapons to compensate…leaving most of the pre-Cartel weapons effectively nerfed.
It can be (and is) argued that the Yellowcake also has the same huge disparity compared to older weapons. But at least the Yellowcake takes some skill to use optimally (managing its split-and-fall trajectory) and comes with the risks inherent to launchers (risk of blowing yourself up, getting caught reloading, or running out of ammo).
