Power creep, I hate it

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

I love the Souls series. These games are challenging (and sometimes frustrating) but because of that even more satisfying when you learn to utilise everything at your disposal and overcome the challenge. You’re looking forward to each and every minor character improvement. The more you play the more powerful you become via stats but it’s never easy to the point you could skip major parts of the content just because you got “Jack’s Demon Slayer of URad +9000”.

I also love the Borderlands series. Those games never were nearly as challenging as the Souls games and that’s totally fine with me. You could play through the campaign/story and have a good time. If you wanted to be a bit more powerful for a while you could farm some specific powerful items at certain ememies and enjoy their power for a few levels. But there always was an incentive to progress character development to tackle new challenges in the game and adapt tactics.

IMO the most enjoyable part of an RPG is the leveling process, the progression, character development, the journey and ultimately experiencing when all these things come together and form some sort of synergy that fits my playstyle.

I had that feeling right after BL3’s launch, even though it had its share of other problems, I enjoyed my time with the game. When I got a unique or legendary item I was excited even when it turned out to be not my cup of tea. I always felt the need to level up my character and find new items for different situations/challenges.

In the last couple weeks/months when I wanted to play BL3 and have a good time I get bored rather quickly. At this point, starting a new character feels kinda pointless to me. That’s because a huge part of the legendary loot pool became so powerful, it invaluates every alternative items, skill/build choice and you can rush through normal mode without the need to upgrade anything. Once (specific) anointments come into play it gets even more ridiculous to the point that even the items that carry those anoints don’t really matter anymore. The increase of legendary drop rates left and right made it even worse. It isn’t exciting to find a legendary anymore.

If I want to enjoy the game now I’d have to artificially ignore a huge part of it: legendary items, anointments and certain skills. I can’t hunt for a fun legendary item anymore - I love farming - because it would render everything else on my character obsolete. Or I don’t start new characters anymore and become bored even faster. Either of those options make me feel like I get way less enjoyable content out of the game than at release.

I don’t get it when people ask for even more power creep because item X “isn’t viable” for Mayhem 10. I don’t get why the devs think it’s okay to balance some major part of a game around the highest difficulty and ignore other parts and more importantly several days of progression that lead to that point. It’s like they don’t care anymore for the content they spent years to develop. It’s all about legendary items, specific anointments and IMO rather boring/stale Mayhem 10 now. The rest falls flat. I’d rather see major nerfs than buffs, they would help the longevity of the game and current Mayhem levels would actually remain relevant.

In the last couple weeks I’ve seen several videos of people rushing through Takedowns in a few minutes while killing their bosses in seconds on Mayhem 10. That’s supposed to be the hardest content? With every game update and content expansion the curve of new powerful items and skills increases exponentially.

What’s next? Most people getting bored of the hardest content because it’s just more of the same thing but due to the power creep it became too easy? Higher Mayhem levels and shortly after more power creep to tackle the new challenge while invaluating everything before that point even more?

I see no reason to buy any of the new DLCs because it feels like all they do is to make the game worse in all the aforementioned aspects while trying to offer new (challenging) content in which they will fail rather sooner than later.

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#2

While I understand where you’re coming from personally, there is a sizeable and vocal portion of the community that opposes nerfs in general.

The pushback isn’t limited to arguably unnecessary nerfs, any nerf at all would be enough. Gearbox have to bear these players in mind when approaching post-release content and progression. This isn’t to say they won’t rework or tone down things, but they’re now seemingly very reluctant to. They have to strike a balance, which means it’s often safer to balance upwards (even though that leads to excessive creep).

I disagree that the game shouldn’t balance for M10 though. It should. It shouldn’t ever balanced for non-Mayhem. But the scaling should match across the board. Currently it’s very haphazard.

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#3

People will want to lynch me for saying this again…

The problem is weaponscaling and like you said, anointments…

People seem to love seeing +100%, 200%, 300%… And also love to ignore that enemy health scales with it…

And when i say they should remove weapon scaling, smooth out enemy health scaling (part of current difficulty scaling which they should add more challenging enemies to in top of the scaling) and actually make anointments fun (instead of the blatant powercreep it’s now) they would almost want to kill me as if I strangled their puppy :sweat_smile:

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#4

I hate power creep as well, it’s one of the reasons I stopped playing until most of the dlcs were released(edit: and almost didnt buy dlc 5 because of the plasma coil), but I don’t think anointments fall into this category because they are on everything (with minor exceptions).

Wtf?

Enemy health scales depending on what anointments you have?

I see anointments as just another element and a mechanic to build around. Yes some are more desirable than others but this is a game about rng based loot. There should be some lame anointments just like there are some guns that do x2 vs x3.

Lack of power creep is another reason why I think arms race has the potential to be the future of bl3/the borderlands series.

No one is arguing against this.

Again. Wtf? If people think differently about a game mechanic, you imply they want to murder you? Twice in one post. Maybe the problem isn’t the game after all. Edit: Sorry for going off topic, I got triggered as well but should have asked questions instead of jumping to conclusions and getting mad.

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#5

It’s not unreasonable to suggest the massive damage increase that comes from certain anointments were a factor in Mayhem 10 initially having a 12,000% enemy health increase and Guardian Takedown releasing in the state it did. Maybe that’s what he’s refering to.

I mean, Arms Race also strips the game down to basic rarity guns. Even most of the anointments (including the most powerful ones) are unusuable or almost so–Action Skill releated ones are out, URAD is dependent on you getting a legendary tier shield/drop to proc the effect, etc. Of course a mode that literally blocks you from most of its systems is going to be more straightforward. And while BL3 would likely benefit from some simplification I’d be wary of stripping away too much in the name of avoiding powercreep.

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#6

That’s reasonable. Without the anointment system how it is, m10 scaling wouldn’t make sense.

That’s not entirely true. If I get a good urad gun, I’ll actively try to avoid getting health pickups. Shields/artifacts are certainly fun/helpful but they are not needed for this anoint to be useful. This isn’t power creep though, just a fun mechanic.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s only one of the reasons I hope they continue to develop the mode.

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#7

The biggest problem I see in the game right now with gear is that GBX has come back behind themselves after release and buffed and nerfed gear somewhat haphazardly. The weapons that have been buffed have been buffed with Mayhem 10 difficulty in mind, and these weapons are way, way overbuffed for normal, non-Mayhem play. If you find a Hellwalker at level 30 in normal mode, that weapon realistically will still be OP in normal mode at probably close to level 50 (at least level 45). Rather than doing it this way and making the buffed weapons super-OP in a non-Mayhem playthrough, they should have adjusted Mayhem level weapon scaling ONLY.

Personally, I think that to fix the scaling/difficulty issues with the game, they could take a couple steps.

Introduce a Mayhem 12-14 (it would not have to stop at 14 BTW, they could have more levels than 3) difficulty setting where all VH gear remains Mayhem 10 (and I mean ALL gear - weapons, COMs, artifacts, shields, and grenades), and enemy health, shields, and armor values increase with each level. This highest difficulty setting would essentially require players to use underleveled gear to increase the challenge. TL; DR - basically re-introduce the concept embodied by the Mayhem 1-3 (then eventually 4) system that existed upon release. This should satisfy the players seeking more challenge from the game.

In order to unlock these highest difficulty levels for the game, players would have to beat the Maliwan Takedown, one of the Slaughters, or some other challenge, at the higher difficulty level. There needs to be some type of gatekeeping function for the highest difficulty setting in the game, and that higher difficulty setting should not have better gear locked behind it - it should just be difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Yes, I realize that this is essentially just the OP levels from BL2, and no, I do not think that is a bad thing. That system worked. Also, I am not talking about introducing slag, passive enemy health regen, or anything like that. Just enemies that are overleveled with respect to the player, essentially.

The next step they should consider taking is to rebalance the game and all gear around normal mode and TVHM so that legendary weapons are not completely ridiculous in that mode. Legendaries should still be really powerful because, after all, this is Borderlands, but they don’t have to be so powerful that they can carry you for 20 levels.

Anointments should be toned down so that there is no scenario where the anointment increases the weapon’s base damage by itself (i.e., skills and other gear not included) by more than, say, 50%. That 50% value may not be the correct value, but there would be a percentage that would work and the concept is still the same. Special effects of weapons, skill trees, and passives can still increase a weapon’s damage, of course - just not the anointment. Right now, we have anointments that increase damage more than some VH’s skill trees, and that doesn’t work.

Finally, once they have re-balanced the game around normal mode and TVHM and essentially capped the anointment system, they can then re-balance and re-institute Mayhem scaling. Because anointments are limited, enemy health, armor, and shield values will be more in line and scaling for the Mayhem levels can be rolled back slightly from the present 10,000% (or whatever it is, I don’t recall for certain). As it is right now, a Level 65, Mayhem 10 weapon essentially is just a Level 75 weapon. It’s not like there is a set rule that says Mayhem scaling HAS to work the way it does now; it could be that the base damage/values of a weapon or other piece of gear might only increase by what would be a quarter or a half-level (i.e., instead of ending up at a Level 75 value, the gear ends up at, say, about the Level 70 value).

I recognize that none of the above has even a remote possibility of being implemented to “fix” the scaling of the game. That is way too far gone at this point, but maybe this type of system is something they will consider for BL4. The present gear values, Mayhem scaling, and anointment systems just scream that they were designed independently from one another, without considering their collective effects.

Sorry about the long post; hope it is at least somewhat readable.

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#8

No I mean that they inflated enemy health so much that the 1/2/300% anointments are a necessary evil :wink:

The difficulty problem derailed really hard there :sweat_smile:

Then new level caps increased power even further and now… Well, we all know the state the game is in now :wink:

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#9

There is no such thing as power creep in Borderlands. There has and will always be some ridiculously overpowered thing you can do. It’s not like suddenly you could one shot every boss with the 4th DLC weapons or something. People have been doing that since day 1.

Borderlands 2 and to lesser degree 1 had this as well. Sal was OP from day 1. Bee was OP day 1 and is still one of the best shields in the game even after being nerfed.

Like where do you get that ALL OF A SUDDEN people have been able to do this? THAT would be power creep.

What we have in Borderlands is power fantasy. Why some people want to take that away is beyond me. Dark Souls =/= Borderlands. Dark Souls denies the player power, it’s a completely different approach to game design.

Sorry but it triggers me when people just toss these keywords around and don’t actually understand what they mean. Power creep doesn’t exist in a game where there is a ■■■■ ton of overpowered stuff already in existence.

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#10

What? have you seen this thread?

Power creep and power fantasy are not mutually exclusive things. You can argue BL is about making you feel powerful and I agree with that to an extent. But a game where the Plasma Coil does literally 10 times the damage of the Bitch absolutely has power creep. The term is used correctly.

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#11

I’m saying power creep doesn’t exist in this game because you could one shot bosses and mobs since day 1. Calling it power creep implies that at some point in the past (including previous games) you were never able to plow through the hardest content with some ridiculously broken ■■■■.

I call Borderlands power fantasy because that’s what it is. You are the Vault Hunter, an unstoppable killing and looting machine. That’s the entire premise of the game. Borderlands 1 is the closest you get to say “see it was not always like this” but even in the base game there were some things that were just way way stronger than the rest, and the addition of new content or a higher level cap didn’t really change that.

People in that thread refer to increase health pools and damage values as power creep but then in the same breathe say it’s relative anyway so the values don’t matter. Well if it doesn’t actually matter then it’s not power creep. Most of the top tier gears would STILL be top tier if you took away mayhem levels. It’s not like the difference in health pools or damage values changes any of that or changes your ability or lack thereof to insta-kill bosses.

They also say that each new DLC is power creep because the weapons are stronger. Yea so what? You can insta-kill every boss in the game and eat through mobs easily with just base game gear. It’s not like the Plasma Coil suddenly makes everyone able to do this. It was there the whole time. Now you just have another way to do it is all.

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#12

The big problem is M10 health values are just pretty damn ridiculous. It is basically impossible to have something be viable at M10 while being balanced while levelling and vice versa. Because that’s what +10000% health does. Even at OP10 in BL2 (which was already pushing the limits of viability and balance), enemies only had effectively 10x scaling - but in BL3 M10, they have 40x.

And the incredibly grating thing is that instead of recognizing this health value as the problem, what GB did was just buff many Legendaries, some by 100-200% - which effectively negated the massive health buff anyway. And every new legendary released is balanced around M10’s massive bloat and given obscene damage numbers. A SMG with no skill curve does 44k damage - and meanwhile purple Vladof pistols and Hyperion SMGs still do less than 4k damage - it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Lots of us were recommending better solutions at M2.0’s advent. The easiest way would have been to change M10 to +5000% health instead. Another method would have been to change Mayhem scaling of weapons from say 2.67 times right now to 5x - its actually a fairly easy fix because Mayhem weapon scaling is tied to an anointment - and we know anointments can be easily tweaked.

Right now we are caught between a rock and a hard place - with every new Legendary buffed, that Legendary just becomes ridiculous at NVHM. But with every Legendary not buffed, and the sea of Purples just left in the dust, the gear diversity at endgame is just incredibly poor. And because GB has already buffed so many weapons, it is very hard for them to reverse this increasingly convoluted monstrosity they have made.

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#13

Even if that’s true, adding options for those who want to play the game in a different way is not a terrible idea.

I mostly play moze, and i feel that i don’t have many options when it comes to difficulty. To me, building for Moze is like standing on a mine field. One wrong move and i just trivialised the entire endgame.

It would be cool if there was a way for me to avoid that, without it affecting anyone who happens to enjoy that sort of thing - without having to resort to modding.

#14

That’s all fine but no one in that thread that claims “power creep” wants more options, they want less. They want stuff taken away from other players because they don’t like them. Well you have the option to not use them if you want. Yet instead “power creep” is used as justification to gut really fun ways to play the game because “OUhuHuHu it’s too strong” when there is PLENTY of overpowered stuff still in this game and being discovered all the time.

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#15

I have the feeling that the new Arms Race mode is a way for the developers to test for a new balance for the game.

  • it seems to have its own scaling, different from the base game
  • it removes ASA, ASE and action skill specific anointments from the equation
  • it removes action skills, some of which are capable of trivialising any content by themselves, like clone and Iron Bear
  • it reintroduces mechanics likes aiming for weak points of bigger enemies like heavies or spiderants, knockdowns, transfusion and singularity grenades… All things we weren’t used to use anymore

I’m expecting to see more similar modes with little tweaks, like the introduction of action skills or whole skill trees. Or maybe a new mayhem level based on the data collected.

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#16

Yes I do believe something can be too strong - and balance must be a consideration for good game design. If tomorrow Gearbox released 10 new weapons, each dealing 10million to 100million damage, would you seriously say these weapons should not be balanced? Sure, these new strong weapons do not make there to be less options - but anyone would tell you it goes against good game design. Or if say in the next update, GB makes some coding error and somehow Fade Away receives action skill damage scaling, and now deals x31 damage at M10. Do we not balance this because it doesn’t take away GB/Rakk Attack as options?

Borderlands has always been such a great looter-shooter because GB has always taken great care to ensure there is some sort of balance. Each manufacturer had their strengths and weaknesses, each Legendary had their power balanced around drawbacks or advantages etc. Passive skills were weaker than kill skills, and the more situational/skill based a skill was - generally there was more power vested into it. Sure, not everything was perfect, and BL2 had lots of imbalanced mechanics - but claiming ‘power-creep’ going against the tenets of good game design is okay just baffles me.

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#17

That power fantasy is all in your head, validated by power creep and trash balancing. The VHs in every game are literally described as nothing more than regular people chasing legends. They all have their unique skills, none of which has anything to do with their self-imposed VH status. You make it sound as if becoming a VH is what gives them power. As if it’s a gift of greatness bestowed upon them. The only thing like that in the BL universe are sirens, and even then, nothing about siren powers makes them any more unkillable than any other VH. A bullet can hurt/kill all VHs as easily as it can any normal person, ask Roland. Not even characters like Brick, Sal, and Krieg are “unstoppable killing machines”. You’ll never see them tank bullets in the story the way they do in game.

Funny when you remember that the main motivation for most VHs is to seek a challenge, of which characters like Zer0 and Amara explictly say in game. So why would the “premise” of the game be intended to literally contradict the character’s motivations? The ways people find to one shot everything in the game is more so the result of the dev’s lack of testing various gear/skill synergies than them intentionally putting stuff like that in the game. Those things would be viewed as outliers in most other games, PvE or otherwise, by the devs and their community. But because people like you cry when those things get tampered with post launch, Gearbox feels as if they have no choice but to design the game where everything is broken, and nothing is challenging. Something that in other games is usually a niche, short-lived type of amusment in the form of god mode/instant kill cheat codes. The Plasma Coil is the perfect example of that fact.

The most ironic thing about all of this is your claim of people " wanting take away fun from others" when the reality is you’d still have the option of the way you want to play if the game was balanced and harder difficulties were actually challenging. It’s called lowering the difficulty. People lowering a game’s difficulty for an easier experience, or in your case, to feel like an unstoppable badass is typical in games with good design. Whereas your solution of ignoring what a game offers you for artifical difficulty is an excuse you give for flawed design that just so happens to cater to your enjoyment.

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#18

Comparing BL3 to souls games is ridiculous. Their only similarity is loot based. The biggest difference is fun vs heavy challenge. BL games are about quirky humor, crazy weapons and fun. Souls games are far more challenge risk/reward. From your critique this is not a game for you. I consider Souls games a punishing slog, and not fun enough to outweigh the frustration. And yes there is challenge to be found. You’re just doing it wrong.

BTW those youtubers have been playing since BL1, are very good at the game and sponsored by GB.

Do buy Demons Souls on the ps5 and leave bl3 alone. You want more challenge? play w only green and white guns, no skill points, or hell try arms race.

GDamn nerf police for a game they barely know. Bugger off

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#19

i have said it before and i will say it again. gearbox made big mistake making the game too easy and then tried to slap on inflated values on enemies guns could not keep up with and ever since they are buffing skill gun and other sources of dmg and game is a complete mess. they would make a better game if they litearlly reverted to original scale adjusted underperforming guns and developed third difficulty mode on top of tvhm which does not need story replay and this difficulty mode will have two settings: it will be hard itself and you will be able to artificially select up to 4 player scaling while being solo still. or even better suggestion is to rescale all sources of damage to something more sensible and introduced damage reduction slider so everyone can create difficulty and TTK of their own liking.

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#20

I truly, truly wish everyone would just stop mentioning Dark Souls on these forums. Every single time the concept of “difficulty” is brought up someone inevitably says “Borderlands is not Dark Souls.” It wouldn’t be as annoying if it wasn’t so completely devoid of any value in these discussions 95% of the time. At least some players here have been kind enough to elaborate on their viewpoints by explaining why difficulty in Borderlands is not a good thing and/or has never existed (in their opinions). In that case it’s just a cringey spring-board into a legitimate discussion. But the whole Dark Souls meme is so played-out it’s giving me second-hand embarrassment when I read those kinds of comments. Please stop.

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