What Mayhem Mode(s) do you play on, and why?

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

Whether intentionally or not, based on current design it’s definitely not clear-cut which mayhem mode is “best”, and I can see scenarios where folks would opt for different spots in the scale. I’m curious where folks fall during actual gameplay. For me, I most often switch between the following:

Mayhem 4: My default. Speed Demon + Drone Ranger being my preferred modifiers.
Enemies having 9x the health / armor / shields, but dropping loot at 8.5x the normal rate, means it’s “worth it” for me from an efficiency standpoint. With my builds and gear enemies fall swiftly and easily, and Speed Demon is invaluable as far as getting around maps and to wherever I want to go.

Mayhem 8: My default when farming Mayhem 6+ Exclusive gear. Speed Demon + Holy Crit being my preferred modifiers.
60x health, shield, armor, in exchange for 260% XP, Money, and iridium and 20x normal loot is not really worth it to me. However, when farming mayhem 6+ exclusive gear, compare it to the alternatives. Vs Mayhem 10, enemies are at 60% health, armor, and shields, the loot rate is 80% and most importantly it’s half the amount of modifiers, and none of the “medium” modifiers which tend to be by far the most annoying modifiers to face. Compared to Mayhem 11, it’s actually MORE rewarding in exchange for LOWER enemy health values. Plus, Easy modifiers are generally a net positive, and Speed Demon in particular I can’t live without. Vs Mayhem 6, you trade double the enemy health totals for half the modifiers, and none of them the incredibly annoying medium ones.

Mayhem 1: My default when memeing it up. Speed Demon being my preferred modifier.
All of the above happens on a character built and geared to scale well into mayhem modes. In general, I find mayhem mode to be a mess which drastically lowers build variety, weapon variety, and negatively impacts balance and gameplay alike. When I want to mess around with weird weapons, weird builds, and try concepts I think are funny, I want to turn it “off”, but I can’t go without Speed Demon so instead I just stick it on mayhem 1.

Why not 10, it has the best loot, some might say. Yes, there is a difference in loot quality between mayhem 8 and 10, but that difference though real is nowhere near the 30+% it would need to be for me to actually consider playing on Mayhem 10 instead. Mayhem 4 I can clear things 10x faster than Mayhem 10, and since Mayhem 10 weapons don’t do 10x the damage vs Mayhem 4 but rather more like 105% of the damage, I’ll take the way faster clear speed and thus easier farming of the anointments, elements, or attributes I’m looking for, which will have way more of a real impact.

Anyway those are my thoughts, what are yours?

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#2

~67,7%. One Mayhem level = one normal lvl = x1,09 scaling.

I play only at M10/11, the game is already too easy to play it on lower mayhem.

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#3

Respectfully, time investment is not the same thing as difficulty. Something taking 100x as long does not, in any way, make it 100x more difficult, or even more difficult at all, than the same task, swiftly completed. And the point remains, it’s less than twice the damage in exchange for taking more than 10x as long to kill things. Do you actually find the game difficult on Mayhem 10/11? I don’t.

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#4

M10 with lootsplosion, laser drones, heart drop enemies and companion system or M11, but I’m moving towards M11 with all 4 classes since I don’t care for world drops as much now. The game is not too challenging but neither too difficult, feels right to me, you just have to work on a decent build

#5

m11 with meta

m5 with legendaries but no anoints

m3 with no legendaries and no anoints

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#6

The whole game is too easy, no matter what level. And it doesn’t take 10 times longer to kill enemies at M10 vs M4.

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#7

When I finish the campaign usually at around lvl 30-35, instead of jumping straight into M10/M11, I start at M1 and go from there doing other sidequests and DLCs since I have the Ultimate Edition.

If I find it too easy, I increase it one Mayhem level, and when I reach lvl 65, I’m around M5-M6, so tuning it up to M8-M10/M11 is just a matter of finding a really strong gun that carries me to that difficulty.

After that, I stay at Mayhem 11. Sometimes I go and pick M10 for a more challenging Takedown with stuff like Rogue Lite, Mob Mentality or Post Mortem, but mainly I play on M11.

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#8

Mayhem 11 with my Melee Amara and M1/M2 with my other characters and other Amara builds. Reason is because I don’t look for the strongest builds, I like to experiment and try everything out and still enjoy the game. That’s something you can’t do on M10/M11.

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#9

Fair, it’s not 10x as long, it’s 11.22x, you are correct. 900% H/S/A vs 10100% H/S/A.

And yes, the time to kill a given enemy is not based on a linear function of their health totals, because other things factor in, such as movement time between enemies (why speed demon matters so much), time to aim, time spent reloading, time spent acquiring ammo, so on and so forth. A lot of which is tangentially related to enemy health totals and thus time spent damaging them, but not directly related.

In addition, assuming you picked skills which scale, you naturally get a damage increase from those, as well as abilities and such with Mayhem Scaling enabled, plus the weapons dropped deal more damage.

But if a gun has 10200 on its card vs one that has 5100 on its card, we say it deals twice the damage, and leave the realities of the rest of it (aim time, reload cycles, etc) to be inferred since it’s too contextual and fuzzy to be meaningfully discussed. Even 11.22x isn’t an “accurate” number, but if you have a more accurate number to sub in, feel free.

The point remains regardless, it’s more time consuming without being any more difficult, and given a choice between spending way longer farming weapons that deal 60% more damage I’d rather farm way faster for a weapon with the desired anointment which will by nature of having it deal 200% more damage.

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#10

Never played anything lower then M10
And even that is easy :worried:

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#11

As a FL4K main, I can genuinely say that without Mayhem scaled skill points M10/11 is pretty breezy.

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#12

Either M1 or M11, nothing in between (unless it’s a fresh play character of course.) I don’t like modifiers but the Easy ones like lootsplosion or slayer are mostly unobtrusive.

M1 when I want a mode where I know for sure just about any build or piece of gear is viable and I just want a relaxing good time playing. M11 when I don’t want to delete everything with one or two shots. I mostly play Moze and FL4K and have M1 and M11 gear sets for each and switch when appropriate.

But ironically, M11 Moze is easier than M1 Moze because of the way her stuff mayhem-scales.

#13

Right, I think we all can agree the game is easy on all mayhem modes, it’s just a matter of how many bullets are required to put down an enemy and thus how time consuming you want kills to be. No one has made any claims to the contrary.

Edit: No so much you but folks in general, why is anyone playing on M11? Compared to M8, you’re losing out on Speed Demon and getting worse rewards for more time per kill. So you lose time in 3 ways: Takes longer to kill things, takes longer to move between things, and takes longer to get the same amount of rewards. What’s the draw? I don’t get the decision to play on that mayhem mode at all.

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#14

When I do play, I play on M-11 because I just don’t care for the modification system. Cute on the first few hours I played it, then a bit tiresome. I use M-11 to get the hardest difficulty without having to worry about the mods, just the enemies.
And I certainly don’t care about the M-11 reduced drop rates, even with those supposedly halved I still get way too many legs.
But, as @GrzesPL said, even then it’s too easy. With a few Lightshows and Clone & Drone everything just dies and my health bar never drops below 25%. Yawn.

I stopped playing a few months ago because of that, only boot up every now and again to make sure patches get downloaded. Waiting for a mission-style DLC to play again…

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#15

You get though that compared to M8 the enemies aren’t harder, right? They deal 0 additional damage, there’s not more of them, there’s no increase in difficulty at all. They just have bigger health pools. The only thing that actually increases difficulty or complexity of the combat is the modifiers, most of which aren’t actually more difficulty either they’re just annoying, but it’s at least SOMETHING which isn’t just bigger health pools. So if you want the hardest difficulty, you should be choosing M10 and deliberately choosing modifiers like Rogue Lite, Boundary Issues, Mob Mentality, and More than Okay Boomer.

As is you’re just spending more time for literally no reason other than wanting to have combat take longer? I still don’t get it.

#16

Your argument hinges on the idea that it takes longer to kill something on M11 than it does on M8. This is technically true, but not in the way that you seem to think it is. It doesn’t matter if something has 10K hp or 10M hp if I can easily deal upwards of 50M dps. More health/shields/armor doesn’t necessarily directly translate to a longer TTK.

The whole “you’re wasting time for less benefit” is such a strange angle to argue from when there are plenty of builds that redmist anything in your crosshairs regardless of what mayhem lvl you play on. Now, if you don’t find those builds to be enjoyable, then that would be a much more valid argument than “you’re wasting time lol”.

The main draw of M11 is the lack of modifiers. I play exclusively on M11 because not having to deal with modifiers like Buddy System, Dazed & Infused, and Not the Face outweighs the benefit of having the positive modifiers. If I want speed, Zane and Amara have more than they know what to do with. If I want splash dmg, Moze has more than enough. Slayer, BKE, and GB are unnecessary.

Now, if you want those bonuses without having to swap characters, then that is another valid argument for playing on M8 vs M11.

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#17

I prefer M10 to M11, with maybe 3 modifier rolls. Hate Rogue Lite, Freeze Tag and anything with elemental immunity.

On the M8 vs M10/11 difficulty bit, for immediate fixes there is 2 ways to increasing difficulty. Either increase enemy HP/S/A or increase enemy damage. By taking longer to kill enemies you are giving them a better chance to deal damage to you.

#18

As time is not a factor for me (when I play) I play on M11. Anointments are bad enough- dealing with Mayhem modifiers makes it worse. If both of these things were removed I’d no doubt play the game more (barring the other reasons I’ve stopped playing).

#19

We can agree to disagree on this. I will contend that increased health pools do make it slightly more difficult since it then takes x more shots to kill something, leaving you exposed to enemy damage for x (or fractional x) seconds, ergo, slightly harder.

As for using modifiers as “difficulty” again, we’ll disagree. I don’t consider environmental effects added difficulty, I consider them annoying. Added difficulty is enemy strength, offensive power, or strategy for me.

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#20

You realize M8 has higher rewards than M11 right? It can take you the same time or heck even less time to kill stuff on M11 vs M8, doesn’t change the fact M8 has more loot and higher rewards. I promise you, Zane will never move as fast as a character with Speed Demon enabled. +150% speed simply does not exist within his skill trees. Plus, he can double up! Take your Zane build with crazy movement speed and rewards for doing so, and give him speed demon, suddenly he’s moving WAY faster and dealing more damage as a result!

Holy Crit is also a net reduction in time to kill as long as you can aim, and with plenty of builds which give free crits left and right even if you can’t. M8 you don’t need to deal with buddy system, dazed and infused, not in the face, any of those. I just don’t get why you would want it to take more than twice as long to accomplish any given task in exchange for fewer rewards, personally.

To CarpeDiem, let’s set the following aside, as I don’t believe they’re productive in context, but I do want to recognize they’re there and true:

  • There are a large number of ways to increase difficulty, including but not limited to expanding the tactical options of enemies, adjusting environmental considerations, and so forth. Increasing TTK is not only the laziest of them, it also only matters if the enemy deals damage to you in the first place, and is a credible tax on resources when they do so. Neither of which are guaranteed to be true.
  • Multiple people are arguing it doesn’t take longer to kill enemies in M10/M11, since enemies are redmisted left, right, and center regardless.

Setting those aside, the trouble with it as a mechanic for “difficulty” in BL3 specifically is that enemies do not, generally, do damage to you in a way that makes them a credible threat. Most enemies just tickle your shields, and then suddenly you’re healthgated by an exploding barrel or a badass hitting you with a cluster of 5 rockets or something. Since any build worth its salt is already designed around that reality of combat, it dragging on longer generally just doesn’t matter. Whether playing on M4, M8, or M10, I’m never downed, never in real danger, regardless of the TTK. Do YOU actually find M11 to be more difficult or engaging, in any way, to M8 or M4 or M1? I don’t.