In the most recent patch, it’s damage was increased by 540%.
Yup. With 8% lifesteal.
I just cleared the True maliwan takedown on my first try with:
2 Crits (one with ASE fire and one with ASE corrosive)
Cosmic Hunter with no relevant passives
Big boom blaster shield
Pearl of Knowledge
And this was absolutely the easiest time I have ever had doing the true takedown. Even with pretty garbage gear, the absurd lifesteal combined with damage that shreds through every enemy was honestly hilarious.
Weirdly, I think the Crit has absurdly good synergy with the Terror Ammo Regen anointment. With much less downtime reloading, you’re shooting much more often, which is arguably the weakness of the weapon (you die when reloading)
The Crit is now both the best SMG in the game, and by far the easiest one to farm. So, go try it if you’re interested in making the game into a cakewalk.
I kind of feel like the Crit and Hail buffs were in response to the “make blues and purples great again” argument that a lot of us, including myself, have made. The problem is that the “make blues and purples great again” argument was intended to reference not just uniques, but also the non-unique blues and purples (e.g., the Stagecoach). It would be nice if we could use just a standard purple from any one of the manufacturers in an endgame build. There are not many of them that can fulfill this requirement.
IMO, overbuffing the Crit and Hail is not a good response by the devs to the playerbase’s calls to make regular purple weapons usable at M10/11 - it just furthers the philosophy of overbuffing weapons to make up for flawed game and playable character design choices.
The overbuffing might just be related to the incoming raid boss encounter. Giving life steal weapons that much of a buff will ensure no one will not be able to kill Hemo after a few attempts. Just face tank it.
For what it’s worth, Amara and Zane can do it just by using their regular skill trees; Zane can even do so while doing damage.
@derwitte Yes, this was the point that I was making in the “Zane is too powerful” thread yesterday. I absolutely think that they intentionally overbuffed these weapons to balance out the differences between the VHs, and make sure everyone had a powerful healing weapon to allow them to beat the raid boss. It obviously will have some sort of nova, spike, or other health gate mechanic that they feel they need to fill in with a super-powerful weapon accessible to everyone.
Since it’s name (as well as leaked achievementa) hints at life stealing capabilities, it evens it out: player AND boss can life leech off of each other.
Fight could, including several immunity phases, last for a long-ish duration on the average player this way.
