Mayhem 2.0. And that arose from the game designers absolute refusal to playtest anything before release. So many things were released bugged on its release - almost everything except guns didn’t scale, enemies clearly had too much health, we had to rely primarily on new guns/anoints, enforcing modifiers that only a minority wanted etc. So many things that could have been easily avoided had anyone playtested for more than 10 mins. I mean all you had to do was open 1 chest at M10 to see loot drops weren’t scaling. Tested Iron Bear for 1 run in Athenas to see it couldn’t break the shield of the first enemy. They had this huge stream team, many of which were in tune with the community, but didn’t consult them regarding the major changes they were making (compulsory modifiers would have been a huge red flag).
But I would argue that it was less Mayhem 2.0, but GB haphazard firefighting in trying to fix the problem they made which really hurt the game. Almost all games/DLC are released with bugs and balancing issues on release - but that’s why we have patches and hotfixes to make the game better. But GB often tried to fix these issues in the most blunt, bruteforce manner possible, without stopping to think about more elegant solutions which arise from the core of M2.0 itself.
For example, they tried buffing a ton of guns to increase gear diversity. Except the problem was never that the guns were too weak - the Cutsman steamrolled everything back at M1.0, why should it suddenly suck at M2.0? What was obvious was that enemies had too much health - anything that was viable at M10 absolutely steamrolled NVHM and TVHM. A level 10 hellwalker could last you 20-30 levels. And by haphazardly buffing weapons, only these weapons with GB’s ‘magic touch’ were viable, and the gap between those things and everything else was absolutely inane. Like why in the world does a Plasma Coil or Crit do 40+ k damage when a regular maliwan does like 4k? This kind of gear imbalance was completely unprecedented in borderlands, which had always, no matter how imbalanced the rest of the game was, gotten gear balance right. And they did that by adhering to a proper baseline - the non-uniques.
Mayhem Scaling was another huge mess. In BL2, action skills and rank based skills scaled fine into OP levels (even if they weren’t always viable) - so shouldn’t the same logic have applied to these things in BL3. GB realised their mistake and sought to fix it, which was good. The bad part was how arbitrary Mayhem scaling was. Shouldn’t guns, action skills, melee, shield effects and rank-based skills receive the same scaling? Why is it that guns and grenades only receive a 2.67x boost, but melee gets 15x, Action skills get 31x and pets get a whooping 54x? It doesn’t make any sense. Once more, if pets and melee NEEDED to have a huge boost to be viable at M10, then clearly 1) they are too weak at base. 2) Enemies have too much health. But yet GB took the most brute force approach again, and the game suffered for it.
And certain skills and items double-dipping into Mayhem scaling is even more mindboggling. GB clearly acknowledged how Short Fuse, Indiscriminate etc were double dipping into their Mayhem boosts, and said they will look into it… and then they went and gave them Mayhem Scaling anyway. They said they ‘reduced’ the Mayhem Scaling on these skills - which means they had the capability to totally eliminate it - but yet went ahead with it, despite Short Fuse already being one of the strongest skills in the game and Indiscriminate/TTB being some of Amara’s best skills. Then there is stuff like FitSD which unintentionally received this scaling and became absolutely ridiculous. How stupidly overpowered it was became evident like 12 hrs after the scaling change - and yet here we are, half a year later, and nothing has changed. Instead GB has allowed more skills like Kensei, Unweave the Rainbow and Big Surplus to receive this ridiculous double-dipping.
BL3 has so much going for it, so much it does better than its predecessors. But the issues propagated by Mayhem 2.0 have unfortunately made this game a shadow of what it could be.
look at how many dedicated streamers can not even bring themselves to play bl3 any more and still replaying bl2