Melee is just not interesting with amara

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

So a few of the things that is driving me crazy about Amara is just how inconsequential melee is while at the same time being so core to Amara’s trees. Amara gets 5 melee expressions as a character:

  • Punch - which you can buff to a ranged punch through her green tree. This is a really COOL ability. problem… its so easy to blow yourself up with the punch. Using the buffed punch should greatly reduce damage or make you invulnerable for a second so that blowing up any of your dots doesnt one shot you.

  • Astral Projection - You astrally project yourself out, punching through enemies… but this isnt buffed by melee damage

  • Phase Slam - You slam the ground, but this isnt buffed by melee damage

  • Orb - Well this is just and endlessly terrible special for reasons that have been beat to death so I wont rehash.

  • Slam - Another cool ability that isnt buffed by melee either.

Ok so if this melee centric character has all these melee talents, but they dont apply to weapons (except one) and they don’t apply to anything except Amara’s punch, I’m struggling to understand why the devs thought this was a melee character? The fact that Amara’s biggest damage increases apply to melee but punching is so dangerous feels like the character is broken.

But wait… The Face Puncher Shot Gun

  • Building Amara around this one weapon feels like a no brainer to the point of, basically building her with anything else is just an exercise in variety not power. Using other builds with other guns exposes such a huge gap between face puncher builds and everything else that I have to ask the Devs to PLEASE shake it up some. Please rework her trees. Other guns need to be much more viable on Amara. Why are so many artifacts so heavily melee focused?

I just saw that you guys decided to fix some interactions that were causing Amara to higher than intended damage. I sincerely hope this is a first step to actually bringing some build and gun diversity to amara.

On a side note, why are anointments so terrible outside of URAD and 90/300? Serious question for devs. WHY would I ever build a character around any other anoint? This game is really amazing from a mechanics point of view. I just dont understand some of the decisions. Its like you guys have this philosophy that some legendary gear should actually be garbage to make the other things “good”. What has actually happened is that most of the gear that drops is absolute trash and there are only 2 “good” anoints that mean more to damage than whether the gun is legendary. Like a good anoint on a blue or purple gun can easily out perform a legendary with a bad anoint… whaaaaa?

Also why on gods green earth are skill specific anoints worse that urad and 300/90? Whaaaaaaaa? equip and do more damage all the damn time. Not much of a choice there its a no brainer.

Sorry for the rant. Great game but frustrating design all over the place.

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#2

Weird note, I was testing this forever ago and, if I killed an enemy with melee, the rad or Catharsis explosion from it normally wouldn’t damage me. But it had moments where it didn’t work.

300/90…isn’t that amazing. If it can one shot something, yes. But if you don’t one shot it, you now have a dead anointment.

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#3

Yeah, I’ve had builds where I’m cruising around blowing stuff up and suddenly I’m dead and there 100% wasn’t a barrel or something near me. So I just gave up on it.

#4

300/90 is pretty godly as an opener with your special abilities. For astral projections its an A+ anoint. Also just for mobbing. Again amazing. Where its not as good is bosses. When thinking of Amara though, most are bad. The phaseslam 300 weap damage and the astral projection 250 weapon damage are the only other anoints I use on Amara. Maybe I was being hyperbolic at only 2 anoints being good, but I really dont see the others performing well.

For example, Amara is THE status effect queen, but the 500% explosion annoint just doesnt perform well, EVEN on Amara.

#5

This…just…literally isn’t true.

Moxsy just posted a build around it, and I was melting stuff with it when it first came out. In fact, when I play, it’s the only anointment I even care about.

You apply a big dot. Ignite it with a crit from the right elemental weapon. Unleash the Dragon melee artifact creates a big dot for this if you want that. There’s also weapon combos to utilize with it. It requires learning and playing around, but it’s so far from “doesn’t perform well”.

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#6

One thing I want to say here, is that I speak in generalities when talking about anoints and game mechanics. There are several anoints where there are special conditions that make them good. My overall point here is that those conditions are far and few between for many anoints. I dont think an interaction with literally one artifact that is a unique drop is good game design for an anoint. There is another condition where this anoint does ok, but to me this is the perfect example of when it drops, I just ignore it for 99% of my builds.

I get that part of the fun of the game is figuring out how to make something work for a build but I also feel like for Amara (generally speaking) she lacks diversity in the guns you can build around her.

#7

melee is just not interesting period

especially when it does not include any meleeing

looking at you facepuncher white elephant

6 Likes
#8

Facepuncher actually is interesting. It allows for a ton of different interactions. I’m mystified as to why Amara’s special abilities aren’t like this. It would be interesting if using her specials with melee artifacts did interesting things. It would also be interesting if landing a melee hit had talents that weren’t just about damage (maybe shield regen etc.)

#9

Both Life Steal and Ammo regen effects already exist for Melee via relics…

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#10

It’s not just an Amara problem. For all the effort melee just has not been a strong point of any BL game. It’s like there is that one missing piece to complete the puzzle.

Brick made it work in BL 1, but that was with enemies that didn’t seemingly 1 shot every shield and the Berserk action skill actually offered strong enough health regen for some margin of error on the Zerg charge.

BL 2 showed progress with Zero and Krieg. But both builds were glass cannons in the sense of it being very easy to go down with a single error and on top of that both had alternate builds capable of doing as much if not more damage while staying alive better.

TPS…uh well…hmm okay folks help me on this one folks if I am misrembering, but I don’t think they really tried for a true melee character there ,.

This current iteration melee damage outside facepuncher and fish slap shenanigans is just too low to justify the dumb charge needed to close the gap when it seems like even a crap gun 1-3 shots every shield, there is no healthgate, and the life steal necessary to account for these weaknesses are not common on melee centric items (that or I’m just super unlucky with my rolls and I will stand corrected to evidence.)

#11

What do you mean no health gate? The only time there’s no health gate is when the damage comes from the player.

Yes. Barrels are considered player damage.

#12

Melee Mord my friend. Only build capable of hitting damage cap (on bandits) in BL1.

I feel both Melee Krieg and Zer0 were brilliant. Melee Zer0 is incredibly powerful, and is still the strongest Zer0 build in quite a few situations. Melee Krieg would have been really great as well - if melee actually scaled in OP levels. The very fact it is still viable at OP10 despite this speaks volumes.

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#13

That’s basically why I had hoped that Amara would get a true melee action skill with her 4th skill tree. I mean, it is so simple, she literally is made to be a Jojo meme with her arms. And just imagine if her punches during this Phasetrance as I would have called it would have done melee-scaled damage.

Just think about this action skill:

Phasetrance
Amara uses all her arms to launch a barrage of action skill elemental melee strikes at her enemies. Her astral arms do light jabs, have a “fire rate” of 8 and her regular arms have a fire rate of 1 and alternate between various heavy swings, both can be used by pressing or holding primary fire (astral arms) or secondary fire (real arms). Addtionally Amara gains 2% Lifesteal from her attacks while in Phasetrance. Instead of an uptime Amara uses phase energy to fuel her punches (just think of it like Iron Bears fuel). Light attacks do 0,4 times her normal elemental punching damage and her heavy attacks do 2 times her melee damage. By pressing the action skill button Amara ends her Phasetrance early and regains the remaining duration as cooldown.

Other variants would have Amara emit a large Nova whenever she kills an enemy and would charge her punches with elemental stickies that explode a second after being applied and deal twice the amount of the initial punch as splash damage (basically making Amara the reincanation of Ganesha by becoming the “White Elefant”).

This would have made Amara a less chaotic and multi-elemental version of Krieg. The skills in the tree as well as augments could have buffed her trance and could basically have been the same as they are now.

The only worrysome thing would be natural double-dipping into both Action Skill and Melee Mayhem Scaling, but that is easy to fix by just having that action skill scale up by it’s own multiplier (at Mayhem 10 it would get +2000% bonus) while being affected by both melee and action skill bonuses from skills and gear, including a bladed gun that was held when the action skill began, which should more than compensate for the lower than usual Mayhem scaling.

Unfortunately what we got was an overly powerful and repetetive version of Pingpong.

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#14

I think he means you don’t have to worry about health gating in BL3. Life steal or health regen of any kind, for any VH, isn’t necessary to complete all content. Yes, it’s required for specific builds, but, in general, you do not need it.

#15

That’s literally not a competent reading of this paragraph at all and you should absolutely feel bad

“This current iteration melee damage outside facepuncher and fish slap shenanigans is just too low to justify the dumb charge needed to close the gap when it seems like even a crap gun 1-3 shots every shield, there is no healthgate, and the life steal necessary to account for these weaknesses are not common on melee centric items (that or I’m just super unlucky with my rolls and I will stand corrected to evidence.)”

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#16

I mean, you could be less of a dick about it… But yeah, after I re-read what you were responding, to, I see what you mean. The forum has weird way of not showing, by default, what you specifically responded to. But still, a little less attitude would go a long way :wink:

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#17

Um, Athena?

Nisha also has a melee capstone that’s an electrical whip. Though I have tried it yet.

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#18

I mean I have found myself being oneshotted on multiple at full health, no front loader shield or deathless artifact in use. Probably missed a barrel or misjudged distance from a generator a few times but I know there have been no environmental hazard drops

#19

I’ll have to give melee Mordecai a try then.

For zero and krieg it’s probably user error as I can’t do squat with Zero and Krieg I look like a cartoon with once I hit OP levels

#20

Thank you it’s been a few years since I played TPS and only made it through one playthrough with Nisha and didn’t get the melee capstone

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