Viability of a resistance build

Borderlands 2 Krieg the Psycho
#1

Yep, I was farming LLMs yestersday and I saw the almighty E-tech relics. Specifically, the Skin of the Ancients…then, an idea came to my head.

How viable is a damage-resistant K with a RR, a perfect Skin of the Ancients and a Meat class modifier?, I don’t know if I should focus on Hellborn or Bloodlust (Mania is a must, at least for me).
I’ve been thinking about the Evolution shield, but I don’t really think that it may be an alternative.

Probably the main weapons would be, as I’m used to; Grog Nozzle, DPUH, and a Topneaa or Norfleet for second winds. Or maybe being focused on Moxxi weapons for health regen.

#2

Personally I think the evolution is the best shield for Krieg when you are playing at the upper OP lvls.

Since Krieg already has very high damage resistance via skills the added bonus from the Skin of the ancients will be pretty marginal.

But since Krieg doesn’t need any cooldown relic there are many options and Skin of the ancients is one of them.
However I would go for a health relic or explosive relic.

#3

@xmngr Krieg doesn’t need Moxxi with Elemental Empathy. Every DoT that you generate will heal you and when you stack DoTs along with damage resistances and health stacking, you get the unstoppable tank.

I always preferred more health and ammo in the form of Blood of the Ancients versus the Skin of the Ancients. If you want to see how the damage resistance numbers stack up with various gears see this thread back on the old forum.

Now with respect to shields, Rough Rider is still the absolute best if you’re running Mania. You get constant fire rate bonus from Embrace the Pain and stacking Salt the Wounds stacks is a breeze, which is another bonus if you’re running a Meat class mod. The damage resistance is not situational or adaptive unlike the Evolution or Neogenator. They may have a greater elemental resistance but it isn’t constant against all damage so, for me, Rough Rider is still better. If I had to pick a proper shield I’d try maybe a Blockade. But with shields, you will have the issue of your DPS from Embrace the Pain going up and down as the shield recharges.

The tankiest build I ever played with Krieg was @Maveco Hellborn-Mania melee build. My favorite melee build by far and the survivability is unmatched. I also ran a slightly different Hellborn-Mania build with a focus on more elemental gunplay with melee option. With Toast mod and its bonus’ in Pain is Power, Elemental Elation, and Fire Fiend, it has unbelievable DPS. Legendary Torch mod pushes survivability up even more with guns due to higher DoT and Elemental Empathy. Legendary Psycho is also very good all-around mod.

What did you have in mind with the Meat class mod?

#4

Health regen.

Well, the idea wasn’t really good hahaha, thanks for the advice.

#5

Meat is a good class mod depending on how you use it (gears, build, etc.).

#6

Yeah, I refered mainly to the build in general btw…
Damn, 244%. And I see what you mean, a relic doesn’t have too much difference if I wasn’t using it.

I’m switching between RR with FoTFH in general.

#7

Questionable. The reason I go evolution over RR is the extra health from the Evo, it also gives me a few extra seconds to toss slag betties before I go into RtB. On op8 I feel that the Evo is the winner. The RR is a very close second.

#8

I tried calculating here the difference in health between Evo/Neo vs RR It seems that even though RR gives you the least health, after it’s 0.2 dmg reduction it gives you more maximum hit-points than the Evo/Neo (as in, it takes a bit more damage to bring a RR user to zero health than a Evo/Neo with same health relic and FtM points);

ps.: I didn’t take the shield capacity into consideration because for my build at least it would be down for the most part due to increased recharge delay, self-ignition and close-combat focused gameplay but if you would take full-shields both Evo/Neo would need significantly more damage to get to zero health.

#9

The advantage is that it will recharge between battles and give you a much needed window to throw out betties for slag.
While in combat the shield will stay down so then you are only getting the advantage of the extra health and marginal health regen.

When you calculated the hitpoints on RR vs the Evo, did you take into account all of Kriegs other damage reducing skills? Or did you calculate it from the assumption that the RR was the only damage reduction you had?

#10

Two issues with your reasoning for Evolution. First, the most glaring is that you don’t regen health or receive any elemental resistance bonus while the shield is empty. So the majority of the time while your shield is down it is doing absolutely nothing else aside from giving you health. I don’t have exact numbers on health between Evolution and Rough Rider with comparable parts but it can’t be that much to overcome the 20% damage resistance of the Rough Rider.

Second, this window for applying slag between fights is already there with a Rough Rider. From full health and the damage resistance you have plenty of time to toss out Betty or Slagga and get to work. Plus with all his shield delay penalties, you aren’t going to have a shield in between Rampages if there are multiple groups of enemies.

Again, you have nothing but slightly more health. No elemental damage resistance and no shield when the proverbial ■■■■ hits the fan.

#11

I don’t agree with this statement.

The evo gives me a few extra seconds before it goes down thoose few seconds are great for betties. The RR will get you to healthgate after 1 medium/heavy elemental attack often times making you RtB after just throwing 0-1 grenades.

The real perk of the shield is that window.

Now my own view might be a bit skewed here, because my RR gives 788k health and my Evo gives 1.04kk health. But after some searching I see that the RR can actually go much higher (970k)

Either way you still have a few extra seconds of shield before it is time to RtB and that is a great thing.

The damage resistance isn’t really noticable when stacked on top of all the other Krieg damage reduction skills.

Damage reduction skill bonuses gets smaller the more you stack them, but health gets bigger the more you stack them.

I guess it is a matter of preference, but I’ve compared my versions side by side many many times before I came to the conclusion that the Evo was better.

#12

The larger health pool is only valuable because of the damage reduction stacking. And that only really occurs once you RtB. Now add in Taste of Blood, Numbed Nerves, shield, and 3-4 million health, and the tank begins to take shape. Outside of RtB you could have Numbed Nerves and your shield. But again, Evolution is down so you have nothing, and with Rough Rider you still have your 20% on top of the health that factors into the equation. If you need more time then you may better of with a Mania-Hellborn melee like @Maveco where you can have Numbed Nerves and Elemental Empathy active outside of RtB, giving you plenty of time to slag targets. Evolutions mechanics just doesn’t seem like a natural fit given Krieg’s skillset.

#13

Hellborn/mania on op8? Are you playing lvl 72 or op8? Because there’s a big diffrence. And the 86% damage resistance on top of actually having a shield is the EXTRA FEW SECONDS I’m talking about. You don’t even have to factor in the rest, that alone is more then ‘not having a shield’.

Believe me. The Evo works great on Krieg. All the way up to op5 i played with the RR. After that I found that I needed more slag, and I needed a little more defence. The Evo provided that better then any other shield.

And the larger healthpool is great both with damage reduction, and the fact that you refill all your health between every kill.

And stop assuming that the evolution is always down. It recharges between battles giving you time to throw betties before you RtB (I’ve written this a few times now haven’t I?).
It will however stay down during your RtB phase. And during that time, YES you will loose out on damage reduction in exchange for a little more health.

But while you are in RtB you have 100 stacks, a ton of other damage reduction skills AND you will kill fast enough for it not to be a problem.

THIS is why I choose Evo over RR in the late op lvls.

#14

OP8 of course.

#15

The difference in maximum damage untill ffyl diminishes the more damage reduction mods you add, regardless if you only have RR’s dr or the maximum a melee-focused char could have (0.75 + 0.5 + 0.5 from ToB, RtB and NN, respectively, assuming the usage of leg sickle) so even though the neogenator/evolution would give you a higher max health, rough rider’s 0.2 dmg reduction would still give you a higher survivability (again, needing more damage untill you’re put to ffyl).

ps.: I used the op8 values from the max stats reference list thread at old gb forums.

#16

I’m not arguing that the RR doesn’t provide slightly more resistance when both shields are down.
I’m arguing that the evo gives you precious extra seconds before you have to RtB at the beginning of each fight. Especially if you are attacked with elemental damage.

But I guess we went way of course with the evo vs RR discussion.