Sadly Why Maya is Bad

Borderlands 2 Maya the Siren
#1

As you know, Maya a weaker character and this is mainly due to UVHM. Two of Maya’s skill trees are alright, but some characters have the same skills as her, but better (ex: Zero’s velocity). This is due to Gearbox making her a healer and someone who can apply status effects more often. This handicaps her because in UVHM, all enemies have health regen, making burn corrosive shock dot useless except against certain enemies, making a lot of her skills useless. Maya being a healer handicaps her as well since in UVHM, most people would have multiple moxxi weapons and they are much better than any of her healing skills. Her harmony tree is mostly health regen, but it’s completely stupid to rely on any of those skills except mind’s eye and wreck; her health regen skills are worthless because a rubi or a grog could instantly heal you or at least get you to the health gate 10 times as fast. Her biggest advantage is the cat com plus any smg, and that she has the best 1 point skill: Ruin. I love Maya and all, it just sucks that you can’t really play her differently build wise, (mainly because her skill trees are the same size as zero, but zero’s skills are much better). You can discuss this, but you can’t really argue about the harmony tree. I hope in BL3, the siren (if they have one) will be more like Lilith, or at least have better skills than Maya.
My skill build

Maya got a boost recently. So, Maya should be re-evaluated
Maya got a boost recently. So, Maya should be re-evaluated
#2

A few points.

  1. Maya has one skill that affects DOTs. Hardly invalidates her at all. In fact, when used in conjuction with Life Tap, they do a great job of healing you.

  2. Life tap turns any weapon into a moxxi weapon, allowing you to use all the higher damage alternatives.

  3. Her healing abilities are one of the things that make her great in UVHM. As she is able to do more damage, she can heal for greater amounts.

  4. Maya is weaker in RAIDS, nothing else. She mobs better than pretty much any other character, killing multiple enemies every phaselock.

  5. No build variety? Theres Backdraft Maya, sniper Maya, Cat Maya, Jakobs build, whatever you can think of, she can do it. The only other character who may have more variety is Axton, because he can use most ARs better than her. But she’s way better with snipers, so she has no problems in that department.

Lastly, as a friendly reminder, it doesn’t really make for a good discussion if you make a claim in the OP

and say that point can’t be argued in the thread. There are tons of videos proving that Harmony is not as gimped as you suggest. There are plenty of people in this board who could point you in the right direction, because that is way off base in my opinion.

Maybe @Derch could provide some food for thought.

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#3

Saying Maya should use a Moxxi weapon is like saying that Krieg should use a Moxxi weapon. They have some of the best defense/healing skills in their skill trees that actually translate to an increase in their offensive production. There are very few situations, namely raids and a few bosses in Digistruct Peak, where I would say that Moxxi+Chain Lightning may be more advantageous over Harmony. But I think you’re missing how important healing is to offensive potential. If you’re constantly healing from multiple sources in the Harmony tree, then you never have to swap to a Moxxi weapon for healing.

Even one additional source of healing, such as Sweet Release, can keep you and your team moving forward without ever having to slow down for cover. Throw on Legendary Binder with 5/5 Sub-Sequence and 10/5 Sweet Release and you will have 30-40 health orbs flying to you and your team every time you Phaselock a target.

#4

I actually had more trouble with getting Maya thru the last half of TVHM than anything found in UVHM. And after hitting lvl 72 and respec’ing to Derch’s Twisted Pimp build (see, there’s one build for her right there), she’s been pretty much an absolute joy to play, even without all of the recommended gear.

And with respect…

…I’ll argue that all day. Watch Derch’s vid for his build.

#5

I’ve kind of settled into this lately: http://bl2skills.com/siren.html#555011550015053000001554500501
Legendary Siren, Bone of the Ancients, Bee or Antagonist, many weapon choices

I’m obviously not using much of the Harmony tree, but that isn’t because I think it’s a bad tree at all. Frankly, I don’t use it because I don’t need extra healing. I’m either killing everything crazy fast with Bee + BoA + Ruin, or laughing as 10/5 Ward and 5/5 Inertia + Antagonist turn me into a juggernaut.

Maya is incredibly effective and fun. Now, I’m a predominantly solo player who doesn’t care much about raid bosses, but for what I actually do in this game, her and Axton are easily my favorites.

#6

Here are two play lists of me playing maya with my build that @kenole posted and yeah shes not weak.

One skill that is quite helpful with slagging enemies, doesn’t make her bad.

Not really handicaps her, while yeah her dot skills suck, she also has the most slag skills which does not suck and more than makes up for it.

I also take issue with the wording “a lot of her skills”. Helios, Recompense, and Cloudkill are the only useless ones, and even recompense can be made good with the right setup. I wouldn’t call that a lot.

Also not all enemies in UVHM have health regen

This is you not understanding her healing, I encourage you to watch what I posted above. Maya’s healing doesn’t handicap, it frees her from needing moxxi guns and some of her skills get better as you level which is rare and nice. Lifetap can easily get you to full health in a shot, as well as her other skills. Also in op8 dots are some of the most scary damage sources and her healing saves her from that more than almost any other character. It’s not at all stupid to rely on those skills as again you can see me doing it without issue.

When you rely on moxxi guns, you have to swap to them and stop dealing damage to heal, you don’t need to do that with her skills and the fact you can have high enough damage with guns to kill most enemies in a shot or two.

I would say her healing is her best advantage, but also ruin is not a 1 point skill…

You can totally play her in many different ways, hell just thoughtlock alone does that. But where are you getting this zer0 stuff from? Zer0 isn’t much like her at all, maya sucks at melee, she doesn’t have a sniping tree, and zer0 has little healing skills, etc…

Not only I can, but again above I show it works and works well so no need for anything else.

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#7

Ninja’d by the man :dukeangry:

Frankly, a lot of what you said is just plain silly. While I’m not going to say that all of Maya’s skills are fantastic, almost all of them are at least decent, or can be built around.
Like a few people have said already, the Harmony Tree is AMASING. Not only does she have great heath gain abilities, she also has massive crowd control and sheild tanking ability, from PL/converge and inertia respectively, to defend that health.
She also has 2 on demand slaging tools that are almost impossible to miss and also have a ton of other utility.

At this point I think it might be a good time to take stock of where we’re at.
Maya has no need for weapon based healing, from Moxie weapons or transfusions.
Maya has no need for dedicated slaging weapons, from a weapon or from grenades.

That opens up at least 2 extra slots you can use for purely damage weapons.

Finaly, she works well with pretty much all weapons in the game, so at this point your arguement that she dosen’t have a lot of playstyle diversity is looking a little shot.

Here is what I usually run, its very similar to Derch’s build, but with a few personal preferance changes (I usually play alone or with another Maya)

#8

As argued by several above, including @derch and @Wingsday , Harmony is not bad.

I’not going to rehash those arguments. I will say that I suspect that a lot of the perception of Maya as “weak” comes from people expecting her to be like Lilith from BL1. This is a mistake. She’s not a DoT master - that would be Gaige, in this game. Maya does her damage with direct gun damage, mostly. She has only one skill - Flicker - that is DoT oriented, and it’s bad because it’s multiplicative (percents of percents).

I do think Maya has a few skills with issues that primarily come from UVHM scaling problems. These are:

  1. Recompense - Crap in UVHM unless 11/5 with Warder COM + Bladed Grog on Non-OP levels. (“Unkillable Melee Siren”)
  2. Helios - Scales badly in UVHM.
  3. Cloud Kill - scales terribly
  4. Blight Phoenix -scales badly
  5. Backdraft - mild scaling problems but can be leveraged to great effect with Transformer shield, shock Slow Hand (“Impulsive Backdraft”)

I also find Scorn to be redundant with Ruin - the two skills basically fulfill the exact same function.

Note that all of the problem skills are NOT in Harmony with the exception of Recompense. Targeting Harmony for criticism was really picking the wrong tree. Actually, the real “no build diversity” issue is located in Cataclysm. Builds that invest here almost always go Foresight, Immolate, CR, Reaper. Builds with Ruin place 5 Points elsewhere - usually Backdraft because why not - then take Ruin.

But that’s only 1 tree, which leaves a great deal of points for the other trees, and that’s where the diversity comes from. In addition to the two builds already mentioned, there are also Blurred Trickster (which is Harmony/Cataclysm-centric), Zombie Maya (leveraging Immo - and good enough to kill several of the raid bosses with), Binder builds, Cat builds, and I’ve even seen a Banshee build that used Rough Rider with 11/5 Fleet.

She’s not weak and she doesn’t have a build-diversity problem, even in solo, where being a pure party-support character isn’t an option.

#9

Work it right and one is always available while the other cools down.

#10

A few notes about what you said:

First, you are right, in general, ruin>scorn. However, scorn has some important advantages that make it worth taking also, in my opinion anyway.

  • It can be used in FFYL, this is probably the best part of it actually, between this and immolate you will probably have a harder time not getting back up.
  • It allows you to slag over another area, while not a huge deal in solo, in multiplayer, this can be invaluable.
  • It can block the small missles, from constructors for example.
  • If you’re going that far down harmony (you probably should, lifetap is awesome) it only costs a point so why not?

Second, I can’t speak for everyone, but I generaly go flicker for my filler skill because it makes increases slag chance and can add some damage, also, I feel like backdraft dosen’t do enough damage for it to be worth trying to manage if you arn’t exploiting it.

I’ll admit that she dosen’t have a whole lot of viable skill builds, most of them are just modified versions of eachother, but you can customise the basic builds to be exacty how you want it, and most of them work with pretty much whatever gear you want to use.

#11

Maya is arguably the most well rounded character in Borderlands 2. She can use almost every weapon in the game and not handicap herself. The reason I say most is there are those weapons such as the Stink Pot that cannot be saved no matter what you do. She balances survival and damage making her incredibly versatile in every situation.

Maya is in fact the most forgiving character when making the transition from TVHM to UVHM on account of her skills. She has two slag skills and plenty of Oomph while also not losing any traction. The skills that do terrible in UVHM (Cloud Kill, Backdraft, Helios, and Blight Phoenix) were doing poorly in TVHM anyways. The only thing Maya neglects in her skill trees is not having a way to boost her damage resistance which would make her perfect.

I don’t need to write anything concerning the Harmony tree other than you are greatly underestimating it. The people above who have a better knowledge of it have already said what I would have wrote albeit in better detail.

Edit: Pressed the wrong button for a reply. Hence ending up linking to another post.

#12

I guess you found this thread a little…troubling?
Ehh?
…
I’m sorry, I’ll leave.

#13

I usually avoid Scorn since my own preference is to have Ruin and some significant investment in Motion. I’m always taking 5/5 Reaper, but I’m not always sinking 20 points into Harmony, so for me it’s Ruin. I actually don’t take Lifetap very often - I usually get enough healing from Sweet Release and Elated, but at the same time I’m staying back as opposed to rushing into the thick of things.

The exception is when I run Blurred Trickster, where I’m hyper-aggressive but with heavy investment in Lifetap.

I think my point is that I find Life tap to be more useful if you’re playing more short-range and aggressive.

For the filler skill in Cataclysm, I think that’s purely personal taste. You take Flicker, I go Backdraft, and I’ve even seen some people take Phoenix since it has a slight knock back effect. That 5th skill is really just filler.

#14

If Maya’s skills like Wreck would activate for a few seconds when she used phaselock on un-phaselockable enemies, she would be a perfect character. Even without that, she’s pretty great

#15

maya’s awesome. haven’t played in forever, but Scorch remembers. Just jumped back in and he offers her his treasure.

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#16

I see what you did there.

#17

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Just checked out Derch’s build, and it is the closest to what I run constantly ( including the gun choices…minus the Blockade )

I stumbled upon my build through sheer trial/error/frustration. The build is so good you can switch Class Mods w/o respec on the fly.

Quasar/Phaslock destroys.
Twister eats those foolish enough to run up in your face.

I hit a wall with her ( just like with Gaige ) around level 64, but once I got my first Maya to 72 ( and then OP8), she is my fav character to play.

#18

and Maya gets a chest drop wooo.

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<img src="//discourse-cloud-file-uploads.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gearbox/original/3X/b/1/b190c00a29f17a47ee8ecc4be3e1703c7948aa01.png"width="690"height="388">

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#19

Maya is one of the only two characters in the game (the other being Zer0) that can one-shot certain Bosses like BNK3R and Saturn at OP8, without the use of a Bee shield. Also, with only 1 point in Restoration it is possible for Maya to fully heal any character with only one-shot with certain weapons (example: the Twister Shotgun) even at OP8. Sweet Release and Elated are both good skills to take for healing purposes and can keep Maya above healthgate. Maya actually has two of the best 1 point skills in the game: Converge + Ruin. This effectively acts as a slag singularity grenade, without the need for an actual slag singularity grenade. And as for your build (since I don’t think anyone else directly addressed that): I would take the 5 points from Fleet and put them into Inertia and take the 4 points from Sub-sequence and put them into Sweet Release. It looks like this: http://bl2skills.com/siren.html#555001550054050100005550500501 . Other than that, the build is fine. Unless you are using a Rough Rider + Breakneck Banshee COM, it isn’t really worth putting points into Fleet.

Forum ID: Poisd2Strike
GT: Poisd2Strike
Trades: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/t/poisd2strikes-humble-shop/367700
Gun Prefixes | Gun Parts | Max Stats
Maya OP8 | Banshee RR / NRR | Binder | Cat | Nurse | Siren | Trickster B / M

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#20

fixed
http://bl2skills.com/siren.html#505501055145050000005500505501

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