Fun, but it gets old fast, imo. They invoked carrot on a stick gameplay what with having all the items, levels, rpg aspects and all, which is fine, but then they just up and hand the carrot off to the player.
There’s not even any good dungeon runs for loot, no meph/diablo/baal runs. The single best place for loot is new haven, 7 chests, 2/3 vendors, reload, rinse, repeat.
Frankly, they just made it far, far, far too easy to reach max level, and far too easy to get tons of great items by farming new haven instead of something actually challenging.
I’m pretty much the opposite. Borderlands has taken over as my quick shooter fix game. If I want to get some first-person blastery goodness, without the windup or teamwork involved in TF2 or L4D, I fire up Borderlands and clear out Old Haven or the like. It’s a pretty good distillation of what makes action shooters fun. It’s just a popcorn game, but sometimes you’re in the mood for popcorn
I’m having fun with it from the “get the guys together for 15min, run a zone or two” aspect of gameplay–as said above, it’s popcorn.
While I’m thinking about it, any of you PC players have any decent combat rifles? I prefer burstfire ones, and I’m having a hell of a time finding anything good (despite cranking out multiple orange sniper rifles and rocket launchers, which I hand off to my existing brick and mordecai buddies)
I have a couple for my soldier, an Atlas one with great accuracy, decent damage & RoF and a 50+ magazine. No effects though. There’s also my Lightning Destroyer; three-round bursts when unscoped, whole 21 mag in half a second when scoped, 90 something accuracy, and good shock effect.
Combat rifles seem like the least well itemized gun type in the game. They seem underpowered compared to other types, and it’s hard to evaluate which ones are better than others.
I’ve got a decent collection of combat rifles, but I’ve not found a single burst type that I like. Roland’s got so much in the way of rate of fire and recoil reduction buffs that burst fire seems self-limiting when you can spray out 25 rounds a second, with the entire magazine accurate enough to all land into a target on the other side of a room. So I lean more towards the Glorious Havoc types, where you just wither enemies with mass amounts of bullets while they’re stunlocked from the incoming crits. It’s pretty amazing at chewing up high HP targets.
I did run across a 48 blue Stomper the other day but I think I’ve already sold it. It was single-shot, basically a sniper rifle without the huge damage or crit boost, which is a hefty price to pay for not having scope sway. I do have spares of quality full-autos though, including a scoped Atlas one that would be fantastic if it hadn’t rolled up as explosive.
Weapon itemization is just weird. A friend gave my mordecai a level 25 blue SMG that is by far the best weapon I’ve ever used. I mean - I’m level 38, and I have level 35ish orange sniper rifles that kick ass, and I’ve got 24 sniper proficiency, and talents that boost sniper rifles … and yet I cause a lot more damage by using that level 25 SMG which I have no proficiency or talent for. I’m probably going to hand it off to a siren who will destroy the entire universe with it.
My guess would be an Anarchy, which can show up blue and does indeed shred things. That’s pretty much the idea, isn’t it? SMGs and shotguns have the most limited range, so if they weren’t owning it up in damage output, there wouldn’t be a lot of point to them. Sniper rifles are about landing giant critical hits quickly and safely, not mowing things down with impunity. The revolver/repeater Mordecai is aimed that way, though.
The component system also renders item levels almost moot. I had a level 36 rifle that my Roland used almost clear to 50, because it not only rolled high on its bonus stats, but on the barrel, stock, grip and body components as well (level 5 on each), making this lv36 item better than the vast bulk of weaponry 10 levels higher, even those with equally high bonuses. In playthrough 2.5, where every single item comes out the exact same level, there’s still a huge variation in every stat due to how the individual components roll up. I wonder why they even include item level on the stat card - low level characters can still get monstrously powerful weaponry (it’s just more rare…) and it gives misleading indications to people familiar with the RPG implementation of it.
Is that how it works? Rather than spending a certain amount of points on various stats, it rolls each independently? So if you roll max on each component, you have a gigantically more powerful item than one with the same level/color that rolled low?
It’s a weird system… unintuitive, since your level 20 weapon could end up being better than a level 45 one.
What do the colors and level affect then? Weighting of the roll? Possible range?
Level affects the base damage values, while all the components, bonus stats, and manufacturer effects are multipliers onto those values. The multipliers get fairly big, while the base value from level scales not too quickly. Compare the base damage between a level 10 and a level 50 item…it’s definitely not a 5x difference. Large multipliers in tandem can dwarf the difference in base value between the averages of a few levels. Bonuses, manufacturer, body and barrel components can all contribute to damage, for example. 50 x 1.8 is going to beat out 55 x 1.5.
IME, you’d have to have extremely good luck to have a level 25 item that beats out even the average level 45, but a really good 25 will definitely beat the worst of the 45s. So yeah, item level is an unintuitive gauge of quality. It’s most obvious on the class mods, where you might find a blue class mod that has 3 to three stats, and a higher level purple version of the same thing that only has 2 to the same three stats.
I think color affects the maximum range of the rolls, rather than the base values, but I won’t swear to it. I haven’t gone digging into the game’s data files yet to get some hard numbers, and the component skew obfuscates what else is going on. The main things making the epics epic are the really powerful bonus stats that are only available at higher colors. You’ll never find a green Hellfire, for instance.
…with caveats. I’ve got a Thanatos repeater that statted-up so high-quality that it rolled around back into a white label (it’s a beast for a repeater!)
