Borderlands 3
I am bracing myself for impact, as I’m about to say something incredibly controversial. Borderlands 3, a loot based game, is being too generous with its loot in the endgame.
Please, hold your angry tweets.
The endgame of Borderlands 3 is in a very, very weird place right now. After you beat the main campaign, you enter True Vault Hunter mode, which creates harder enemies and drops better loot, and then a new feature of Borderlands 3 is that you can start stacking Mayhem levels on top of it, 1 through 3.
Mayhem 3 is just an absolute loot paradise. At the cost of enemy beefiness and a lot of potentially harmful modifiers, blues and epics rain like candy, and legendaries are far easier to find. While this potentially seems a little excessive, I think the general overall gameplay of Mayhem 3 with this amount of loot is okay, fun and rewarding.
But for bosses? This is where things get complicated, and I think the game has gone a little too far.
Three things combine here that have made boss farming, and therefore legendary farming, kind of a joke in Borderlands 3, even on the supposedly ultra-tough TVHM Mayhem 3 difficulty, the absolute current max.
1. You can now respawn literally steps away from many bosses due to how saves and reloads work in BL3 as opposed to past games.
2. As I said, the Mayhem 3 drop rate is insane, and as such each boss kill is practically a guaranteed legendary drop. My record is three legendaries from one boss, so far.
3. There are at least a few builds, many of them relatively easy to assemble, that can burn down bosses almost instantly.
Borderlands 3
The most common boss burning build is FL4K’s Fade Away crit build. This is a problem because it’s not really even hard to assemble. If you distribute your 50 points correctly, you can melt any bosses with your almost infinite crits, and pair that with a good Jakobs legendary and you’re golden. Sure, other pieces can make it even better, but not much is needed to make it a boss killing machine.
I don’t have FL4K at 50 yet, but this is essentially the same deal for my Amara melee build I’ve spoken about before. It’s not an instant burn, but after maybe 25 seconds of punching I can kill a boss like Gigamind without dying, and then rinse and repeat as much as I want. Between running to him, killing him, and picking up the loot, it’s maybe 90 seconds a run for 1-3 legendaries, and it makes farming anything else in the game kind of pointless, outside of getting X legendary drop from X specific enemy.
It’s clear that Gearbox wanted to take some precautions to prevent people from save/reload farming. For instance in the Gigamind boss room, there’s a red chest and some Eridium chunks. Once you open the chest once and punch that Eridium once, it disappears indefinitely, presumably on some sort of timer. It doesn’t come back when I reload.
But Gigamind does, and he essentially operates like a chest that takes 25 seconds to open, and he’s almost guaranteeing me a legendary each time I do so. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Obviously it will take some time for many players to get a build they can insta-farm bosses with, and some classes are better than others (again, FL4K is the obvious choice right now). But I feel that given how important endgame is in a loot shooter, the concept of insta-killing bosses on repeat on the hardest difficulty with little effort for guaranteed legendaries every minute and a half kind of feels…wrong.
I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know if more boss health is the answer because that would seriously hamper non-OP builds people try. It feels more like some of the top tier endgame builds need a liiiiitle bit of scaling back, FL4K’s insane crits, for instance. But even then, this seems like kind of a complicated problem.
I am enjoying Borderlands 3 in the late game here, but with this insane amount of loot dropping I feel like I’m going to get bored rotating boss burning runs in a matter of days here. It’s like zero challenge for wild rewards, and that can only carry the game so long.
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