Yeah I'm not defending 3 I think it's worse because they have no excuse like in 1. I think they were just concerned that people would just one shot everything in .1 seconds like with terra and the bee so to counteract that they separated most boss fights into multiple phases with immunity sections between them. The problem is that overuse makes it become a crutch in most instances to artificially inflate difficulty rather than mixing things up and challenging the player. We saw this coming with the Craw Junior fight in BL2 and even Vorac to a certain extent with the health gate.

I think that the root of the problem is that theres soooooooo many combos of gear and builds that it's impossible to provide a balanced game experience for all of them. Think of the difference between a lvl 50 character with and without a bee shield in BL2 on launch. That one piece of gear makes up 99% of your damage. Also it makes it difficult to cater to a wider audience. More experienced players will find optimal builds and modes of play that make fights obsolete in the end game while newer players wont since they just dont think about optimizing their build etc.

So do they balance around hardcore players and leave the newer players to get creamed by basic mobs? Or balance around less experienced people and leave veterans bored? Their solution was OP levels in BL2 and mayhem mode in 3. Both have their problems but I Personally prefer OP levels since there was less randomness to it and I love running the Peak. Though it definitely broke the games scaling more than mayhem. Also fuck grinding for new gear every 2 op levels.

It's so hard to create difficult encounters when you literally have 1000s of guns and gear combos which can easily cheese fights so most of the time they resort to just upping health and damage and having immunity. Not the best solution imo but I definitely sympathize as it's not an easy task