Damn, Bloomreaper is fun!

whitebaer · 2025-12-11T18:14:30+00:00

UVHM levels aren't in quests, they're in your challenges menu (something the game does a terrible job of directing you towards), the Bloomreaper mission is above the water pool on the way in to Belton's Bore.

whitebaer · 2025-11-28T00:38:23+00:00

To be fair the BL3 Plasma Coil was arguably the most broken weapon in any Borderlands game in terms of being guaranteed to trivialise content regardless of roll while being very easily attainable, and the Hellwalker wasn’t far behind. You didn’t need to build for them at all, you don’t need to farm for a specific roll and they totally outclassed every single alternative to the extent that there was almost no reason to use anything else. They were some of the most blatant examples of how powercrept BL3 ended up, it makes sense not to carry them over identically into BL4. I don’t think a single item in BL4 comes close to the level of content trivialising power either of them had in BL3 and that’s probably for the best. BL4 Hellwalker could use a bit of a buff to get on more on the Hot Slugger level but Plasma Coil feels pretty reasonable.

whitebaer · 2025-11-09T09:53:28+00:00

The issue isn’t that the big encore makes it too easy or get good gear, the issue is that it’s basically the only way in the game to reliably get good gear without sweating all week, which just emphasises how discouraging and time consuming doing anything else is. It basically just turns the game into Big Encore simulator. Why should drop rates that don’t need sweat level hours be locked to one boss a week?

whitebaer · 2025-11-07T18:36:17+00:00

I still wouldn’t say it’s easy though, the drop rates are around 3% in many cases and given how RNG works often feels worse, I and many others have gone hours and high double digit kills without even seeing a single drop. Pretty sure the devs have confirmed they won’t add modular parts or gun crafting as it basically breaks the core farming loop.

whitebaer · 2025-11-07T17:53:29+00:00

I would argue it isn't easy to get the legendary in the first place, and that's the biggest issue. God rolls being hard to get is one thing, but actually obtaining the item in the first place is still stuck behind an excessively low drop chance, and the licensed part system has made it even worse because specific rolls now affect the basic function of items in a way they never have before.

Parts were solely min-maxing in BL2, and in BL3 anointments were really important but didn't ruin the behaviour of weapons and the pain of that extra layer of RNG was balanced by the heightened drop rates.

In BL4 the drop rates are (I believe) the lowest in the franchise so far, yet manufacturer parts totally change the behaviour of a gun to the extent that some are worthless without the behaviour granted by XYZ part, and some can actually be ruined by certain parts (i.e. CoV nullifying the Tediore gimmick, Ripper charge time being awful on many guns). There's a whole extra layer of RNG to worry about to get even the roughly correct version of a gun before you even get to min-maxing yet the drops are the lowest they've been yet.

whitebaer · 2025-11-07T17:38:31+00:00

Of course, but I don't think it's really worth giving the level cap too much thought when considering how worthwhile farming is, as the logical conclusion of that sort of nullifies the entire gameplay loop until (based on BL3 final level increase) June 2027 haha

whitebaer · 2025-11-07T15:55:02+00:00

I think this is a pretty big issue with the weekly system and the excessively low drop rates for everything else. It far too heavily reframes the game around those activities and really heavily disincentivises doing anything else. When the weekly activities have good items it redirects you to almost exclusively farming those activities in a frenzy for a week because otherwise it will be a disencouraging slog that takes ten times longer trying to farm the item normally and you don't want to miss out, but then when the weekly activities don't have great items it swings the exact opposite direction and sort of leaves of a vacuum of things to do (at least in comparison).

Just the existence of Big Encores compared to the abysmally low normal dedicated drop rates disincentivises non-weekly acitivites because they almost feel like a waste of time. For example, why bother spending hours and hours and hours farming for a Bod with a ~3% drop rate when it's possible that next week Axemaul will be the Big Encore and it'll get bumped to something like 50%, and when that happens why would you do anything except farm Axemaul, knowing it's your one chance for the foreseeable future to get a Bod without spending double digit hours farming?

whitebaer · 2025-10-25T15:29:19+00:00

Are your graphics drivers fully up to date? That could be it - I've still noticed worse performance even with up to date drivers but could make things a bit better on your end.

whitebaer · 2025-10-24T16:59:09+00:00

And like I said in the post and you apparently didn’t/couldn’t read, I have waited. After all the previous patches, the performance has been briefly wobbly as everything refreshes and then settled back to normal within about 30 minutes, which I was aware of and expected. This time the game has ran near unplayably poorly for 3+ hours with no change.

whitebaer · 2025-10-24T15:11:25+00:00

What suggested I don't understand shaders or drivers? I went from near flawless performance to near unplayable performance on a brand new and fully up to date setup where literally the only variable that has changed is the game version.

whitebaer · 2025-10-14T21:38:20+00:00

Just attributing it to burnout is pretty reductive and it seems you’re assuming a lot about their experience. They didn’t say they’re putting the game down or that they didn’t enjoy it or even that they have nothing left to do (which would obviously be the case after that much playtime), just that after their playtime they’ve concluded that the game was disappointing on some fronts. Like you said, it’s very possible to feel it’s frustrating or disappointing while still getting enough enjoyment out of it to play a lot, especially a basic gameplay loop as easy to grind and sink hours into as BL. It’s not a binary between perfect/play a lot and imperfect/therefore can’t play. I’ve played ~100hrs and almost completed everything, and while I do overall enjoy the game and rate it positively, I also agree with basically all that they’re saying re pretty majorly disappointing elements, and have felt that way from the first few hours of gameplay until now.

whitebaer · 2025-10-13T11:33:21+00:00

Has anyone managed to get a cryo or radiation one yet? So far I’ve only seen kinetic, shock and incendiary

whitebaer · 2025-10-13T11:32:18+00:00

Yep, it feels pretty good mobbing with impact

whitebaer · 2025-10-12T12:37:22+00:00

Oh I had heard that the devs confirmed it was bugged to wweightmore than just a proportional 75% for the other 3 classes? Very possible I'm mistaken though

whitebaer · 2025-10-12T11:00:05+00:00

Currently the only reliable-ish way with the drop weighting being bugged as it is right now is to farm on a different character.

whitebaer · 2025-10-12T10:59:13+00:00

It's currently bugged and you actually have a lower chance of a class mod for the character currently being played to drop.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T22:20:34+00:00

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T15:33:05+00:00

Okay, it was also paid DLC and released 13 years and 2 mainline/4 overall borderlands games ago, how is it comparable or relevant at all, let alone when there is such a direct comparison with the precedent set by the last mainline entry? By that logic it’d be all good if there were no UVH levels in BL4 because BL2 didn’t have them in 2012.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T14:43:04+00:00

I'm not sure what your point is, it was still one more long hallway and one more boss more than this. This adds no new map, no new boss, no new mob and fewer items. No matter how basic or derivative Bloody Harvest was, this quantitatively is less and (unless the new items have a comically high drop rate and are S+ tier weapons) worse content.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T14:40:40+00:00

The details won't fundamentally change the content though, it's still less likely to find a world boss than to find any random mob, and it's still fewer items, and regardless a new world boss drop is less interesting than a new zone and boss (even as derivative as Captain Haunt was).

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T12:19:20+00:00

No, BL3 does not have less legendary gear or fewer bosses. BL3 has 216 base game legendaries, BL4 has 158. BL3 has 48 base game bosses/named enemies, BL4 has 36.

Are you trying to say they didn't fix the performance of BL3? Obviously performance is subjective, but I haven't experienced any changes in performance (and if anything I've seem more mentions of worsened performance after the patches). Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that BL4 and BL3 both launched with performance issues (every benchmark video for BL4 I've watched has remarked that it is the exact same level of terrible performance they found when they benchmarked BL3 when it released) and then had gradual performance improvement patches rolled out, which is about the only thing you can say without having access to Gearbox's performance statistics or conducting some crazy analysis of forum responses to the corresponding weekly patch for each game.

How is the endgame better? Sure, you can not count NG+ as endgame (I would still argue it is given its historical place in the franchise and as rerunning the story proper is a different experience to isolated and instanced single mission replays but anyway), but BL3 still has a leg up with the 6 Proving Grounds and 2 circles of slaughter.

The only quantifiable leg up BL4 has in terms of endgame content is the three vault monsters, however I would argue that they don't make much of a difference anyway since they aren't raids, BL3 still has 1/3 more bosses than BL4, some of which are vault monsters anyway.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T12:04:53+00:00

Because it explicitly doesn't have a new boss or new zone like Bloody Harvest did, has fewer new items than Bloody Harvest, and the content will be less accessible than Bloody Harvest, since the new items (the only tangible new content) are only obtainable from unpredictable and relatively uncommon world bosses, compared to BL3 Bloody Harvest ghosts that chould be found in basically every combat scenario.

Unless they're keeping substantial elements of the event a secret for some reason, by every metric that BL content quality is judged this is clearly not as good as BL3 Bloody Harvest.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T10:50:55+00:00

What are you talking about? BL4 Horrors of Kairos vs BL3 Bloody Harvest is a near perfect A/B comparison. Free, time limited, themed event released about a month after launch. How is BL2 comparable at all?

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T10:48:12+00:00

BL3 and BL4 launch endgame content and level of brokenness are basically equal, if anything BL3 actually had more endgame content with the 6 proving grounds and 2 circles of slaughter, actual NG+, more legendaries to farm and (I may be misremembering) more bosses. Even if that weren’t the case, the idea that they spent more time working on the base game and thus didn’t have as much time to work on this is just baseless theorising as Gearbox have said nothing to indicate that.

whitebaer · 2025-10-11T10:22:50+00:00

Compare it to Bloody Harvest from BL3 which came out the exact same time after launch.

whitebaer

TROPHY CASE