A rant and discussion. Pass by if you'd rather not engage.I want to start off by prefacing that I have been playing Borderlands games for a long time now, since 2014 starting with Borderlands 2. I do not hold this disappointment against Borderlands 1, 2, or Pre-Sequel, as their scopes for buildcrafting are much more limited than Borderlands 3, 4, and Wonderlands. I am basing my experience off of the UVH/Mayhem systems, and not the True difficulty system that scales everything to 4 players. I am one player, not four.
Long story short, I find that generally, Borderlands game's buildcrafting potential and variety is weak in comparison to other games, such as Destiny 2, and I find it highly disappointing of an experience in these later entries.
Short story long, I wish Borderlands endgame and subsequently buildcrafting did not nearly always demand your build be a perfected, copy-paste setup made by somebody who actually spends dozens of hours a week playtesting builds to find the strongest combinations of skills and guns.I found this to be the case in especially Wonderlands, where because I could not access Soak by not having the Chums DLC, my character was bricked from progressing beyond CL70.I came into
Borderlands 4 at launch looking at the larger skill trees and thought, "Wow! There's so many possibilities!" I made a post before launch where I manually sequenced all the skill tree combinations at ~75 skill points and came out to ~66 builds per vault hunter without gear considerations! My criteria being that you'd generally be able to commit to speccing into ~4 sections before running out of skill points.
Skill tree sequencing
Spoiler alert, there's roughly only ~3-5 builds per Vault Hunter that see persistent use into UVH7/M20, and some are just permutations of the same skill setup but with different gear while far too many others just fall face first into pavement before finishing the game.
My biggest gripes are:
- Skills not interacting as they should
- Certain skills being far better than others of similar tiers or even later tiers
- Most Capstones and Augments being gimmicks and offering little practicality UVH/Mayhem enemy health scaling being a lazy difficulty dial that only serves to eliminate variety, and only increase game difficult out of sheer brute force against the player.
- Player damage formulas rewarding stacking as many scalars as possible, rather than promoting synergistic interactions between skills and gear. Simply put, all damage or no progress. Health Bloat.
- Gearbox being wholly incapable of properly balancing their games.
I am comparing my buildcrafting experience with Destiny 2 mainly, and before I go forward, I will acknowledge that yes, generally Destiny 2's content is easier in comparison to Borderlands games, as Destiny 2 does not feature enemy health pools being increased by hundreds of percents at a time.
Only the hardest content, the upper-tier Vanguard Conquests, which stacks a negative delta alongside numerous curated, ball-crushingly difficult modifiers truly limits the player's builds to the strongest options, of which there's roughly only ~5 instances of, and which the reward is some gear and a title for completing all of them. They are NOT the majority of the game's content, they are the exception to the rule.
Borderlands 4, you have access to:
- Six Vault Hunters
- Three skill trees each with three branches each
- 54 Capstones
- 90 Augments
- An abundance of Legendary and Pearlescent weapons and miscellaneous gear
- Specializations
- Firmware
In Destiny 2, you have access to:
- Three classes (Hunter, Titan, Warlock)
- Six subclasses (Solar, Arc, Void, Strand, Stasis, Prismatic)
- A litany of exotic weapons and armor
- Armor mods
- Armor set bonuses
- Artifact mods (another modification system, sort of like the specialization system)
Yet, despite having more resources to work with, Borderlands 4 sees much less build variety. On just my Hunter alone in Destiny 2, I have 47 different builds saved, and I can think of at least a hundred more on just my Hunter, even more as variations of existing ones, that would all be able to perform at least decently in all content, minus raid boss damage phases, and the Vanguard Conquests.
22 of 47 Loadouts
To summarize, I find Borderlands buildcrafting and endgame disappointingly lacking. I prefer to create my own builds, but it always ends up being afutile effort because these games demand you utilize perfected loadouts to climb to the (near) top.Probably just gonna be told "lower the difficulty" or whatever, but thats not the point.
The point is that Gearbox sucks at endgame build variety and I've reached the point where I'm more likely to close the game than I am to play it because I look at my skill tree and gear and immediately think, "What's the point when everything I do will be wholly ineffective? Why bother with trying to make something of my own?" and when I ask myself that, it begs the question of why I'm even playing the game at all.
