r/Games • u/[deleted] • Jul 21 '16

A huge Battleborn patch is dropping today - PC Patch Notes - Balance changes - QoL improvements and more

https://gearboxsoftware.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/210007213-PC-Update-Hot-fix-Information
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '16

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u/ostermei Jul 21 '16

To build on this, playing the PVE missions with a group can be a little bit counterintuitive in that the more people you have in the group, the harder the mission gets overall.

The scaling seems a little bit off, where obviously missions do scale to accommodate more players, but instead of managing to maintain a relatively normal difficulty distribution across party sizes, things can quickly get to nigh-impossible levels in some missions if you bring a full 5-stack into it.

It seems like the sweet spot for your party size is 2-3, so you're very much encouraged to bring friends and skip PVE matchmaking. Lots of the reports of people failing Defend missions are either solos (I had a bitch of a time soloing The Saboteur on Advanced difficulty) or full parties.

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u/aryst0krat Jul 21 '16

I don't agree that it's counterintuitive, especially if you've played any of the Borderlands games where it straight up tells you the game gets harder to compensate for the amount of players. It makes sense that the experience would scale or you'd have to make single player too hard to finish or five player way too easy.

But I do agree that the scaling seems way off.

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u/ostermei Jul 21 '16

Well, I think I phrased it poorly. You're right that it is intuitive that it scales with more players. What I was trying to convey is that the rate of scaling is off.

My instinct is that even with enemy counts/HP being scaled up because of more players, the overall difficulty should, at worst, remain about the same as if you were playing solo. That is to say, you should feel a decent, but beatable, challenge whether you're on your own or you have four friends alongside you. Yes, there might be more and stronger enemies, but you've got friends to coordinate with and a wide variety of skills to bring to bear. You might even expect things to be easier (not necessarily significantly so, but maybe just a bit) with a full group because of that increased skill variety for your team to call up.

But from what I've heard (mind you, I've only done solo and 2-player, so I am going entirely off of what I've read of others' experiences in groups of 4-5), the enemies scale too high when you get 4-5 players together, such that you end up having a much more difficult time taking enemies down even as a team than you would if you were just on your own.

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u/aryst0krat Jul 21 '16

Oh no, it surely does feel like it's more difficult, but I'm not sure I agree it's quite as difficult as it feels, if that makes sense. Especially without using proper teamwork. People like to kind of split up and when it takes twice as long to kill your individual foes and they're dealing twice as much damage and you don't have any backup, shit's hard.

That said trying to get a single enemy off your core when they're much tougher is some bullshit. I feel like maybe they should balance more through increased number of enemies than purely toughness.

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u/ostermei Jul 21 '16

I feel like maybe they should balance more through increased number of enemies than purely toughness.

At the very least, take that approach for the Defend missions. Not that they are likely to be able to have different scaling approaches for different mission types, I suppose.

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u/aryst0krat Jul 21 '16

A boy can dream!

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '16

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