Borderlands 2

I think you're right about the dual nature of the game. Part of me still has fun shooting the helmet off a Goliath and leading him around to other baddies. Extra challenge and hilarity for a midget goliath. Part of me does it because it's fun and part for the chance at some decent loot. Then the disappointment comes when he drops a purple weapon but it sucks(fuck you hyperion guns!). I almost want to say this game would have a much better farming model with an AH(don't stone me!). At least, SOMETHING to do with blue and/or purples that you don't want besides selling to Marcus. An extra level of lootiness would go a long way.

This is what defeats my motivation to dealing with public games to kill a raid boss. Most likely, I'm getting a bunch of loot that will be turned into vendor fodder. Also, just to harp on this again, a lot of the boss encounters are poorly balanced with regards to player talents. A lot of the game is balanced around fast and frequent killing along with relatively short cooldowns. It's pretty obvious they had to toss trivial adds into some fights to keep the boss from devolving into a point and shoot.

Yeah, but Axton is fucking boring.

I think the slag thing in UVHM is overblown. If you're playing multiplayer (which I rarely, if ever, do), you can have one person responsible for keeping mobs slagged. If solo, almost every class has a reliable way to apply slag (ruin, gunzerk with a slag offhand, kunai, etc). With the Tiny Tina expansion, the florentine SMG is dual shock + slag, and it is buyable with seraph crystals.

I much prefer the higher health mobs and end-game boss fights in BL2 to how easy the BL1 expansions were to blow through even with overpowered lower level items (ie, hellfire and pestilent defiler. I don't think I ever even finished the claptrap DLC because it was stupidly easy with my abundance of skill points and overpowered gear.

pemulis_sl said:

If solo, almost every class has a reliable way to apply slag (ruin, gunzerk with a slag offhand, kunai, etc).

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Nope! Your examples include 2 specific talent trees while all three are cooldowns. And if you think having to kunai each and every enemy is the answer to tedious gameplay...ugh. I'm here to kill shit, not whittle it down while waiting for my cooldown to reset!

One single endgame weapon should not be a solution to slogging through UVHM.

Here's the real problem with UVHM: the game isn't designed for it. High health and damage enemies can work, but players do not have the talents or items(most of the time) to support it. 99% of the time, you're killing enemies fast and furious. The talents are built around this. Look how many are built around the concept of "kill some dudes...collect a bit of loot, recharge your shields, poke around a bit...kill some more dudes". You start to lengthen "kill some dudes" and a lot of talents fall apart or lose their effectiveness.

Look how many people bitched about the witch doctors in the Hammerlock DLC. They are tough sons of bitches and can last a long time if you don't take them out before they self-heal. Especially if you find one that is the same element as your main gun. I encountered one last night, a non-fire version, and he self-healed through a face blasting from my Maliwan Hellfire!

The developers realized all this and hamfisted a fix by upping slag's effectiveness. It's crude and tedious, but it does work. But it does little to cover up that UVHM is poorly balanced.

different strokes I guess. I've put more hours into BL2 than any game I've ever played and I continue to look forward to getting stuff I still don't have - all the while challenged to get through areas unlike the hot-knife-through-butter my Lilith was with a hellfire in BL1

That's like saying raids are challenging because the trash takes a while to kill.

The game is more challenging because the typical mobs are more difficult to kill, and you can easily find yourself respawning if you don't play somewhat cautiously. 99% of the game is fighting normal (trash?) mobs, so I'm not sure the MMORPG raid trash analogy works.

PS: we're obviously not going to agree. I just don't get the people who declare they are going back to BL1 because of slag/UVHM scaling.

We don't have to agree to have a discussion. I'm definitely not going back to BL1. I don't know of anyone who is. BL1 is just load your character up with an Ogre and blast away. Kinda fun if you hack the game to simulate playing on 4 players. Skag dens can be annoying though.

The point of the analogy, and I think it still applies, is that it's the wrong kind of "challenge". I would either like the challenge to be more commensurate of how boring it is or make overcoming it more fun. As I said earlier, I still shoot helmets off Goliaths because it's fun. Use something like that. Charm burning in EQ was incredibly fun. Weapon swapping to a slag weapon(because who goes looking for a primary slag weapon? The nature of slag will ensure it's a secondary weapon) or being forced to a certain spec will always be boring and restrictive.