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Why on earth is everybody farming for XP and everything? If there was competitive borderlands or something yeah I could see maybe some point in it, but this seems a bit rediculous.

What's the point in playing the game if you're going to grind a boss for half an hour just so you can one shot any boss in the game? Are you guys that addicted to loot or soemthing?

Why does it matter? Surely they can play their games the way they want to?

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Why on earth is everybody farming for XP and everything? If there was competitive borderlands or something yeah I could see maybe some point in it, but this seems a bit rediculous.

What's the point in playing the game if you're going to grind a boss for half an hour just so you can one shot any boss in the game? Are you guys that addicted to loot or soemthing?

Ask the idiot who farms the Leviathan's treasure vault and pulls 1 orange per every 2 or 3 runs (that's this guy)

And the real reason is simple-we want certain gear that we like (I'm farming for a 50 deliverance, baby maker and slagga right now), and most of us have already beaten the game 1, 2 or even 3 times already-why go through the trouble building those last 2 or 3 characters up to 50, putting MASSIVE hours in to do it all over again, doing nothing different. I'd rather boost my last couple characters up to levels quickly so that they can go on raids. That's why.

Speaking of....BOOYA!! 4 legendaries in ONE run-Level 50 striker, WTF shield, Bitch, and Logan's Gun. Yes, I'm an addict for legendary things.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Why on earth is everybody farming for XP and everything? If there was competitive borderlands or something yeah I could see maybe some point in it, but this seems a bit rediculous.

What's the point in playing the game if you're going to grind a boss for half an hour just so you can one shot any boss in the game? Are you guys that addicted to loot or soemthing?

I farm for XP because I have completed every single mission in the game, and completed the story missions more than a dozen times at this point. I want to get every character to 50, but after spending 20+ hours each on two characters getting through normal mode and TVHM, and countless hours farming for rare items, I would rather just spend an hour pressing an easy button and blow through the story as fast as possible so I can get back to doing endgame content (DLC, Playthrough 2.5 side quests, etc...) rather than spend yet another 20+ hours grinding my way through all the enemies at level. But now, because I wasn't able to get a character on my friends profile through the story fast enough, I can't use that trick any more so I have to resort to either farming Terramorphous or the Warrior, or using the endless Rakk trick in the Vault of the Warrior in order to get XP. At least I can do something else while farming Rakks, but it takes hours.

@Timetowaste85 - Good Christ man! You have the best luck with that. Also, I still need to dupe you that Plasma Caster. Unfortunately I wasn't able to kill Hyperious with it before he put up his shield. It takes multiple people to do it that way, because his HP doesn't scale as drammatically as I though. 3 people with the Bee + Plasma Caster should be able to do it easily enough.

Edit - Just saw this:

-Reduced level of Captain Scarlett and Mr. Torgue DLC raid bosses in Normal Mode.
-Captain Scarlett and Mr. Torgue DLC raid bosses no longer drop Seraph crystals in Normal Mode.

I guess they had to do the second option if they were going to do the first option, but why reduce the level? Who would actually fight the raid bosses in normal mode anyway? At that level there would be almost no point. Anything you got from them would be replaced almost immediately as soon as you stepped into TVHM.

They also made it so the Bee won't affect every bullet in the magazine of a Tediore reload, so that's out as well. Only Gaige gets that bonus damage with Anarchy stacks because it's percentage based, not a flat bonus. Basically, Anarchy is the strongest build in the game now, and everything else took a significant hit because they nerfed the Bee. I'll be interested to see how low the damage was dropped.

Fight them for the quests to get your achievements, is my guess.

 pretre wrote:
Fight them for the quests to get your achievements, is my guess.

I suppose, but bosses in playthrough 1 aren't actually difficult in any way, shape or form, so it's not much of an achievement killing a level 30-34 Hyperious the Invincible.

Also, they apparently increased the HP on Terramorphous, which combined with the Bee nerf should make him a lot more of a pain in the ass. Fortunately I have all of the stuff I want from him. I'm more worried about the Warrior, because I still want a Volcano, but if farming that joke of a fight is going to take me 10 minutes per kill, it's not worth the time investment due to the terrible drop rate. It's not realistic to build up a stack of 600 Anarchy before every kill when it just goes away every time you reload the game.

***Warning: Long rant incoming***
TL;DR version - Better game design and smart boss mechanics lend difficulty and increase player satisfaction. Simply increasing boss health and decreasing player damage does not solve the problem, nor does it add balance. It adds frustration and increases the time investment, but ultimately doesn't make anything more difficult.

Here's the long version:

I've never liked the idea of game developers making it "harder" to kill bosses simply by adjusting numbers on a sliding scale. Bosses like The Warrior and BNK-3R are not difficult in the slightest. They have easily avoidable damage mechanics and more-or-less just sit there while you shoot them to death. Increasing health and decreasing player damage only serves to increase the amount of time it takes to actually kill the boss. The player is in no danger of screwing up the fight unless they fall asleep, so there really is no difficulty, only time spent.

There is a better way of going about it that gives players a more gratifying sense of accomplishment and protects item rarity while awarding the best items to the players who are best at your game, rather than the players who farm the most. You basically create two modes for the fight, an easy mode and a hard mode. The easy mode is more-or-less how fights are done now. The Warrior, for example, moves between several points on the map, throws damage at the player that they either easily avoid or just soak up, and eventually he dies to damage.

The hard mode on the other hand increases fight difficulty in such a way that how much damage a player does has little bearing on how hard the fight is to complete. For example, in the hard mode, there could be two alternating phases to the fight followed by a third "kill phase". In phase one, the Warrior is out of the lava and directly attacking the player, but he is protected from all damage by a shield of hardened rock which must be removed before you can damage him. You must hit a number of critical spots in order to remove this shield, and while you are doing so he is throwing attacks at you that you must avoid or die (IE - either don't stand in the fire OR stand in the safe zone which moves from place to place). Once the shield is down you can take off a set portion of his health, after which he dives back into the lava. While he is under the lava, he launches chunks of magma at you that you must avoid, and summons smaller creatures which you must destroy. After all of these creatures are dead, the Warrior returns to the surface with a refreshed rock shield which you must again destroy in order to further damage him. These phases repeat a few times, at which point the Warrior becomes enraged and begins phase 3. He returns to the surface and goes on an all-out attack and the player must avoid damage, hit several critical points that blow off pieces of his chest and expose his heart, allowing the player to finally deliver the killing blow.

This is further supplemented by making the normal mode fight drop only purple items and possibly one or two rare legendaries. The hard mode on the other hand will drop a guaranteed legendary item, which can be one of several items on a loot table, one or two of which are common and drop the majority of the time, and a few of which are rare and drop less frequently (but not so infrequently that it's pointless to try). The fight could also have a lockout like the current "raid bosses".

This sort of fight structure creates re-playability because players want the rare items, and perhaps certain configurations of those items (Practicable Conference Call with Caustic damage on it VS a Social Conference Call with no elemental type, for example), and gives people a sense of accomplishment when they can actually beat the mechanics of the fight through skill rather than just equipping the most powerful items and blasting away. It also means a player can spend an hour or so attempting the fight, but not feel like they missed out on anything because they didn't finish it quite as fast as someone else. Also, having better gear DOES help, because the player who does more damage can get through that 20% of the Warriors health and kill the adds during phase 2 more quickly than the player who cannot, but it doesn't punish the player with lower damage too much because he might have to spend more time dodging the Warriors attacks while he takes down the shield and damages him, and perhaps take longer killing the adds in phase 2 to move back into phase 1, but he was still able to do it. It just takes a little longer.

Basically, better boss design would make much of this kind of nerfing irrelevant, make the best items in the game obtainable for those that wish to put in the effort, and reward people for being GOOD at the game rather than for getting two items that trivialize every fight, then spending 100+ hours farming to get everything else. It would make the guy equipped in nothing but legendaries stand out as a quality player who knows the game inside and out rather than stand out as the person who spent the most time farming. There are plenty of ways to ensure players MUST play to the mechanics and cannot simply use exploits or safe spots to make the fight trivial.

Personally I think the Hyperious fight was a step in the right direction, because it added mechanics to the fights other than simply providing a tank-and-spank like everything else, but those mechanics are still rather easy to just avoid by constantly moving. Increasing or decreasing the damage a player does only serves to increase or decrease the amount of time he must spend fighting the boss before it dies. Master Gee was actually the best addition to the game because you don't actually do anything to him directly. You MUST play to the mechanics in order to kill him. Unfortunately it was spoiled by the addition of a "safe" spot which trivializes the encounter. It was done to make the fight soloable, which I appreciate, but there are better ways to go about making a fight soloable without trivializing it. Adding more mechanics that the player must contend with, and adjusting them based on the number of players in the game such that it requires more coordination (but rewards more/better loot) as the number of palyers increases is the RIGHT way to do it. Not simply adding a spot labeled "stand here to win".

Anyway, that's enough of that. Long rant over.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So I wonder what would happen if I disconnected myself from XBox Live and didn't download the update, then rushed through the game with my friends character to get the Flesh Stick quest up to level 50. It should still work as long as I am not connected to XBox Live and cannot download the update, correct? I'd only need it to avoid downloading it for a day or two while I get everyone to 50, and as long as they don't delete all the XP gained in this way there should be no problem.

Think I'm gonna give it a try.

Agreed, Aldarionn.

Your "rant" is roughly what I was getting at a couple pages ago with my assumptions of the "Invincibles", but worded better.

Admittedly, most of them do not actually battle as I thought at the time. . .but yea.

Aldarionn, I'd love to grab that tedious faster, and there is another option to power level: the bar in torgue's campaign. If you finally get that, we can power level the rest of our guys. Dont worry, I'll drop you the rest of the goodies when I get back from Atlantic city tomorrow. I'm sure that level 50 Bitch will be my toy of choice for our farm raids. The bee will still work really well with it, especially on Axton.

kirsanth wrote:Agreed, Aldarionn.

Your "rant" is roughly what I was getting at a couple pages ago with my assumptions of the "Invincibles", but worded better.

Admittedly, most of them do not actually battle as I thought at the time. . .but yea.

I hate to compare a 1st person shooter with RPG elements to a game like World of Warcraft, but many of their boss fight mechanics are EXTREMELY well designed and would very easily translate to Borderlands 2. If Gearbox took a leaf out of Blizzards book and designed boss fights around a set of mechanics that the player MUST use or die, the game would be far more interesting. They could also make fights where you need a certain type of item to complete them...IE you MUST have a shock weapon to complete a particular phase of the fight, or you MUST have a shield that grants immunity to a certain element or the boss will kill you at one point. I DON'T mean you should need specific legendaries or anything, but specific TYPES of items which exist in enough quantity that with a little effort a player can obtain them easily enough. My example using the Warrior fight was a simple set of mechanics I thought up on the fly, and it would make that fight about 1,000% more interesting. If I can come up with something like that off the top of my head (Admittedly I played WoW for many years in a top raiding guild, so I have a number of examples to go off of) then a professional design team should be able to do better.

timetowaste85 wrote:Aldarionn, I'd love to grab that tedious faster, and there is another option to power level: the bar in torgue's campaign. If you finally get that, we can power level the rest of our guys. Dont worry, I'll drop you the rest of the goodies when I get back from Atlantic city tomorrow. I'm sure that level 50 Bitch will be my toy of choice for our farm raids. The bee will still work really well with it, especially on Axton.

I'll toss you any of my items you want when I'm online next, and I'm anxious to try that level 50 Bitch. Also, please tell me about this leveling technique! I'll buy that DLC for sure if I can use it to easily hit 50 with the rest of my characters.

Supposedly people are saying the bar room brawl at level 50 gets you about 20,000xp, and you can restart the mission almost immediately-5 second walk to the board. It's supposed to be better than Fleshstick was. I can jump on tonight, after my buddies and I get back from The Hobbit. Should be back by 7 your time.

Kan, if you're still trolling this board and want to join us tonight, feel free-I have many donations to give out.

The bar is basically an arena with a quicker respawn.

But an arena that can be restarted over and over for torgue tokens.

That's perfect. I'll download it as soon as I am able but I likely won't be able to play for more than an hour or so until tomorrow during the day.

Sounds like a plan. The bar mission is really early into the dlc-like the second mission I think? I'm gonna see if I can Hellfire Terra down with a Bee shield on, solo, when I get home, before the movie. I get all these toys, and haven't tried half of em. Probably bring the Fire Bee grenade with it. How is the patch anyway? I've just heard a lot of whiners on the gearbox thread.

I have not played since the patch hit to be honest. I've been busy and working so my play time is limited to evenings, and I had company last night. I actually might not even get to play tomorrow because I have to help install a washer at my dads place during the day, and we are getting a Christmas tree for my grandmother in the evening, and I have to fit laundry in somewhere.

Getting old and having responsibilities is a bitch.

No kidding. I'll be out of town for work now Sunday night-Wednesday early evening. If Hammerlock's DLC comes out Tuesday, I won't be able to play until the next day. Oh well. At least there's a decent bitch to add to the mix. Lol. I did my Christmas duties wednesday. I smell a deliverance coming tonight, and I figured out what the issue with the slaughterdome was: there's a round later that actually spawns an ultimate badass: kill the low crap early til we get to him and Vermi should show.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Make it 8 tonight, your time. Hobbit was pushed back an hour. I have the bar unlocked, so I can power level any of your stuff tonight.

That works. It's raining something fierce out here tonight so I think I'm going to skip my usual dinner plans and just stay in. I'll be online when I get home from work and I'll download the DLC, and when you get in just hit me up.

Damn, it's been a good morning-level 50 Deliverance AND a level 50 Corrosive Infinity!

Well, this evening I think I'm going to get my friends character up to Pyro Pete's bar tonight and then farm some XP for my Maya and/or Zer0. I'll be interested to see how quickly I can hit 50 with them.

looks like they fixed the infinity golden keys on PS3 glitch and made them shared between the split screen. Also there's a warning when you load two of the same profile to tell you that the second one cant use customization and badass points.

That sucks for you PS people. Of course, us Xbox guys had no option to do that anyway-just had to make a quick offline profile to use as a mule, and that was our second character option. That said...
Sir Hammerlock's campaign should be coming soon, as I mentioned before, and I'd assume it's this Tuesday, rather than showing up on Christmas. Sadly, I can't jump on it til Wednesday night due to work...so does anyone want to join me on a big-game murderfest Wednesday night, and hold off on what will probably be the coolest (in terms of killing, not noise) dlc for a single night?

Also, Axton's head is Muldoon from Jurassic Park, complete with raptor claw marks and the title 'clever boy'. For nostalgia's sake, it is now my favorite head.

At least you can load two of the same profile so you can level two characters at the same time. If I could have done that I would have 4 characters at 50 now instead of just two.

Yep, I'm up to 4 50s and one 44.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I was completely wrong. Golden keys seem to be tracked by character now. Each of my characters got 11 (except Salvador) that I have checked so far. Weird.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh... Oh snap. Just reloaded Gaige out of curiosity. Each of the characters that got keys gets 11 on every reload... Omg.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It may have something to do with loading the character on the second screen since the golden key status doesn't seem to be saved if you use keys on the second in a coop. Wacky.

So they didn't fix it.....they made it worse? Jesus.

 Aldarionn wrote:
So they didn't fix it.....they made it worse? Jesus.

I would not say worse at all. 11 Keys for my second screen everytime I login instead of one? That would be better in my book.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
After some testing, it looks like it works exactly the same way it did before except now I have more keys on that bottom screen. I think this is probably just an unforseen consequence of another change.

They did make it so it will tell me if a head/skin that the bottom character gets has been used by the main profile. That was annoying before.

Salvador has been pretty cool so far. I just got to bunker with him and he did pretty well, even though it was TVHM and he had a deadweight coop. I've been using the middle tree (capstone is the fire and reload faster the longer you hold down) with assault rifles (My two pairs are dual torgue gatling guns and a Elemental SMG/Electric Gatling). The sheer bullet hose-ness of the character is fun, you can just pour shots into people. I'm going to try one Torgue Gatling and one Slag Blaaaster to see how that goes.

Last character to 50 is Maya and I'm probably just going to let her tag along while I try to get Salv to the Warrior.

So I figured I'd update my haves/wants list since I recently got a massive influx of legendary items thanks to Timetowaste85

I have the following at level 50
Actualizer (Seraph)
Ahab (Seraph)
Blood of the Seraphs (Seraph)
Devastator (Seraph)
Evolution (Seraph)
Patriot (Seraph)
Retcher (Seraph)
Seraphim (Seraph)
Tattler (Seraph)
Baby Maker
Bitch
Blood of Terramorphous
Bunny
Conference Call (Practicable, Social, and Practicable with Slag)
Deliverance
Fabled Tortoise
Fire Bee
Flame of the Firehawk (Inflammable)
Gub
Gunerang
Hammer Buster
Hellfire
Hide of Terramorphous
Hornet
Impaler
Infinity
Invader
KerBlaster
Legendary Soldier
Legendary Hunter
Legendary Mechromancer
Madhous!
Maggie (Loaded)
Neogenator
Nukem
Pandemic
Pitchfork (Cartel with Slag, Cartel with Caustic, Pacifying with Caustic, Pacifying)
Pyrophobia
Quasar
Shredifier
Skullmasher
Slagga
Slayer of Terramorphous (Any class)
Striker
The Bee
The Cradle
The Sham
The Transformer
Thunderball Fist
Unkempt Harold (Thrusting)
Volcano
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Plasma Caster (E-Tech, Caustic Hyperion, Electric Bandit, Electric Tediore)
Railer (E-Tech, Dahl, Caustic)

I want the following at level 50
Crossfire (Seraph)
Meteor Shower (Seraph)
O-Negative (Seraph)
Bonus Package
Emperor
Norfleet
Rolling Thunder

The Seraph grenades are really the only wants I have at this point. Everything else is just gravy.

Dude, I have infinities waiting for you. Lol. Caustic and fire.
You can have it Wednesday night , after I'm back from my work trip.
Also, as it's probably pretty obvious by Aldarionn's post, I have the same items that he has and I need the same items that he needs. I think he left off the slagga though. Slagga, hammer blaster and baby maker are the top three wants, as well as zer0's dark night skin.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Dude, I have infinities waiting for you. Lol. Caustic and fire.
You can have it Wednesday night , after I'm back from my work trip.
Also, as it's probably pretty obvious by Aldarionn's post, I have the same items that he has and I need the same items that he needs. I think he left off the slagga though. Slagga, hammer blaster and baby maker are the top three wants, as well as zer0's dark night skin.

Awesome, I can cross that off the list this week then.

I'm not as interested in the Slagga and Hammer Blaster, but if someone has them I'll definitely dupe-trade for them. I'm also looking for Gaige's Blackest Night and Beyond Pale skins if anyone has them, but I'll honestly take any skin/head that I don't have.

I'll be farming assassins Wednesday night too, and can probably snag the emperor quickly too-I'll keep you posted, or you can join me on runs, if you're around.

Well it depends on time. Wendesday is our Pathfinder game so after about 6pm pacific I'll be busy. Any time before that I can do some runs on the Assassins if you're online.