#orange weapons

And most recently I have been working through Digistruct peak with my friend, we are both nearly at Overlevel 8 now.

So enemies got a recent patch that increased their health regen, this hasn't effected my gameplay much as a hardcore player that always have the legendary weapons AND Gunzerking brute force, but to many others, especially my friends who count on lower-rated gear are very much alienated by the game, ultimate is a struggle enough as a solo player who isn't a Gunzerker without the recent upgrade to enemies.

  But at the same, rare loot drops increased for enemies over level 61, excellent! Fantastic news, it was working fantastic until Digistruct peak came out...now a lot of the bosses that have specific-gear drops are not coughing them up half as frequently as they used to and now tubby/chubby enemies have appeared more often and now they drop orange or better gear, EVERYTIME. The legendary loot midgets seem to have been broken and sometimes hardly drop an E-tech relic! I have no idea what Gearbox were thinking, atleast they gave us the opportunity to find tubbies more often right? (Sidenote: Tubby skags and spiderants are insanely cute, thus making it harder for me to pull the trigger).

 As a person who has seen so much of what Borderlands could offer, it is a fantastic game with a rich setting, characters and beautiful places. I want to see my dedication being rewarded, I mean working all the way to 61, then 72. THEN OVERLEVELING. To over level you need the right gear, and at the moment me and my friend have been dependant on the Unkempt Harold, one of the only power-house weapons in the game that does not require a set playstyle to use effectively. (And once you spec your character for it, it is amazing).  A weapon that can be bought in any Torgue Vending machine and I can find the prefix I want. So every few over levels me and my friend buy it and use it...only that and a grog nozzle. Why?

  Well because many of the other weapons offer little returns. NO weapon can offer the sheer damage and success as the Harold can WHILST being so easily obtainable. A weapon found in the main game, yet why were Seraph weapons introduced and I can hardly talk about any of them? Oh yeah because they aren't half as good as they could be. Sure they are powerful under certain circumstances but for the price of facing Invincible Seraph warriors atleast 5 times? NO. And its even worse that the best Seraph weapon, the Interfacer is ALSO a Voracidous-only drop when they removed it from the in-game Seraph vendor. Nice...now we can only hope every time a team MANAGED to defeat this beast, an interface MIGHT drop and it MIGHT be a elemental and it MIGHT have the right weapon parts...good luck with that and good luck with finding several elemental versions to choose from.

But then you have to consider there are also Pearlescent weapons! The rarest of the rare! And NO enemy (before Digistruct peak) had a good chance at dropping these, Pyro Pete did briefly before he got nerfed a bit. This is all well and good, legendary weapons are hard to get, these other weapons are even rarer, so once you have one, it must feel like a whole new ball game? No, its embarrassing how legendary and pearl weapons can be easily beaten by blue or purple counter-parts at times. Ofcourse I don't want to find a legendary and auto-win the game (like the Harold lets you do...). But the rarity of these items should definitely justify the power they wield. Why is it, At max level, to defeat Voracidous, there is only really ONE way to win as a player of average or better skill legitimately? A gunzerker with a precise pistol building, wielding specific gear?

Ofcourse there is a 'optimum' build for this but I hardly see anyone even attempt to use other weapons to take a creature like this down. As it is the same reason why I find so many legendaries just to put them in my bank just to say 'I have them'.

Ultimate takes a lot of fun out of the game by removing one of Borderlands biggest selling point: Weapon variety. Some of the guns are so fun to use, such as the pearl Storm sniper rifle, but if it could kill anything, I would actually use it! One of the most fun things I have done is use twin shreddifiers to run into a field of loaders to rip them up. I got downed quite a bit ofcourse as the enemies completely topple a players health on this difficulty but never the less, Ultimate is supposed to be hard. But it alienates solo players by restricting drop rates and making those that drop, terrible.

And what sparked this off was that 4 new pearl weapons have been added to the game, one of them being the Carnage, a Torgue shotgun from the first game that fires rockets. It boasts a 1000% weapon damage on the card so it sounded pretty awesome.

  Wrong. After 2 days of farming tubby spider ants (where it was complete luck when they spawned), one of them dropped the 'Juicy Carnage', now I can only assume it was a weaker version of the weapon as when I fired it at a bandit, by the time I got to shoot it again, it already regenerated the health it lost...I was appalled. THESE WEAPONS, weapons that are added so players who are dedicated to getting to max level AND beyond can have new weapons to give them an edge. And they are horrific, WHY? Did not ONE developer try out this gun scaled to 72 and say "hold on, for a pearl this is pretty bad..". In Borderlands 2, legendary weapons have lost their definition as being truly 'legendary' and as for pearls, its hard to be excited about anything other than that you found really hard-to-find gear, the avenger is alright with an element on it and the butcher is fantastic and the sawbar is alright for crowds. But these kinds of weapons should be the go-to weapons for all players who can master them. Instead they are a joke and I see so many players trying in vain to make these weapons 'shine' when Gearbox hardly tried to make this loot worth your effort to acquire it. I mean, after all, you can find a DPUH in a vending machine so why bother with the rest? The Norfleet, is an example of a weapon over powed to the ridiculous, one that shouldn't actually be balanced this way (but seeing as they allowed such a powerful weapon in, why not let the pearls atleast match that quality, if the legendary isn't supposed to be as good?), the fact is the norfleet is an example of a pretty hard to acquire weapon, which is a pretty good example if it weren't for the fact that solo players get shafted since Verminous is almost impossible to spawn without more players in the game and unless you can use the Hyperius 4 player-slider mechanic, you won't get the chance to ever see the creature, nevermind defeat it in a one v one fight.

  I am not asking for an easier Ultimate mode, I have completed it on so many runs but the recent change in how legendaries are found and how weak the new weapons are, as well as the buff to enemy health-regen, it makes me wonder if Gearbox understand that this game shouldn't be about the challenge but that they have put enough fun and amazing narrative that people shouldn't need to feel frustrated by the lack of amazing loot and the underpowered nature of their characters. I actually love Axton but I switched to Salvador once I realised there was truly only one way to solo all the raid bosses without needing a highly elaborate playstyle with other classes. (Such as the immolate trick with Maya or Bloodspode with Krieg). 

  I love this game to death, I truly do and that is why I address these concerns, All classes should have atleast several ways to tackle raid bosses. Now that the over-level system has been introduced, players that want a truly crazy challenge can make that for themselves. But atleast now, if players can slog it through the digistruct peak challenge, they can use overpowered gear on level 72. And ironically that over-levelled gear might actually make organges and pearls 'balanced' to an appropriate standard that makes them raid-boss fight worthy.

  But the point is that the main core of the game on ultimate shouldn't become a nightmare for solo players.