This shield grinds my gears. In fact its one of the most stark examples of developer balance priorities being completely out of tune with the state of the game.

P.S.A. Let me not sugar coat it, if you are tempted to use this shield because your own damage is a potential hazard.

Don't. Its a waste of time.

For the people who use grenades strong enough to down themselves, this shield will NOT prevent that. You are doing 100s of thousands of damage.

A 90% reduction will still result in your death. Spoiler alert.

The only way this MAY retain value is if you get a turtle role. And thats a maybe since the reduction ends if you lose your shield.

This shield should be 99% OR Immunity from Self Damage

The very people who want to use this shield, get zero benefit from it.

Rant end.

Note: Downing myself over and over, while having the honey badger shield makes me want to close my console.

P.S.A The Vault Card Counter-Measure Grenade is probably the strongest grenade in the game is what I was downing myself with

Kind of wanted to do an overall thread on my issues with Balance in hopes the developers see it.

Licensed Part Imbalance

Right now, the meta is essentially Jakob's + Ripper rolls. But how we got that point is design inevitability. To put it bluntly, There is no such thing as a bad Ripper or Jakobs roll, as they are the only licensed parts with no variations and no functional draw backs. But most importantly, Jakobs and Ripper have no secondary limiting factors. Their one limiting factor is the chance to role on any given weapon. All other manufactured have additional layers of limiting factors, whether it be competition, variants or general restrictions ( maliwan not possible on kinetic weapons) Gun Diversity Is Being Sabotaged Accidentally (Systematically) : r/Borderlands4

As long as Jakobs has no competition, it will always be a boon. The Order definitely should have a Amp related Licensed part to give. Licensed Part Meta Needs Some Work : r/Borderlands4

Augment/Capstones Philosophy

Every character should be able to do

1 Augment + 1 Capstone
- or
2 Augments

I think this is the single biggest thing other than License parts that railroads the meta. This would allow many builds to exist and greatly increase variety. Characters like Vex would need somewhat of a rework, due to many of her command skills being tied to augments but it's small price to pay for a far more diverse game.

Right now, the game is full of developer approved builds. Infinite Bullets, Infinite AS duration or abusing some kind of ordnance. etc

Class Mod Philosophy

So many class mods that could be contenders have baked in design to fail rolls. So instead of the common sense skills being put on the class mod, the class mod will have a random fluff skills or even contradicting skill. That's why 10/5 rolls are the meta instead of the class mods being valuable with spread out skills.

The truth is, class mods having 2.5 weak/fluff skills, with one good skill guardrails everyone into looking for the same thing. Isn't it a failure of design if the consensus best version of Undead Eye class mod is 10/5 in Bloodshot? Did you succeed in creating build variety?

Bl3 class mods only gave you 5 total skill points btw. The seeing dead managed to transformative for Zane while many of the BL4 class mods feel more like stat padders.

How does Vex not have a single mod going into mortal terror for instance? Or a class mod that Mimick's what Mortal Terror provides so non-green tree builds can prosper? Bl3 mods fulfilled needs. Bl4 mods just exist?

Poor Scaling Numbers

Nova's don't scale well without exception.
Tediore Chucks damage floor is too low. I think they scale ok, but the difference between Bl3 Tediore and Bl4 Tediore is staggering.
Ordnance Launchers damage floor is too low without investment.

Cooldowns are Overturned Across The Board

Cooldowns are so long, and require SIGNIFICANT investment to shorten. This is how things like the Triple Bypass becomes meta. This also results in infinite action skill duration builds being the go to. You spend so many points on cooldown, that you end up not having a build capable of killing anything. The game seems designed around the fact, the Accelerator repkit augment exists. Without it, action skills like the APOPHIS Lance would have 30+ second cooldowns after firing just once.

Vault Hunter Trees

I could get far more specific but I will just say, that with the exception of Harlowe, i think there are WAY to many 5/5 skills in Tier 5 & 6 of the Vault Hunters. Hard to put my finger on it, but since the trees are bigger than previous games, SP have a reduction in value relative to the size of the tree. Especially since the game launched with the same amount of SP as previous titles despite bigger trees. This is made even more apparent when each branch requires it's own investment to unlock lower tiers.

Utility Skills like Booming Business should just not be 5/5 investments. But This is less of a pain point. Just a nit pick

I can probably think of more given time.

u/AkilTheAwesome

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