this week Borderland 4 a patch has been released that makes some changes to the balancing of marauder equipment shooterentrails and then probably dropped a nasty catchphrase. Gearbox also revealed some of what's coming in the larger patch due out next week: performance fixes are back on the menu, as well as deeper balancing that will address “those unintended interactions” people were counting on. heavy duty builds.
It's all in keeping with the good rhythm the studio has established since the initial flurry of activity in response to the game not performing very well on PC to begin with. Last week brought large patch including the first round of Vault Hunter balance tweaksso this week the next shot precedes the pursuer.
“We continue to monitor feedback on changes to Vault Hunters and identify areas for further improvements,” Gearbox wrote in notes for this stalker patchbefore detailing the following gear adjustment:
- Ruby's Grasp damage increased by 50%.
- Ruby's Grasp fire rate increased by 25%.
- Hooligan drone damage increased by 50%.
- The bully's base damage has been increased by 50%.
- Rangefinder base damage increased by 30%.
- Queen's Rest spawn chance increased from 30% to 50%.
- The rate of fire of the Queen's Rest has been increased by 50%.
- Seventh Sense orb damage increased by 250%.
- Hellwalker base damage increased by 30%.
- Convergence base damage increased by 25%.
There are a couple more settings. Legendary Boring Shotgun Anarchy now correctly rewards stacks of mutualism on auto-reload or kill, each pet now receives the appropriate critical strike chance from passives and equipment, and Vex's bleed now counts as status effect damage. The latter sounds like it might be bad news for those using Vex knives, but even if it isn't, the overpowered Vexers will likely not sleep well for the next seven days.
I say this because Gearbox has made it clear that next week's patch will “eliminate unintended interactions in certain Vault Hunter skills and make adjustments to overproducing gear,” with Borderlands 4 director Graham Timmins going so far as to say: tweet about it as a warning for those who have too powerful builds. He received some pushback from anti-nerve campaigners and wrote in response: “We have future content, like the upcoming Invincible, where we want players to find a challenge/achievement. If we balance this content around bad gear, it will eliminate build diversity by forcing players to use certain builds using said gear.”
Next week's patch also announced “another round of adjustments that will focus on class mods, rekits, shields, and firmware tweaks to make melee builds more viable and address shortcomings in other specific Vault Hunter builds,” as well as additional efforts to improve the game's performance. In the meantime, perhaps write a poetic eulogy to Vex's boss-killing knife so you don't forget the heady days of its maximum bleed.
