2001

I knew some pedant would bring those up, and I’ve tried them, but a shotgun makes a better shotgun than a revolver posing as a shotgun. The one thing about this game, though, is that all weapons are viable, so it’s all a matter of preference.

2002

It’s not about ‘tackling them sooner’. If you aim to complete all the siedquests (like I am in playthrough 2), you’ll end up with some quests at Trivial difficulty, no matter what order you do them in. That’s annoying!

I don’t want every random creature to autolevel. I just want unique bosses and such to always present a challenge, no matter what level you are when you get to them.

2003

A shotgun doesn’t make a better shotgun for Mordecai, if you have pistol skills and a gunslinger mod.

Also, when did it become pedantic to bring up information on a messageboard? I guess only when there’s an ass on the board.

2004

Revolvers are my favorite weapons in this game. They’re accurate, powerful, and versatile. Repeaters, however, have often disappointed me. I see them as poorer SMGs, their only advantage being that they run on a different ammo supply.

2005

I have a purple revolver “shotgun” that has over 80 accuracy, does piles of damage and reloads fast. With the pistol skills and gunslinger mod mentioned, it is far superior than any shotgun I’ve seen.

It’s not pedantic, it shreds things to bits with far more accuracy and ranged ability than any shotgun I’ve noticed. Obviously my preference with my hunter is pistols, but if I saw the same pistol with any other character I’d almost have to pick it over most shotguns unless I had a talent that made shotguns not suck in general.

2006

I have a Crux Shotgun that has over 90 accuracy and fire 103x7 full of explosive pellets at a rate of 3.0. I like revolvers too, but I haven’t found a weapon that does so much close quarter damage in a long time. Also has a clip size of 20, and with my soldier mods, I never have to pick up ammo ever.

2007

“Waste of daylight fool”

Soldier is my favourite character so far. Wife is playing Siren, they seem cool but don’t suite the way I like to play. Soldier seems toe best suited to run and gun gameplay which I prefer in FPS.

I am curious, I never liked melee characters in first person. How are people finding the Berserker to play in that mode?

2008

My Siren’s just started Playthrough 2. The final part of P1 was fairly straightforward after I picked up a dark orange SMG in Old Haven with the “Hallelujah” red text ( = insane ROF and reload). With a 40% SMG damage mod I just tore through everything, with only a couple of guardians at the end causing me any bother.

The final fight was a let down but I actually found myself enjoying the storyline and the race against time feeling (even if it’s not accurately reflected ingame as such).

Starting P2 was amusing, the “kill 5 skags” quest threw a BadMutha Shock Skag at me. Ouch.

2009

So… I just got this and MW2 from gamefly.

I love Borderlands… wow… it kicks ass.

2010

Indeed. Having just gotten back into TQ (to finish my backlog), Borderland’s curve just makes no sense. You do maximum weapon damage to any mob 3 levels below you, which basically means that a crappy weapon stays crappy, but they also do crap all damage to you. You also get crap for XP which makes going back to do quests kind of pointless.

Yet if you try to take on mobs 2 levels above you your weapon damage is penalized severely while you take massive amounts of damage.

Writing it down it sounds like it should be ok, but something is just really off with the way they balanced it.

2011

It’s pretty hectic, but frequently hilarious in coop. The early game is just like any other class, you just run towards stuff with a shotgun and crit them in the head once or twice for the kill. Later in the game when you get decent rocket launchers and 20+ skill points you can really start playing the interesting way.

I spend my time running around with a triple rocket launcher which has a clip of 9 and fire rate that doubles temporarily when I kill someone. I had to turn my graphics options down when I started doing this. I’ve basically skilled up as a blaster with a few points in the tank tree.

If you tech up to be a brawler you need to slowly start allocating a bigger % of points to the tank tree as the game goes on, but that’s not a big problem. You end up with monsterous amounts of hitpoints and damage reduction / shield recharge skills which is always fun. Some of the brawler skill points are just useless (% chance of cash prize???) but other skills give you a super long berserk time and mega damage improvement so you can take down bosses and badass enemies with ease. berserk also causes your character to scream and annoy the hell out of your playing partners :)

2012

Offensive turret dropping can be pretty brutal, especially if you pick up the turret round increase talent and some good elemental damage artifacts. I haven’t started a second playthrough yet, but I may drop Lilith for now and start it up as soon as I go back and pick up the two claptraps I must have missed somewhere.

I really want that guided missile talent, but I found the Support tree talents to be more useful overall, so I’m still working my way up Infantry at 37. That last talent tree has some cool stuff in it – I really wanted Grit – but I didn’t like the lower tier stuff apart from the health bonus. You can get Grit from Class Mods, but I’m pretty addicted to my Tactician with +3 health regeneration, which lets me go for either elemental protection or high cap shields. My current shield is a high cap 1,000+ strength with 89 regen.

I found repeaters that have mags less than 24 cap and a fire rate under 12 to be pointless when I could just use an assault rifle. My Roland’s current holdout repeater has a fire rate of 20 and a mag cap of 36. I don’t use it much, having 12+ skill in Sniper Rifles, Assault Rifles, and Shotguns, but I like to play around with pistols once in awhile. Like I said, 6 rounds (or even less) doesn’t cut it for me when getting swarmed, but blowing their heads off with a high damage revolver is certainly satisfying.

My Lilith is pretty much an SMG user with some Sniper Rifle. I think she has a pistol just in case she burns her SMG ammo, but I’m going to switch to an SMG ammo regeneration Class Mod when I find a decent one. I’ve seen a few that are average. When you can do +40% damage with an SMG, and find a good SMG, why would you use anything else?

One awesome thing about Lilith is her elemental resistance talents. Grab those, she has a much easier time with certain enemies. Also, you can accidentally ram one of those toxic barrels and not die.

2013

Only if you have a point in it already.

2014

I think the whole point is they really didn’t “balance” it. Rather, they went with an approach that makes fighting either lower or higher (i.e., +/- 2 levels) mobs a waste of time.

Hell, as far I can tell, there isn’t even an XP bonus for taking out the higher level guys (same XP for a same type mob at your level or higher). There’s certainly an XP penalty for taking on the lower guys (which is fine, given how easy it is).

Combined with the “best loot is from chests” approach, there’s no reason to take out high mobs. Compare this to some traditional RPG’s where a player could get a big leg up both due to XP and item rewards for successfully doing a David vs. Goliath.

Borderlands basically has built-in disinsentives for doing all side quests, because the main quest becomes a joke if you do too many sides.

2015

Certainly for a Roland shotguns are generally better than revolvers. It’s only the pistol-specific nature of Mordecai which can push revolver shotguns out well ahead of regular shotguns.

2016

Yeah, they really wrecked the potential of the game by having character levels do more than give you skill points to spend or allow you to use more guns.

Whatever bonus to the experience they thought that brought can not possibly make up for the problems it introduces for multiplayer or in trying to find an appropriate challenge.

2017

I finished first playthrough with Hypnotoad42 last night. The final boss battle was sufficiently amusing gameplay-wise, though of course I have no fucking idea why that thing was there in the first place, totally absurd story alright. Neener neener, no Vault for you!

Anyway, I’m having a hell of a hard time tearing myself away from this game – if friends are online playing it I almost always get sucked in. Co-op is just too darn entertaining in this game.

I lurves me my +36% SMG damage, +3 High Velocity, +2 Quicksilver, +5 SMG Ammo Regen Siren class mod. LURVES IT, I do.

2018

It’s fun playing as a Siren with the stun special power. I probably melee 40% of the time against non-human (i.e. non-shooting) enemies. It’s very actiony, you slap’em around a bit, dance around to the weak spot while they’re dazed and then unload with that 2-shot revolver. I have some + to melee, so a second slap often takes down the weaker ones.

Not doing it so much with the soldier. I guess I don’t like getting that close when I don’t have the ability to Phase out.

2019

Mordecai has the strongest Melee when criticaling. I do devastating damage with a melee critical.

2020

It’s also a big plus that pistols are the most common bladed weapons for the plus to melee bonuses. Mordecai’s pistol skill tree is overpowered, particularly in view of the gunslinger mod.

Heck, one of my pet peeves about Brick is that he apparently loses the benefit of his plus to melee items when he goes berserk (barehanded).