Borderlands L50

I hit 50 tonight on my Siren tonight. This was on Playthrough 2, and it happened while clearing out Old Haven for the couple of missions that you get there. That's perhaps about 70% through the main storyline's missions, and not even working seriously on finishing all the quests. One interesting thing is that it allows you to fill the L50 xp meter, which I've done about 3/4ths now, with the Siren parked outside the map where you have to activate the Echo Network nodes. (Getting close to the end of the game.)

This second playthrough was a lot easier than the first. Some of these weapons are seriously powerful. For instance, I found a Hellfire SMG from a bandit in the Treacher's Landing area. It has a 100% DOT rate, and mows down things like you wouldn't believe.

Anyways, I'm not sure how much more I'll be playing this game - I originally bought it on F's recommendation as a team-play game. However, no one ever seems interested in playing it. =\

Upsen.

Borderlands - Difficulty: Tough is Tough.

I was playing some late night co-op with T on the weekend, and we reached the Dahl Headlands with a L16 and L17 Mordecai character. It was a bit tough getting to Lucky but doable. However, when we got to the mission where we had to take down 8 opposing runner cars, it became sort of a zergfest where we would get blown up, respawn, and try again a number of times over. Eventually we cleared the required 8 runners, and ended for the night, but it was after quite a lot of respawns. T lost a ton of credits he was saving up. I didnt fare as badly cause I was broke from buying ammo upgrades.

It was only next morning when I realized why the runners were so tough to beat. They must have been +2 levels or higher to us. Checking the Mad Mel mission that was next in the chain, sure enough it said L20, Difficulty: Tough. (My Mord was L18 at the end of the night.)

This has happened on a number of occassions - a +2 Bonehead and a +2 Badass Fire Skag in my early levels, and later on with +2 Lancers and +2 BadMutha Elemental Spiderlings. (btw you cant even run those over with a runner car, your car blows up and they are okay)

Most RPG/levelled games get tougher when you fight stuff that is a couple levels higher than you, but there is a much less steep slope to climb than in Borderlands. Usually you can get by with a bit of skill and/or luck fighting up to +4 or +5, with colours and con levels like yellow, orange, purple, red etc, to denote how much higher they are. In Borderlands, however, even-level is easy, +1 is a nice challenge, and +2 is suddenly a barrier when you face off against a "tough" version of a foe, like a Badass or a Badmutha variant. Generally that's the point where I give up on fighting in the area with the +2, and I go do an easier level that is Normal or Trivial, until I get a level or two to even me up with the tough foe. Being late at night and running a bit on autopilot, I'd forgotten to check the mission level, and we just zerged it out. Doh!

Its a bit funny and a bit of a headsmacker really. If you are following the main storyline exclusively, soon the difficulty level of the missions outpace your character level. Then you have to go back and do some of the side quests, or get enough fight xp somewhere to keep up with the main quest.

Also, 2 Hunters don't stack very well compared to 2 Soldiers. (probably little else stacks as well, to be honest)

Upsen.

P.s. Borderlands vehicle combat is just asinine in general, terrible physics and driving AIs, also accuracy and firing arc limitations. Couple it with how slowly bullets travel in the game, and it makes enemy cars hard to beat unless they have stupidly run up against a wall or post, and are still driving into it.

Borderlands - Dont get Mad Moxie's until its Fixed.

I was looking through the gearbox forums and there are reports of people losing their gear after playing through a portion of the Mad Moxie DLC on the Xbox360.

not sure if its cause of hacks or mods, but I'm just passing along what I'm seeing.

So I just beat the first three mad Moxxi stages and my shield, grenades and mod disappeared.

I had the same thing happen, grenade mod, shield, and char mod all disappeared, I'd only done 2 of the 3 rounds, then I exited and when I loaded that character again they were gone.

Upsen.

p.s. Also, a lot of people complain about corrupted characters after playing splitscreen, so keep that in mind too.

Borderlands Sirens and Playthrough 2

I've been spending most of my free time playing Borderlands as opposed to playing LOTRO or anything else the past while.

E had gone forward and left my co-op soldier behind on the main quest, so I switched to using my singleplayer Siren for all the games. The Siren wasn't as good as the soldier at first, since the special ability is not terribly good for offense. Sure it has a phase blast on entering and a 2nd one on exiting, but they aren't really enough damage to do any serious killing at the beginning, plus you have to get to that dangerous close melee range. Plus I kept running out of ammo since SMGs burn ammo so quickly. (Crits are not something you rely on when you use a stuttering jerky weapon like an SMG)

After about L25 or so, she suddenly got very tough. There's a few reasons for this:

finding a few good elemental SMGs such as a 3.7x zoom super accurate Spy corrosive SMG. I used it even in most situations where I would have switched to a sniper rifle. I understand why SMGs have scopes on them now, it was hard to see this when I just started playing and didn't have a +67% acc proficiency bonus yet.


a Mercenary Class Mod that allowed some SMG ammo regen - the reason I liked the Solider Support Gunner mod so much. Suddenly the ~1000 SMG ammo capacity was no longer a restrictive limit, since I could regenerate more. I no longer needed to keep a couple of different secondary weapons for when I ran out of SMG ammo, so I could focus on just using SMG and improving the skill on it.

Mind Games, the Siren power in the Controller Tree. This power, at 3 points, gives a 15% chance per bullet to seriously slow the enemy move rate, and fire rate. With an SMG's high rate of fire, that 15% happens every burst I shoot. A lot of tough foes are reduced to the speed and response time of an old shuffling zombie. BTW, even the enemy bullet speed is affected, and the end results is rockets slowly cruising through the air and bullets flying in slo-mo bullet-time, haha!


The Phase Blast has actually gotten to a useful state, since it recharges in 15sec, less a second per enemy killed, and has some elemental mods in it. I can actually use it to kill swarms of small stuff.

Currently at L40 and climbing. I started the second playthrough, and in about 2 or 3 hours, I went through from the first shoot 5 skags quest to cakking Mad Mel in the Dahl Headlands. It progresses a heck of a lot faster than the 1st time through due to the extra firepower and support abilities. For example, the enemy runner cars used to be really tough if you where on foot, and a pretty tough fight car-to-car, but now I just hop out of the car and mow them down with just a couple clips from the SMG.

I'll see how far I can get and how fast, with just the main quest on this playthrough.

Upsen.

p.s. the game's forums mention that large characters like Brick are easier to hit and small characters like the Siren are harder to hit. Realistic but sort of unfair for the bigger characters? I dont know if there are different base amounts of HP etc.

Why is changing an account or forum name so hard?

This is something annoying that I've run into this in a few different games.

First time around it was during my Champions Online experience, where they refused to change my account name so it would be different from my in-game and forum name, when, if I'm remembering correctly, it was their fault that their damned forum software didn't differentiate between login names and displayed nicknames when they first made the discussion forum available.

At least there I could protest by not subscribing to the game.



Now I find I'm having a similar issue with my Lord of the Rings Turbine forum name.

I had created my Turbine account back long ago enough that I wasn't using the forum name "Upsen" at the time. I was still using the name "Nizetti" quite extensively. I decided I wanted to update the forum name to "Upsen" so I could do a bit of posting, reflecting my ingame character's name. Only problem was, there was no option to change it!

So poking around the forum a bit and not finding an answer, I posted asking people how it was done. Basically the replies back said that it isn't done, it's not possible. Apparently it was tried before, and it would break forum access. What the hell?

I eventually found a support FAQ answer for it:

Can I change my account's Username?
No. Once your Username has been created it is not possible to alter it.Neither Turbine Account Management nor Turbine Technical Support can change your Username.

I accidentally misspelled my Username during account registration. Can I fix it?
All the details of your account are tied to the Username that you choose. The Username cannot be changed once it is selected.

Chrissakes, people, this is 2010 now! Why the hell is your software so inflexible?

Upsen.