Borderlands 2 is very fond of sending you into obvious traps. I keep running into sidequests where you are clearly going to be betrayed, to the point where the quest text makes sarcastic comments about it. The main storyline requires you to take orders from someone while she is betraying you. It goes beyond stupid to suicidal.
Also under the heading of traps, playing a sniper character is increasingly unsatisfying as fewer and fewer areas spawn the enemies before you are in aggro range. Maybe this will reverse at some point, but all the bandits are in their huts, the skags are in the holes, and the rakk are over the horizon until red dots appear on your screen. Robots fly in from orbit and enemies burrow up literally beneath your feet. If I could blast those huts with my rocket launcher, that would change things, but the enemies just don’t exist until they are within pistol range. I need to play multiplayer and send someone else in as bait first. I’m sure the enemies will spawn into that obvious trap.
: Zubon
Spoiler: it never reverses at any point.
I’m playing Zer0 myself, although I went down the melee tree precisely because the game very clearly is anti-range. In a way though, it is sort of justified insofar as sniping is a ridiculously easy and altogether safe activity. Most times I can get that one free shot off before the place aggros, and then I usually just stand right out there in the open because few of the bullets actually hit me – most damage I take is negated by the skill that super-charges my shield each time I kill someone, which is every few seconds by virtue of the the headshots. If all the bandits/etc were outside 100% of the time, I would have breezed through the game even faster.
Of course, this tactic is significantly less useful on True Vault Hunter Mode, e.g. New Game+. Incidentally, melee is also less useful (or at least Zer0’s melee). I got frustrated a bit and tried the other characters up to level 10ish, but I simply cannot stomach the notion of leveling them all the way up to replace Zer0 at level 40.
I’ll probably stop playing soon, but I suppose 68 hours is a pretty awesome run for a single-player game.
I thought I’d try switching to the Mechromancer last night. She is still too low of level for the class to be meaningful, but it just immediately feels freer having general abilities rather than ones tied to a specific weapon class. Also, Deathtrap (her robot) seems to be an improved version of Bloodwing (from BL1), so that’s nice.
I tried Gaige too, but the whole Anarchy thing basically means you are back to shotgun-range 24/7. Technically I could focus on the other trees instead, but at that point I felt like I should just go play a character with a focus on those other areas, e.g. Maya instead of Gaige.
Ugh. Sometimes I wish these sort of games would just let me start 2nd (etc) character at level 20 or something.
Anarchy didn’t really interest me, but if you’re a lousy shot to begin with, I can see how “hell with it” is a good option. I think you’d need the 5 points in “Close Enough” to get much good out of Anarchy … at which point, it could go well. Wiki says that full Anarchy plus 5 points in Close Enough yields 90% damage without any need to aim at all. That’s pretty good, and I imagine there are collateral benefits.
Close Enough seems to work even if you hit. Or do sniper rifle rounds naturally penetrate targets? I will occasionally shoot someone in the head, and with the same shot detonate a nearby barrel and kill more. It’s a nice perk.
Ironically, the end game seems to rely a little more on range than melee.
I didn’t notice the mobs were mostly spawning inside agro range – it simply appeared they began spawning when something agroed them or triggered something nearby. I usually shot an explosive barrel or something from great range which caused the other enemies to start spawning. This let me pick them off from a range with the sniper rifle. They also drop agro easily enough making hit and run tactics viable.
I grew tired of that and switched to melee, which I found more fun once you hit the bottom of the Bloodshed tree.Good times there… much harder in True Vault Hunter mode though.