Borderlands 3 | The Complete History of Power Creep! 

Man I remember when nighthawk was the best gun in the game At some point gearbox realized there are too many legendaries in the game to keep a track of so they just said fuck it lets make everything op Remember when ironbear wasn't scaled properly in mayhem mode and was completely not usable. And one patch gearbox just suddenly said oh btw we buffed the ironbear so it one shot everything in m11

Bl3 has the biggest case of power creep that I had ever experienced in a videogame

Playing Borderland 3 recently is kinda refreshing to have this unchecked power fantasy. Games recently have become so restrictive in their balancing. Honestly man if it wasn't for youtube suddenly recommending me your Borderland 3 2024 video I never would've played it because of all the bad press it got around launch and even to this day. With Borderlands 1 & 2 I only ever played one character and wasn't as into the endgame aside from a few raid bosses. But in 3 I've already maxed out all characters and I'm having a blast. Although I get that playing the game this late is an advantage cause I didn't have to deal with the multiple nerfs, level cap increases, the terrible story, and the base game lacking in endgame content. Story is still terrible today, but it occupies less than 10% of the overall package that it was easy to just shove it under the rug after I was done with it.

Reminder that when the Shlooter artifact first came out with its vault card, it originally had a 100,000% legendary drop chance on the card before they nerfed it to the 1000% it has now

the power was so creepy, and i loved it so damn much.

Great video I thought people forgot how hard the takedown was before the power creep weapons and nerfs

The amount of buffs and power you get by the end of BL3 support cycle is some of the best gaming experience I've had. I love being broken and OP and this game did it right. Kinda.

I think a follow up video talking about the enemies creeping as a result would be helpful, for example every guardian in the first moments of the guardian takedown have the health of TRAUNT

This is kinda nostalgic, I remember experiencing most of these phases of the game. Kinda wish it was balanced differently lol. Arms race was definitely a fun change of pace, im still salty about not getting a perfect toboggan from it tho 😢

It was undoubtedly a commercial decision to sell the DLCs, although those could have sold on the strength of their stories IMO. For me, the evolution of gear, skills and mayhem mode, while a bumpy journey, made new builds and play styles viable and fun. It certainly kept me playing for years. GB never have and never will please everyone

HEY SPG - so good to see you back

Dude. Great vid. I miss those old days when shit was brutally difficult.

As ridiculous as it got, and as scummy as it can be to put all the best stuff behind an additional paywall, I'm also happy that Gearbox eventually shifted from nerfing stuff that overperformed to buffing stuff that underperformed more. Weapons like the Lob, the Krakatoa, and the Hellwalker were suddenly awesome, as well reversing neffs on the Maggie or the Flakker

I see a lot of complates about power creap in destiny 2 but then i think about borderlands and just laugh. Like boresplosion zane with the infernal wish or revolter with the toboggan just makes the entier map disapear ina Single shot

Because of the power creep it really felt like BL3 was a Pay to Play game. And that’s why I stopped playing the game after I played through the base game and the first season pass. It’s kind of frustrating because I did enjoy the game and the prior games in the franchise

This is definitely something that was in need of a closer look and discussion. So many of the day 1 weapons that slipped through the cracks are just completely unusable now. Remember when the meta was the Cutsman and the Crossroads? The Jericho does like 20% of the damage of a single pellet from the Hellwalker, or a single projectile from the plasma coil. Anointments were another source of power creep that was a mistake.

Two things I'd like to add for the power creep journey: Free events: They nerfed the Cutsman and Crossroad to then introduce the Kyb's Worth, the new best SMG in town and the legendary Redistributor, which made swiss cheese for any encounter with multiple enemies like the slaughter shaft in the maliwan takedown. If my memory serves you could go as far back as the Bloody Harvest when that had the terror annointments make new, really strong builds though I don't think the unique weapons themselves where good, just the annointments with something like the projectile recursion. Patches/Updates: The power ceiling of the game also increased when they did buffs after the backlash from the initial nerfs. The Lob, the Hellshock, Hellwalker, and the Kaos were all ones that received mega buffs that made them really great. I think there was a time when Malak's Bane was a good, even if not the best, sniper rifle back in the hotfix that buffed the Lob.

Amazing video, the Powercreep in BL3 is absolutely mental Even though I honestly like it, its not a PVP game so im fine with completely busted gear

I dig the power creep as long as it comes late in the lifecycle of the game. Like right before I give up playing it and the power creep lets me make one more super powered toon before putting it to bed long term.

I remember the plasma coil being so strong that is was literally like a full automatic Norfleet with pinpoint accuracy.

Ha i remember when cartels came out i got a really good Qsystem on my fl4k crit build good times!

I maintain that the mana well is also a great example of power creep. I know it needs a specific build to be op, but with that build, you get perma uptime, keeping you invincible and dealing significantly more damage. Possibly the easiest OP build to set up/play.

I think you're missing a couple things. Mainly, Fish Slap, Lucky 7 and maybe a mention of Moze's heavily overtuned IB buffs.

Amazing video, glad I got to see all of this happen

I remember when the Hyperfocus and cutsman were the best smgs and now they're just toy guns compared to the plasma coil or the flipper

IMO I loved this power creep. For someone who has less time to farm, it is very possible to do all content with any VH that I want. Honestly it isnt so bad. But yea sadly almost all base game legendaries became obsolete.

I don’t like how some of the most OP gear comes from the vault cards. It doesn’t feel as good as having to kill something to get the drop. Redeeming it from a menu just cheapens things.

Question.. why does the "Booster Infernal Wish" grants more DMG than any other version of it?

I was able to get an Infiniti pistol around level 14 and it literally carried me to level 40 😂

Cap, at the start there was a one shot grenade. I think called the porcelain something. Easy af.

The monarch was literally the best assault rifle in the game and no other AR could even come close to it.

What build are you running?

Personally I don’t hate the powercreep. It’s satisfying being able to absolutely nuke maps sometimes. And if I don’t wanna do that then I can just other less strong but still insanely fun weapons, like the Lyuda on FL4K for example

The power creep is so bad that you can pick up a hellwalker lvl 1-whatever And keep the gun for 10-20 lvls cuz it one shots everything

can we have an honourable mention for recursion

You know its bad when every character has a boss one shot build

I can deal with power creep on a surface level. It's just a natural thing that is going to happen with a game series like Borderlands - new (paid) content means new challenges and good guns, and obviously you want the money spent to feel worth it so you put a little something extra strong in the pack to grab attention and to get people farming. What I'm not okay with is how, this far into the game's life, they won't roll back some of the nerfs they did in the first year. Like it's wild how guns like the DNA, Plasma Coil, and Clairvoyance are just allowed to exist when they shred literally any enemy in world record times. Soloing max level end-game content in a few minutes at most, with some ludicrous pay-to-win builds. But then you have the Sandhawk and Yellowcake which got nerfed extremely hard for "game balance" reasons early in the game's life. Yet the former guns outclass Sandhawk and Yellowcake by an extremely wide margin, even at their pre-nerf peak performances. But then you have stuff that used to be bad like the Hellwalker and I think the Monarch (edit: it wasn't the Monarch, I don't remember what gun it was for sure. Maybe the Faisor or Rowan's Call? idk for sure), which used to be just ~okay~ and then got buffed like crazy and are now staples of every end-game build. Now here we are, probably on the heels of Borderlands 4, at a point where the power scaling for Borderlands 3 doesn't matter at all. They could, and should, absolutely go back and rollback the nerfs they did early on. Shredding through bosses with Yellowcake with the 300% strength buff is way less optimal than using ANY of the strong DLC guns. Sandhawk is unusable on anyone other than Moze because she's the only one who has the ability to feed it, but even then the range is so awful that it's just a suboptimal shotgun instead of a sniper rifle. Give it back the range and make the 3 ammo per shot go back to 2 ammo, and the 2 ammo back to 1. It would also be completely fine to tune a lot of guns back anyways from a sales perspective since most people who buy the game now are likely buying it via recommendation, and the general consensus is that the vanilla game sucks so most people are buying bundles anyways meaning that the DLC is very likely already being sold alongside it so it's not like the nerfs being rolled back would affect new players either. They'll still be inclined to farm the paid DLC weapons and play those pieces of the game because snipers and launchers aren't that good for some people's builds. Good to have in the back pocket but only for niche situations or emergencies or to patch up an elemental gap in your build. Buff the Pipe Bomb. Buff the Sandhawk. Buff the Yellowcake. Bring back the 90/300 anoint. Every gun can't be a meta staple, but these few pieces of gear used to be incredible and got unfairly shafted by early nerfs that were too heavy handed, and have since been power crept no matter how you slice it. I am fixated on these few weapons because this is personal, I spent 3 weeks farming the perfect elemental and shooting style variants of the Sandhawk and the 90/300% x2 Yellowcake only for them to both get nerfed literally days later. I will never not be mad about it until Gearbox gives me back the guns that I like. "Game balance" literally does not matter at this point, they proved it themselves with every subsequent DLC or in-game event by adding more and more absolutely busted guns and mechanics. The power gap for end-game Borderlands 3 builds between 2019 and 2024 is miles wide. TLDR I'm REAL salty about some birds and a cake

It kinda doesn’t matter because it’s just a fun single player game, and not a particularly skill intensive one for most people. It’s not really “supposed” to have an infinite endgame with balance and only a few take it that far so I don’t think much thought or dev time was given to it

Oh yeah... cartel event on my 12th birthday

Honestly think they did it just to make farming easier. In any case I want to play again...right now!

I forgot how insane the content drops for BL3 were! Like every 1 - 2 months you had major story dlcs or new gamemodes/maps and all that with weekly or biweekly patches, mostly buffing weapons. I really wished we had that for Wonderlands :( Great video!

This is hilarious to see considering I dropped the game soon after launch due to them nerfing the shit out of everything.

Don’t forget the stupid broken buffs they gave to so many underperforming weapons that raised the power floor a lot. A good example is the crit, went from something most people never really bothered getting to one of the best SMGs in the game and you could technically get it at level 10 for only $100

Borderlands 3 was so hard when it launched lop

No fishslap?

I don't think it having power creep is the problem the only bad part about it is it's pay walled but "power creep" or the game/meta changing with updates and additions like every other game does is not a problem itself and the balance argument doesn't make sense to me because nothing about any of the borderlands games is balanced

Cartels are the best

Man seein dead was something else back then

i know who you can blame, randy lol xD

Couldnt take down bosses in seconds on launch: *laughs holding queens/kings call as fl4k*

The line "By this time legendaries were already dropping like crypto currency investments" made me laugh so hard lmao

Grade school borderlands Sadge

So I assumed the legendaries in fuster cluck are balanced?

Man idc some randos dropped some hacked weapons n now i can one shot everything

As bad as BL3's powercreep was, at least it affected inanimate objects, not actual living breathing characters with their own stories 😢

And you didn't even mention all the weapon buffs along the way. Many of these were necessary but some served as milestones in the power creep spiral. In particular, I remember the Krakatoa and Hellwalker. Yes, they sucked before but did they need such huge buffs? One of the other major sources of power creep was how badly the community reacted to nerfs early on in the game's life. After that Gearbox were hesitant to balance things downwards, only up, and that inevitably led to the cake walk we see today.

i feel like durung the time of updates relasing it was soo fun w power creep but now at the end of bl3 life its sucks

I think the power creeps are necessary as a game grows older. If you have streamers and content creators playing a game for 5-7-8 years straight, you would want to spice things up a bit. Retire a gun, retire a build, add a new gun, nerf an action skill. I think it helps players not get bored. I'm speaking for myself, of course. It is annoying to scrap a build then start over. But I personally don't find it annoying at all as a game strategy by the publishers/devs. Anyhoo, great video, and true

A thing i really wished that Gearbox would have done before leaving the game, would have been to have buffed all of the weak weapons to where they ranged between useable to the top 10 best. These weapons will now and forever be unused. Such a shame.

Destiny 2 which way PC going in this gsmd

I don't know what power creep is yet, because I only have the base game. Sad...😢

It would have been much more excusable if the power crept gear had been hard to get. Takedown or raid exclusive for example. But with most of them being almost free difficulty fell apart.

I play BL3 on the worst system ever, the switch but I still love watching your videos for tips.

Even with all the power creep, the “creeping death” was never strong😞 disappointing cause that’s the best Metallica song in my opinion

I was playing bl3 a few months ago but it got boring. It’s suffering from the one thing a lot of games are suffering from in this era. To much of to much. I replaying bl2 when I get bored

Borderlands games have a history of introducing power creep via DLC items.

Lol " things were kinda balanced" dude BL3s inital few months were not even close to balanced. Guns like Cutsman,, Flakker, Face -Puncher, Cross Roads, and Tediore reloads were already wreaking havoc on the end game. Flakker got knocked down pretty quickly but we also had the Call weapons and by the time Jackpot was around the Maggie had become a monster of a pistol. BL3 started its power creep journey the moment the started doing balance passes.

Powercreep ruined this game. Endfame means nothing because none of the items matter.

The REVOLTER was the worst thing to happen to this game. Bonus damage by doing nothing and being able to start the effects with ASE. I hated it.

Having 3h+ of some "story", and more ways to not be bored by game is not a paywall. It is marketing. Still Gearbox is better than Blizzard or Bethesda. Even with its flaws.

BL3 is a pay to win game. Best guns, shields, mods, artifacts, and even the best builds are all hidden behind pay walls. Power creep is not as big of an issue to me. 🤦‍♂️

Have you guys ever played a borderlands game. This has happened in every game. Borderlands is meant to make you feel powerful late game. Hop on moze. Turn up to mayhem 10. Turn off your annointments and unequip your guns for non splash damage. Look at that! You cant do any damage! Its almost like the new guns were made to fill holes for kits. This is what has happened in every game ffs 🤦‍♂️

Bl3 too easy

Borderlands 3 is the best game ever. But the other game was d2 was the worst game ever.

Borderlands 3 is garbage

The worst character and least fun is Flak.

They spent all the time before first DLC nerfing everything good