While Borderlands 2 made wonders for the franchise and turned a series into Gearbox's own Cash-Cow Franchise, this doesn't mean the game's perfect.
Examples of scrappy items can be found here.
Mechanics
- The DLC raid bosses originally could only be fought once a day. This restriction was later patched away.
- The Badass Tokens, for only adding increments of one percent or below stat boosts for each token redeemed, invoking some tedious Stat Grinding as well. They're also disliked by veteran players for the opposite reason, namely making the game too easy once you have enough of them, and the vast majority of Self-Imposed Challenge runs of the game will have the player disabling BAR to put everyone on even ground.
- The Golden Keys. Only obtainable by registering real-life codes into the game, and once that code is used up, those keys cannot be reobtained, ever. Not even a hard reset can bring them back, and the golden keys are basically Loot Boxes in every way but real-life expenses.
- The changes in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode. Enemies can now regenerate health over time, and are generally more resistant to damage. Their levels will always match the levels of the player who has the highest level of the bunch, creating some serious compatibility issues between players (though luckily, missions and item drops are similarly made to scale). The effects of slag, by contrast, is increased threefold, which increases target damage significantly. Suffice to say, this creates a lot of reliance on slag; if it isn't slagged, it's too tough to take down. If it is slagged, it dies as quickly as it would on any other difficulty. This also makes being slagged a death sentence, making items like the Chulainn not worth using in spite of its incredible dual-element capabilities. In short, the game is now so difficult and so reliant on one mechanic that it's enough to rub people the wrong way.
- Similar to the above, to get to the max character level (which, as of Fight for Sanctuary, is 80, alongside the Overpower Level at 10), you have to complete the base game and all DLC content at least three times. Normal and True Vault Hunter aren't all that bad, but given all the issues that Ultimate Vault Hunter has, it slams headlong into Fake Longevity. And given the multitudes of builds for all six characters, this means you have to, at the bare minimum, beat the game 18 times to get everyone at endgame strength. From the third game onward, this mechanic got dumped in favor of bringing on level scaling after completing the base game campaign, so you're ready to start build-crafting as soon as you hit max level instead of having to slog through a bone-breakingly hard version of the game you've already played to death.
- Unique mission rewards can spawn with random parts like any other item, but the instant the mission is turned in and the reward is in your inventory, it can never be spawned again for that playthrough, not legitimately at least. This is on top of missions being locked at certain levels, which on Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, is the current host's level. This results in an exercise in tedium as not only do you have to grind up to max level to get the most out of the mission reward, you also have to repeatedly close and restart the game to get the desired roll of the item you want. Later games would ease up on this by putting mission rewards in vending machines, scaling to your current level.
Character/class abilities and bonuses
Axton
- The buffs of "Duty Calls" only work on non-elemental weapons, in a game wherein elemental damage types deal higher damage outputs than non-elementals. Besides, there are so few end-game Jakobs weapons that could benefit from this.
- "Laser Sight" increases your turret accuracy up to 50%. But this skill alone doesn't fix two of the turrets problems - It has a quite short duration and its turn speed is too slow, consequently making it too slow to seek any targets.
Maya
- "Backdraft" adds fire damage to Maya's melee attack and adds a fire nova explosion. Problem is, Maya doesn't have a melee-centric skill tree nor gameplay style. It's just better off leaving the melee roles to other Zer0 or Krieg players since they can do the job of killing enemies with melee than Maya.
Salvador
- "I'm Ready Already" provides up to 25% cooldown reduction to Gunzerking. But there are two other skills that reduce the Action Skill cooldown such as "Get Some" and "Yippie Ki Yay". And if you could kill enemies fast enough, these two skills make the flat 25% reduction obsolete.
Zer0
- While "Unf0rseen" makes your decoy explode with a shock damage, it only comes in handy against melee enemies, and other ranged enemies might not even bother to attack the decoy. Other than that, shock damage only works against shielded enemies, and not enough to deal with other enemy types. It's not even capable of slagging your enemies, which is a needed element in UVHM.
- ""Kill C0nfirmed"'s improves critical bonuses the longer you aim down the sights. However, aiming down the sights slows down your movement speed and tightens your point of view. It also takes quite a while to build up stacks.
- Inversely, this is extremely useful out of combat, when picking enemies from a much safer distance. It allows you to effectively one-shot enemies before they can even aggro. Combine it with "B0re" and you can even line up multiple targets to kill with one shot.
Gaige
- "Interspersed Outburst" is treated as a separate damage instance different from your currently-equipped weapon, which makes farming the weapon-specific Badass Rank (BAR) challenges for Badass Tokens more difficult that intended. If you've managed to kill an enemy with the Outburst skill's digisplosion effect first before any other bullet, that kill won't be counted towards the weapon challenge. If you even try to farm said BAR challenges on lower difficulties with a high-levelled Gaige, that would be difficult as the Outburst can One-Hit Kill the targets first. Because of this skill's bugged interaction, Gaige players have since then opted into removing points from Interspersed Outburst whenever they attempt to farm any weapon-specific Badass Rank challenges.
- "One Two Boom" allows Deathtrap to shoot a large electric sphere that explodes on a wide radius only when you shoot at it. Problem is, you really can't control when Deathtrap uses this and you must rely on the AI, he takes quite a long while to charge it every time and the sphere also travels very slow.
Krieg
- "Bloody Revival" makes you deal more damage in Fight For Your Life state when using assault rifles. These two conditions are completely niche and situational enough, as it would limit your gun usage when downed. Not to mention that the "Light the Fuse" skill would replace Krieg's Fight for your Life state, making this completely useless when both skills are spec'd into.
- "Fuel the Rampage" is only beneficial when playing solo, as you could rampage more often when enemies damage you thanks to it giving Cooldown Manipulation. But it has quite a negative drawback of enabling Friendly Fire, which means your teammates can now potentially damage a Krieg player who spec'd on this skill. As such, people won't spec into this in multiplayer, otherwise the Krieg player would be downed more often if the teammates use quite a number of area-of-effect / damage-over time abilities and weapons. Not to mention the fact that you could be harassed by Griefers who would shoot the Krieg player down just to frustrate them.
- "Hellfire Halitosis" overrides your melee attack with Krieg breathing fire on the nearby enemy. But looking at Krieg's other skills, there are more ways to lit enemies on fire, even from afar. Again, much like the reception to Zer0's "Unf0rseen", this skill could have been more useful in UVHM if it deals slag damage than fire.
