Borderlands 3 has nerfed its most powerful Legendaries and fixed up others

Of the one billion potential guns in Borderlands 3, few rise above the level of vendor trash. Some of the Legendary gear rises just a bit too high, Gearbox say, so they've stomped it down a bit and buffed others to reach "an acceptable medium". Which seems a bit of a shame. If Borderlands is a wacky game of reckless silly gunmurder, as Gearbox pretend, why not buff everything to the highest level of daftness? Cowards. It's a cooperative game, not a competitive one, COWARDS.

Gearbox explained in yesterday's blog post that they want to stop players being pushed towards the few mega-powerful items:

"Our goal with Legendary gear is to enable a large variety of playstyles and builds for all characters. After looking through the data, we found that that some pieces of Legendary gear were greatly outperforming others and felt they were limiting builds instead of increasing them. In addition, some of the damage output of Legendary gear limited the growth in combat engagements for the future so we tuned everything to an acceptable median. We expect all Vault Hunters to be able to create amazing builds and we want to support that with more ways to grow and reach those power levels."

They've notably hacked 25% off the Butcher's accuracy and damage, reduced the Crossroad's blast from 4 projectiles to 3 while reducing its accuracy, and cut the Flakker's damage by 33% as well as making it spaff the entire magazine in one shot. But they've also buffed a load of other guns by up to 40%. All player pets get 50% more health too, and the Digi-Clone a whopping 100% extra health. This does sound... balanced. But it doesn't sound wacky (the cowards).

See the blog post for full details on the balance changes, as well as explanations for some of the bigger ones. The update launched last night.

Borderlands 3 is this week hosting an Eridium-o-rama event, being a whole lot more generous with the rare currency.