Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/30/x ... nds_2_bug/

There's a bug or soemthing that might mean you are perma dead if infected with something or other.

Bullet. Sponges.
Just got chased around Three Horns Valley by no less than four Rabid Skags, who effectively ate my Catch-A-Ride and pursued me all the way to the Happy Pig motel. Two Gunzerks and three Fight for your Lives later and I finally dispatched them.

The psychos (maniacs now) seem to have new lines too (mostly insulting my Mum, it seems) The badass ones are now utterly terrifying due to having about 100,000 health each.

GONNA WEAR YA FACE! SHOW IT TO YA MUTHA!

I love this game to bits.

I wish the barks were subtitled, they often get lost in the gunfire and screaming.

Slowly forming the opinion that True Vault Hunter Mode is a trifle unbalanced. I can now take out bandit cars with three or four shots of my corrosion sniper rifle (would take ten or twelve shots in the first playthrough), but Badass Maniacs... brrr. They must have close to 200,000 health each at L40, and during the Bloodshot Stronghold mission I managed to meet one who seemed to be resistant to virtually all elemental damage, and who had a shield to boot.

Cue a Benny Hill-style chase back to the beginning of the level, pursued by an enormous lump of meat who, in between telling me he was going to piss on my mum and informing me I could call him daddy if I liked, began reciting a full-blown Shakespeare soliloquy (the "too too solid flesh" one from Hamlet.) I couldn't make up my mind whether I should be laughing or crying.

I think I'm going to go grind The Dust and the entrance to Lynchwood for a while and see if I can level up a bit more.

Finished. The final level was a bit quick and an anticlimax, even discounting a level 50 friend with all orange weapons one-shotting almost everything.

TVHM now!

Well I'll be buggered sideways. You can access your old "Normal" playthrough after starting TVHM, but the only way I've found that gives you the option to select it is to switch to another game (I had started another playthrough as the assassin), then switch back. At this point you're given the option to select your difficulty level, and if you select Normal it plops you back into your old game.
So, hurrah, basically!

£14.99 on Steam this weekend, me and the chaps have decided to give it a punt at that price point.

Ooooohhhhh this is fun!

I never played Borderlands, so this is my first encounter with it.

I quite like the sarcastic little robot.

I'm near the end now and already thinking about my next run through. I may go mechromancer I reckon for the next one.

I went down the sniper route this time round and have a skill tree that means if I can score a critical hit with the first bullet of a fully loaded sniper rifle whilst in decoy mode it's pretty much raspberry jam time.

Second wind is still a brilliant idea that should be in more games.

I did my first run through with the Mechromancer, and she's... interesting.

You have to have multiple weapon options. Long range is effective for a while, but as you make more kills, the closer you have to be to hit them.

I found the most lethal high anarchy weapon is a high damage Jakobs pistol with a reasonable mag and fast reload. Fires as fast as you can pull the trigger.

I didn't get Sledge's Shotgun, that might work well too.

Am I doing this wrong? I have two guns available to me at the moment, a pea-shooter pistol and a shotgun that takes about six hours to reload.

I haven't died yet but I've come very close and had to do that 'get a kill to survive thing', which went pretty much down to the wire.

The baddies are all over me like a cheap suit.

Urrrrgh. I hate guns like that (as per that exact line in their description), especially if they're just an assault rifle and not a sniper rifle or something that does a lot of damage. Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick in a game already populated by bullet sponges.

The first part of the first playthrough can be a little hair-raising for sure, but just remember to keep checking and comparing the guns that you pick up - ditch the lower quality ones straight away. Use your pistol to pepper things from a distance and save the shotgun for when they get close. Also look for places to skulk and pick creatures off. With the first mini-boss you reach (the Bullymong thing) I just stayed inside the shipping container and blasted it when it came close. Oh, and memorise your critical hit points for each creature - a shotgun blast to a bullymong's head can kill it outright, whereas you can poot away at its body for a week with a peashooter pistol

I will sing the praises of the sniper rifle from the highest rooftop - huge critical hit damage and great accuracy. Do the bullymong fur quest as soon as you can, to get Hammerlock's sniper rifle (don't be tempted by that oaf Claptrap and his shotgun). Doesn't matter which character you're playing, the sniper rifle is great for any of them and helps you pick off those bullymongs from a distance, to avoid getting swamped by five of them at once and batted around like an oversized volleyball.

Lastly - keep watching your badass rank and spend your badass points as soon as you can get them. A few percentage points here and there can make all the difference.

I play this game way, way too much.

The Borderlands rules: open ever box, check every vendor, use gear that's better than yours no matter the colour, and try guns out before you use them 'in anger'. That last one is the 'TK's Wave Rule' - sometimes you'll pick up a badass gun, that's better in every way than what you've got, but has such odd effects when you actually fire it that it's unusable in your current situation. Named after a unique shotgun in Borderlands that was a mission reward, that was horrible to actually use.

Oh, each manufacturer has different effects on their weapons:

Tediore: below average stats, incredibly fast reloads, on reloading you toss the gun like a grenade, more ammo in it, bigger than the boom.

Maliwan: every weapon has an elemental effect

Hyperion: above average stats. Reverse recoil mechanic, the more you fire, the more accurate the weapon.

Dahl: every weapon fires a burst when you zoom in.

Jakobs: high damage per shot, mostly semi-auto, small mags with longer reload.

Vladof: rate of fire monsters

Bandit: huge mags, long reload times

Torgue: explosive element, fires slow rocket ammo, makes long range combat difficult.

Cheers guys

Four of the Saturday night crowd (including me) have now bought this in the Steam sale, so we're going to try four player co-op on Satuday night, beginning at Level 3 from the first sort of 'village' that you get to where the posh dude with the moustache is.

I might roll another character in the meantime, I picked the sort of 'default dude' and he's a bit rubbish.

All the characters really come into their own when you get the abilities levelled up a bit. There's no real difference early on other than the special ability you have.

Can you have multiple characters on the go at once, or is it just the one?

I suppose really I should just load the game up and find out for myself.

Yes. Press Y at the title screen to switch between your games. Badass Rank and bonuses are carried into new games, unless you choose to switch the whole Badass system off. This makes additional playthroughs easier from the start as you've already got Badass bonuses active on various things.

It doesn't work



(It's alright, there's a SELECT CHARACTER option on the main menu that appears to switch between the character slots.)

Wheeeee! This is fun!

Also, however it's doing the friends integration, it seems to work very well, as I could see two of my chums online and could invite them to a game, despite me having done nothing whatsoever to add them - maybe it works off the Steam friends list or something. (But then how does it work for people who bought the game in a shop and don't have Steam installed.......)

I've died three or four times now, biting off a little bit more than I could chew on each occasion, and had a couple more battles that have absolutely gone down to the wire, terrifically exciting stuff.

The world construction is very much MMO-esque, as an ex-WoW player it's all very familiar, and whilst I can understand how folks not used to that kind of game design could find it annoying, it's almost like a comfortable pair of old slippers for me, except slippers with a badass attitude and proper FPS gameplay.

Few points:

1) I am now in the groove with constantly changing weapons as I get something better, and sorting out that an UBER DAMAGE SHOTGUN is a worse choice than a lower damage assault rifle with a far better rate of fire. Yes I know it sounds obvious, but still.

2) Starting to spend badass points and skill points, my commando dude has a little portable gun turret which is proving very useful and opens up tactical opportunities as well.

3) Speaking of which, tactics in fights, running away to find some cover and suchlike works very well. It's easy to get locked into FPS MODE KILL EVERYTHING ASAP and that's not necessarily the best thing to do here.

4) I'm doing all the optional quests before moving on with the story quests, my OCD completionist circuits are kicking in.

5) Vendoring all my shit every time I get to any sort of vendoring machine, 'emptying my bags' as it's called in WoW.

6) Interface is a bit clunky with keyboard and mouse, clearly designed for a gamepad, but I'm far too gimp-handed to play an FPS game with a pad so I'll stick with keyboard and mouse.

7) Looks and sounds absolutely lovely, a real aesthetic treat.

Overall, I'd say it's a single player WoW spliced with Diablo 3 and put into a first-person perspective, injected with a great sense of humour and awesome gunplay.

This is a good thing.

I see what people are saying about the end now. "In order to get to X you have to go and turn on the things at A, B, C and OH ALSO D". It's like they thought the game wasn't long enough so they had to pad it out as much as possible which seems pointless when multiple playthroughs with different characters are encouraged which increases the game value no end anyway.

I've now got bore enabled for my sniper chappy which means I can shoot through things and the people/robots/skaggymongs behind get extra damage. Lining that up while using the decoy is now my "new favourite thing".

this game is aces, I'm playing it with a mate online (xbox) which works better than any other online game I've played and makes it a bit more possible in TVHM as, when you go down, the super badass maniac, who can remove 10k points of shield and 10k points of health in one hit, just keeps mashing you with his stick and ignores your mate while he pours clips of ammo into the buggers skull. I went the gunzerker and TBH hes a bit shit untill, like level 40 where you can open up 'come at me bro' and use him properly. I find a pair of sniper rifles works exceptionally well in gunzerker mode at close range.
Also I've started a runthrough with the Mechromancer but I'm not entirely convinced if shes good or not, I seem to be in the habit of throw out bot, lob in a couple of grenades and wait for bot to die/recharge then throw out bot again. I'm sure thats the right way to use her but... I dunno, bit boring maybe? I've only got to lvl 10 with her so far.

Well we've started talking about proper class composition for our co-op adventures, we've also agreed that we'll all get to Level 8 (as I believe this is when you get to Sanctuary?) before doing co-op, and then level at the same rate together. (We did this with WoW and it worked really well, those who wanted to and/or had the time to play more, just rolled extra characters which they could level as fast as they wanted to, so that the 'core group' of characters to play together with were always the same level.)

It looks like there are only four of us on-board for Borderlands 2, one of our 'core six' is is being a fucking Rift-nerd at the moment, and the other has played through Borderlands 2 already on the EggBox with his son and doesn't want to do it again.

As such, given that there are four of us, would each of us just rolling one of the different classes work well? Or is it like WoW where you prefer more damage-type characters to heal or tank type characters? Or would one of each be fine?

In Borderlands 1, my impression was that the overall class makeup of a group seemed to make little difference, you just went for the one which had the playstyle you liked the most and then crafted that character in a way that fits the group. This may have changed for 2, but given that it's still nominally playable in single player, they can't have made a class too reliant on having teammates.

Disclaimer: It's been a while since I've played it, so memory may not be all that great.

This is what I'm wondering about, in WoW of course you have the two distinct gaming styles (technically three if you include raids but not relevant here):

1) Single player questing, which all classes can do solo. BUT, the difficulty and/or number of enemies does not scale with group size, you go into an area with two or three of you, you're going to find it about two or three times easier to play through that area.

2) Instances (5-man), groups are very tightly defined, you want three damage guys, one heal guy, and one tank guy.

Now as I understand it Borderlands 2 (or 1) doesn't have instances, it's all kind of open world stuff, but as the game does scale enemy quantity and difficulty based on party size (which WoW absolutely doesn't), I'm wondering if you start to need more of a defined party composition, especially at the four player maximum - or can you just roll in there with four Gunzerkers if you want?

Well, I suppose we'll find out the hard way on Saturday night

Typically, we had 3 people of different classes, there didn't really seem to be much synergy between them. That being said, none of us was the soldier, which seemed to have the abilities most relevant to coop. Mainly as he was super dull to play.

In 2 the Gunzerker seems to be the best suited for co-op as he's a glass cannon in my experience in single player (so hard keeping the little bugger alive), whereas the Mechromancer is ideally suited to soloing (although I also rocked through the single player campaign with the Assassin).

WHEN CLOUD GAMING GOES WRONG.

So how in the name of fuck am I supposed to choose?

I guess I'll have to work on the premise that the local files will be the up-to-date ones.

What's wrong with a bloody timestamp? Grrrr.

Always always go for local when you get that screen.

Aye I went for local and it was fine

Some of these early boss fights are quite tough, the Midgemong battle killed me a couple of times before I got the hang of giving the bugger the runaround, dropping my turret down, running back to the health machine to heal up, and so on.

It doesn't help that the trash respawns, like it does in WoW

I now have this sniper rifle, and yes it's awesome.

I waited too long to get it I think (I went off and did the Midgemong quest and others first, in fact I damn near left this quest until last in the area because I'm thick), but now I have it I'm like, 'Oooohhhh fab, I can take out a camp without them getting much of a chance to lay a finger on me.'

Really makes a superb change of pace from having to get up close and personal.

Mechromancer comes into her own once she levels a bit... Anarchy makes her hit fucking hard. Leveling Deathtrap instead makes life easier if you don't like fighting as much.

Siren is also soloable once your get health replenishy powers like health for killing phase locked enemy, health while you phaselock an enemy, etc.

I finished this last night. That lass boss is a reet fucker. Ended up finding a spot in the corner where he couldn't get me and just pecked away at his health with everything my my arsenal. Took a full sniper rifle clip, full pistol clip, full rocket clip and 75% of my assault rifle ammo to bring him down.

I may go off and do some more side quests or start vault hunter mode - is that new game+ scenario where you carry over your level and weapons?

For True Vault Hunter Mode you're essentally starting a new game, but with all your levels/weapons/etc intact. You can even access the weapons you have stored in Sanctuary, as they're accessible from Claptrap's place. Enemies are much tougher, most are renamed and there are some new ones (like the Bullyrott and Armoured Maniac).

As you enter each new area, the Fast Travel units are usually unlocked right away, and the whole map of the area is already uncovered to what you've found in the previous playthrough.

Best thing is, you can switch between your Normal and TVHM playthroughs. I've been levelling up via TVHM (because it's a lot faster) and then switching back to Normal to knock off the remaining few side quests to try and get the cheevo. Haven't tackled Terramorphous yet, though.

Don't say that name in front of me.

Ah. That bad, eh?

Oh, and I did the Patricia Tannis riding a fish Easter Egg the other night. Which is... rather odd to see.

I went along with a friend to see Terramorphous. He's absolutely ridiculous. I'm more pissed off at how much money he cost me in resurrections than anything

I thought the point of Terrormorphus was that it required four level 50's and a whole bucket of luck to defeat him.

I didn't know this at the time. I don't think he did either.

So what you two are saying is, tackling him by myself at Level 47 is not a clever move?

Basically, yes.

Well we've got this booked in for Saturday night, group will be a Commando (me!), a Siren and an Assassin.

We're all going to kill BOOM AND BEWM solo (I've already done it), which will take the three of us to Level 7, and we're going to fight our way to Sanctuary as a three man group, through Captain Flynt, and then take it from there with what we want to do.

Really rather looking forward to it.

I only noticed the other day that Boom Bewm do Kofi Kingston's pose in their intro slide thingy.

http://savygamer.co.uk/2012/11/30/borde ... -pc-12-99/

£12.99 for a steam key for this (via Savygamer)

That's even cheaper than it just was in the Steam sale!

My mate claims he killed BOOM BEWM at Level 3 last night, then he said he thought he might have been Level 2 and killing him made him ding Level 3.

I said he must be misremembering things, but he was very insistent.

Is that even possible?

I might roll a new char just to try myself. He's playing as an assassin.

I'd imagine it would be very difficult indeed. It's possible to kill them without being in their "arena", as you can jump down to trigger their cutscene, then jump back out, take Big Bertha and Boom out from up high in the nearby bandit area and then run to the edge of the lift and kill Bewm when he approaches.

You'd really need a sniper rifle for that though, and you'd have to do the Bullymong fur quest to get that, but I suppose doing the bare minimum of stuff, you might be able to get it at L2-3.

Going up close and personal with B&B would be very difficult at L2 unless your friend was a critical hit diva or had lucked into a decent weapon very early on.

CTKBB-FB9SW-FZR3F-CRT3J-TR9H9 according to shillmeister Nelson

Ooh, thank you Sir!