BL3 Alt Hunt Rules v3

Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wwxGn2XY14qtANYcWDdREvZQzHU5c7_EGNXUQTjgW_o/edit?usp=sharing

Note that this sheet uses a lot of complex formulas and relies on some Google Sheets specific features, so exporting it to an Excel sheet may cause you to lose functionality.

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Basic Rules
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The hunt will run for exactly two weeks, from <dates - note should align with weekly vault card challenges reset>. There is no limit on how long you can play during this time, though note an average completion is expected take around 60h, or just 4.5h per day - you really don't need to no-life it.

You must stream your entire playthrough, so it's possible to verify that you followed all rules.

Players will be ranked by progression first and stream time second - if two players have the same progression, the one with less stream time is ranked higher. If one player has 20h more stream time, but managed to get one extra item, they're still ranked higher. This ensures you're not punished for having other commitments or needing to sleep. If you want to switch to another game, it's recommended to quickly stop the stream to split the VOD, to make your playtime clearer and avoid accidentally being misranked.

You must play on the latest version of the game, with the latest hotfixes. You may not use any mods, even if they're only visual. And you may not save/profile edit your characters during the event. We all want to be playing through the same vanilla game.

Any character you use must be created at level 1 during the event. You may create multiple characters, both progression and playtime are combined between them all.

You must play on Normal difficulty.

There are a number of things that provide unfair advantages to those who've played before, or worse, to those who've save edited them to insane levels:
- Guardian Rank - You must disable it
- Borderlands Science - You may not spend any tokens or use any boosters started before creating your character (though you may enter the machine to finish the quest)
- Vault Cards - You may not redeem any items, or even just open the chests you get for completing levels (as these can give eridium)
- Golden and Diamond Keys - You may not spend either

As it is impossible to disable them, you may complete vault card daily/weekly challenges, and collect their xp and eridium rewards.

You may only use items you collect on your new characters during the event - you may not use any items from the Lost Loot machine (as it's difficult to prove), any items mailed to you by friends or ECHOcast events, or any items in your bank from older characters. Items mailed by Manufacturer Challenges or NPCs are fair game, and as long as you keep careful track of what you put in it, you may still use your bank. If you create multiple characters, you may transfer items between them.

You may not use any of the Super Deluxe bonus items, though you are allowed to redeem them and instantly throw them on the floor. These items require paying to unlock a small advantage, while not providing any new loot sources to farm.

You may not buy any items from Maurice's Black Market. This gives guaranteed easy sources for a few items, but changes frequently enough to dramatically impact practice runs or people following along casually ignoring the time limits.

You may not pick up any of the rare spawn missions. Which ones are accessible depend on who your friends have recently killed, allowing outside influence into your run.

The Moxxtail, Pinata, and Badass viewer ECHOcast events must be disabled, as they'll all affect your game, and may provide an unfair advantage to those on Twitch over other platforms. You may leave the rare chest event and extraction event on.

You may not farm any enemy more than 10 levels beneath you or your gear (including mayhem levels). If you're level 54, you may not farm enemies below level 54 - 10 = 44. If the highest level gear you're using is 52m7, you may also not farm enemies below level (52 + 7) - 10 = 49. Practically, this just means you probably shouldn't leave mayhem mode once you enter it, you probably want M1 with speed demon anyway.

You may play in coop, as long as all players follow all the other rules. There must be no more than 3 levels between the highest and lowest level players in your party, to prevent powerleveling. This restriction still applies in Cooperation mode, an endgame build will naturally clear areas easier than a new player.

You may duplicate items, but only to give one each to other players, you may not keep duplicates yourself, and you may not give other players more than one duplicate. If you accidentally duplicate more, just throw them on the floor. This restriction prevents mass duping items to sell for an early Crit/Hail.

Drops
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To have proof of a drop, you must look at the item card and clip it. You may also grab the item and show if off in your inventory. If an item drops out of bounds, and you can't see the card or grab it, it will have to be refarmed. Too many items in this game look alike to be able to trust just seeing an an item on screen, the only way to verify is by looking at the card. You may use photo mode to grab items which are out of reach. Items found in vendors must be purchased to count. Items found in Arms Race do not need to be extracted to count, as long as they follow the previous rules.

When playing in coop, if using instanced loot, drops only count for the player that found them. If playing with the same loot, drops count for all players, though only one needs to see the item and make a clip. This echos the actual item accessibility.

Each item has an associated point count, roughly corresponding to how much effort it takes to get. When you get an item to drop from one of it's listed dedicated sources, you may redeem that item, and add it's points to your overall progression. Some items have "World Drop" listed as one of their dedicated sources, as you might expect these can be redeemed regardless of where you collect them from.

You are only allowed to redeem one world drop, as if it was dropped from it's dedicated source. Finishing the final campaign quests unlocks a certain amount of extra world drops. This cannot be done retroactively, you must have finished the quest before finding the drop, and once an item's been redeemed you can't change your mind it and redeem it from a dedicated drop instead. You may complete these quests multiple times by (re)starting TVHM, they're worth more on subsequent completions than on the first.

Quest                  | First | Subsequent
-----------------------+-------+------------
Divine Retribution     |   2   |     20
All Bets Off           |   1   |      7
The Call of Gythian    |   1   |      7
Riding to Ruin         |   1   |      5
Locus of Rage          |   1   |      5
Mysteriouslier: Horror |       |
  at Scryer's Crypt    |   1   |      3

Items from the Eridian Fabricator, mail, slot machines, vendors (including Earl's), the dedicated loot rooms, event rewards, and mission rewards all simply count as world drops, you will need to finish some campaigns to be able to redeem them.

You may not do any tricks that completely skip the work done to access a particular loot source. Known examples include:
You may not photo mode to collect the items in the Bounty of Blood Bank multiple times, or to collect them before the final story mission when it normally opens - you must (re)start tvhm to get another chance.
You may not refresh Vaulthalla by leaving and coming back, you must kill Psychoreaver once per farm.
You may not SQ before reviving Eista during "We Slass! (Part 3)" to farm his drops, you must fight him once per farm.

The one exception to this is in arms race: you *are* allowed to photo mode exit clip to collect loot from chests without finishing their arenas (where possible). Arms race is a badly designed gamemode with horrible drop rates, which you'll spend way too long in anyway, anything to speed it up is welcome.

You may dashboard/read-only farm, as long as you only keep and redeem items from the last run.

Glitches
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Banned glitches/exploits:

- Complex Root AoE Boosting
- Phalanx Doctrine Stacking
- Emote Cancelling the Pestilence, Multitap, and Gargoyle reloads
- Infinite Re-Volter or Toboggan duration glitches
All of these are quite obvious glitches, which are obviously each (part of) the single best build if they're allowed. The Re-Volter is especially egregious, as it's a completely free 100% damage boost on top of any other build in the game, for just 5s of work. Some of these are also completely inaccessible to console players.

- Projected shield or Beskar invulnerability glitches
Again, quite obvious glitches, which help trivialize any boss, and are obviously part of the best build if allowed. Technically neither is full immunity, but they're close enough.

- Car Warping
This still actually works - gearbox is incompetent what a surprise. It is an extremely obvious glitch, which is (now) rather difficult, but in some cases (Wotan) saves an incredible amount of time - someone who pulls it off could easily save hours over others.

- Skill Point Duping
This again is an extremely obvious glitch, which is incredibly difficult to pull off, that makes a single best but boring build. It's also inaccessible to people without friends on the same platform, we still want solo players to be able to compete.

- Using Dakka Bear to charge crystals in guardian takedown, or to skip Scourge's teleport phases
This is a bit less egregious than the others, but it still saves a significant amount of time off of something that's a relatively obvious glitch, and it's only possible on one character. Note that in coop the crystals take longer to charge, two people charging simultaneously is different to Dakka Bear + 1 Player.

Anything else not listed above is allowed. This includes (non-exhaustive):

- Swap reloading
This is very similar to drop reloading from BL2, it is actually possible on controller (by only equipping two weapons), and most importantly, it is *extremely* difficult to get out of muscle memory once you start doing it.

- Rocket and Grenade Jumping
This is very easy to do accidentally, even from an enemy, it would be very hard to draw a line.

- All Out of Bounds
It's very hard to draw a line again, the previous "clipping through a wall" attempt had some serious holes, and it actually saves less than 5m over the whole event, it's of little consequence.

- All forms of action skill cancelling
This is very easy to do accidentally, and is no longer possible to abuse by binding to scroll.

- Emote cancelling outside of the banned situations
These are easy things to get into muscle memory and difficult to remove, and are all of little consequence.

- Respawning enemies by hitting certain triggers or dying/fast traveling (e.g. Rampager, Slaughter Bosses, Scraptraps, Tom/Xam, Seer, Cartels Minibosses)
These are all obviously minor glitches, but you still need to fight the enemies again to get another drop. They also avoid extra loading screens, which greatly appreciated, especially by console players.

- Stacking melee elements to dupe eridium
This is a minor glitch again, but it requires a bit of effort to setup, and needs you to actively search for eridium piles. It also ends up being the fastest way to gain eridium in a lot of cases, helping speed up the boring farming before getting to Hemovorous.

- Stacking Elemental resistances and an Adaptive shield for elemental immunity
This takes quite a bit of specific gear to setup, and doesn't rely on any explicit glitch, you're just stacking bonuses. It also a lot more restricted than the invulnerability glitches.

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Motivation
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While I enjoyed the original BL3 hunt, there were quite a few ways I thought the rules could be improved.

The first major issue was that the rules were overly restrictive in places it really didn't matter. You couldn't start TVHM. You had to finish the main story. You couldn't leave mayhem levels. You couldn't walk through walls, which you can easily do by accident, but you could still do some really egregious oobs which never do so (https://youtu.be/R1syGZ28lGo). You couldn't swap reload, but you could still quick swap after every shot to abuse cold bore the same. Most of these rules are simply gone now.

The next issue is to do with the drop lists. The drop lists were obviously based on LootLemon's data, and while that's fine in 99% of cases, there are a few weird side cases which caused inconsistencies. The Tidal Wave and the TK's Wave were counted as two separate items but the TK's Wave, TK's Heatwave, and TK's Shockwave all counted as the same, even though all four have the same weapon balance, which gun you get depends entirely on what parts it rolls with. The new drops sheet bases everything entirely on item balances. If two items have the same balance, even if they have different names, they're considered the same and count towards the same drop. If two items with the same name have different balances (the Beast and the Company Man), they count as different drops.

Another related minor issue was with the listed drop sources. This again obviously came form LootLemon, and had a few minor issues. Most notably, the DLC4 purple world drops were also listed as only coming from Wardwatcher Alpha/Beta and Blackheart King, when in reality they can come from most of the DLC's badasses. To address this, I wrote a series of scripts that extract all drop data directly from the game files, and used that to generate the new drops sheet. https://github.com/apple1417/gen_uniques_db/

The point values weren't balanced amazingly either. Anathema's drops were worth twice as much as the Arms Race COMs, despite the arms race COMs being incredibly difficulty to get. Mayhem exclusive drops were also worth over twice as much as the non mayhem drops from the exact same enemies, even though on any reasonable build mayhem doesn't really make kills that much harder. I've adjusted the points based on my experiences during the 3 hunts I've done, though there might still be places which could be improved. It's hard coming up with a balance between simplicity and accuracy. In practice, it's easy enough to get everything so points aren't super important, though they're still nice to use as comparisons. In the new sheet I changed the primary counter to just items, points are only shown as a percentage.

The last thing I didn't like was how static the route was - there is a single best route to take which you determine entirely beforehand. One of the best moments during the original hunt for me was when we realized that the world drop Cold Warrior we got in the Vaulthalla loot room meant we didn't need to kill Tremendous Rex, and could skip Cistern of Slaughter. The problem is, you didn't get a choice in what these loot rooms gave you. You couldn't do any clever routing based on which world drops you find, you just needed to take whatever the first random roll you got was. Another thing I didn't like was that you were allowed to change what your one free world drop was - this removes all risk, if you happen to get whatever you redeemed from it's source you can just switch it to something else. The loot rooms and specific items you were allowed to collect as world drops all also seemed like kind of arbitrary choices, I wanted something more concrete. Trying to solve all this has proven to be quite hard.

Even after the world drop nerf, you still get too many to make simply allowing world drops acceptable. In most DLCs, whenever any COM drops, it's a legendary. The trials now give a bunch of basically guaranteed legendary relics/coms/pistols. Some of the DLCs haven't been properly nerfed - e.g. DLC2 bosses have 50% chance to drop a world drop legendary gun every kill. Farming up a bunch of eridium lets you just spam the Eridian Fabricator. And even just vendor farming works decently well.

So for now, unlocking world drops by completing campaigns is an interesting enough alternative. You get 8 world drops from plaything through everything, which you need to do anyway to farm all sources. Doing a full second playthrough gives another 47, or alternatively just getting to Sanctuary and doing the 4 DLCs there adds 24. 8 is rather limited but still gives you a few good choices. You could skip Slaughter Star + Cistern, but that leaves you with no flexibility. Or you could skip Slaughter Shaft + Star, and do Cistern instead given it's drops are more common. Or what about only skipping Tremendous Rex, and still farming Vandas. Doing another playthrough is a big time investment, but also lets you skip a lot more stuff. After the world drop nerf you probably won't just run into drops while doing other things, but there are still a lot of sources which are pretty generous which you could specifically route in.