Shoot 'n loot

I've played all three, but most of my time has gone to Borderlands 2. I still play it quite a bit, currently working on an Overpower Level 4 playthrough as Maya.

 

Borderlands 1 is by far the best of the series IMO and the Pre-sequel is pretty bad. 2 has some serious balance issues IMO with incredibly overpowered mindless builds that play the game for you. All off them are unplayable online though with the rampant cheating and those who aren't expressly cheating like to use the cheese instant win builds which I derive no pleasure in playing with nor playing with those that do. Most of my time has gone to Borderlands 2 of the series, but that's more because Borderlands 1 to me is less replayable than Borderlands 2 definitely not because it's better in my opinion.

Played as a Mordecai in Borderlands 1 who exclusively used Snipers even though his Pistol build is honestly vastly superior and quite frankly over-powered. Also avoided guns that exploited the Elemental issues such as the Volcano, Hellfire, Pesilent Defiler etc etc for reasons detailed above. In Borderlands 2 I played as a Zer0 again playing with Sniper Rifles as they're the most interesting guns in the Borderlands series to me from the added sway and the ability to pick the magnification of the scope eliminates my primary dislike of Snipers in games which is an over zoom plus a lot of the weapons in other categories felt over-powered and I derived little joy in melting people with an SMG or the like, headshots or bust. When Krieg was released I switched fully to him even though I thought Brick was fairly meh in Borderlands 1, I felt with Krieg they did it right ofcourse played a non-Silence the Voices build to avoid being overpowered and actually enjoy the game.

 

The loot system is fine enough. You don't need the Legendaries or Pearlescents to win and if you play Crawmerax Legendaries are a dime a dozen. Most of the pearls don't behave in a unique fashion they're just stronger alternatives to legendaries so IMO they're not neccesary to have.

Borderlands one was a bit more stingy in terms of legends dropping randomly, but like I said you have craw which the lowest I've seen drop from him was 4.

Pearlescents are pretty rare I found like 2 not ones I care about either over all the time I've been playing so yeah it's a time sink if you have to have them, but again most of them are just stronger variants of what you have.

You can beat the game with a level 8 Hellfire due to how the elemental pools work in Borderlands 1, they fixed it a little in Borderlands 2, but yeah I don't like playing a game with an instant-win button feels like there isn't point to it when you don't need to have any sort of skill to be successful.

 

Nope I hold by Borderlands 1. I never turned on my rank boosts either.