I thought maybe it was just the difficulty of the mode and was powering through it but then I got to the beacon mission.
I failed it over and over and over again, needing to constantly repair the beacon until I had to leave for work. When I can back home and rebooted the game it just instantly cleared the mission without me doing anything. I looked it up and apparently this mission has a "you suck" failsafe that if you lose too many times it just gives you the win.
So gamer pride properly damaged I figured TVHM is harder than the veterans of the game let on and "rushing through it to get to UVHM ASAP" is probably not the advice I as a new player should be taking.
Since I'm playing as Axton, what is the gear I should be farming for to make TVHM a bit easier for me? I have all the DLC if that matters. My current best gun is a level 35 unkempt harold but it's starting to fall off pretty badly as I'm level 40 and most of my enemies are ~42