Psst, Borderlands 4 has a pretty broken infinite damage build, and it may soon go the way of the dodo
Be very, very quiet. Yes, I know this is being yelled from a page on a video game website that at least five people have heard of, so it’s hardly hush-hush, but if Randy keeps shouting unhinged things at people about PC specs, I think we might slip under the radar.
There’s a Borderlands 4 build. It’s a bit broken, and can reportedly down bosses in a click of your fingers by doing a craptonne of damage. I am telling you this information now. The game’s director is aware of the quirk at the heart of this slapping-up setup, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might be tweaked soon.
The build in question, as you’d expect for a shooter, involves knives. Vex’s knives, to be exact. As spotted by Percival Celebration Gamer and shown off by TuYouber NickTew, it’s possible to set up the Siren in a fashion that can one-shot bosses even at higher difficulty levels.
You’ll need a Vampiric Vivisecting Throwing Knife with the Penetrator augment. They’re pretty rare, so you may need to rummage through your cupboards. The domino that kicks off the chain is you lobbing that at the enemy before you do anything else. Next, let me introduce you to Vex. She’s got a couple of handy passive skills – Bloodletter and Contamination. The former means her gun and skill critical hits have a chance to apply a bleed effect, which combines with the knife here to make each tick of bleed do critical damage.
On top of that, Contamination kicks in to make critical hits increase your chance of status effect application to 100%. Cue bleed damage causing more bleeds to spring up on the poor enemy, and you have numbers that’ll keep going until your foe keels over, probably while mumbling something about you being a tryhard.
It worth noting that according to NickTew, the knife doesn’t appear to work this way if you’re playing co-op and more than one person lobs one, seemingly because the two sets of bleeds caused “will overwrite each other”.
The hangup with this build, aside from the rareness of the knife, is that it looks likely to be patched out or significantly nerfed soon. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins replied to a tweet about Vex’s bleed being a bit too powerful the other day. He was quick to declare that the studio are “not going to knee jerk react to anything”, but did add that this looks similar to a bug that afflicted fellow Vault Hunters Harlow and Rafa prior to release. That one “actually crashed the game and/or froze the UI”, so the devs are investigating to see if there are any stability issues being caused by Vex’s potent phlebotomy.
Oh no, I think Randy heard me type stability issues! You’d better scurry off before he infiltrates the treehouse and shouts something about the futility of trying to run his game on a toaster.