Wesley Yin-Poole
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Borderlands 4 players have discovered an infinite damage build so broken it kills bosses in seconds — even on the hardest difficulty levels.
As reported by PC Gamer, YouTuber NickTew released gameplay showing a Vex build that makes a mockery of Borderlands 4’s toughest enemies. And now the build is spreading like wildfire, fans are convinced Gearbox will soon nerf it into the ground. So, as NickTew suggested: “abuse it while you can.”
To make this build work you need the Vampiric Vivisecting Throwing Knife with the Penetrator Augment. Land a hit with this knife and subsequent damage to the target are automatic critical hits for five seconds.
Here’s the trick: add bleed stacking and each tick of the bleed effect registers as a critical hit. Yep, every one is a crit.
That’s brilliant for every class, but it’s even better for Vex because of her Bloodletter passive. This makes your gun and skill critical hits have a chance to apply bleed, which counts as gun damage and is based on the initial damage dealt.
Vex's Contamination passive adds to the carnage, because it causes critical hits to increase status effect application chance up to 100%, ensuring the bleed re-procs infinitely. So, throw the knife, land one big shot on the boss, and watch the numbers get bigger and bigger as the bleed ticks it down.
NickTew nukes a boss with a level 32 weapon on the Ultimate Vault Hunter Level 5 difficulty, just to show how effective the build really is. This difficulty means enemies have an additional 350% HP, and the boss still goes down in seconds.
The problem is, a knife with this augment is a rare find (hopefully you didn't sell or drop one you picked up early game!), so you’ll probably need to do some farming to get it (Splashzone seems like a good shout). Once done, though, the build is essentially complete.
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It’s worth noting that there appears to be an issue with using this build in co-op, although we’re not sure why.
Obviously, Gearbox will take a look at this one, although Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins has said the developer won’t “knee jerk react to anything.” Indeed, fans are saying this build should be nerfed, as it’s clearly operating in a way that breaks the game.
“I honestly think this has to get nerfed,” said one YouTube commenter. “There’s OP build and then there’s this. It just trivialises the game to the point that the guns don’t even matter anymore. Just apply the penetrator debuff and bleed and then watch it go exponential in damage. Probably not an interaction the devs picked up on in balance testing.”
Gearbox has a lot to contend with right now, including improving performance (while Randy Pitchford tweets through it), adding a field of view (FOV) slider to the console version, and working on post-launch content.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].