A YouTuber seems to have found an incredibly broken build for Borderlands 4 – but it may not quite be breaking the game like everyone believes.
While this build made it to sites like IGN, it was actually found and shared by YouTuber NickTew. The build is so powerful that NickTew’s Vex was able to take down a boss at the highest difficulty level in a matter of seconds.
And we’ll be specific about that too. His Vex was at Ultimate Vault Hunter level 5, which meant the enemy had a 350 % increase in its health bar. But with NickTew’s build, he could just math his way into eradicating any boss’ health down to nothing.
The Power Of Multiplication
Vex has one passive skill in her skill trees that makes this build possible. Bloodletter, which is at the second row of the Vexcalation skill tree, comes with this description:
Gun and Skill Critical Hits have a chance to apply Bleed, causing Kinetic Status Effect Damage over time for a Duration.
Bleed is affected by Status Effect Application Chance, and is itself considered a Status Effect.
This effect can stack.
So, imagine a skill that makes your enemies bleed, and they can keep bleeding if you have other items to make it happen.
The Power Of Exponentation
Vex can then pair this skill with a Specialization called Contamination. While all Vault Hunters can use this Specialization, she gets the most out of it.
Contamination comes with this description:
Critical Hits grant increased Status Effect Application Chance.
Status Effect Application Chance: +10% per Stack
Stack Duration: 10 seconds
Maximum Stacks: 10
In plain English, Contamination allows the bleeding caused by Bloodletter to stack on top of each other. As you can see, these two are already a deadly combination.
And then there’s the finishing touch.
To Get OP, You Need To Press Your Luck
NickTew only managed to make his Vex OP because he found a weapon with a Penetrator Augment. In his case, it was a knife appropriately called the Vampiric Vivisecting Throwing Knife.
These weapons are apparently rare to obtain, but this early in the game, we don’t know if Gearbox gave players gacha rates to find these items yet. But it does seem farming for weapons with this augment is worth it.
Penetrator turns all damage to automatic critical hits for 5 seconds. And that is what makes all of this come together.
You have a bleeding effect that adds damage, and a specialization that stacks the bleeding. If all those bleeds are critical hits, then no enemy can survive your character.
Maybe Gearbox Planned For This?
There is one interesting element to this. NickTew claims that other players couldn’t get this to work in co-op.
While some people believe it’s a bug, let me posit the very opposite. Maybe Gearbox allowed overpowered builds to happen in the game, but lock them out of being usable in co-op.
We’re going to have to wait a while to sort it out between Gearbox and the community, but wouldn’t it be interesting if they planned for this all along?
