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Gearbox has big plans for Borderlands 4’s next big patch.
Gearbox associate creative director Grant Kao made this announcement on Twitter:
@ProdigyXL (AKA creative director Graeme Timmins) and I have a plan of attack for the next couple weeks of changes.
We have a big patch coming soon that will address the recursive behaviors of a few passives which will impact a few builds.
However, our goal has always been to increase and enhance the build variety of classes and gear to tackle the game now and challenges we have lined up in the future.
This week, we’re looking at increasing the value of some legendary pistols and then we’ll look at increasing the opportunity for ARs to shine.
And along the way reacting to passive changes.
OK, But What The Heck Does That Mean?
Passives refer to passive skills. Each Vault Hunter can earn passive and active skills in their respective skill trees.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines recursive as:
involving doing or saying the same thing several times in order to produce a particular result or effect.
In other words, this is an action that repeats itself. We know some folks already knew what this meant, but we wanted to make sure everyone is on the same page.
What Gearbox Wants To Change
Kao is pointing out that certain passive skills have an effect that repeats itself. Kao didn’t bring up an example but we can.
Some fans may remember the infamous Crit Knife. This was one of the first OP builds found for Borderlands 4.
A huge part of this build’s success is Vex’s passive skill effect, Bloodletting. When the community talks about Bleed, they’re actually referring to this skill.
Bleed causes Kinetic Status Effect damage. At the same time, it is affected by Status Effect Application Chance.
In plain English, Bleed can stack on top of itself. And this is one of many in-game abilities that players easily exploited.
Is Gearbox Going In The Right Direction?
Kao is very cleverly telling players that they are planning to modify Crit Knife and many other powerful builds.
It’s not that Gearbox wants to take anything away from players. They do want to encourage them to use the other abilities in the game.
As Kao said, they want to make pistols and ARs more attractive options. We don’t know what Gearbox will do to make this happen, though.
They could take away this stacking effect completely. Or, they could add a limit to how many times or how long it lasts.
They could even take a page from fighting games and apply damage scaling, making each successive stack less effective.
But those are our best guesses for what Gearbox plans to do. We’ll see what they announce next, and when this patch actually arrives.
