Since Borderlands 4 came out, developer Gearbox has released a PC-focused patch that tackles crashes, among a few other things. But players are wondering what the studio intends to do about the looter shooter’s balance, especially at a time when builds that let you one-shot bosses are doing the rounds.
Gearbox has now indicated that in the short-term, it plans to buff underperforming gear and skills rather than nerf overpowered builds. Indeed, those instakill builds you’ve seen online are safe, for now. But, Gearbox insisted, they will get nerfed eventually.
Confirmation comes from Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins, who took to social media to acknowledge the debate about what he called “builds that use unintended interactions and/or the knife.”
Here’s the statement:
“We’ve seen the discourse about builds that use unintended interactions and/or the knife. We’re not going to act on those immediately, instead, we’re looking at our first round of buffs. Those will get addressed but we’re going to start with underperforming gear/skills first.”
So, what’s all this talk about a knife? As IGN has reported, Borderlands 4 players have discovered an infinite damage build so broken it kills bosses in seconds — even on the hardest difficulty levels.
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. Add bleed stacking and each tick of the bleed effect registers as a critical hit.
Players have come up with eye-catching builds around the knife that essentially makes a Borderlands 4 boss fight a trivial experience, and thus farming for the game’s best loot a lot easier. For example, Vex’s Bloodletter passive 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. Add Vex’s Contamination passive, which causes critical hits to increase status effect application chance up to 100% and thus ensuring the bleed re-procs infinitely, and you’ve got exponential damage. 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.
The news that Gearbox is focusing on buffs over nerfs right now is being celebrated by the community. Borderlands 4 content creator Moxsy called it “such a huge W.”
“Massive nerfs hitting Wonderlands & BL3 on launch caused huge outrage and frustration in the community. Love to see this direction,” Moxsy said in a post on social media.
The question now is what steps Gearbox will take to nerf the knife. Will it change how it works completely, or apply slight changes to tone it down?
There’s no timeframe for Borderlands 4’s next patch, but we know some more of what the studio is working on. PC performance improvements are a “top priority,” the studio has said. A Field of View (FOV) slider is on the way to the console versions, too.
Borderlands 4 console players are also keen for a patch to address some glaring technical problems. Last week, the tech experts at Digital Foundry confirmed a gradual worsening of framerate with continuous playtime, even on PlayStation 5 Pro and Xbox Series X. As revealed in a new video published to YouTube, Digital Foundry found performance starts dipping after around 30 minutes to an hour, which it called “too intrusive on the overall experience, too regular an interruption.” Even after a completely fresh boot, the game is still prone to framerate drops.
Gearbox development chief Randy Pitchford has acknowledged the problem on social media, promising incoming improvements. As a workaround, Pitchford suggested console players quit Borderlands 4 and restart. Digital Foundry’s Tom Morgan confirmed this does restore performance, but criticized the situation, saying “resetting the game every hour should really not be an expected solution for players.”
Meanwhile, Timmins has said he’s got his eye on “cricket jumping,” which lets Borderlands 4 players leap across huge chunks of the map.
If you are delving into Borderlands 4, don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
