At this point, Gearbox has learned its lesson. After doing big, unwelcome nerfs early on in Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands, Gearbox has told fans that in Borderlands 4, even with a number of huge damage builds, almost all of which are based on bugs or unintended interactions, they will pause nerfing those for now in favor of doing a bunch of buffs. Here’s what Borderlands 4 Creative Director Graeme Timmins said about it on Twitter late yesterday:
“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.”
You know something is notorious when it’s just called “the knife,” and there’s a specific throwing knife that allows for infinite crits for five seconds, allowing wildly fast boss burns, especially on a character like Vex where bleed keeps infinitely proc-ing those crits so one shot can kill a boss in a few seconds. Other characters, one hit:
It does, however, take a lot of effort for a lot of these builds to come together, needing loads of skill points, and actually farming a crit knife to use in the first place can take dozens of hours (apologies, I already have three and got two of them in an hour yesterday). So I can see how this may not be that urgent. Also, this is fundamentally a PvE game, so delays on something like this are less of a big deal (“no nerfs ever,” however, is not a recipe for a healthy or fun game in the long term, even in PvE).
As for the first round of buffs, it’s hard to know where they will even start. Outside of a bugged interaction or two, it’s commonly thought that Amon may be the weakest Vault Hunter right now. Multiple trees on multiple characters are not performing as well as they should compared to other options. Loads of legendaries are not worth using.
I hope they also fix some things, in addition to doing buffs, as I’d argue that’s a higher priority. I wrote a very long list of these yesterday, from an overabundance of charge/single-fire guns to inventory bugs to grappling hook annoyances. I wouldn’t expect them to all be fixed in one patch, but I’d much rather these things be changed than the patch be 100% focused on buffs. There’s no timing on this patch yet, but hopefully we will hear more soon.
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