The best Harlowe builds in Borderlands 4: Gravitar guide

The best Harlowe builds in Borderlands 4 take full advantage of the Gravitar's experience as a former Maliwan combat scientist, using her mastery of battlefield manipulation and the elements to great effect. Oddly enough, Harlowe feels the most like the traditional Siren we've come to know, more so than the best Vex builds, despite her reliance on tech.

Nevertheless, the Gravitar brings much more to the table than you'd initially expect, so I'll go over three of the best Harlowe builds at max level below. I'll cover the skills, augments, and capstones to pick, alongside gear that works with them to make this character shine.

Best Harlowe builds in Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 - Official Gameplay Overview - Harlowe - YouTube

Watch On

Harlowe has three unique skill trees, each with their own associated action skill, just like the other Vault Hunters in Borderlands 4:

• Creative Bursts: Focuses on Harlowe's Chroma Accellerator, dealing elemental damage, causing status effects, and action skill spamming. There are also many perks that boost weapon DPS, whether through rate of fire, elemental buffs (radiation or cryo), or straight-up damage increases.
• Seize the Day: This is the premier AoE tree in perhaps the entire game, built around putting multiple enemies in stasis so that they share damage thanks to Harlowe's unique trait. There are lots of boosts to both weapon and ability power, with an emphasis once more on cryo damage.
• Cosmic Brilliance: Unquestionably the most team-focused tree in the game, you can buff allies' shields, reload speed, action skill cooldown, cryo/radiation damage, lifesteal, and even add ricochets into the mix. That's not to say there aren't some selfish perks, though, as this tree also has lots of effects that only apply to you, like making your melee elemental, bonus damage the larger your overshield is, and gamma ray shots.

Harlowe's trait is Entanglement: Whenever Harlowe uses her action skill, any enemies damaged/affected become entangled. Entangled enemies share a portion of both gun and skill damage with all other entangled enemies.

Now I'll go over three Harlowe builds, starting with what's generally her strongest setup for most situations, Creative Bursts/Chroma Accelerator. I've listed the skills, augments, and captones in the order you'll want to pick them up, though remember that you can respec if you'd like to tweak things while levelling.

Harlowe build: Dirty Bomb

Image 1 of 2

• Primary skill tree: Creative Bursts
• Action skill: Chroma Accelerator
• Favoured element: Radiation

One of Harlowe's defining traits across all her trees is her knack for elemental damage and status effects, and this build uses that for some truly remarkable single-target and AoE radiation damage.

Things start off relatively simple, with a bunch of perks that boost elemental damage and status effects, like Fuzzy Math, Elementary, and Enriched. But the build really starts heating up when you put together the Neutron Capture augment—which transfers a portion of her action skill damage to weapon radiation damage—with Carry the One, Glow Up, Test Subjects, and Chain Reactor. Now, you'll have a chance to entangle nearby enemies, deal bonus radiation damage to entangled enemies, recharge your action skill faster, and gain bonus critical hit chance. Then there's Fissile Launcher and the Demon Core capstone, which fire off radiation darts at enemies all the time.

This build also takes some perks from the Cosmic Brilliance tree, too—Action at a Distance, Momentum, and Neutron Decay—as this massively increases your DPS. I recommend picking these last so that you can prioritise unlocking the Demon Core capstone, Chain Reactor, and Dirty Bomb earlier.

Here's where you should spend your skill points:

If there were any skill points left, or if you wanted to save some points elsewhere, you could look at perks like Elephant's Foot, Practical Applications, and Wasted from the Creative Bursts tree, Creative Overflow and Resonance Cascade from Cosmic Brilliance, or Parallel Circuit and Pulse Drive from Seize the Day.

Harlowe build: Ties That Bind V2

Image 1 of 2

• Primary skill tree: Seize the Day
• Action skill: Zero-Point
• Favoured element: Cryo

Amara's Ties That Bind build from Borderlands 3 was absolutely busted when it came to mobbing, able to stasis a target and tie multiple enemies together so they shared damage. Well, Harlowe's unique trait basically already does the latter, while the Seize the Day skill tree handles the first part—and somehow even adds more damage-sharing into the mix. This build works incredibly well for mobbing, though I'd recommend swapping to a Chroma Accelerator build if you're exclusively farming bosses, since this is undoubtedly more AoE-focused.

By default, Zero-Point will only stasis a single target, which is a bit of an issue at first since it means you're not really entangling many enemies. The Strange Attractor augment you'll unlock early on can get around this issue a little thanks to its ability to entangle enemies you critically hit, but it's really the combination of Ripple Effect, Too Coolant for Schoolant, Concurrence, Control Group, and Falling Bodies that lets you quickly stasis and entangle entire groups. Now, enemies won't be able to move and they'll share all the damage they take.

That's where damage boosting perks come in, like Parallel Circuit, Unstable Ice-otope, and most importantly, Triple Point. That last perk heavily increases your cryo damage against entangled enemies, so grab a cryo weapon and let loose. A Jakobs weapon (or part) would be especially good here, since these guns automatically ricochet to nearby enemies, further sharing damage between targets.

This build also takes perks from the top of the Creative Bursts tree to increase your weapon damage and status effects. As much as I'd love to add the Refraction skill from the Cosmic Brilliance tree, which gives you ricochet chance against entangled enemies (which stacks on top of the innate ricochet of Jakobs' weapons), it's too far down the tree to unlock it right now. However, you could potentially use a class mod that provides it.

Here's where you should spend your skill points:

Harlowe build: Nuclear Winter

• Primary skill tree: Cosmic Brilliance
• Action skill: Flux Generator
• Favoured element: Cryo/Radiation

This Cosmic Brilliance build admittedly isn't the best for either bossing or mobbing, and I'd generally recommend either of the previous builds above this one. However, if you really want to use the Flux Generator, or if you're playing with friends, then this is still a relatively powerful (and fun) option. Generally speaking, the goal is to drop your Flux Generator onto enemies, then stay inside to buff yourself up while you clean up the mess around you.

A key part of this build is the Creative Overflow and Latent Charge perks, which increase your damage the higher your overshield is. Since the Flux Generator already gives you an overshield, it's easy enough to trigger, but you can make this synergy even stronger with Mains Hum and Distribution Function.

From here, it's all about increasing your damage output, whether through elemental damage, gun damage, or critical hit buffs. Nothing does this better than the Nuclear Winter augment, which causes you and your allies to deal bonus cryo damage while you're inside your Generator, and bonus radiation damage while you're outside it.

This plays into several other perks, like Decoherence, Refraction, Meltdown, and especially Excited State, which gives you an automatic critical hit against enemies inside your Generator, to quickly buff yourself up whenever you drop your skill on the ground.

Here's where you should spend your skill points:

Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection
Borderlands 4 characters: Meet your new Vault Hunters and find out who's strongest.
Borderlands 4 Rafa builds: The speed-demon Exo-Soldier.
Borderlands 4 Vex builds: The spooky Siren.
Borderlands 4 Amon builds: The fierce Forgeknight.