Borderlands 4's fresh out the gun factory—which means busted interactions abound. Like, for example, the dreaded Crit Knife, which has been the terror of endgame bosses the world over. And while Gearbox isn't planning on nerfing these right now, it uh, might want to take just a tinsey winsey look at this one.
As discovered by YouTuber NickTew (thanks, IGN), it turns out you can obliterate most bosses in BL4 with a measly 25 out of the 49 skill points specced into gun damage. And even then, that's not strictly necessary.
In the video above, they demonstrate this by rocking up with a character on Ultimate Vault Hunter 5 difficulty and clapping Primordial Guardian Inceptus until its health bar reads a big fat "Oof!"
"My damage was so high that I, for the first time ever, saw the damage proc 'Total Existence Failure'," NickTew explains. "But in that clip I was kind of min-maxing my damage." Ergo, using the crit knife "that everybody hates."
However, "you basically don't need anything for this to work other than a gun" and a bit of bonus gun damage. Playing Vex, NickTew explains that he only has around 25 of the 49 skill points the game gives you for some spare gun damage.
The reason this works is because of a bugged interaction on weapons with the "Torgue - Licensed Sticky Magazine" attachment and the taser alt fire. Ordinarily, these weapons pump enemies full of a bunch of sticky rounds that explode when you reload or switch modes.
However, for some bizarre reason, if you switch to your underbarrel taser and shoot it, the explosion damage for each shot goes from a piddly average of around 5,000-10,000 damage to a whopping 300,000 average per explosion.
This scales with mag size (more bullets before reload means more explosions)—and you do need a big enough mag to give you the precious seconds to swap over and then fire the taser, given the stickies start exploding when you start switching. In other words, you need to have enough stickies leftover by the time you fire the taser to get the bang for your buck.
Best guess I have is that the explosives start using the taser's damage modifier instead of the SMG's base damage the moment NickTew swaps over. Out of curiosity, I did some quick napkin math, and it lines up:
- The sticky explosions do around 5,000-9,777 damage, or just roughly under/over 100% of the gun's base bullet damage of 944. There's some variation/RNG involved due to skills or talents, but it's roughly in line with the gun's base hurt-per-bullet.
- With the taser fired, the sticky explosions do something in the ballpark of 300,000 damage a pop. The taser on his gun deals 2,575 damage a second, which would only be 25,570 with a 100% modifier.
- But given the taser runs for a long time (I counted 10 seconds on NickTew's screen), that's more like 25,750 base damage over the taser's entire duration...
- ... Which would shake out to 250,750 with that modifier applied. Add in the Sticky magazine's escalating damage and other skills, and you get within that 300,000+ damage ballpark.
That's a bunch of assumptions made, but the numbers are within close enough striking distance of each other that I'm pretty confident the explosives are adopting the taser's base damage (over the entire 10-second duration) the moment it's fired—regardless of whether it hits the target or not. NickTew also fires it into the air, and it does the same thing.
Anyway, I figure this might be one of the interactions Gearbox does patch out. There's a difference between a cool, busted build and an entire gun obliterating endgame bosses with a mere pittance of skill points: Still, I think Mr. Torgue himself would approve. I can only imagine how overkill this would be using an infinite ammo Peacebreaker Rafa build, which already obliterates health bars with Torgue stickies.
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