Borderlands 3 patch rolls back major FL4K nerf and makes Moze mod less powerful

Gearbox has finally stopped nerfing Borderlands 3's robot vault hunter FL4K. After two nerfs in as many weeks, the developer has decided it went too far, and is partially rolling back a recent change to FL4K's Leave No Trace skill, which has a chance to return ammo to the player's magazine when they land a critical hit.

In a Borderlands 3 update last week, Gearbox added a two-second cooldown to the skill because it was "returning much more ammo than intended". Now, it has reduced the cooldown to 0.3 seconds, which might be a good middle ground. The new cooldown should "retain the promise of the ability" without making it super-powered again, it said in patch notes this week.

Gearbox also nerfed Moze's Bloodletter class mod, which converts healing into shields. It was creating "overwhelming synergies", so Gearbox has increased the delay on Bloodletter by half and dropped the recharge rate of Bloodletter shields by 50%. "This should help encourage the intended use of this class mod, which is to heal shields manually, not automatically," the developer said.

Just like with FL4K, Gearbox also partially rolled back last week's big nerf to Moze's Means of Destruction skill, which gives you a small chance of recovering a grenade whenever you deal splash damage. The nerf, intended to stop Moze spamming infinite grenades, added a two-second cooldown—that's been reduced to 0.3 seconds. "The infinite grenade bug will be addressed in a future patch but we wanted to enable other builds that use Means of Destruction so we dramatically reduced the re-trigger delay to a reasonable number," Gearbox said.

Elsewhere, Amara got a couple of buffs. Her phasegrasp ability, which summons a giant fist to hold an enemy in place for a few seconds, now has double the range, and will cooldown immediately if you miss with it, letting you try again. Her Alacrity power, which nets you a reload speed bonus for each stack of Rush, now gives you an extra bonus when you rank it up: previously players were only receiving one point worth of bonuses even if they ranked up the skill.

The patch also made a number of bug fixes, including adjusting the drop rates for the Pain, Terror, and Agonizer 9000 bosses to make them drop higher quality loot. You can read the full patch notes here. If you're grinding through the endgame, check out our updated list of every Borderlands 3 Shift code that works right now.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.