Borderlands 4 is rife with overpowered builds that use what developer Gearbox has described as “unintended interactions” to cause massive damage, even to the game’s toughest bosses on the hardest difficulties. The most infamous of these is ‘the knife,’ which Gearbox has said it’s aware of but won’t nerf just yet. Now, there’s another new best boss melting build to add to the list.
YouTuber NickTew, who had led the charge online with his knife build discovery, set out to “nerf proof” their Vex in light of Gearbox’s comments about potentially stamping out knife builds. In doing so, he found a way to cause so much damage from a single clip of a gun’s magazine that Borderlands 4 spat out a “total existence failure” message in the boss health bar — something I had no idea even existed in the game.
In a new video, NickTew had to slow down the gameplay just to be able to show this ‘total existence failure’ message in action, so quickly did the boss’ health disappear.
The interaction requires you have a gun with the Torgue Licensed Sticky Magazine and the Taser alt-fire mode. A Torgue Sticky mag enables the weapon to fire sticky projectiles called “gyrojets” that attach to enemies and explode for massive damage upon reloading or switching modes. In this case, switching to Taser.
NickTew demonstrates how you can load an enemy up with gyrojets via an SMG due to its fast rate of fire and big magazine, then right before reloading, switch to the underbarrel taser, causing the gyrojets to explode and cause much more damage than they would if reloading normally. As NickTew put it, with this build you’re able to “snap the boss out of existence.” This works on every character, and it does not involve using the knife.
The only issue here is an SMG with this specific combination (Torgue Sticky and alt-fire) is a relatively rare find, so you’ll need to do a spot of farming to nab one. Or perhaps you have one anyway, sitting in your inventory just waiting to cause havoc.
NickTew isn’t entirely sure why this combination causes so much damage. Is it a bug, or are there calculations going on under the hood that spark this huge uptick? It certainly feels like one of Borderlands 4’s “unintended interactions,” so it’s probably not long for this world.
This week, Gearbox indicated that in the short-term it plans to buff underperforming gear and skills rather than nerf overpowered builds. That means instakill builds like this one are safe for now. Confirmation came 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.”
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.
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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 [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
