Borderlands 4 director warns next patch will target overpowered builds relying on “unintended interactions”

This week’s Borderlands 4 patch has arrived, firing some gear balancing tweaks into the looter shooter’s innards, then probably dropping a cringey catchphrase. Developers Gearbox have also revealed some of what’s in store for the larger patch that’s set to arrive next week, with performance fixes back on the menu alongside some more in-depth balancing that’ll touch “those unintended interactions” folks have been relying on for overpowered builds.

It’s all in the line with the nice rhythm the studio have settled into following an initial flurry of activity in response to the game running not goodly on PC out of the gate. Last week brought a big patch featuring the first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks, so this week sees a chaser precede the next shot.

“We’re continuing to monitor feedback to the vault hunter changes and identifying areas to make further improvements,” Gearbox wrote in the notes for this chaser patch, before listily outlining the following gear adjustage:

• Ruby’s Grasp damage increased by 50%
• Ruby’s Grasp fire rate increased by 25%
• Bully drone damage increased by 50%
• Bully base damage increased by 50%
• Rangefinder base damage increase by 30%
• Queen’s Rest spawn chance increased from 30% to 50%
• Queen’s Rest fire rate increased by 50%
• Seventh Sense orb damage increased by 250%
• Hellwalker base damage increase 30%
• Convergence base damage increase by 25%

There are a couple of other tweaks. The legendary tediore shotgun anarchy will now properly award stacks of mutualism when auto-reloading or netting kills, every single pet now gets the appropriate chance of a critical hit from passives and gear, and Vex’s bleed now counts as status effect damage. That last one sounds like it could be bad news for those exploity Vex knife builds, but even if it isn’t, overpowered Vexers likely won’t sleep well for the next seven days.

I say that because Gearbox have made clear next week’s patch will “address unintended interactions in certain vault hunter skills, and make adjustments to overperforming gear”, with Borderlands 4 director Graeme Timmins going as far as to phrase a tweet about it as a warning to those with overpowered builds. He’s gotten some pushback from anti-nerfage campaigners, and responded by writing: “We have future content like the upcoming Invincible that we want players to find challenge/accomplishment in. If we balanced that content around bad gear, it would remove build diversity, forcing players into specific builds using said gear.”

Also teased for next week’s patch were “another round of adjustments that will focus on class mods, repkits, shields, and firmware being tuned to provide greater viability for melee builds, and account for deficiencies in other specific vault hunter builds”, and more stabs at improving the game’s performance. In the meantime, maybe pen a poetic eulogy for Vex’s boss-destroying knifeage, lest the heady days of its max bleeding be forgotten.