Borderlands 4’s first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks has arrived, with Gearbox having waited until they’d had a chance to try getting some of the looter shooter’s technical gremlins under control and observed the state of play balance-wise before whipping out the ol’ nerf/buff cannon.
That approach has meant some arguably overpowered early builds haven’t been coded out of existence as quickly as players might have imagined, with the developers seeming keen to avoid knee-jerk reactions when it comes to vault hunter changes in particular. I assume the fact they’ve had a DLC robo-cowboy to help keep post-happy exec Randy Pitchford occupied has probably helped maintain that lack of sudden and potentially ill-fated moves.
“For today’s update, we wanted to focus on creating greater build diversity by adjusting underperforming skills,” the studio wrote in the notes for this first significant balance patch. “Amon in particular gets a host of adjustments to bring him closer in line with the general power level of the other Vault Hunters. Vex’s summons and Rafa’s melee power see adjustment to make those builds more viable in the late endgame. Finally, Harlowe has a couple tweaks to make sure Stasis is getting value for players.”
As you might have gleaned from that, a glance through the full notes yields many instances of the word “increased” across all four hunters. Amon’s gotten by far the most changes, with more than 60 bullet points by my count having affected everything from his actions skills to augments and passives of various varieties. Vex has seen slightly less tweaks across all three of those spheres, while Rafa’s had action skill, capstone and passive changes. Harlowe only sees two tweaks, both to her stasis-related damage.
“Looking to the future, we’re investigating stats and behaviors on Class Mods, Rep Kits, Shields, and Firmware to make sure they are providing avenues to greater build diversity,” Gearbox continued. “We are also planning to fix a number of unintended interactions. These exploits prevent us from creating meaningful build diversity as they trivialize content that is otherwise meant to challenge players.” Judging by that last bit, this overpowered Vex build may soon be less godly.
Finally, it’s worth noting that this update’s also seen the devs add in “auto-clearing of Borderlands 4 stale shaders on version update”, which they say should help prevent “performance degradation on some PCs”.
If you’ve not already, make sure to check out our Borderlands 4 review by Jasmine Mannan for impressions of the game that aren’t delivered via an all caps tweet from the Pitchford.
