Gearbox has launched the first major balance update for Borderlands 4, implementing a wide range of significant buffs across all Vault Hunters.
In an accompanying blog post, the developer explained its goal is to empower players to “build their perfect Vault Hunter” by encouraging experimentation with gear, skills, and specialization trees. To achieve this, the update focuses on increasing build diversity by strengthening underperforming abilities.
Most notably, Amon, a character widely considered the weakest, has received substantial upgrades to bring his performance in line with the other Vault Hunters. The patch also enhances Vex’s summons and Rafa’s melee power to make those builds more viable in the late endgame. Additionally, Harlowe’s abilities were tweaked to ensure her Stasis skill provides more value to players.
This update honors Gearbox’s previous commitment to prioritize buffs before addressing overpowered builds, leaving even those based on “unintended interactions” untouched for now.
However, the studio warned that these exploits will be addressed in the future. “These exploits prevent us from creating meaningful build diversity as they trivialize content that is otherwise meant to challenge players,” Gearbox stated. The team is also investigating stats on Class Mods, Rep Kits, Shields, and Firmware to further broaden build variety in upcoming patches.
Beyond character balancing, the update introduces a key performance improvement for PC players. It now automatically clears stale shaders on version updates, a fix designed to prevent the performance degradation and stuttering issues that affected some users after the last patch.
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