Hi! I'm Stone Swan. I'm an Amara build crafter, making builds since around February 2020. I was originally inspired by Moxsy, and tried to differentiate myself by making off-meta builds. I made a green and blue tree gun build. I made the first Amara slam build with the Spark Plug. I had the goal of making true melee viable in Mayhem 4, which back then was the highest difficulty. I accomplished that goal within a couple months with the original Black Swan build, and thought I was done.

Mayhem 2.0 rolled around, and I couldn't make anything off-meta work until Gearbox did a couple major balance changes and introduced mayhem scaling. Soon, the builds started flowing again. A generalist gun/melee/action skill build. A Downfall build that was later converted to Phaseslam and Phasecast to participate in the two End Game Rush community challenges (and got 2nd place for the second EGR). Old builds were updated, purple tree builds were made, Nimbus was used somewhat successfully. I discovered how the Ice Spiker artifact was tied to Amara's action skills and made my second slam build type.

Making full-length build videos was fun and very rewarding, but I continued to have less and less time to dedicate to them. I decided to go out with a bang and put out 9 builds at the same time, covering three of them in depth in my Whiteness of Swans video. That was the end of my YouTube builds, but not the end of build making in general; DLC 6 and level 72 were yet to come.

I continued making builds but not making videos for them, only showing them on stream. I made more true melee builds. I got Amara to deal damage over time (dots) from guns (NOT Unleash the Dragon) on a level that erases raid bosses extremely quickly. I discovered that the Victory Rush artifact wasn't working properly, and the community responded loudly enough that Gearbox fixed it. I figured out the radsplosion damage formula, and made countless other small discoveries. I made grenade builds, more slam build types, a Hellfire build, builds using nearly every legendary class mod, and even a couple purple ones. A sniper build. A launcher build. Even builds where you can shoot the Guardian Angel effectively. You name it, I've probably tried it.

I accomplished my final goal: a true melee Amara that can punch to death True Guardian Takedown enemies without overly relying on action skill damage (Phaseflare, Ties That Bind) or Unleash The Dragon or other forms of melee damage, while also using tropes from the Mayhem 3 days: Phaseslam, Blitz, Brawler Ward shield. Once that was done, I knew it was time to make this site and share everything.

Shoutout to my friends, acquaintances, and inspirations along my build-making journey, in no particular order: Moxsy, CZ47, MadGlenny, lesshandsomejack, tbj_quag, soccerchickTV, LazyData, SomeOldGuyInHawaii, Skkra, Ancient_Rune, xEternalDragonx, Lonemasterino, nino_salvaje, and I'm sure many more I'm forgetting...

Much love,
Stone_Swan