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A true melee build focused on the Unleash The Dragon artifact. Amber Swan SYNOPSIS A true melee build focused on the Unleash The Dragon artifact. INTRO This rather leisurely true melee build involves drive-by punching and leaving enemies to die alone somewhere behind you. The goal here is to punch once and let the fire dot from Unleash The Dragon take care of the rest. As always, there are caveats with things that cannot be punched and things that do not take dot damage. But if you want to insta-melt raid bosses while barely paying attention and have a blast zipping around and sucker punching mobs, this is your build. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES With Sustainment, Guardian Angel, and move speed from Mindfulness, this might seem like a tanky build. But punching is your healing, and the goal of this build is to just punch once for every enemy. You still have to be mindful (heh) moving around between encounters. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT This is somewhat complicated. Unleash The Dragon snapshots the damage of your punch and deals fire damage over time based on that. So you want to remove as much HP as possible with your first punch. However, Anima gives a status effect damage boost to whatever your action skill element is, and the Unleash The Dragon is always fire. For removing the most HP from an enemy, there's an argument for shock, because lots of enemies are shielded, and shock damage against shields gets huge bonus. That big hit against their shield will make UTD very strong, especially with a 150/90 anointment. Run shock against Maliwan enemies and Guardians. Run incendiary against COV enemies and creatures. Even though COV enemies can be shielded and armored, there's still lots of pure flesh enemies. PUNCHING GUN Guardian Angel, with 150/90 anoint and a 60% melee damage blade. By punching enemies and running away, not only do you increase your survivability, but the Guardian Angel bonus increases the damage of the UTD dot. This gun is also a survivability tool. It can be used to get yourself up from FFYL, if there's no enemy in punching range. The Guardian Angel projectiles will double dip Indiscriminate, so you can shoot the nearest enemy and other enemies in the periphery will take lots of damage. It can be shot at enemies for healing through Sustainment if you're taking lots of damage. Alternating between shooting and punching is the recommended way to face True Guardian Takedown Guardians; you will clear much faster if Guardian Angel Indiscriminate projectiles are also taking chunks out of them. BACKUP GUN Blade Fury, with 150/90 anoint. This is for flying enemies such as Seras and Death Spheres. Shoot them once and then UTD take care of it while you turn your focus back to grounded enemies. This can also be used to help you clear the crystal phases of True Guardian Takedown. CLASS MOD Phasezerker, with as many points into Anima as possible. Recommended passives: action skill cooldown rate, melee damage, area damage, area damage radius. Alternatively, outside of True Takedowns, an Elementalist with points into Wildfire can help with area clear. At 10/5, Wildfire has an 80% proc rate, so you will often kill two enemies for one punch. SHIELD Brawler Ward, with ASE Apply Terror anoint. Preferably low level, but that is not required. This shield will consistently provide a huge buff to your punches. A Stinger shield with Action Skill Start anointment is recommended for the crystal phases of the True Guardian Takedown. Otherwise, you will very likely get overwhelmed. ARTIFACT Unleash The Dragon arti fact. It can only roll with 2 out of 3 passives, those three passives being incendiary damage, melee damage, and incendiary resistance. Skip the incendiary resistance. GRENADE Fish Slaps, in corrosive and radiation, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. Radiation for Maliwan Takedown because of immune heavies (see "Notes - Immune Maliwan Heavies" section below), and corrosive for dealing with most raid bosses. Shock can be used for one shotting Seer. GAMEPLAY LOOP Set your action skill element appropriately. Grasp an enemy and punch it or a linked enemy. Move quickly away to the next enemy, punch it, move to the next, and so on. Throw some zig zag in there to dodge enemy attacks while approaching your next target. Remember, the further away you get from your punched enemy, the stronger the fire dot on them becomes because of the Guardian Angel. For bosses like the Valks, you can punch them and run away just fine. For tankier bosses, simply throwing a Fish Slap at them is recommended. NOTES - IMMUNE MALIWAN HEAVIES You have your action skill element set to shock vs Maliwan enemies, as noted above. However, there are two different problems created by shock and fire immune Heavies in the Maliwan Takedown. For shock Heavies, you can ground slam them, because UTD also works with slam, and your slam is non-elemental. Keep the Heavy at the edge of your slam radius, so that the Guardian Angel applies more damage to it. Fire heavies, no matter whether you choose to punch or slam them, simply won't take any damage from the UTD dot. For these enemies, delete them with a Fish Slap. NOTES - DOT IMMUNE ENEMIES Badass Maliwan Heavies of any element, along with Anointed Tinks, will not get the UTD dot applied to them. Use your radiation Fish Slap against them. Blue Fire and Red Rain also are dot immune; use your corrosive Fish Slap against those two. NOTES - MAYHEM 10/11 Most of the time, true melee builds should play on Mayhem 10 take advantage of Speed Demon, and this is one of those times. Other benign Mayhem 10 modifiers: Medium - Healy Avenger, Hard - Drone Ranger, Very Hard - Not The Face or Post Mortem. Post Mortem is usually fatal to true melee builds, because your killing punch will send you directly into the spawning Death skull. However, this build, you punch and run away, so you can safely dispatch the Skull from a distance with your Blade Fury. NOTES - GUARDIAN RANK Most of the time, disable Shield Reboot and Emergency Response, so that your Brawler Ward remains depleted as often as possible. When using the Stinger with Action Skill Start for Guardian Takedown crystals, re-enable those perks temporarily.

A very strong true melee-focused build that can blitz through any content, if you know what you're doing. Ruby Swan SYNOPSIS A very strong true melee-focused build that can blitz through any content, if you know what you're doing. INTRO Ruby Swan, along with Sapphire Swan and Emerald Swan , is one of my "jewels" of true melee builds. This one is the "red jewel", designated as such because it uses a red tree action skill, Ties That Bind. But it's not as simple as that. This build probably goes the deepest into the theory crafting rabbit hole, pulls out some tricks I KNOW you don't know, and comes back with tons of power and highlight reel potential. It can even use some guns quite effectively, allowing for a wild run & gun & punch experience. Highly, highly recommended. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES If you want to focus more on guns, move three points from Clarity to Personal Space. Two of the traditionally only gun-focused skills, Indiscriminate and Transcend, actually come into play while punching. Find out why in the "Notes" sections at the end. Burn Both Ends will be self-stacked via our class mod and a bonus element. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever element you want the element of your punch to be, which should be suited to the content you're facing. Except Cryo. This build uses the Spiritual Driver class mod, so selecting cryo will make you slow yourself. PUNCHING GUN 1 The Psycho Stabber, with a Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. The general purpose puncher; use this against beefy isolated targets or if you feel patient enough to punch a boss rather than taking the easy way out and throwing a fish. PUNCHING GUN 2 Unforgiven, with a Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment, preferably with high crit damage on the card and a melee attachment. See "Notes - Unforgiven" below. PUNCHING GUN 3 Ionic Disruptor, with a Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. See "Notes - Ionic Disruptor" below. PUNCHING GUN 4 Guardian Angel, with a Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. See "Notes - Guardian Angel" below. SHOOTING GUNS While this build can use guns in conjunction with punching, you need to stick with strong guns: Hellwalker, Beacon, Free Radical, Kickcharger. All with the same Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. BACKUP GUN Face Puncher, preferably with x14 pellets, with the Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. This is to help take down bosses and flying enemies and anything that annoys you from a distance. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, with 3 points into Mindfulness for the movement speed that every true melee build requires. Recommended passives: melee damage, action skill damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash damage, splash damage radius. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. SHIELD Brawler Ward with 300% melee damage, preferably low level but not required, with the ASE Apply Terror anointment. If this shield isn't broken immediately by the Driver dot, enemies will take care of it for you. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector Static Charge. The Driver plus Elemental Projector will give you heaps of elemental damage, greatly helping the strength of your punches. The most important passive is Area of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot, which will also increase area damage radius. Other recommended passives: melee damage, action skill cooldown rate, movement speed, elemental damage. GRENADE Fish Slap with an ASE 50% bonus element. Match your Fish Slap element and the bonus element to the content you're facing. This will require carrying multiple Fish Slaps. Throw this grenade for easy bossing, or to get rid of pesky mobs from a distance, or to deal with immune heavies in the Maliwan Takedown without switching your action skill element. GAMEPLAY LOOP Assuming you're just holding the Psychostabber, the thought process is very simple: grasp enemy, punch enemy. You have 234% increased elemental damage from your gear and skill tree. The Static Charge chains will double dip that damage, because they're based on the strength of your melee hit and then get their own damage formula, including elemental damage. A Static Charge chain was used to one-tap Seer in the gameplay video above. Not only will the Static Charge kill nearby mobs for you, it will also give you lots of Groundbreaker for your next punch while doing so. Your ASE 50% bonus element on your Fish Slap will get added on top of your Groundbreaker damage. This build is extremely efficient when mobbing, even in True Guardian Takedown. If you can't get ahold of a flying enemy with Ties That Bind, shoot 'em down with the Face Puncher. Hold the Psycho Stabber or Guardian Angel and throw Fish for bosses. If you're shooting guns, make sure your gun element matches your action skill element. This means no cryo or radiation guns. NOTES - UNFORGIVEN This is where the rabbit hole begins. Buckle up. You can punch with the Unforgiven for its ridiculous crit multiplier. "Melee can't crit in this game, though", you say. While this is true, melee-adjacent things can. In the "Gameplay Loop" section above, I talked about the strength of Static Charge chains. These chains can also crit and, when they do, they'll be buffed by the Unforgiven and Transcend in the blue skill tree. Static Charge chains basically aim for center-of-mass, so they rarely crit against humanoid enemies. However, the creatures in the Guardian Takedown have mostly forward-facing crit areas, and the Static Charge chains will crit them quite often. In the gameplay video above, you'll hear lots of Hollowpoint explosions when punching those creatures, because the Static Charge is killing them with crits. Let's talk about that: Hollowpoints while meleeing. In case it hasn't dawned on you, this is effectively a way to punch for billions of damage. Not only will a Hollowpoint clear out enemies around the kill (hence why the Area of Effect passive is recommended on the Static Charge), but they will give you enormous Groundbreaker damage going into your next punch. Your Groundbreaker damage will be above damage cap. And that's not all... Going further into the rabbit hole, an ASE 50% bonus element's damage source is "bullet". What does that mean? Well, if you melee with, for example, a Re-Volter or Urad bonus element, those bonus elements will get mayhem scaling along with the melee attack. Same goes with action skills: your Phasecast, for example, gets 200% bonus shock damage from Re-Volter because the bonus element gets the same action skill mayhem scaling. This is because the damage source of those bonus elements (along with the Terror Cryo bonus element) matches whatever attack they go along with. This is not the case for ASE 50% bonus elements on grenades and shields. Their damage source is always "bullet". If you attach one of these bonus elements to your melee or action skill, it'll be 16x or 31x weaker, respectively. There is no mayhem scaling for bullets. However, Groundbreaker, which can be accumulated through mayhem scaled attacks, is not itself mayhem scaled. Therefore, ASE 50% bonus elements properly add their 50% damage to Groundbreaker. Why does this matter? Because bullets can crit. If you have an ASE 50% bonus element active and you punch a crit spot, the bonus element will crit. Let's say you have, for example, 10 million Groundbreaker damage build up. This is very easy to do between Ties That Bind and Static Charge and even your guns if you're shooting things. An ASE 50% bonus element adds 5 million damage to that Groundbreaker. Now imagine, with that damage stored, you punched a crit spot while holding an Unforgiven and with Transcend procced. That 5 million turns into 67 million . We're already in crazy territory here, but now you need to realize that this enormous ASE 50% critting is likely going to kill the enemy, proccing Hollowpoint directly on the enemy you're punching. If there were any other mobs in range, they're gone now, and you have billions of Groundbreaker damage stored for your next punch. Billions that the ASE 50% is going to apply to again . Yeah. So the Unforgiven is not only for your Static Charge chains, but also for your punches directly. This is why, vs the creatures in the gameplay video, you see me grasp an enemy but punch a linked enemy on the ground, instead of the grasped enemy. It's much easier to hit that crit spot when the enemy is on the ground facing you. NOTES - IONIC DISRUPTOR But wait, there's more! There's a special effect of the Ionic Disruptor where if you melee an enemy with it, that enemy will have a shock dot applied to them, and while it's applied the Disruptor's bullets deal more damage to that enemy. As you might guess, there's more going on under the hood here. Firstly, if you're holding the disruptor, it converts your melee damage to shock damage, even if you have Illuminated Fist and your action skill element set to something else. Even if you throw a corrosive Fish Slap, it will get converted to shock damage on impact while holding the Disruptor. (This is sort of a way to get around immune Heavies in the Maliwan Takedown - if you're punching with fire and come up against a fire immune heavy, you can swap to the disruptor and your punch will now be shock without changing your action skill element.) Secondly, the shock dot that gets applied by a Disruptor melee is not a normal dot. It is also a bullet. Yes, that's right, you're not going insane; every dot tick is a bullet instance. And funnily enough, it does bullet things like heal you through Sustainment and travel through Ties That Bind links. Every dot tick does those things. It's why you can storm the Maliwan Takedown bridge while true-meleeing with the disruptor: you apply dots and constantly heal from them as you move around. It's why in the gameplay video you see me punch an enemy with it, Phasegrasp one of them, and then see every enemy linked by Ties just melt. It's crazy. This is the recommended weapon to hold against Guardians in the Guardian Takedown. But you can do it pretty much anywhere. Just make sure your action skill element is also set to shock, so your Driver self-dot, and therefore Elemental Projector, are there to boost your punch. NOTES - GUARDIAN ANGEL Now it's time to have some fun. The Guardian Angel is a great gun for this build. First, it will increase the damage of your Static Charge chains, making them more likely to kill enemies and give you more Groundbreaker damage for your next punch. Second, it can be shot at enemies to build up lots of Groundbreaker damage that way. This gun's projectiles double dip Indiscriminate, so when you shoot an enemy and those bullets ricochet around, you're going to get Groundbreaker damage for your next punch. Those ricocheted bullets will also do plenty of killing all by themselves, especially with a good amount of damage from Spiritual Driver. It's fun to shoot as you're running and approaching enemies; if the bullets themselves didn't kill anything, your punch certainly will. Bonus points for when this high-projectile-count shotgun launches enemies away. Third, it can come with both a 60% bonus melee damage attachment and extra crit damage bonuses. NOTES - GUARDIAN RANK Disable Shield Reboot and Emergency Response, so that your Ward remains depleted as long as possible. NOTES - MAYHEM 10/11 You must play on Mayhem 11 with this build, even though I usually recommend Mayhem 10 and the Speed Demon modifier for true melee builds. The problem with Mayhem 10 on this build is that the only very hard modifier that doesn't completely kill the build is Not The Face, and that modifier ruins our critical hit interactions. You get enough movement speed with the Driver and Mindfulness anyway.

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Peak single-target true melee. High survivability (for a true melee build). Radsplosions. What else can you ask for? Sulphur Swan SYNOPSIS Formerly the peak single-target true melee (since eclipsed by Steel Swan ). High survivability (for a true melee build). Radsplosions. What else can you ask for? INTRO Can true melee defeat a raid boss? Can the White Elephant hit for billions of damage after being applied by a punch? It's kinda surprising, but the answer to both of those questions is: kinda... yeah. Here we have the first build added to this site after the site's launch. And oh boy did it give all the other true melee builds a run for their money. This build emerged when I tried to build around the Zheitsev's Eruption. The Eruption's reload debuff effect is extremely powerful. And being a debuff, it is a damage multiplier that is double-dipped by any double-dipping effect. Like, say, the White Elephant or the Static Charge. The White Elephant was heavily nerfed a long time ago, but if you throw enough damage formula at it, the double-dipping effect overcomes that nerf. The Static Charge has always been strong, and this build uses it very effectively, but its strength shines more in multi-target scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, this build fills in a gap that most other true melee builds on the site have left: it has radsplosions. Lots of them. (Although Golden Swan is now part of that club.) And it has pretty great survivability. And it can boss, too, so what's the catch? Just a slightly odd gameplay loop as you work with the Eruption's effect. But don't worry, it'll only take a run or two to get used to. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Max Do Harm, one point into Infusion, but no Body & Mind? You don't need it, and it can even be detrimental if you're trying to see if your punch stuck a White Elephant bomb to your enemy. Personal Space on a melee build? Personal Space applies to guns/bullets, and the ASE 50% bonus element anointment that you'll have on your grenade always counts as a "bullet". ASE 50% bonus elements apply to Groundbreaker. With all of your buffs going, your total Groundbreaker damage (including the bonus element) is going to be 7+ times as strong as the damage that built it up in the first place. That's right, this build can take Groundbreaker from 10% of the initial damage to 700+%. So, very indirectly, Personal Space is actually quite a large damage increase for your punches. Do Harm is to buff Phaseslam a bit, and Infusion is for a little bit of lifesteal when using the Face Puncher. Max swap speed is important, but no extra reload speed beyond that (no Alacrity). You want to swap to and from your Eruption often, but you also don't want it to complete its reload animation. ACTION SKILL Phaseslam. Technically, any action skill can be used. But Phaseslam will be the most effective because it will: kickstart your damage, stack Samsara, immediately proc your bonus element anointment, keep your Terror anoints cycling, proc a bit of Expedite, and stagger/ragdoll enemies. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever is suited to the content you are facing, except Cryo. It's a Driver build. DEBUFFING GUN The Zheitsev's Eruption, in radiation only , with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. The work horse of the build. The Terror Dmg anointment will get double dipped by your White Elephant (and Static Charge). Upon starting its reload/repair animation, the Eruption sends out 8 homing splash projectiles at nearby enemies. Each projectile debuffs an enemy for 20% increased damage from all sources for 6 seconds. The animation can be cancelled by the typical means: meleeing, throwing a grenade, using your action skill, swapping, mantling, etc. When the animation begins again, the projectiles get sent out again, except if you cancelled it via melee. All other cancellation methods will reproc the projectiles. So the easiest and most consistent way to reproc the projectiles is by swapping to and away from the Eruption. This is totally fine, because then you get to swap to your punching gun... PUNCHING GUN The Guardian Angel, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. No, not the Psycho Stabber, although it's not half bad. The Guardian Angel will add another multiplier for the White Elephant (and Static Charge) to double dip. It's also the gun you hold if you want Phaseslam to do some damage and get you Expedite stacks (you generally want this). FFYL /FLYING ENEMY GUN Face Puncher, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. You can also shoot the Guardian Angel at enemies if you're down, and Indiscriminate will have a good chance of getting you back up. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, mostly for proccing Elemental Projector with your action skill element. Mindfulness points are also useful for maneuverability and closing the gap. Recommended passives: action skill cooldown, action skill damage, melee damage, splash damage, splash damage radius. Getting a large splash radius means Phaseslam hits more enemies and White Elephant stickies can hit more than just the enemy they're stuck to. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. You can actually run lots of other class mods, though they will be less effective than the Driver: Golden Rule with points into Laid Bare and Mindfulness for a bit of damage and faster cooldown, Stone with points into Awakening and Do Harm, Muse with any skill points, Breaker with Find Your Center and Personal Space points, Dragon with a point into Remnant. All of the same recommended passives. SHIELD Red Suit, preferably with two Roid augments, with ASE Apply Terror anointment. The Eruption reload projectiles are splash, and would down you without this shield, especially since you're following the projectiles toward the enemy and ideally boosting splash radius. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector White Elephant. You can also use an Elemental Projector Static Charge for pretty similar results most of the time. However, the White Elephant is what's needed to take down big bosses. The Static Charge will provide more consistency in mobbing and for bosses with lots of adds (like Wotan). The only time the Static Charge truly outshines the White Elephant on this build is when mobbing with Guardians in the Guardian Takedown. Recommended passives: action skill cooldown, area-of-effect damage in the 2nd or 3rd slot (so it also increases area radius), melee damage, elemental damage, move speed. GRENADE Fish Slap, in radiation, with ASE 50% radiation damage anointment. Both aspects are pretty important. Radiation element Fish so that it gets boosted by Elemental Projector. You will almost always have a radiation dot on you (that won't damage you thanks to the Red Suit) from the Eruption projectiles. The Red Suit will also protect you from your Fish, as long as you have the White Elephant and not the Static Charge equipped. Your ASE 50% radiation bonus element will get added to your Groundbreaker when you punch, and it will be even further boosted by Elemental Projector. You're building Groundbreaker all the time via your Red Suit's aura, your White Elephant stickies (or Static Charge chains), Phaseslam, and the Eruption projectiles. This bonus element, when coupled with the Driver self-dot, will also stack Burn Both Ends for you. GAMEPLAY LOOP Before engaging in combat, shoot your Eruption until it overheats, then swap away to your Guardian Angel before the repair animation gets any further. Now it's primed for debuffing. Whenever you swap back to your overheated Eruption, a set of projectiles will get sent out and debuff enemies. (No projectiles will proc if there are no enemies around.) When entering combat, Phaseslam into some mobs while holding the Guardian Angel. Swap back to the Eruption briefly one or two times to send out one or two sets of debuffing projectiles. Then punch 1 or 3 enemies to death. Back to the Eruption again, then back to punching. Keep in mind, the debuff lasts 6 seconds, so you do need to be swapping back to the Eruption pretty often. Luckily, your relatively short window of actual punching will be very productive. Phaseslam with the Guardian Angel in your hand when it's available. Throw a Fish at enemies that are immune to your action skill element. Face Puncher annoying flying enemies. Feel free to follow your Eruption projectiles to the enemy. You want them to proc a radiation dot on you for your Elemental Projector. Standing directly next to an enemy and sending projectiles into them isn't the craziest idea. You have great survivability with the Red Suit aura and Eruption projectiles giving you steady healing with Sustainment. Samsara will pull its weight if you Phaseslammed effectively. You will sometimes get jostled around with this build. Both because you're true melee and because the Eruption projectile explosions can push you a little bit. Just persevere and punch when you can; you'll be fine. NOTES - GUARDIAN TAKEDOWN There are a few areas in the Guardian Takedown where piloting a true melee build can be very risky, for various reasons. For this build, during both crystal phases and during the last mobbing section before Scourge, take a break from the true melee for a while, lest you get overrun and/or knocked off. Instead, continually jump while alternating between reloading the Eruption and shooting the Guardian Angel at enemies. Phaseslam when available. Throw Fish if you feel like it. Maybe when you're on your last crystal you can start punching again, if you want. NOTES - RAID BOSSING The setup for raid bossing with the White Elephant is as follows. Set your action skill element appropriately and make sure the Eruption is overheated. Start with a volley of projectiles from the Eruption, then immediately follow it up with your action skill. You can use Phaseslam or base Phasecast or base Grasp. All you really need it to do is to proc your Elemental Projector and anoints. Once the Eruption is back in your hand, another set of projectiles will proc. Immediately swap to your Guardian Angel, punch 2 or 3 times, and step away. Hopefully, you attached a White Elephant sticky or two. If a sticky of a favorable element gets attached, there's potential for massive damage. If a sticky of massive damage procced, run back up again and punch for Groundbreaker. If not, or after you have punched for Groundbreaker, repeat the process, except your action skill is now on cooldown. Swap to the Eruption a couple times for a couple sets of projectiles, then punch 2 or 3 times again and back away. When your action skill is done cooling down, repeat the whole process. White Elephant is chance-based, of course, but this build is still able to take down raid bosses in a reasonable time frame, in my opinion. NOTES - HEMOVOROUS If you have patience, you can actually punch/White Elephant Hemo to death. Problem is, he's very hard to land a punch on. You have to go for his legs. Keep in mind he will move his legs to both face you and attack you as you approach. It's tough, but doable. You will need to Fish him during his flying phase, though.

Phasecast and gun-based cryo build that creates all sorts of chaos. Oblivion Amara SYNOPSIS Phasecast and gun-based cryo build that creates all sorts of chaos. INTRO Oblivion Amara is one of the two builds I originally made in 2020 after the purple tree came out, along with its sister build Fission Amara. Here it is updated for level 72, and it's very strong. This is a cryo gun and Phasecast build, and has the potential to create some very fun, very destructive shenanigans. Sometimes you might find yourself suddenly wondering where your nearby enemies went and how they died. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE ACTION SKILL Tandava for general usage, Reverberation for bossing, with the special Reverberation technique. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Always cryo, with a few exceptions. You can stick with cryo vs many armor bars, but you much switch to corrosive vs Wotan. You can also switch to better match harder content, such as fire vs Guardian Takedown creatures and shock vs Guardian Takedown Guardians. Your action skill element greatly affects your guns' power, as that is the element Unweave The Rainbow procs as. PHASECASTING GUN Guardian Angel, with either the Killstack or 200% Astral Projection anointment. Killstack is the only anointment that is attached to the player, not the gun, so if you get some Tandava/Reverberation kills while holding a Killstack Guardian Angel, that damage and reload speed will transfer when you swap back to your shooting gun. 200% Astral Projection is great for Reverberation vs bosses. SHOOTING GUNS Anything cryo and splash. Even though you can change your action skill element as mentioned above, do not deviate from cryo weapons (exception: "Notes - Frozen Heart" below) My favorites: Beacon, Recursion, Kaoson, Sand Hawk, Flipper, Plaguebearer, Anarchy, Trevonator. The reason we want to stick with cryo is because shooting and freezing enemies and then hitting them with Unweave The Rainbow is a very strong mobbing strategy, especially when coupled with radsplosions and Free The Soul. The anointment varies based on your preferred playstyle. If you want to swap to the Guardian Angel for your casts, put Consecutive hits or 150/90 on your guns. If you don't want to swap, you can put 250% Phasecast on your guns to get more gun damage. Swapping is not necessary; Tandava won't kill as often without the Guardian Angel, but it will definitely freeze enemies, allowing you to kill them easily with the aid of Unweave. Reverb will still kill if you aim it correctly. FFYL GUN My favorite FFYL strategy is to use my cryo gun to freeze a nearby enemy and get up when Unweave finishes them off. But if you're using a less powerful gun for your shooting, it may not be strong enough to freeze, so carrying something like a Consecutive Hits Free Radical or Plasma Coil may be wise. CLASS MOD Phasezerker, with points into Clarity. This class mod will allow you to automatically stack Rush and Do Harm, leading to more powerful Phasecasts and other action skill effects such as Unweave The Rainbow, Free The Soul, and Remnant. Further, it increases your cooldown and gun damage. Because of the way the Phasezerker works, you should generally cast Tandava or Reverb twice in a row for maximum Do Harm and maximum damage. Recommended passives: weapon damage, action skill cooldown rate, action skill damage, splash damage, splash damage radius, weapon crit damage, weapon type damage. SHIELD There are a few options, but the most important one is the Void Rift, with Action Skill Start anointment. It's the shield that was used for the original version of this build, and it both synergizes so well and helps create so much chaos. Upon break, it will suck nearby enemies towards you (and barrels - watch out) and then release a strong cryo nova. Further, when enemies shoot you and damage it, it responds by sending homing cryo projectiles back at them. Both of these types of damage are cryo splash, further helping us freeze things and finish them off with Unweave The Rainbow. Other options: Frozen Heart, cryo Stinger, Band of Sitorak, Plus Ultra. The Frozen Heart, with Action Skill Start anointment, is easy-mode for freezing enemies. Just cast and then shoot at whatever blocks of snow are laying around you. Unweave will take care of the rest. The cryo Stinger, with Action Skill Start anointment, is just a powerful punch in nova form. The Band of Sitorak or Plus Ultra, with ASE 50% bonus element anointment, is for when you don't want to swap to the Guardian Angel to cast. These shields provide great Topped Off uptime, especially the Band of Sitorak, which then leads to great 250% Phasecast uptime on your guns. The Band of Sitorak is especially fun with a Safe Space augment, able to send basically any enemy ragdolling. The Plus Ultra is a little slower to recharge than the Sitorak, but it doubles your health for better defense. ARTIFACT Ice Breaker Otto Idol. The most important passive is Area of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot, which will also increase area damage radius. Other recommended passives: action skill cooldown rate, movespeed, cryo damage, cryo efficiency, weapon type damage. There are a few other options for artifact prefixes: Snowdrift for moving around a boss arena. Last Stand for more survivability. Ice Spiker for another form of attack and another way to proc Samsara. GRENADE Unfortunately I have to recommend a Fish Slap, not in cryo, in order to deal with cryo immune Maliwan Heavies. Shock or radiation or fire, with an ASE 50% radiation bonus element for radsplosions. There's always the option to Groundbreaker an immune heavy with damage done to other enemies, but sometimes the timing for that can be too tight. If you don't have to worry about immunities, It's Piss or Hyperion Quasar (non sticky) or Mesmer, with ASE 50% radiation bonus element. Anything utility oriented like these works just fine. GAMEPLAY LOOP Figure out if you want to be swapping for your casts or not, and choose your weapon anoint and shield accordingly. Then you cast, you shoot, you destroy. If you're using the Void Rift and a Beacon, the OG loadout, there will be tons of things flying around, freezing, and exploding. Sometimes you have to play a game of "Are any of these blocks of ice still alive?". NOTES - FROZEN HEART An exception to using cryo-only guns is if you want to only freeze with the Frozen Heart, and use splash guns of other elements. With this setup, I would also recommend not swapping for Phasecasting, and use the 250% Phasecast anoint on your guns to keep their power up between freezes. You also would not need to use the Ice Breaker artifact. NOTES - RAID BOSSES Builds such as this have an inherent way to take out most raid bosses by Reverbing or Tandava-ing a mob and letting either Remnant hit the boss or letting it hit another mob and then you Groundbreaker the boss. Some of the weaker raid bosses can be Reverb'd directly.

A Nimbus and damage over time (dot) build. Amara Dot Com SYNOPSIS A Nimbus and damage over time (dot) build. INTRO The Nimbus class mod is still pretty weak, but it can be built around to make a fun and interesting build. The damage over time from the cloud by itself is great for mobbing, but would make very slow work of bosses if you don't supplement it with additional mechanics. Notes that the Nimbus class mod has two dots, the tiny one that's listed on the class mod itself, and one that the cloud applies based on the gun you are holding. You can ignore the one listed on the class mod; this guide only references the second one. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES There is an extra point in blue tree, and 5 points in Restless that can be moved as you like. If you want to fire your gun in addition to using the Nimbus cloud damage, you can put more points into Alacrity and/or From Rest. If you want Tandava to deal more damage, you can move 4 into Do Harm. The Nimbus cloud damage that is based on your gun looks at your gun's dot chance. Every tick of the cloud has that chance to apply the dot to an enemy within it. This is why you spec Violent Tapestry and Awakening, to increase that chance. Nothing in purple tree helps except perhaps Burn Both Ends, but speccing that would mean taking a lot more damage and therefore losing Topped Off cooldown. ACTION SKILL Tandava is the best option here, for a few reasons. 1. You need to have an action skill that ends immediately so your anoints kick in and apply to the Nimbus cloud, adding dots in different elements. 2. Having the splash version of the action skill makes you much more likely to land a hit on an enemy and proc the cloud. 3. The Phasecast 250% gun damage anoint greatly increases the cloud damage, because it increases your gun's dot damage. Glamour's aggro-relief is the best option for keeping Topped Off active, which is important because of Tandava's long cooldown. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Your action skill element determines the primary element of the Nimbus cloud, and this should be selected to match the content you are facing. GEARING STRATEGIES There are many ways to gear for this build, depending on if you want to go all-in on the Nimbus dot or if you want to supplement it with a dot from your gun. Before going into the gear recommendations, you need to know how dots work. The cloud's damage over time is based on your gun's listed dot damage. The chance for it to apply this dot is the same as the listed dot chance. All guns have a dot damage and dot chance, even non-elemental and cryo guns. Non-elemental and cryo versions of a gun have dot stats proportional to the other elemental versions. For example, a fire Ion Cannon lists 295529 card damage and 201698 dmg/s for the dot. The ratio of dot to card is 201698 ÷ 295529 or 68.25%. That ratio is the same for all Ion Cannons, and in fact all Vladof launchers. 68% is also the same cryo efficiency you'll find on any cryo Vladof launcher. (The ratio varies based on manufacturer and weapon type.) That means that a non-elemental Ion Cannon, with it's higher listed card damage of 369411 multiplied by 0.6825, has a higher hidden dot damage of 252123 (with the same dot chance). Non-elemental versions of guns create stronger Nimbus cloud dots. And cryo versions are stronger than other elements (dual element Maliwans being the exception). The strongest Nimbus cloud gun is the non-elemental Ion Cannon, while the second strongest is the Masterwork Crossbow. The third is a cryo kickcharger. The Nimbus cloud damage, being based on your gun's dot damage, is also increased by your active gun damage bonuses at the time the dot takes effect. Any skills, anointments, artifact passives, and classmod passives that add to gun damage will be factored in. The cloud dot is also increased by elemental damage. The Nimbus cloud's size and area of effect is increased by splash radius boosts on class mod and artifact, though splash damage itself does not affect the cloud's dot at all (nor does it affect gun dots). The Nimbus cloud applies a primary dot based on your action skill element, regardless of the element of the gun in your hand. The cloud will also apply a dot for each active bonus element, one per element. The bonus elements are applied at 100% of the damage of the primary dot, regardless of the bonus element's strength, whether it's a 50% ASE, a 100% Urad, or a 200% Re-Volter. Therefore, the way to get the most damage out of your cloud is to diversify your action skill element and bonus elements. Similarly, if you also choose to shoot the gun you're holding in order to apply dots from that source, you get one dot per element. Therefore, in this case, match the element of the gun you're holding to your action skill element. Your gun, then, will match your Nimbus cloud element, and be diversified from your bonus elements. Never hold a radiation gun; in all situations with this build, radiation is much more effective as bonus element, and radiation guns have the lowest base damage. With all of that explained, you can now make decisions about your gear. GUNS All guns with the 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment, and all of them single projectile. You want guns with high dot damage, whether it's listed or not. For maximum Nimbus cloud damage, hold a non-elemental Ion Cannon. Vladof Launchers have a movement speed penalty, however, so perhaps the 2nd best Masterwork Crossbow would suit you, or a non-elemental Major Kong. If you'd like to shoot the elemental gun you're holding to supplement Nimbus damage, good options are the Kickcharger, Major Kong, Slow Hand, Recursion, and Storm. The Kill-o'-the-Wisp can have a very high dot damage, but it is only applied by the orbs exploding, not the lightning chains. Shoot the Wisp for chip damage and Sustainment healing. Your non-elemental and cryo guns, if shot, will still be able to apply dots from your bonus elements, but you'll be missing the full power dot from your gun. SWAP GUN Guardian Angel, with Elemental Critical Hit anointment. Swap to this if you want to accelerate the Nimbus cloud dot damage, AFTER the dot has taken effect. Once the Nimbus cloud dot has applied your main gun's dot, swapping weapons won't change the damage of that dot. HOWEVER, if you swap before the dot applies, it will likely apply based on the Guardian Angel's much, much weaker dot value. In practice, this means waiting 2-3 seconds after the cloud has appeared before swapping. The anointment here is for triggering a large status effect explosion on enemies. The best way to do this is with a grenade. Radiation is going to be your workhorse dot for the vast majority of content, so a radiation Hex is great for critting while holding the Guardian Angel. The Guardian Angel is also your FFYL gun. You will likely have at least some dots going when you are downed, so the GA will help finish off those enemies. Additionally, you can shoot the GA at the nearest enemy and Indiscriminate projectiles, which will double dip the GA damage bonus, will kill other enemies nearby. CLASS MOD The Nimbus, with as many points into Tempest as possible. The most important passive is Splash Damage Radius, as that will increase the effective area of the Nimbus cloud. Other recommended passives: weapon damage, action skill cooldown rate, shield recharge rate (for Topped Off uptime). SHIELD There are a few options here, but all of them must have ASE 50% Radiation anointment. If you want to shoot your gun, a triple-amp One-Shotter or Mana Well or 0.m are great options. An Old God will increase a specific element's damage. A Band of Sitorak is great for Topped Off, especially with a Safe Space augment, which will help clear away approaching enemies. The Mana Well offers the most damage for your cloud, although it comes with some complications. If you have any capacity, slamming will give you a shock bonus element and start draining your shield. This can be the fourth element for your cloud, assuming your action skill element and your two anointments cover fire, corrosive, and radiation. However, you need to work that slam into your attack pattern, and you will lose the cooldown from Topped Off. Tandava with Glamour has a base 42 second cooldown, so losing Topped Off is significant. ARTIFACT Again, more options. The highest damage for your cloud is offered by the Pearl of Ineffable Knowledge. The cloud damage will ramp up on the fly as your Pearl stacks accumulate. However, the Pearl does not offer Area of Effect or Cooldown passives. An Atom Balm Victory Rush is great for more effective radsplosions. The overall best, though, is a Company Man of the appropriate manufacturer with a 50% Damage roll on the top. With the Company Man, you get gun damage as well as whole suite of good passives. The most important passive, again, is Area of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot, which will increase area radius and the effective size of your cloud. Other recommended passives: elemental damage, action skill cooldown rate, movement speed, shield recharge rate. GRENADE And still more options, with an ASE 50% bonus element anointment that's a different element from radiation and your action skill element. There's always the general crowd control grenades such Hyperion Quasar (non sticky) and Mesmer. But those will not easily take advantage of the Elemental Critical Hits anointment on your Guardian Angel. For proccing the Ele Crit anoint, the most all around useful grenade is a radiation Recurring or MIRV-tacular Hex. If you want to Ele Crit your fire or corrosive dot, a fire or corrosive Lightspeed will work. GAMEPLAY LOOP To be absolutely clear, this build clears slowly. Patience is required. However, at least Glamour allows you to relax while you wait. How you play depends on your chosen loadout. Assuming you're going for just cloud damage, you would cast at some enemies, perhaps cast again at a different group of enemies, let the dot take hold, then switch to the Guardian Angel and throw your grenade for some Ele Crits. Then you have to wait for your cooldown. While waiting, avoid damage in order to keep Topped Off active, and stay on your Guardian Angel and perhaps throw another grenade. When Tandava is cooled down, repeat. If you're trying to get the Mana Well bonus element in the mix, cast once, slam for the Mana Well bonus element, then cast again at different enemies to spread the dots around and put more enemies under the effect of Glamour. Your cooldown will be longer this time without Topped Off. If you want to shoot your guns along with the cloud, equip an amp shield. Cast, shoot, cast, shoot. Then swap, throw grenades, and await cooldown. The caveat here is that you can't swap back to your gun and fire some more, because then you will have lost your 250% Phasecast anointment. You should also, before swapping to the Guardian Angel, space out your shots so that each shot is amped. Even further, wait until an enemy dies before shooting so that your shot gets Overkill , which will increase your gun's dot. You will need to always be mindful of all of your elements: action skill element, gun element, anointment elements, element of your grenade. The Nimbus needs all the help it can get, so forgetting something can make your gameplay more painful than it needs to be. Once you're comfortable aiming your Casts and avoiding damage, you can switch to base Phasecast or Deliverance, use Allure, and equip the Band of Sitorak for a much faster action skill cooldown. NOTES - RAID BOSSING It's possible for the Nimbus cloud to take out a raid boss if you only help it along with Guardian Angel and Elemental Crits. However, it's slow going. The recommended raid bossing setup is to use the gun dot from something like the Kickcharger. Have your elements diversified like normal, equip an amp shield, equip a Toboggan, hopefully have Overkill, and fire a shot after Phasecasting with all of those bonuses applied. If the shot applied a dot, then swap to the Guardian Angel and start Ele Critting. NOTES - BONUS LOADOUT For the actual highest damage cloud dot, you can dot yourself with a low level Sellout and use an Elemental Projector Victory Rush. Gameplay loop would be as follows: shoot your foot with Sellout, swap to non-elemental Ion Cannon, cast at enemy, slam for Mana Well shock, cast again, swap and shoot your foot again, swap over to Guardian Angel and start Ele Critting. This is usually more work than it's worth, and you lose Topped Off. This would be a way to take out a tough boss with just the Nimbus cloud, though.

A Multi-tap-only Ties That Bind gun build. Leeloo Dallas Multi-tap SYNOPSIS A Multi-tap-only Ties That Bind gun build. INTRO The Multi-tap is pretty consistently underrated, so this build is simply meant to optimize and showcase it. The dang thing can get up to nearly 100K damage per bullet with 7 shots per second fire rate, with a mechanic that can make it do extra damage on reload, plus Atlas Critical Hit Damage can roll on class mods. These upsides outweigh the downsides of it being non-elemental and non-splash. Yes, the build name is a Fifth Element reference. Atlas guns sort of look like the guns they have in that movie, too. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Typical red/blue Ties That Bind gun build. However, Dread is avoided and as many reload speed skills are specced so that you can take advantage of the Multi-taps cryo projectiles on reload. This occurs every reload when at least one enemy is tagged with the tracker grenade. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. Phasecast for bossing with the 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever is suited to the content you are facing. This build has 5/5 Infusion to allow for some element matching (and lifesteal with Sustainment). GUNS Multi-tap, with Killstack anointment. An additional Multi-tap with 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment. There are perhaps other weapons that can take advantage of the fast fire rate and reload speed of this build. The Prompt Critical is not bad. You can experiment and find others. CLASS MOD Phasezerker. Skill points don't matter much. What's most important is an Atlas Critical Hit Damage passive. Other recommended passives: action skill cooldown rate, pistol damage, weapon damage, splash damage radius (for larger hollowpoints). SHIELD Re-Volter, with Action Skill Start anointment. The boost to fire rate is key for depleting the mag quickly and getting to the cryo reload. The shock bonus damage, of course, is also good. ARTIFACT Atlas Company Man, with any top rolls except Magazine Size. Recommended bottom passives: area of effect damage, reload speed, action skill cooldown rate. Avoid mag size here as well. If you set your action skill element to cryo and use a cryo bonus element on your grenade, an Ice Breaker Victory Rush would be a good substitute. GRENADE It's Piss, with various ASE 50% bonus element anointments. Change out the elements to suit your content. GAMEPLAY LOOP Grasp an enemy, shoot the tracker grenade at them, and fire away. Tracker grenade enemies between grasps, too, or don't. Using the tracker can make it hard or impossible to hit crits, but having those cryo projectiles is great for some bosses such as Anathema and the Valks. There's not much to this build. The Multi-tap melts.

Giving love to the unloved, this true melee focused-build uses Fist Over Matter and the Dragon class mod. Antimatter Swan SYNOPSIS Giving love to the unloved, this true melee focused-build uses Fist Over Matter and the Dragon class mod. INTRO In my quest to find a use for the Fist Over Matter action skill, I got lucky and also ended up with true melee and the Dragon class mod. It doesn't get much further off-meta than that. This isn't the most powerful or efficient true melee build, but it is well-synergised, and it will steadily carry you through your content. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES This is heavily over-specced into purple tree, but it still picks up two true melee essentials: Sustainment and Find Your Center. It gets a third important skill from the class mod. ACTION SKILL Fist Over Matter. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Any of the four, although there's some really nice cryo synergies in purple tree, so it's recommend to try staying on cryo. If you're fighting vs Guardians, for example, you can stay on cryo because you get shock damage from Re-Volter and Static Charge, and even Shock Stone if you're so inclined. PUNCHING GUN 1 Guardian Angel, with Terror Cryo anointment. This gun is necessary in order to get the most out of Fist Over Matter. You can punch with it while FOM is active, letting FOM kill all enemies in the vicinity while also giving you great Groundbreaker damage for your punches. PUNCHING GUN 2 Psycho Stabber, with Terror Cryo anointment. Swap to this when FOM is on cooldown. BACKUP GUN Face Puncher, with Terror Cryo anointment. Use this to take out flying enemies or whatever else may be annoying you from a distance. FFYL GUN A separate FFYL gun may not be necessary when you have the Face Puncher, but you have an extra weapon slot, so might as well. A Free Radical with Consecutive Hits anointment works well. CLASS MOD Dragon, with at least one required point into Remnant. Remnant is going to greatly help you in nearly all situations. Extra points into Do Harm are also highly recommended, as you have a lot of things that benefit from action skill damage: Remnant, Fist Over Matter, Unweave The Rainbow, Body & Mind, Free The Soul. Recommended passives: melee damage, action skill damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash damage, splash damage radius. The special effect of the Dragon class mod, where your augment is procced upon a melee kill, occurs only once with this build. Yes, unfortunately, the Dragon only procs Expedite on the first melee kill, not any subsequent melee kills. Still, it's basically a free 30% cooldown, and you'll get plenty more Expedite procs from all of your action skill damage skills. SHIELD Re-Volter, with ASE Apply Terror anointment. It will proc naturally, no need for the Action Skill Start anointment. After it breaks, killing an enemy will let it begin charging again via Shield Reboot, and taking another instance of damage will likely break it again. This loop keeps the Re-Volter effect going, without losing an anointment slot. ARTIFACT Elemental Stone Static Charge. Match the element prefix to the content you are facing. Recommended passives: melee damage, area of effect damage in the 2nd or 3rd slot, action skill cooldown rate, move speed, elemental damage. GRENADE It's Piss, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. The extra damage you get from the debuff really helps Fist Over Matter, and even your punches for that... ...matter. Utility grenades are also an option, such as the Hyperion Quasar (non sticky) or Mesmer. You can put on a Fish Slap if you're a degenerate :) GAMEPLAY LOOP Select an action skill element and Elemental Stone suited for your content. First enemy you encounter, grasp them with Fist Over Matter and find something else to punch. The further away you are from Fist Over Matter, when holding the Guardian Angel, the more damage it will deal to the grasped enemy and any others near it. Keep an eye on your action skill active yellow icon, and when FOM is over, swap over to your Psycho Stabber and continue punching. When FOM is done cooling down, repeat the above. It's actually pretty straightforward. While FOM is active, it will grant you healing through Sustainment, making you pretty hard to kill. It will also spawn Remnant orbs from the enemies it kills, creating further destruction and giving you tons of Groundbreaker damage. NOTES - HEMOVOROUS Without recommending Fish Slap or Phaseflare, especially on a true melee build, you might wonder how a build like this can make it through a fight like Hemovorous. But trust in the chaos that Fist Over Matter and Remnant create. Hold the Guardian Angel, grasp at Hemo/Vermi, and run around shooting the Guardian Angel at them for lifesteal while you wait for Remnant to do something. Once you hear or see some Remnant action, slam or Face Puncher Hemo/Vermi to deliver all of that Groundbreaker. This is basically how it goes for all boss fights: wait for Remnant and capitalize on it. This is a slow and steady and patient build anyway, so it fits the playstyle. NOTES - MAYHEM 10/11 For nearly all true melee builds, it's recommended to play on Mayhem 10 for the Speed Demon modifier. You can roll Healy Avenger, Drone Ranger, and Not The Face for your other modifiers and have basically zero downsides.

A Jakobs Amara, except it also uses a select few other manufacturers. Agent Amara SYNOPSIS A Jakobs Amara, except it also uses a select few other manufacturers. No "Sheriff" or "Deputy", just "Agent". INTRO This build is not for you. It requires extreme care and discipline. It is punishing, if you don't play it correctly. And even sometimes if you do. It's also quite gear specific. You have been warned. ... With that out of the way, this build is the result of putting the Infernal Wish on an Amara gun build. It actively kills you, but rewards you with high damage and the ability to use some weaker weapons. (And the inability to use a lot of regular weapons.) GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES This is a very interesting setup. Sustainment is two points away, but obtaining it requires losing Blight Tiger, Avatar, or 30% elemental/kinetic damage from Burn Both Ends. Blight Tiger is hugely important for infusing Jakobs weapons with corrosive. Losing Avatar is simply not an option; this is a Kensei build, and Avater gives you twice the Kensei damage uptime. And Burn Both Ends synergizes very well with both non-elemental weapons and the Infernal Wish. None of these things can be lost. Which is fine, because Sustainment actually doesn't help very much. Basically, if you have a Wish dot and something healthgates you, you will go down immediately, even with Sustainment. So yes, this build has no life steal and actively tries to kill you. The Wish dot, coupled with an active bonus element (from your shield and grenade anointments), will self-stack Burn Both Ends. Normally, self damage such as the Wish dot does not stack BBE, but the bonus element "ticking on top of it" as a hidden damage instance will stack it. Just through regular action skill usage and gun shooting, BBE will give you damage without having to worry about being damaged by enemies. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. Phasecast coupled with 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment for bossing. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever is suited to the content you are facing. This is a Kensei build, and it also has Infusion at 40%. This is so you can add lots of elemental damage to your non-elemental weapons for better element matchups. Choose your action skill element wisely, as it will greatly impact your damage. CLASS MOD Kensei, with as many points into Joyful Freedom or No Mistakes In Nature as possible, and with one of the four possible manufacturer crit passives: Jakobs, Dahl, Hyperion, and Atlas. This crit passive is a whopping 64% at level 72. And this is why the build is not just restricted to Jakobs weapons. Other recommended passives: weapon damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash damage radius, weapon type damage, weapon crit damage, melee damage, shield recharge rate, incendiary resistance (works against the Wish dot). JAKOBS GUNS This build uses lots of Jakobs guns well, because they tend to pack a stronger punch per trigger pull, and pulling the trigger fewer times is beneifical because you don't want the Wish dot stacking too high. Bekah, Rowan's Call, King's/Queen's Call, Hellwalker, Clairvoyance (single projectile), Love Drill, Trickshot, Bird of Prey. You can even use overlooked or less powerful guns, although some may only work against non-True Takedown-level enemies: Dead Chamber, Companion, Maggie, Quickdraw (have 2 so you can swap between them), Seventh Sense. Some of these guns are normally fired rapidly, such as the Rowan's Call. Exercise trigger discipline and only fire as many times as it takes to kill the enemy. The damage output of this build is designed to require fewer trigger pulls. The Trickshot fires rapidly automatically, but whatever you're aiming at should be dead after 1-2 trigger pulls anyway. All guns with the Consecutive Hits anointment. Killstack would be a contender, but you lose Killstacks when you enter FFYL, and this build definitely enters FFYL. For a bit of nostalgic fun, use a Wedding Invitation with Next 2 Mags Cryo anointment, with an ASE 50% cryo bonus element, and cryo action skill element. You might be surprised how strong it is. The Wedding Invitation, when it crits or hits an enemy with a ricochet projectile, stacks a debuff to both fire and cryo damage, the former up to 100% and the latter up to 200%. Credit to Lonemasterino for this discovery. So cryo damage is very strong with this gun. DAHL GUNS Soulrender, Kaoson (x1), Sand Hawk, with Consecutive Hits anointments. These weapons synergize with the Wish because they allow you to restrict your trigger pulls. The Soulrender can be fired in bursts until a couple skulls appear, at which point you can let off and let the skulls destroy enemies. The Kaoson has extra damage from the stickies exploding, allowing you to stop firing before an enemy is dead. The Sand Hawk, in semi-auto mode and when aimed at a crit spot, kills just about anything in a few shots anyway. HYPERION GUNS Guardian Angel, Masterwork Crossbow, Heart Breaker (x8), Smog, Reflux (x7), Convergence (x3 or x4), all with Consecutive Hits. Exercise trigger discipline and these guns will take you a long way. The Crossbow is especially powerful when you get used to aiming it. The Guardian Angel with Indiscriminate will wipe out a whole group quite easily. ATLAS GUNS Multi-tap and OPQ System, with Conseutive Hits anointments. Trigger discipline required. OTHER GUNS This build can make use of some other guns, in which case you can ditch the manufacturer crit passive on your class mod and use a Splash Damage passive: Anarchy, Contained Blast, Prompt Critical, Backburner. With Consecutive Hits. FFYL GUNS Each manufacturer listed above has a good FFYL option: Hellwalker, Soulrender or Sand Hawk, Guardian Angel, OPQ System. However, it may also be wise to have a separate FFYL gun that will work in all situations, such as the Free Radical or Plasma Coil, with Consecutive Hits anointment. BOSSING GUNS Some of the stronger guns listed above should be equipped with a 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment and be used for bossing: Bekah, Trickshot, Hellwalker, Bird of Prey, Sand Hawk, Soulrender, Anarchy, Contained Blast. SHIELD Infernal Wish, with a highly recommended shield charge part or two. With ASE 50% bonus element anointment. The shield charges are very important for survivability, as the Wish dot will do much less damage to its own shield than to your health bar. A strong dot can be chunking at your health, and picking up a shield charge will suddenly make it much less likely to kill you. Avoid the following augments, which disable the Wish's extra projectile effect: Adrenaline, Capacity, Delay, Recharge, Reflect, Trigger Happy, Turtle. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. ARTIFACT An appropriate well-rolled Company Man or Pearl of Ineffable Knowledge with a mag size passive. Passives for Company Man: elemental damage, area of effect damage, melee damage, shield recharge rate, action skill cooldown rate, move speed, incendiary resistance (works against the Wish dot). GRENADE Hyperion Quasar (non sticky) or Mesmer, with ASE 50% bonus element anointment. Both of these are great for crowd control, which may be necessary more often than you expect. Throw these for utility whenever there's a hint of danger. GAMEPLAY LOOP Activate your action skill and start shooting, but exercise great trigger discipline. Only shoot as often as necessary to kill. If needed, wait for your action skill to come back before continuing firing, so that your trigger pulls are more powerful with Kensei damage. If there's trouble brewing, throw your crowd control grenade. Aim for crits. This build will often play like a Deathless build, in that getting health-gated means you instantly go down anyway, because your Wish dot takes out the rest of your HP. But as long as you have a good FFYL gun, this is no problem. Going down resets the severity of the Wish dot. You're just going to have to rewire yourself to not get frustrated by going into FFYL. At the end of combat, or with one enemy left, keep an eye on how strong your Wish dot is. You don't want to go down with no enemies left. If it looks like you might go down, look around for health vials and shield boosters. Health vials, in general, are going to be something you should pay attention to at all times with this build. NOTES - ANATHEMA FIGHT There is a dumb mechanic to this fight where if you pass close to a Guardian mob, you are health-gated just by touching them. This can mean an instant down if you have a Wish dot active. Do your best to avoid the mobs walking around, especially when taking a jump pad back to the arena or when they're doing a pole-vault-front-flip at you. NOTES - RAID BOSSING When referring to bosses like Hemo, Seer, or the True Trials bosses, this build cannot raid boss well at all, unfortunately. If you want to try, equip a Re-Volter with Action Skill Start and use something like a 250% Phasecast gun damage Free Radical.

All possible locations of breakable crystals in the Guardian Takedown, useful for eliminating enemy knockback.

Dark Army-focused build. Nightmare Amara SYNOPSIS Dark Army-focused build. INTRO The Dark Army is one of the strongest guns on Amara, if properly set up and built around. The core interaction with this build is the fact that Dark Army drones, when summoned (i.e., when you swap to the gun), retain all of your gun damage bonuses you have at the moment of the swap and summoning. Coupled with the Spiritual Driver class mod and lots of movement speed, you can make the Dark Army drones permanently, hugely buffed. Credit to Skkra on the Borderlands 3 subreddit for informing me of this interaction. More details on setting this up are in the "Gameplay Loop" section below. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES This is a fairly basic Driver setup, with a couple notable omissions of Dread and Deep Well. You want to be reloading as quickly and easily as possible, and those two skills delay your reloads. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever element is suited to the content you are facing, which must also match the Dark Army in your hand. Fire, shock, or corrosive. No cryo - this is a Driver build. GUNS Dark Army in fire, shock, and corrosive, with Next 2 Mags anointment matching the element of the gun. Look for a low mag and high damage version. This is your main gun, your FFYL gun, your bossing gun, your everything. It will carry you. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, preferably with as many points in Mindfulness as possible. Recommended passives: SMG damage, splash damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash damage radius, weapon damage, reload speed, fire rate, crit damage. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. SHIELD Re-Volter, with ASE 50% Radiation damage anointment. Preferably a low level one, but it's not necessary. The Action Skill Start anointment is not necessary because it will break naturally as soon as enemies are engaging you. And you can let them engage you; nothing matters with the Dark Army at your side. ARTIFACT #1 Elemental Projector with Otto Idol or Victory Rush. Recommended passives: SMG damage, area of effect damage in the 2nd or 3rd slot, action skill cooldown rate, reload speed, movement speed. ARTIFACT #2 Snowdrift. Rarity or passives don't even matter. This is for pre-buffing the Dark Army drones by sliding very fast. See the "Gameplay Loop" section below for details. GRENADE It's Piss with ASE 50% Cryo damage anointment. With cryo and radiation as your bonus elements, you get 2 more stacks of Harmageddon, you slow enemies so that the Dark Armies can better aim at them, and you get some very strong radsplosions. GAMEPLAY LOOP To get maximum damage out of your Dark Army drones, you must pre-buff them after every fast travel or map load. As noted in the Intro, the Dark Army drones, when summoned (swapped to), retain all of your gun damage bonuses at the time of summoning. With the Spiritual Driver equipped, you can swap to your Dark Army of choice when moving very quickly, and the drones will retain all of that Driver gun damage. Here's how you prebuff: equip the Snowdrift, swap to Phasecast, and do *not* be holding the Dark Army you want to use. Cast at the ground. This dots you via the Spiritual Driver, and because your action skill ended, the anoints on your grenade/shield allow you to get 25 stacks of Mindfulness. Make sure you have plenty of space in front of you. At 25 Mindfulness stacks, run and slide. At the beginning of your slide when you are moving fastest, swap to your Dark Army of choice. Now your drones are permanently buffed, as long as you do not swap away from them. Change the Snowdrift out for the Elemental Projector and select Ties That Bind. Make sure your action skill element matches the Dark Army you are holding, and you're ready to obliterate things. If you need to swap or re-buff your drones in combat, you can get a slightly less powerful setup: after your grasp on an enemy ends, make sure you have 25 stacks, then simply run up to top speed and swap. Note that after you've buffed your drones, you do not need to keep moving fast. You can stand still, and they will still do massive damage. The Dark Army that's actually in your hand will do much, much less damage than your drones. There's two things you need to do while in combat. 1. Fire the Dark Army in your hand and reload it. It must be a full magazine depletion, not a manual reload with some ammo still in the mag. This makes the drones deal elemental damage for a short time, which is important because... 2. Always be using your Grasp in order to keep yourself dotted and keep Elemental Projector procced. This gives the drones a massive damage boost if they're firing elemental shots that match your action skill element. NOTES - GUARDIAN TAKEDOWN There are times you need to switch Dark Army elements between facing creatures, Guardians, armor phase of bosses, and shield phase of bosses. You will also need to re-buff your drones between each Scourge teleport, because they don't teleport with you. At nearly every point you need to swap, instead of redoing the whole gear change and slide setup, you can utilize the speed boost provided by a jump pad. Simply swap as soon as you hit the pad. Of course, you can choose to do the long setup if you prefer. Between the first room and the first Guardian encounter, there's a pad. There's no pad before Anathema, but you can use your falling speed to swap to corrosive. During the fight, you can switch from corrosive to shock on the jump pads. After the fight, you can still use the jump pads to switch to fire for creatures. After creatures, there's another jump pad before the second set of crystals. You will need to manually buff and swap after teleporting into Scourge's arena and before triggering the cutscene. In the first teleport area, there's a jump pad below where you spawn. When going back to Scourge's arena, there's a jump pad to go up and smash the crystal. You'll have to manually run and swap during the second teleport.

Beginner-friendly Ties That Bind gun build that is very Ties That Bind gun build. Possibly even the most Ties That Bind gun build. Acidwolf SYNOPSIS Beginner-friendly Ties That Bind gun build that is very Ties That Bind gun build. Possibly even the most Ties That Bind gun build. INTRO When facing off against raid bosses, most Amara gun builds change something, like switching to a Phasecast action skill and Phasecast anointed gun. Or a Phaseflare action skill and a Psychostabber. Or swapping to the Guardian Angel and throwing a fish, perhaps also with Unleash the Dragon. Or whatever else. In contrast, this build leans so hard into Amara's multi-target abilities that it *becomes* the raid bossing solution. Using Ties That Bind to kill a boss through a second enemy isn't anything new. What's new is the strength with which this build does it. This isn't just: "Ties That Bind Wotan as he splits to kill both halves instantly." This is also: "Ties That Bind True Hag of Fervor (and a tink) and a single Beacon projectile produces a Remnant that hits Hag for hundreds of billions." This is: "Every Indiscriminate ricochet hits for hundreds of millions instead of just 10 or 20 million." If you're a real OG, the damage philosophy is very similar to Pain Amp Amara , even though that isn't a gun build. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES This skill tree isn't too far off from a typical red/blue TTB gun build. However, there are a few very deliberate omissions and inclusions. Remnant, Ties That Bind, and Indiscriminate are all double-dipping skills. That means that their damage is based on a different, initial source of damage, and then they get their own damage increases as well. (That initial source in this build is our guns.) So to increase the effectiveness of these three skills, we need to choose damage increases that affect both the initial source and these skills directly for maximum double-dipping effect. All three skills double dip elemental damage, for example, if you're using an elemental gun. If you use a non-elemental gun, then it's just a single dip, a normal damage increase. Remnant and Indiscriminate double dip splash damage if you're using a splash gun. That's why we spend the five points in Arms Deal - for more splash damage. It's why there's zero Infusion points - the Infused portion of a gun's damage does not get splash bonuses. Action skill damage is maxed through Do Harm and Awakening, because Ties That Bind link and Remnant damage is increased by action skill damage. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Always Corrosive. This is a single element build. As for why, see the artifact section. GUNS Anything splash and corrosive that can roll the ASE 125% splash anoint. Effective weapons that fit that criteria: Beacon, Recursion, Trevonator, Gargoyle, Major Kong, Anarchy, Contained Blast, Fearmonger, Hive, Plaguebearer, Backburner. Those last three don't really Indiscriminate, but they're strong enough that it doesn't matter. You can use some other strong corrosive splash guns that can't roll the splash anoint: Kaoson, Soulrender, Sand Hawk, Hornet. For these, use the Killstack anoint. CLASS MOD Phasezerker, ideally with points into Anima for that extra dot damage, but it's not too important. Prioritize passives: splash damage, splash damage radius, cooldown, weapon damage, weapon critical damage. That splash damage passive will make Remnant and Indiscriminate double dip harder. The Phasezerker is ideal for this build because it will stack up a lot of Do Harm for our TTB links and Remnant. It does this by its special Rush stacking nature, and because the cooldown it provides will keep our TTB cycling quickly. It also provides some much needed gun damage. SHIELD Corrosive Old God, with ASE Apply Terror anoint. The corrosive elemental damage increase provided by the Old God will get double dipped by our three important skills. ARTIFACT Flesh Melter Victory Rush. This is why we only use corrosive guns and corrosive action skill element. The Victory Rush part isn't essential. A purple Flesh Melter with great passives will beat an average Flesh Melter Victory Rush. The passives you're looking for are corrosive damage and AoE damage, with cooldown closely behind those two. The Flesh Melter is an absurd amount of corrosive damage when fully stacked up. This, of course, makes us lean even harder into the "need more than one enemy" linchpin of this build, but we're already in too deep. The only way out is through. Turns out, there's hardly any relevant end game fights where you have just a boss and no mobs to work with. GRENADE Fish Slap, in radiation, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. Because all of our other damage is pure corrosive, we need something to take out those corrosive immune Maliwan heavies. Even if it's just to deliver Groundbreaker. (You could also just switch elements on your Beacon, but whatever.) The Terror Dmg will get double dipped by our skills. GAMEPLAY LOOP You grasp. You shoot. You destroy. Indeed, that's the gist of it. The whole idea here is to make it simple to raid boss. There's no elaborate setup or anything; you just wait. You grasp the boss and wait for an add to get linked up, then you shoot the boss. Remnant kills the boss. Ok, there's a *little* more to it. One important thing to know is that Remnant targets the enemy closest to you. So before shooting that raid boss with a mob linked, make sure you're kinda close. But not close enough to splash yourself, of course. You'll find the same sort of thing happening often during regular mobbing. You grasp and shoot an enemy, then all other nearby enemies die, and Remnant drifts toward the original grasped enemy and obliterates it. In scenarios where waiting a few seconds gives you extra enemies, then wait. Notable example here is the first few phases of Wotan. Wait for him to spawn some adds before you attack his shields. That way, you can utilize TTB and get Flesh Melter stacks. Versus the Seer, step in the water and wait for guardians to approach. You get the idea. Otherwise, this doesn't play much differently than a normal red/blue TTB gun build. But you will see tons and tons of large damage numbers. It will definitely be weaker in single target scenarios and/or when your buffs have worn off. But that's what strong guns like the Plaguebearer and Backburner and Beacon are for. Or, if you're quick enough, Groundbreaker can be utilized on that lone enemy. If the somewhat weaker single target damage is too frustrating for you, consider the alternative loadout... NOTES - ALTERNATIVE LOADOUT Swap out your Phasezerker for a Spiritual Driver (with points into Mindfulness, same recommended passives) and your Flesh Melter for an Elemental Projector. Again, the artifact doesn't need to be a Victory Rush, but it helps. Prioritize passives: corrosive damage, AoE, cooldown. This setup will have less reliable raid bossing ability when utilizing Ties That Bind and Remnant, but it will have much better single target damage. NOTES - HEMOVOROUS Indiscriminate and Remnant make this fight pretty fun. You can pew pew at Vermi, and Indiscriminate will chunk Hemo if he's nearby. Or just spam a Recursion. Stay somewhat close and Remnant will track them, although there's still a chance it gets thrown off by all of the little bugs in the fight. Their red HP phases are probably the only time you might consider switching your action skill element to fire, using a fire weapon, and using the Driver/Projector loadout. NOTES - OTHER BOSSES As mentioned above, there's hardly any relevant end game fights where you have just a boss and no mobs to work with. Bosses like Anathema and Scourge initially start alone, but just wait 5-10 seconds and mobs will appear and you can begin doing work. Spawn mobs in the Seer arena by walking in the water. Spongeboss can be lured out by the Spiderants. Etc.