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.

A spicy Spiritual Driver gun dot build that rewards accuracy via the Elemental Crit anointment. Amara Dot Crit SYNOPSIS A spicy Spiritual Driver gun dot build that rewards accuracy via the Elemental Crit anointment. INTRO The anointment, "Elemental critical hits can cause status effects of that element to explode..." (EleCrit) has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It's most common usage is on a gun you swap to to detonate a status effect (dot) applied by Fish Slap/UTD or a strong, one-shotting gun like the Kickcharger. But I've always wanted to find a way to use it as a main gun anointment. I've, also, always wanted to make a gun dot build with the Spiritual Driver. This build accomplishes both. As a cool side effect, it allows usage of some really underused and otherwise weak guns. Inspiration to try working with the EleCrit anointment came from Ancient Rune's Alchemical Agent Zane dot build. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Yep, no capstones. The EleCrit nova is based on the strength of the dot you apply, and then it gets its own damage formula. This is a form of double dipping. Therefore, we need to grab damage boosts in our skill tree that will apply to both your initial dot and the EleCrit nova: Tempest, Laid Bare, Burn Both Ends. Just for fun, let's follow the rest of the logic for creating this skill tree. Because this is a Driver build, we also want points into Mindfulness. And we also need to spec Sustainment for survivability. We need Sustainment because other forms of healing won't work here: Samsara doesn't apply to Ties That Bind, Ebb & Flow is for melee builds (although we take it here because sometimes you punch for Groundbreaker and we need to dump some skill points somewhere to reach Burn Both Ends), and Clarity is not enough on its own. We choose Ties That Bind as our action skill because it has a much shorter cooldown than a Phasecast or Slam action skill. A shorter cooldown matters because the Driver self-dot will deactivate Topped Off, making us lose a lot of action skill cooldown rate. Cast/slam also won't be able to help us with their huge gun damage anointments, because we're using the EleCrit anoint. Ties can also give us lots of Expedite stacks, further facilitating its cooldown. Following the chain of logic back, we need Sustainment because we're using Ties because we're using Driver. We've chosen our action skill and the end points of each of our four trees. The rest of the skill points cover regular gun benefits, dot skills, and some splash for the EleCrit nova. This is one of the few builds that could actually use more skill points: 1 more for Burn Both Ends and 1 more for Mindfulness. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. For some boss fights, base Phasegrasp can be used for faster action skill cycling - it has a shorter cooldown and no duration when grasping a target that cannot be lifted. Hemo is a good fight for base Phasegrasp. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Fire, shock, or corrosive. Whichever one matches your fire, shock, or corrosive gun. No cryo, because this is a Driver (and dot) build. GUNS Anything with at least a decent damage over time stat, with the EleCrit anointment. I'd say around 50K-ish status effect damage per second or greater. We get to use quite a few overlooked weapons here. My favorites: Hellfire, Fearmonger, Recursion, Free Radical, Plasma Coil, Beacon, Hellshock, Kyb's Worth, Trevonator, Chandelier, Slow Hand, Soulrender, Insider, Satisfaction, Back Burner, Plaguebearer, Hive, King's/Queen's Call, Unkempt Harold, and Boogeyman. I've also had minor success with the Convergence and the Flipper. There might even be some non-unique purple weapons with acceptable dot values. Note, though, that a max damage per-pellet version of a gun may not have the max status effect damage. You want the version of every gun that has the highest status effect damage. You also want the version of a gun that has the fewest projectiles per shot, if it has such variants. The lower the pellet count, the higher the status effect damage. UTILITY GUN Guardian Angel, with EleCrit anointment. Its usage here is like the typical usage of the EleCrit anointment: apply a dot with your guns, then swap to the Guardian Angel and detonate the dot with a grenade (that can crit) of the same element as the dot. This gun can also be shot in FFYL, and if there's multiple enemies around, there's a good chance it'll get you back up via an Indiscriminate projectile. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, with as many points into Mindfulness as possible. Phasezerker usually overshadows the Driver when building for gun dots; it can get you up to 10 Anima and it applies dots more reliably through better Violent Tapestry stacking. However, there's still a reason to use Driver for dots: moving fast gives you a lot of gun damage, and dots from your guns are strengthened if you have more gun damage. To make up for less reliable dots, you simply shoot your gun more. This results in a go-fast-pew-pew-style dot build, as opposed to Amara Dot Gun , which is a methodical, single-shot dot build. Recommended passives: splash damage radius, splash damage, action skill cooldown rate, mag size, weapon charge speed, weapon damage, weapon critical 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 Action Skill Start anointment. The fire rate from this shield is great all on its own, but also because it will give you more stacks of the Guardian Rank perk C-C-Combo, which is a damage increase that will double dip with the EleCrit novas. Also, the shock damage will give you a shock dot at 200% power - which is all-around great. If you're using a shock weapon, your EleCrit will detonate based on that stronger dot from the Re-Volter. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector Victory Rush. The Elemental Projector is the more important part. But both parts of this artifact will provide damage boosts that the EleCrit nova can double dip. Recommended passives: action skill cooldown, movement speed, AoE damage, fire/shock/corrosive damage. GRENADE Hex, Lightspeed, or Hunter-Seeker, with ASE 50% bonus radiation damage anointment. All three of these grenades can crit, and therefore can proc the EleCrit anointment on your gun. Because this is a dot build, adding a radiation bonus element will create and strengthen radsplosions and overall spread a lot of damage around. GAMEPLAY LOOP Your Re-Volter will cover shock, and your grenade anoint will cover radiation. So your guns will mostly be fire or corrosive, depending on the base health of the enemies you're facing. Shock can be used for Guardians in the Guardian Takedown or just in general with a very high shock dot weapon like the Plasma Coil or Free Radical. Choose the element of your gun to suit the content you're facing, and grasp and shoot and aim for crits. Believe it or not, this build can be very forgiving if you don't have good aim. Dots are not increased by landing a critical hit. So you can do a drive-by at high speed with your Driver and land some body shots just to apply a large dot (remember dots are increased by gun damage), and then stop and carefully hit a crit to proc EleCrit. If you can hit crits at high speed, all the better. If the enemy doesn't have an easily accessible crit spot, don't fret: this is a Driver build. It's still going to have good damage simply by moving fast and shooting a strong gun. The EleCrit anoint has a cooldown. However, the cooldown is reset if you swap to a different gun. A fun way to play this build is to have 2-4 guns of the same element and rapid-fire swap between them, getting an EleCrit with each before moving on to the next one. Weapons with charge times slow this strategy down a little bit, so choose your guns wisely. NOTES - IMMUNE MALIWAN HEAVIES When facing a Maliwan Heavy that's immune to your gun's element, your damage will drop significantly (and you won't lifesteal). The solution here is to use a radiation Hex. Your main gun element won't do any damage, but the radiation dot created by the bonus element anoint on the Hex will still get applied. Then the Hex can be thrown and used to proc EleCrit in radiation. The Hex will also keep your lifesteal going. NOTES - ALTERNATIVE BOSSING STRATEGY Similar to the strategy above regarding Maliwan Heavies, and alluded to throughout this guide, an alternate strategy to shooting and getting crits is to apply your gun's dot at high speed, then swap to the Guardian Angel and proc EleCrit with a grenade that element-matches the dot that you applied. See the Hemo fight in the gameplay video.

An easy-going aggro-relieving amp-focused build made for snipers and launchers. Hidden Tiger SYNOPSIS An easy-going aggro-relieving amp-focused build made for snipers and launchers. INTRO A deep green tree gun build in order to pick up the Glamour augment. Glamour, when paired with Ties That Bind, will basically de-aggro the whole battlefield, and any enemies that aren't turned into allies will instead target other enemies. Free to approach the fight without any interference, you can carefully apply a few very strong damage buffs: amp shields, Toboggan, and Overkill. While this build can create leisurely gameplay, there's a lot to understand about it. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Going deep green tree for Glamour isn't actually that much of a loss for gun builds. We still get nearly all of the strong skills. Restless is maxed in blue tree because we are not using Expedite and because Glamour actually lengthens our cooldown. Restless is not a huge boost to cooldown but having Ties That Bind back that little bit faster is very nice. You can take a few points away from Heavy Rain and lose cryo as an action skill element and instead pick up Sustainment. Personally, I don't find Sustainment necessary. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. Optionally, base Phasegrasp for some bosses so you can double proc Transcend and so your action skill can begin cooling down while your anoints and other effects are still active. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever element complements your gun vs the content you're facing. Shock if using Spiritual Driver for bossing (see Notes - Bossing section below). GUNS Snipers and Rocket Launchers. My absolute favorite is the Bird of Prey - highly underrated and very effective, especially with Indiscriminate and Infernal Wish. Others that I use: Masterwork Crossbow, Love Drill, Hive, Major Kong, Hellwalker, Recursion, Yellowcake, Globetrottr, Backburner, Kickcharger, Sand Hawk (in semi-auto), Monocle, Ionic Disruptor. Other strong single-shot weapons such as the Kings/Queens call also work (I prefer the long scope so I can use them like snipers). The Lucky 7 can be made to work by having Dread refill your magazine. All guns either with a gun damage anointment (Killstack, Consec Hits, ASE 100, even Grasp Active 150%) or a Next 2 Mags anointment. 125 Splash can also be used on launchers. When bossing with Spiritual Driver, use N2M on a launcher where both the gun element and the N2M element match vs whatever boss you're facing. CLASS MOD Phasezerker and Spiritual Driver. For the Phasezerker, skills don't matter; instead look for good passives: action skill cooldown rate, sniper damage, heavy weapon damage, pistol damage, weapon damage, splash damage, splash radius, weapon crit damage, Jakobs weapon crit. Driver is recommended for bosses, especially raid level HP bosses. Look for +3 into Mindfulness, and similar passives to the Phasezerker, leaning more towards heavy weapon damage and splash damage. SHIELD Best-in-slot is a double-amp Infernal Wish. But even without amp parts, a Wish is recommended. One-Shotter shield would be recommended for multi-pellet weapons such as the Hellwalker or Globetrottr or Sand Hawk. A "poor-man's" shield would be the 0.m, but make sure you stick to 1-2 pellet weapons with that. Anointment: ASE 50% bonus element. ARTIFACT Toboggan, with ideal passives being weapon-type damage, action skill cooldown rate, and Area of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot. A well-rolled Company Man could be a good substitute, if you don't like sliding between shots. Keep a Cutpurse on hand in case you run out of rocket ammo. GRENADE Mesmer with ASE 50% bonus element. This grenade is great for aggro relief between grasps. GAMEPLAY LOOP To begin, grasp an enemy, and immediately all surrouding enemies will be linked and de-aggro to you. Make sure you've slid for Toboggan amp, and your amp shield is topped up. Fire at your grasped enemy. If that enemy didn't die, it's very likely a linked enemy did, granting you Overkill and triggering Shield Reboot so your amp shield is quickly filled for your next shot. Slide again and shoot again. Now your grasped enemy is dead, you have your ASE 50% bonus elements procced, and you have Overkill. Rinse and repeat. I'd recommend brushing up on your Overkill Upkeep if you aren't familiar. This meticulous playstyle is made possible because Glamour controls the field. There are some very weird Glamour interactions, though. Grenades do not make contact with Glamoured enemies. If a Hack Hound or Anointed Militant is Glamoured, your shots will pass right through them - you have to either kill them through a TTB link or splash a surface next to them. The flying Sera Guardians, when Glamoured, will fly very high up while fighting each other. You will also see some Indiscriminate projectiles come towards you. Don't worry, in almost all cases they can't hurt you. Just don't use the Headsplosion :) Glamour and Ties that Bind is strong enough that I've taken this build through the entire True Maliwan Takedown bridge area with the Monocle while taking zero damage from enemies. NOTES - BOSSING Equip the Spiritual Driver and switch your action skill element to shock. How does one use an amp shield with the Driver? By simply waiting 3 seconds for the shock dot to wear off, after which you have 5 seconds with your Mindfulness stacks to slide very fast and shoot a rocket launcher buffed by a ton of Driver gun damage, your Toboggan amp, your shield amp (or simply a second projectile from the Wish), and all of your anointments. ASE anointments are activated immediately upon grasping a boss. Yes, this forces you to have a small amount of shock Infusion (16%) against an armored or flesh HP boss, but that's worth the tradeoff for being able to get your shield amp. There are a couple scenarios where you want to switch your element to corrosive, and that's during boss fights where it's impossible to keep your shield topped up anyway. Notably, vs Hemovorous where there's so much being thrown at you, and vs Anathema where the radiation bubbles dot you. Switching to corrosive lets you keep up your Mindfulness stacks longer, because it's a longer dot. Use the Infernal Wish and you're set. As mentioned above, you may also want to consider switching to base Phasegrasp for some bosses so you can double proc Transcend and so your action skill can begin cooling down while your anoints and other effects are still active. The tradeoff is that any adds that spawn will be aggro to you, and may make it hard to keep your amp shield full.

Information about quality-of-life hotfixes and other mods for playing Amara at end game. Modding If you're on PC, we can fix a thing or two to increase your quality of life while playing Borderlands 3. Examples include making the Sleeping Giant always roll all of its buffs, or making the Shooting Star shield work on every map. Below, I will direct you to resources for setting up mods, and share what I consider to be essential mods. Open Hotfix Loader (OHL) There are a few kinds of mods. The most common kind is known as "custom hotfixes". To set up custom hotfix mods, you will need to download and correctly place a few files. Go to this website and scroll down to the "Installation" section, and follow the instructions. Essentially, after OHL is set up, you will have a folder into which you place your hotfix files, and when Borderlands 3 is launched, your custom hotfixes are automatically loaded and applied. To add hotfixes to an already launched game, add the new hotfix to the folder, quit to Title Screen, and re-sign in. There is no need to quit to desktop to add hotfixes. On the other hand, if you want to remove hotfixes, you need to quit to desktop, remove the hotfixes from the folder (or place them in another folder within your 'ohl-mods' folder), and relaunch the game. Essential Hotfixes DJIRA BALL! , by CZ47. Do yourself a favor and hop on over to the dedicated page for this , and introduce yourself to the coolest esport within your favorite game :) Note that the Guardian Takedown will not play normally with this hotfix enabled. VENDOR CRASH FIX , by CZ47. You know how sometimes in the Maliwan Takedown (or anywhere, really) your whole game can crash when you approach a vendor to refill your ammo? This mod will fix that basically 100% of the time. REALLY LUCKY 7 , by CZ47. Allows you to use the Lucky 7 pistol at maximum power without spending 25 minutes reloading it. FYI, it is considered in poor taste to run out the magazine with this mod enabled and continue to use the Lucky 7 for the activity you're currently running. It should be treated as if you rolled all of the modifiers yourself and have ammo regeneration tactics to keep it from being depleted. SLEEPING GIANT 100% , by CZ47 (direct link, right click > save as) . Like the Lucky 7 mod above, this mod makes the Sleeping Giant always roll all of its buffs after the first reload. The same etiquette also applies here. SHOOTING STAR SHIELD FIX , by CZ47 and Lonemasterino (direct link, right click > save as) . If only Gearbox fixed this shield, we would have it as a very strong avenue of attack for Amara's gun and true melee builds. Thankfully, we have this hotfix, which also includes a fix to the Hot Drop artifact so that it works in low gravity, like in the Guardian Takedown. PHOTO MODE UNLOCK , by Apocalyptech. Removes the boundaries of the photomode camera and increases its movement speed. Get closer to damage numbers, or simply look around at the beautiful maps Gearbox has created. TERROR NO EFFECTS , by Bra2ha and CZ47. If you are annoyed by the visual and audio pollution created by the terror status, this removes both of them for you. Terror anoints are absolutely wonderful, so I would hate for people to avoid them because of aesthetic reasons. THE FULL LIST of mods for Borderlands 3. Feel free to browse and see if anything interesting or fun catches your eye! SDK Mods A second kind of mod is called an SDK mod. These are much less common but much more capable than hotfix mods. To get SDK mods installed, go to this web page and follow the instructions. Then add whichever SDK mods seem appealing to you. The one that appeals to me the most, however, won't be found on that site. As of right now, it can only be found here. Thanks to the genius modder OhYes10fps, we have an SDK mod that reverts the projectile nerf and brings back the original glory days of the Projectile Recursion and other weapons. Check it out: Download it here. Download the build I used in this video here. Beware: this interaction always resulted in frame drops, and can even potentially crash your game. I would not recommend firing a recursion when there are two immune enemies in close proximity. Examples include first phase of the Valkyrie fight, when they all drop down at the beginning, and Diadems in the Guardian Takedown. Most PCs will be severely lagged or crashed by something like this happening: Save Editor We all know farming in this game can be a pain. On PC, you can save edit your gear with the ZakisM save editor . I urge caution, however. If you don't know how to make legitimate gear, I would stick to changing things like the element or anointment of an item you already found.

Tips for understanding and building with Amara's Red Tree at endgame. Red Tree This guide will help you understand the quirks and uses of each of Amara's skills, so that perhaps you can do some build crafting of your own. In this section, we cover the red (Fist of the Elements) tree. ANIMA A skill with many uses. On builds that utilize damage over time (dots), this skill is invaluable. It's what makes Amara the strongest character with the Fish Slap grenade and Unleash The Dragon artifact. It has two often overlooked properties in that it further boosts status damage of your action skill element, and when attuned to shock it gives shock status damage an even longer duration increase. Even on gun builds that don't focus on damage over time, but still use guns with high damage over time (Free Radical, Kickcharger, Plasma Coil), investing into Anima means dots will help finish off enemies. And if you have radiation damage in your build, stronger radsplosions. A common class mod for gun builds, the Phasezerker, can roll extra points into Anima. When self dotting for various buffs, whether it's with the Spiritual Driver class mod or directly shooting your foot, Anima will keep that dot on you longer. Unfortunately, Anima breaks in all respects when your action skill element is set to cryo. It does not buff anything at all in this situation, as if you never specced it. STEADY HANDS Often taken for granted, I would recommend 3 points into this skill on nearly every build that shoots a gun. INFUSION Another skill with many uses. The most basic use is to fully invest in it so that you can diversify the elements of an element-locked gun (such as the Free Radical), non-elemental gun, or to tackle content where enemies have multiple HP bar types. For example, against creatures in the Guardian Takedown, which are armor and flesh, it can be used to infuse a corrosive gun with fire, or the other way around. Whatever percentage that you have Infusion convert, that percentage of your gun's damage becomes a bonus element, and bonus elements do not get increased by splash damage. So if you're using a splash gun and have any increased splash damage, that splash damage bonus is effectively reduced by the same percentage you have invested into Infusion. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because using Infusion for a better elemental matchup can result in more damage than what you've lost from your splash bonuses. The second use for Infusion is to put one point into it to create another damage instance for the Face Puncher, which, when specced into Body & Mind, doubles the amount of Body & Mind novas that get procced. And Body & Mind is a very strong skill when invested into. A third use for Infusion is another one point wonder when shooting your feet to dot yourself, which you may do for various reasons. For example, you want to proc Elemental Projector with a low level Sellout, but you want shock damage, and the Sellout only has fire and corrosive. Attuning yourself to shock and having 1 point into Infusion means a portion of those Sellout projectiles are shock and will shock dot you. You can also use Infusion to diversify the Sellout's dot on yourself, so that you get multiple dots and therefore multiple stacks when using the Golden Rule class mod. E.g., you're attacking with fire phasecasts, so you set the Sellout to corrosive and Infuse it with fire so that you get fire and corrosive dots when you shoot your foot, increasing the effectiveness of the Golden Rule. Infusion can also be used to change your gun's elemental output when you don't want to swap weapons, such as having a buffed Lucky 7 or Sleeping Giant or Anarchy. You can, for example, have a corrosive Lucky 7 that you Infuse with fire while fighting the creatures in the Guardian Takedown, and then you switch your action skill element over to shock when you move onto the Guardians. And then corrosive when you drop down to fight Anathema, and so on. Lastly, investment into Infusion can be useful for true melee builds. It's common to get knocked backwards, especially in the Guardian Takedown, and not be able to melee for lifesteal for a few seconds. Shooting an element-infused Psycho Stabber can allow for enough life steal to regain healthgate before closing the distance again. TEMPEST Very important elemental damage increase. Very hard to pass up. A requirement for nearly every build. ILLUMINATED FIST Extremely important for true melee builds, as it allows your punch to also be increased by elemental damage boosts and to Sustain you. Outside of that, it's just a flat 75% melee damage to all forms of melee damage. It can also be specced so that, even on non-melee builds, when you punch an enemy to deliver Groundbreaker you also get healed by Sustainment. Beware that attuning your punch to an element will make you unable to Sustain off of or deliver Groundbreaker to enemies that are immune to that element. This comes up most often in the Maliwan Takedown. (Use ground slam as an alternate method of Groundbreaker.) WILDFIRE Mostly a low value utility skill that can be specced to help spread around status effects, which, when also specced into Violent Tapestry, can help gain you Rush stacks. On a more dot-focused build, whether it's Unleash The Dragon or gun dots, this skill becomes much more valuable. It also has value on cryo-focused builds, because it can spread the frozen status effect from one enemy to another. It doesn't have the greatest range, though. DREAD Very useful skill on grasp gun builds, mostly for the mag refill upon killing a grasped enemy. It does not matter how the grasped enemy dies, you will get the mag refill. This aspect is very useful for managing the ammo in your mag on, for example, a Lucky 7 build. It is also a generally good DPS increase, because you can skip a reload. One odd situation where it is detrimental is if you're running Terror Ammo Regen and trying to sustain a Sand Hawk in semi-auto mode for a long activity, as Barbie Dahl can do. Dread pulls from reserves, so even with ammo regen, it will eventually run your sniper ammo stock dry. Other than that, it's a good skill. The gun damage aspect of it will also stack with each newly grasped enemy when using Eternal Fist. INDISCRIMINATE Very, very powerful skill, and most gun builds take it. Turns any gun into a multi-target gun, at least the guns that it works with (which is most of them). Also extremely useful for getting up from FFYL. The card says damage of ricochets is reduced, but on Mayhem 10 or 11, it also gets about a 5.5x mayhem multiplier, making your ricochets stronger than your original shot. DEEP WELL 1 point wonder for a slightly significant mag size boost. No reason not to take it on a gun build that goes this far down the tree. CATHARSIS Mostly bad for a few reasons: it has an unnecessary cooldown, it deals self damage, and it can be tough to get all of the investment needed for it to be any good, which is all 5 status effects and lots of action skill damage investment. The only case I've found for it is on a grenade build , as it helps increase area clear. You avoid the self-damage of it because you also want to be out of range of your own grenades, and going down blue tree to get Laid Bare and Avatar gives you plenty of points to dump into action skill damage. Because it's not like there's much else in the blue tree that benefits grenades. SUSTAINMENT Very valuable life steal skill. Not as necessary as most people believe, because of the power of Samsara and Clarity for healing. But still highly recommended, and required on almost all true melee builds on this site. CONFLUX Useful only as a way to get 1 or 2 more status effects for greater debuff from the Harmageddon Guardian Rank perk. FORCEFUL EXPRESSION Decent value increase for both guns and grenades. It can be hard to justify the extra points required to get here on some builds, though.

A damaging aura-based slam build, with some action skill damage and Terror Reflect supplements. Gone Fission Amara SYNOPSIS A damaging aura-based slam build, with some action skill damage and Terror Reflect supplements. INTRO The Mind Melt is the radiation slam artifact, and while it's not the strongest item by itself, it encourages a rather fun, oddball playstyle. With the Mind Melt, after you slam, you carry around a damaging radiation aura for several seconds. The Ember's Blaze shield also creates a damaging aura. The Terror Reflect anointment, when holding a Guardian Angel, and especially with bonus elements, can make enemies kill themselves. The combination of these three things allows you to basically just stand there and clear content. Almost as if you're "out to lunch" or "gone fishin'". "Don't mind me, I'm just melt ing things." GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Speccing Sustaintment allows both your damaging auras and your reflected projectiles to heal you. Coupled with your class mod (Stone), this build is quite the tank. You have a decent amount of action skill damage to boost Phaseslam, Reverberation, Body & Mind, and Free The Soul. There's some cryo synergies in there as well, because you'll be using the Terro r Cryo anointment on your weapons. ACTION SKILL Phaseslam. Reverberation for bosses. Phaseslam's wide radius will build up a ton of groundbreaker damage to be released on your next slam. And whatever it doesn't kill, it will freeze if you're attuned to cryo. Reverbation, with a particular technique , can chunk boss health bars. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Cryo, to synergize with Go With The Flow, Free The Soul, and Unweave The Rainbow in purple tree. Unweave procs with splash damage (and melee damage) dealt to frozen enemies; Phaseslam and your damaging auras are splash damage. Switch to corrosive for Wotan, fire for Guardian Takedown creatures, and shock for Guardian Takedown guardians. Everything else: remain on cryo. MAIN GUN 1 Guardian Angel with Terror Cryo anointment. Terror Cryo will get added to all of your damage, even reflected projectiles. It will help freeze enemies for the cryo-related skills in purple tree. Guardian Angel, with Indicriminate, can be shot at enemies in a pinch to build up Groundbreaker. MAIN GUN 2 Face Puncher with Melee Apply Terror anointment. Swap frequently to this gun and shoot at enemies to make sure you have max (3) terror stacks. Body & Mind will also make this gun pretty powerful, if you want to supplement your main damage before swapping back to the Guardian Angel. Always perform your other attacks, action skill and slam, with the Guardian Angel in hand. OPTIONAL GUN Zheitsev's Eruption (pre-overheated) for debuffing. This can be swapped to and away from to add quite a bit of damage from debuffing. Anointment doesn't matter much, although Terror Health Regen will increase your survivability while you have it out. FFYL GUN Something typical, like a Free Radical or Ember's Purge with Consecutive Hits anointment. CLASS MOD Stone, with heavy preference for a splash damage radius passive. That radius increase is pretty crucial, because all of your attacks rely on it. Skill rolls aren't as important, but lean toward Do Harm and Awakening. Awakening not only boosts the effectiveness of both Do Harm (for damage) and Violent Tapestry (for freezing), but also the effectiveness of the damage reduction on the class mod itself. Other acceptable passives: action skill damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash damage. SHIELD Ember's Blaze, with the Terror Reflect anointment. This shield and anointment account for a lot of your standing still damage and subsequent healing through Sustainment. ARTIFACT Mind Melt, with heavy preference for an Area of Effect passive in the second or third slot, which also increases splash radius. The second half of the artifact can be a few things: Victory Rush, Safeguard, Cosmic Crater, even Pull Out Method. Pick whatever suits you or sounds fun. Other acceptable passives: radiation damage, incendiary damage, action skill cooldown rate, cryo damage, cryo efficiency, movement speed, corrosive damage. GRENADE Anything utility oriented, with the Terror Damage And Fire Rate anointment. Hyperion Quasar (not sticky), Mesmer, It's Piss. GAMEPLAY LOOP When entering a fight, start off with a couple Face Puncher shots to build Terror stacks, then Phaseslam, then start ground slamming with reckless abandon. After that, the order you do things in doesn't really matter. Just don't forget to keep Terror stacks up. For boss fights, switch to Reverberation, and you can use that plus Body & Mind to take them out, while also ground slamming to deliver groundbreaker and take out adds. NOTES - BARRELS & WATER Slam builds are especially vulnerable to barrels and water. Be careful out there and try to clear barrels before approaching them. Avoid water and puddles at all costs. NOTES - HEMOVOROUS You might think a build based on a relatively weak slam effect wouldn't do much to Hemo, but you'd be wrong. While Hemo is kind of a hitbox mess, there's a mechanic in the fight we can take advantage of. The eggs and pods that both Hemo and Vermi launch at you are destroyed very easily by your auras and slams, dealing damage directly to Hemo and building up tons of groundbreaker to be released when you slam near them. Also, the eggs/pods are automatic lifesteal, as Ember's Blaze kills them on approach, and failing that, automatic second winds. Add some Phaseslam into the mix and baby you've got a stew going. This is one of the few builds you can take to Hemo and just go wild with slamming.

Get in touch with Stone_Swan about Amara builds. Questions or Comments? There's a lot of info on this site. I try my best to explain things thoroughly, but if something isn't clear, feel free to reach out: Catch me live streaming (albeit infrequently) on Twitch at: twitch.tv/stone_swan Join my Discord server and ask a question in the bl3-general channel . I or someone else in the community will do our best to answer.

Tips for building with Amara's Burn Both Ends skill at endgame. Burn Both Ends Burn Both Ends is an elemental damage increase that also applies to non-elemental attacks. That is to say, if you have 5 points into Tempest (30%) and 5 points into a fully stacked Burn Both Ends (75%), then you have +105% increased elemental damage. It will take a 100 damage elemental gun to 205 damage. And it will take a 100 damage non-elemental gun to 175 damage. But it doesn't apply to just guns, it applies to everything. So it is a very strong damage increase for multiple kinds of builds. The main drawback with it is it requires you do be damaged by enemies at a constant rate in order to keep up your stacks. Self damage normally does not stack it. There are a few workarounds, though, and these workarounds are core to several builds on this site. The main interaction in each of these workarounds is that, while self damage does not stack Burn Both Ends, an active bonus element on your self damage, being a separate instance, will indeed stack it. An active bonus element includes Urad, Terror Cryo, Re-Volter, and ASE 50% bonus element anointments on your grenade or shield. There are three main ways of dealing self damage: 1. Shoot your foot with something like a low level Sellout pistol, and dot yourself. The normal dot from the pistol won't stack BBE, but the bonus element will also dot you and start stacking it. Note that dotting yourself with an active cryo bonus element will slow you. 2. Have an Infernal Wish shield equipped and proc the fire self damage by shooting your gun. An active bonus element in this instance won't also dot you. Instead, it will be a hidden damage instance, but it ticks along with the Infernal Wish fire to stack BBE. 3. Have a Spiritual Driver equipped and use your action skill to proc a self-dot. In the same vein as the Infernal Wish, an active bonus element won't dot you when doing this, but it will tick along in the background, stacking BBE.

All sorts of tricks, techniques, and knowledge to help you plow through the most difficult content as Amara. Tips Various tips for increasing your general knowledge and skill level at endgame, opening up more build possibilities for you. Combat General Advice FFYL Maliwan Takedown Guardian Takedown True Melee Skill Trees Amara's Green Tree Amara's Blue Tree Amara's Red Tree Amara's Purple Tree Other Skills & Gear Burn Both Ends Groundbreaker Grenades Overkill Upkeep Phasecasting

Tips for understanding what you're up against when playing a true melee Amara build at endgame. True Melee True melee, the actual punching of enemies, is both the most rewarding playstyle and the most frustrating playstyle, in my opinion. There are several builds on this site focused on true melee. You must be aware of its limitations, so that you can expect them and do your best to work around them. ZERO RANGE True melee has basically zero range, which presents many problems. The obvious one is flying enemies, such as Death Spheres or Seras. many of which actively avoid your approach, even if you could reach them with Find Your Center or Blitz. Even something simple as an enemy jumping on a box can mean they are unreachable, and while you are trying to get to them you get downed. It's for these reasons that grenades and guns like the Face Puncher and Blade Fury exist. KNOCKBACK There are certain enemies that will relentlessly knock you back while you are attempting to punch them. This is most common in the Guardian Takedown. Additionally, most of those enemies in the takedown are not stunned by your melee attacks. So they remain grounded and attacking you, while also knocking you away, making you have to wait to land on your feet and close the gap again. DEATH SKULLS True melee builds massively benefit from the Speed Demon modifier on Mayhem 10. However, being a true melee build removes the ability to use one of the very hard modifiers, Post Mortem. The death skulls that spawn from a killed enemy have hitboxes instantly, and a punch that kills an enemy will also send you directly into that spawning skull, downing you every time. BODY & MIND Body & Mind is a useful damage increase for punching, but its area-of-effect nature will also detonate barrels nearby, or add elemental damage to the water you are standing in, damaging you. WOTAN The most loved boss of Borderlands 3, Wotan, cannot be true melee'd, at least not without huge risk. His deterrence field healthgates you when you get close. TELEPORTATION There is a risk of teleportation when you attempt punching an enemy. This is especially risky in the Guardian Takedown. See below: There is no rhyme or reason to this teleportation, at least not that I've found. You can be teleported forward, to the side, a short distance, a medium distance, out into midair over a cliff, whatever. It's rare, but it happens. GRASPED ENEMIES Thankfully, Find Your Center allows for meleeing of grasped and elevated enemies. However, it is not made easy. To consistently punch a grasped enemy, you need to move backwards a little bit after each punch, as demonstrated below:

Phasecast and gun-based Urad build that creates chaos through cryo and radiation. Fission Amara SYNOPSIS Phasecast and gun-based Urad build that creates chaos through cryo and radiation. INTRO Fission Amara is one of the two builds I originally made in 2020 after the purple tree came out, along with its sister build Oblivion Amara. Here it is updated for level 72, and it's very strong. This is a Deathless Urad build, although it has significant defensive capabilities and can be played very safely at the expense of a little damage. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE ACTION SKILL Tandava for general usage, Reverberation for bossing, with the special Reverberation technique. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Always cryo, except against Wotan, where you switch to corrosive. PHASECASTING GUN Guardian Angel, with the Urad anointment. SHOOTING GUNS Anything cryo and splash, with the Urad anointment. My favorites: Beacon, Kaoson, Boogeyman, Sand Hawk, Flipper, Anarchy, Insider, Soulrender, Plaguebearer, Backburner. FFYL GUN If you're using a less powerful gun for your shooting, it may not be strong enough to get you back up from FFYL, so carrying something like a Urad Free Radical or Plasma Coil may be wise. CLASS MOD Stone or Phasezerker. For the Stone, look for points into Awakening and Do Harm. Awakening boosts the effectiveness of the damage reduction that Stone grants, and allows you to take lots more damage as a Deathless build. Do Harm boosts your action skill damage, which makes lots of your attacks more effective: Unweave The Rainbow, Free The Soul, Remnant, Tandava, Reverberation. For the Phasezerker, look for points into Conflux. The other two skills don't help. Recommended passives: weapon damage, action skill cooldown rate, action skill damage, splash damage, splash damage radius, weapon crit damage, weapon type damage. SHIELD Re-Volter with Action Skill Start anointment or Beskar with a Reflect part with an ASE 50% bonus element anointment. For the Re-Volter, ideal parts are triple Turtle, with triple Absorb being next best. For the Beskar, the Reflect part is essential. The reflect ability on legendary shields still lets you take damage when a projectile is reflected. The Reflect part that appears on purple shields and some legendaries negates damage when the reflect chance rolls. When the Beskar rolls with a Reflect part, and you enter FFYL once and get a second wind, the Beskar's legendary reflect ability "breaks" and it takes on the properties of the Reflect part. Because the Beskar has a 100% reflect chance, after that point, it will reflect 100% of projectiles without letting them damage you. This does not negate all damage, however; indirect splash can still damage you, and if a projectile dots you, you will take that dot damage. ARTIFACT Ice Breaker Deathless. 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, radiation damage, weapon type damage. For bosses, you can swap out to Snowdrift Deathless, which makes avoiding damage during the Wotan fight much easier, and makes navigating the Anathema fight much simpler. GRENADE It's Piss or Hyperion Quasar (non sticky) or Mesmer, with ASE 50% bonus element. Anything utility oriented like these works just fine. GAMEPLAY LOOP Choose your loadout first; you have two classmods and two shields to choose from. Stone will be slightly stronger action skill effects and great defense, while Phasezerker will be slightly better cooldown and better gun damage. Re-Volter will increase DPS massively, while a Reflect Beskar will be massive defense. In an area like the Guardian Takedown where it's relatively easy to avoid damage, you can put on the Phasezerker and Re-Volter. On the Maliwan Takedown bridge where it's relatively hard to survive as a Deathless build, you can put on the Stone and Beskar and be basically indestructible. My overall favorite is Stone + Re-Volter. Other than that, you cast, you shoot, you destroy. NOTES - RAID BOSSES Builds such as this have an inherent way to take out most raid bosses by Reverbing 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 Reverbed directly.

Slam build based on the Ice Spiker artifact. It's much stronger than you probably think. Icicle Amara SYNOPSIS Slam build based on the Ice Spiker artifact. It's much stronger than you probably think. INTRO It was the summer of 2020 when I noticed that if you had a Nimbus class mod equipped, you fake-grasped, and then slammed an Ice Spiker projectile into an enemy, the Ice Spike would proc the Nimbus cloud. It wasn't until later that year that I figured out why: Ice Spiker is basically another Amara action skill. The Ice Spikes get action skill damage, proc Samsara, proc Laid Bare, proc Expedite with a kill, and even refund half the rush stacks consumed by your latest action skill usage if they get a kill (see Avatar). And of course, they proc the Nimbus cloud. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE ACTION SKILL You can actually use any action skill available to you. But the best are: Tandava, Reverberation, Phaseslam, Eternal Fist, Shooting Star, Light Fantastic. That's most of them. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT You can get away with cryo in nearly every situation, even vs Wotan depending on your loadout. But just to be safe: always cryo except element match a boss. MAIN GUNS Guardian Angels, one with Terror Cryo anointment and the other with Urad anointment. This build can play either way. BACKUP / UTILITY / FFYL GUNS Face Punchers for delivering Groundbreaker or using with Body & Mind to take out elevated/flying enemies. With Terror Cryo and Urad anointments. FFYL weapons such as Ember's Purge, Free Radical, Backburner, Plasma Coil are recommended in case Body & Mind isn't active while you are down. Same anointments as above, or with Consecutive Hits. A Crader's EMP-5 is nice for getting around. CLASS MOD Stone, with Do Harm and Awakening points. Awakening points will buff the damage reduction on the com, as well as the effectiveness of both Do Harm and Violent Tapestry, two very important skills for this build. Recommended passives: splash damage radius, splash damage, action skill damage, action skill cooldown rate. A well-rolled Stone is more effective than the Phasezerker for action skill damage, and its damage reduction is very good. These two perks are what enable the usage of a wide variety of action skills. SHIELD You've got 2 options, depending on if you're using Terror Cryo or Urad. First is a Mana Well with ASE Apply Terror anoint, for use with Terror Cryo. Slamming with this shield (when it has any capacity) will give you a 100% shock bonus element and 90% true damage reduction. Second is Beskar with a Reflect part and with ASE Apply Terror anoint (see "Notes - Beskar" section below), for use with Urad. This shield is also insanely defensive. ARTIFACT Ice Spiker Otto Idol (for use with Terror Cryo) and Ice Spiker Deathless (for use with Urad). The most important passive is Area of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot, which also grants increased area radius. Other recommended passives: cryo damage, action skill cooldown rate, movement speed, radiation damage (on the Deathless). If you want even more tank, use the Safeguard suffix (when using Terror Cryo). Ice Spiker can be swapped out for Snowdrift if you just want to use your action skills during a boss fight. GRENADE Hyperion Quasars (non sticky) with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate and Phasegrasp Terror Skulls. The Terror Skulls are for when you want to use Eternal Fist (see "Notes - Terror Skulls" section below). GAMEPLAY LOOP Activate your action skill of choice and slam away. It takes a little bit to get the hang of the Ice Spiker projectiles. They travel through enemies, and up around over most terrain obstacles. For example, you can hit an enemy who is hiding behind a box by simply slamming directly at them; the spikes will travel straight over the box and hit them on the other side. If you slam close enough, you can get all three projectiles to hit. However, you'll have a bit more damage if you're further away and let the Guardian Angel add its damage bonus. Cryo immune Maliwan heavies are usually not a problem, because you have a non-cryo bonus element with either the Mana Well or Urad. Because this build uses the strongest defense-oriented items in the game (Stone, Beskar, Mana Well), you can basically go wild in dangerous places like the Maliwan Takedown bridge. But as always, be careful of barrels and water. NOTES - BESKAR The reflect ability on legendary shields still lets you take damage when a projectile is reflected. The Reflect part that appears on purple shields and some legendaries negates damage when the reflect chance rolls. When the Beskar rolls with a Reflect part, and you enter FFYL once and get a second wind, the Beskar's legendary reflect ability "breaks" and it takes on the properties of the Reflect part. Because the Beskar has a 100% reflect chance, after that point, it will reflect 100% of projectiles without letting them damage you. This does not negate all damage, however; indirect splash can still damage you, and if a projectile dots you, you will take that dot damage. NOTES - TERROR SKULLS Phasegrasp Terror Skulls will reproc and seek out a grasped enemy every time Eternal Fist lifts a new enemy. And the skulls are very powerful. There is the Terror Skulls anoint on a low level grenade with this save file, and the anoint notes the skulls having very low damage because of that. But the skulls actually deal damage based on the level of the gun you're holding. This setup is great for taking out airborne enemies while your Ice Spikes take care of everything on the ground. NOTES - BONUS LOADOUT You can also use a Re-Volter shield with Action Skill Start for a bit more damage. But this is a risky playstyle, especially if using a Phaseflare action skill. Pair with a grenade with either ASE 50% corrosive bonus element (if using Urad) or ASE Apply Terror (if using Terror Cryo). NOTES - RAID BOSSING While the Hemovorous fight can be very hectic and dangerous, it's rather easy for this slam build. Go Terror Cryo, Mana Well, and Shooting Star, and slam, slam, slam. Shooting Star can even get strong enough on this build to melt True Hag of Fervor.