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 is one of my three crown jewels of true melee builds, along with Sapphire Swan and Emerald Swan. Ruby Swan is 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. 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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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.

Tips for understanding and building with Amara's Blue Tree at endgame. Blue 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 blue (Mystical Assault) tree. DO HARM Very powerful action skill damage increase. It gets further increased in effectiveness by Awakening further down the tree, and the capstone Avatar allows you to stack more Do Harm at a time. This increases all things that are action skill damage, not just your action skills themselves. This includes Revelation, Remnant, Ties That Bind links, Unweave The Rainbow, Body & Mind, Free The Soul, Catharsis, and Ice Spiker. FAST HANDS Very useful, always-on reload and swap speed. Always take this if you're doing anything with guns at all. VIOLENT TAPESTRY Great utility skill, at the very least useful for 1 point simply for the ability to gain Rush stacks by applying a status effect. Even with a Phasezerker class mod, you can keep your stacks topped up very easily with this skill. If you need to be applying status effects in general, whether its to enemies or to yourself, it's worth investing some points into this skill. It is further increased in effectiveness by Awakening. Violent Tapestry also increases cryo efficiency, making it an extremely important skill for cryo-focused builds. Amara does have a lot of synergy with cryo, either directly or indirectly through melee-related skills. ALACRITY Always worth at least 1 point in a gun build. A good place to dump points if you need to go further down the tree. TRANSCEND Very strong critical hit damage increase, especially because it can be stacked twice with Avatar. Great for boss melts when the boss has an accessible crit spot. A purple Mantis class mod can give you an extra three points into this skill making those boss melts go even faster. This skill can also be taken for builds that crit in unconventional ways, such as Ruby Swan or any Spark Plug build. RESTLESS When Expedite is available, this skill is pretty low value. Otherwise, it can be a points dump if you don't need the reload speed from Alacrity or anything above it. ASCENDANT Always taken if you're going at all deep into blue tree. Increasing the effectiveness of augments like Glamour, Expedite, and Stillness of Mind is game changing for how a build can play and flow. FROM REST This skill is hit or miss, depending on the type of guns you are using. If going for a conventional gun build, I would always recommend putting at least 2 points here. Lots of Maliwan weapons feel sluggish without this skill, because of their charge time. If you're strapped for points in this tree, usually Wrath is taken over this skill, but if you have plenty of other gun damage sources (such as Spiritual Driver or a 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment), this can be prioritized over Wrath. LAID BARE Very powerful damage increasing skill. Always taken if you're this far down the tree, and some builds go into blue tree simply to get Laid Bare , because it applies to everything. WRATH Good gun damage increase, nothing more to it. REMNANT Extremely powerful skill. Always take it if you're this far, and you never need more than one point into it. Some builds even require you to get this skill on a class mod. Remnant gets your overkill damage as its base, then gets a x31 multiplier on Mayhem 10/11, and then gets action skill damage, elemental damage, splash damage, etc. It will always target the enemy closest to you, if that enemy is reachable and still existant by the time it gets there. You may have seen some raid boss 1 shots with Remnant. Yes, it's that powerful. AWAKENING If you need to be investing in Do Harm and/or Violent Tapestry, then you also need to be investing in Awakening, if you get this far down the tree. This skill also increases the effectiveness of the damage reduction on the Stone class mod. Having 6/3 Awakening with the Stone gives you significant tankiness. AVATAR Perhaps the most important skill in all of Amara's skill trees. The ability to get twice the amount of Do Harm or Violent Tapestry when you use your action skill can make or break many builds. It also refunds you half of your converted Rush stacks if your action skill activation killed an enemy. And of course, the ability to activate your action skill twice in a row is huge.

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.

The big list. The Builds READ OR DIE. Well, kind of. A lot of these builds require lengthy explanations in order to be properly understood and played. Playing a build improperly may result in a bad time. Most of these builds require intermediate to expert level experience with the Borderlands 3 endgame. If you're not quite at that point, perhaps head over to the Tips section for help. It is assumed that you know how the anointments function, that you have all Guardian Rank perks unlocked, and have a basic understanding of the damage formula. All gameplay footage of Takedowns are in True Takedown mode. Gun Builds Acidwolf Hidden Tiger Queen Mida s Inferno Amara Nightmare Amara Leeloo Dallas Multi-tap Amara Dot Gun Amara Dot Crit Barbie Dahl Phasewalker Cold Hearted Ragebow Beeg Badaboom Agent Amara Mother Chuckin' Amara Action Skill Builds Supernatural Amara Meteor Amara Sorceress Queen Hybrid Builds Fission Amara Oblivion Amara Lame Faker Amara True Melee Builds Emerald Swan Ruby Swan Sapphire Swan Golden Swan Sulphur Swan Steel Swan Amber Swan Antimatter Swan Stone Swan Slam Builds Gone Fission Amara Icicle Amara Magmamara Teslamara Other Builds Phase Yeet Boomfist Amara Dot Com Unreal Amara

Hellfire-only build. It's only half a joke. Inferno Amara SYNOPSIS Hellfire build. It's actually pretty good! INTRO This build started as a meme, a proof of concept, the concept being just how far theorycrafting and optimizing can take you. The Hellfire is widely considered to be a very weak, very terrible gun. But it can still be built around to make it kill True Guardian Takedown enemies, even without Ties That Bind. It's also, actually, a pretty fun build, because the Hellfire has a great feel to it, as do most Dahl SMGs. The core interactions that make this build work are down toward the bottom in the "Notes - Hellfire Advantages" section. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Note no Sustainment. Samsara is your sustain. Unweave the Rainbow is your damage. Violent Tapestry allows you to access that damage. ACTION SKILL Reverberation, usually. Tandava can also be used, but beware the longer cooldown. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Almost always cryo, but you can experiment with matching your element to your content. Even against Guardians in the True Guardian Takedown, I tend to stick to cryo for the faster freezing, even though shock makes for much stronger Unweave damage. When bossing with Reverberation, element match the boss (cryo can often be used in place of corrosive, unless you're fighting Wotan). GUN Hellfire, with Phasecast 250. I recommend going for max dot damage, single projectile. Get as low of a mag size as possible, because mag size passives are preferred on your artifact to make up for this. FFYL GUN Free Radical with Consecutive Hits anointment. Even though you can often get up from FFYL with the Hellfire on this build, sometimes it just isn't enough to cut it. UTILITY / BOSSING GUN Guardian Angel with 200% Astral Projection anointment. This is for big bossing Reverb/Tandava damage. CLASS MOD Phasezerker. Skill points aren't too important, but lots of points into Clarity does help your survivability. This, and also the artifact, are where optimization really goes a long way toward raising up the Hellfire. Passives such as SMG Damage, Action Skill Damage, and Dahl Weapon Critical Damage, Weapon Damage, and Mag Size really make a difference. Splash Damage Radius is very helpful for Hollowpoints, which greatly help with area clear. Action Skill Cooldown Rate is also not a bad passive. SHIELD Re-Volter, with Action Skill Start anointment. ARTIFACT Dahl Company Man, with damage, crit damage, and mag size top passives. Good passives for the bottom: mag size, action skill cooldown rate, area of effect damage, cryo damage, cryo efficiency. Mag size passives are highly preferred because you don't want to spend precious time reloading while an enemy is frozen. Backup artifact, until you get a good Company Man, would be a Pearl of Ineffable Knowledge with a mag size passive. GRENADE Whatever grenade you want, with ASE 50% bonus cryo damage anointment. It's Piss, Mesmer, Hyperion Quasar are all good utility. Fish Slap if you want to incorporate it into your bossing strategy. GAMEPLAY LOOP Cast Reverb at enemies, then shoot them in the face. That's the basics. Always be casting as soon as you can, because the more you cast, the more Violent Tapestry and Do Harms stacks you build (because of the Phasezerker's Rush stacking method). I often cast twice in a row whenever it's available. See the "Notes - Hellfire Advantages" section to learn why both Do Harm and Violent Tapestry are critical to this build. Always be aiming for crit spots. Unweave the Rainbow can crit, making it obscenely effective. A nice bonus to killing with Unweave critical hits is more Hollowpoints. NOTES - HELLFIRE ADVANTAGES So how does Amara make the Hellfire kill True Guardian Takedown enemies? By dealing damage to them via Unweave The Rainbow. Unweave The Rainbow is a form of action skill damage, and it gets mayhem scaling and is increased by Do Harm stacks. UTR requires two things: splash or melee damage, and for the enemy to be frozen. The Hellfire is actually a splash gun. But why does this build go this route for damage when the gun is fire-locked? Because the Hellfire has a very high cryo efficiency. A gun's dot damage listed on the card divided by its projectile damage listed on the card is its cryo efficiency. You can confirm this if you have two versions of a gun, one cryo and one of a different element. The Hellfire has an extremely high listed dot damage relative to its projectile damage. The one in this save file lists 90,786 dmg/second with a projectile damage of 7,205. If this gun were cryo, it would have over 1,200% cryo efficiency! So how about we just add some cryo? And Amara can make any gun cryo, through Infusion. It's only 40% of the damage at 5/5 points, but that still makes for an effective cryo efficiency of about 500%. The 50% Cryo ASE bonus element also inherits the Hellfire's efficiency. The Hellfire freezes very fast for as little damage as it does. And when the freezing occurs, Unweave The Rainbow kicks in to finish the enemy off. This is why constantly Phasecasting is recommended in the "Gameplay Loop" section above. More stacks of Violent Tapestry means greater cryo efficiency and faster freezing. More stacks of Do Harm means stronger Unweave The Rainbow damage. Beware that going into FFYL makes you lose all stacks for both of those skills. So don't act like you're invincible or anything. Remember: no Sustainment. NOTES - BOSSING The Hellfire is not a bossing gun, even with this build, because bosses cannot be frozen. That's why we have the Guardian Angel and use powerful action skills like Reverberation (learn more about Phasecasting technique here ) and Tandava. Add on the Fish Slap if you want. You can even get an Orb Damage anointed Guardian Angel and use the Shooting Star variant of Phaseflare. Equip a Snowdrift when bossing, if you like, because it's not like a Dahl Company Man or Pearl are going to help your action skill damage.

A close-quarters, chaotic Driver gun build. Cold Hearted SYNOPSIS A close-quarters, chaotic Driver gun build. INTRO This build makes use of the anointment, "While Phasegrasp is active, Amara constantly triggers novas that deal 24756 damage." When you put this anointment on the Frozen Heart, these novas take on properties of that shield, in that they freeze and heal you. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Unweave The Rainbow is the star of the show, as it will greatly increase your damage against frozen enemies, provided you're using a splash gun. Unweave is boosted by action skill damage, so maxing blue tree is a necessity. ACTION SKILL Eternal Fist, for potentially the longest grasp time, for more nova destruction. It's also one of the grasp variants that begins and ends immediately when grasping a non-graspable target, and begins cooling down. This is useful because, for the most part, targets that cannot be lifted also cannot be frozen. With Expedite, every enemy that gets grasped and kills gives you a stack, and any enemy that gets killed by Unweave The Rainbow also gives you a stack. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever element is suited to your content. Unweave The Rainbow will be that element, as will your "constant novas", even though those novas still have the ability to freeze enemies. You should also match this element to the gun you're using. GUNS Anything decent that does splash damage, in fire, shock, and corrosive. Anointments: Killstack, Consecutive Hits, or ASE 125% Splash if applicable. Suggested guns: Plaguebearer, Backburner, Beacon, Sand Hawk, Free Radical, Major Kong, Guardian Angel (yes, as a gun to shoot), Kaoson, Prompt Critical. Try the Firecracker for a bit of fun. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, with as many points into Mindfulness as possible, and also with a recommended Splash Damage Radius roll. Other recommended passives: action skill damage, splash damage, action skill cooldown rate, weapon type 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 Frozen Heart, with the anointment, "While Phasegrasp is active, Amara constantly triggers novas that deal 24756 damage." As mentioned at the top, these novas on this shield makes every nova have the freezing and healing properties of the Frozen Heart. They'll freeze everything around you while Eternal Fist is doing its thing. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector Victory Rush, with an Area of Effect Damage roll in the 2nd or 3rd slot, which will increase the radius of your novas. The Elemental Projector means your action skill element needs to match your gun's element. Other recommended passives: weapon type damage, action skill cooldown rate, movement speed, elemental damage. GRENADE Anything useful, with an ASE 50% radiation bonus element. The radsplosions will help obliterate frozen enemies. For utility, It's Piss, Hyperion Quasar (non sticky), Mesmer. Something like the Lightspeed can also deal decent damage with Unweave on frozen enemies, especially if it matches along with Elemental Projector. GAMEPLAY LOOP The novas from your shield anointment aren't as large as the regular Frozen Heart novas, so getting good damage with the Driver usually means staying close and strafing around a grasped, frozen enemy. Once that enemy is dead, everything around you will also be frozen, and you can finish them off, then go looking for the next enemy that Eternal Fist found. Generally, like any Driver gun build, move quickly and shoot. Because this is a fairly close-quarters build, the only thing you have to look out for is splashing yourself in the face. NOTES - IMMUNE MALIWAN HEAVIES Because of Elemental Projector, nearly all of your damage is stacked on one element, which can create problems with immune heavies in the Maliwan Takedown. Either punch/ground slam to deliver Groundbreaker to kill them, use a different element gun, or briefly swap action skill elements. NOTES - RAID BOSSING This build has the old Amara-bossing-with-guns problem, at least when it comes to raid bossing. To overcome this, change over to a regular Driver build by swapping your Frozen Heart out for an Action Skill Start Re-Volter and move fast while shooting strong gun. If you wanna get really strong, put your action skill element on shock, swap to Phasecast, and use a 250% Phasecast Free Radical.

A very strong Spark Plug slam build. Teslamara SYNOP SIS A very strong Spark Plug slam build. INTRO The ultimate evolution of the original Amara Spark Plug build , it has grown almost too strong. It can speed through nearly any content. And it's very simple to play. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES There are some gun-related skills for your the Face Puncher, your FFYL weapon, or shooting the Guardian Angel (see "Notes - Shooting the Guardian Angel" section at the bottom). Transcend also is beneficial for the Spark Plug, because the Spark Plug can crit. Burn Both Ends can be self-stacked by the Spiritual Driver self-dot and an active bonus element (Terror Cryo). Normally, self damage does not stack Burn Both Ends, but a bonus element "ticking on top of" a self-dot will. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. Optionally base Phasegrasp for bosses for the lack of duration and shorter cooldown. You can actually use any action skill you want, just be aware that waiting too long between activations will make you lose damage. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Always corrosive. Nothing of importance changes if you change your action skill element, so corrosive is chosen for the longest dot length. The longer the dot is on you, the longer you have Mindfulness movement speed and the longer you have Burn Both Ends damage. MAIN GUN Guardian Angel, with Terror Cryo anointment. Hold this, slam, and move away for increased Spark Plug damage. FFYL GUN If you have any still going, your Spark Plugs will get you up from FFYL most of the time, but it may be wise to carry something like a Free Radical or other strong gun. Anointment possibilities: Consecutive Hits, Terror Cryo, Terror Crit. BACKUP GUN Face Puncher, preferably x14, with Terror Cryo anointment. With Body & Mind active, this gun can help you quickly take out distant flying enemies or get you up from FFYL. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, with as many points into Mindfulness as possible. Movement speed is quite important for slam builds. Otherwise, it's used to self-stack Burn Both Ends, in conjuction with an active bonus element. The most important passive is Splash Damage Radius, as that will increase the radius of your slams, and thus increase the area over which you can apply Groundbreaker. Other passives: action skill cooldown rate, splash damage, action skill damage. SHIELD Re-Volter, with ASE Apply Terror. Your Re-Volter will break naturally, and reproc every time you kill an enemy, via the Shield Reboot Guardian Rank perk. This frees up an anoint slot instead of using Action Skill Start. Another favorite of mine with this build is a corrosive Messy Breakup, with the same ASE Apply Terror anoint. Like the Re-Volter, this shield can re-break over and over again with Shield Reboot, giving you lots of drones. The drones are very helpful for bossing, distant enemies, and shock-immune enemies. ARTIFACT Spark Plug Static Charge. The Static Charge bonus element applies to the Spark Plug. The most important passive is Area Of Effect in the 2nd or 3rd slot, as that will also increase your splash radius and the radius of your slams. Other passives: action skill cooldown rate, shock damage, cryo damage, movement speed. GRENADE Fish Slap in various elements, with Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. Use the Fish if you want to more quickly deal with immune shock heavies or dispatch a boss. GAMEPLAY LOOP Grasp immediately when it's available, then slam with reckless abandon. Move away from your Spark Plugs to increase damage from Guadian Angel. When out of combat, get into the habit of swapping away from your Guardian Angel, perhaps to something like the EMP5. The Guardian Angel increases all self-damage by 5x, so with the Driver self-dot active, you can actually down yourself while running between fights with no enemies around. NOTES - SHOOTING THE GUARDIAN ANGEL Guardian Angel with Indiscriminate makes the Indiscriminate ricochets double-dip the Guardian Angel bonus damage. The ricochets are very powerful. Randomly shooting the Guardian Angel at an enemy will sometimes clear all of the enemies around you and give you huge Groundbreaker damage for your next slam. This is a great technique for speeding up the Anthema fight: as you approach Anathema to slam a Spark Plug, shoot the Guardian Angel at his face. The bullets will ricochet and kill the mobs all around the arena, and your next slam will take a huge chunk out of Anathema. NOTES - SPECIFIC BOSSES The Spark Plug can completely meme on some bosses: Scourge, Rampager, Tyrant of Instinct (even the True version). Try and and see for yourself. Beware that during the Scourge fight, slamming a Spark Plug too close to the center of the arena can automatically chain-kill the Diadems that he spawns. Instead, place the Spark Plugs near the top of the center diamond on the side you enter the arena. The Spark Plug does not work at all against Hemo and Vermi. For that fight, equip an Elemental Projector Static Charge, and corrosive Fish Slap, and just Fish them to death. This build has a great damage formula, and this will make very quick work of the fight.

One shot basically anything in the game with damage over time from your guns. Amara Dot Gun SYNOPSIS One shot basically anything in the game with damage over time from your guns. INTRO The ultimate evolution of Amara Dot Com , this build focuses on damage over time (dots) applied with high dot damage guns. This build can one shot anything in the game, if you allow some tech to accelerate the dots after the shot is fired. But it also allows you to use some overlooked weapons for regular gameplay. This build is somewhat complicated to set up and play correctly, though, so pay attention. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES This is somewhat atypical of a red/blue Ties That Bind gun build. Skills like Personal Space and Transcend do not affect dot damage. Nor does splash damage, so Heavy Rain is more about the projectile speed for use with some weapons. Five points go to Do Harm to make sure Ties kills linked enemies, giving you Overkill even at the start of combat with no Overkill or anointments active. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. There is a bonus loadout that uses Reverberation, see "Notes - Radiation Loadout" at the end. Stillness of Mind is important for preventing enemies from damaging your shield. It also allows the Recursion to ping around and hit more enemies while they're stationary. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Whatever element matches the gun in your hand. Your main gun will apply the largest dot, and when your AS element matches it, Anima provides an extra boost to that element's dot damage. DOT SCIENCE AND ON-SHOT VS ON-HIT Gun dots are increased by gun damage, any form of amp, the charge mult on certain weapons (such as Major Kong or Kickcharger), Overkill (Guardian Rank perk), and most global on-hit modifiers such as elemental damage, V1, and Guardian Angel bonus. Gun dots are not affected by crit damage, splash damage, weapon type damage, or Personal Space, because all of those are non-global on-hit modifiers. What does that mean? Let's go on a tangent. There are certain things that occur "on shot", when you fire a projectile, and others that occur "on hit", when the damage actually occurs on the enemy. Gun damage, for example, is on shot; if you were to fire a projectile with bonus gun damage, then removed those bonuses before the projectile hit, it will still do damage according to the gun damage you had when you shot it. Same goes for amp, the charge mult on certain weapons, and Overkill. These on-shot modifiers are essentially an increase to the card damage of your gun, and therefore they increase the applied dot. Something like crit occurs on hit, because how can the game know you actually landed a crit until it hits? If you were to remove your crit bonuses before the projectile lands, it would deal less damage. But this also is why crit swapping exists. Weapon type damage is on-hit, and this is the reason why "Shotgun Damage" does not apply to the Face Puncher. The Face Puncher is a shotgun and uses shotgun ammo, but its bullets land (on hit) as melee damage. Thus, the on-hit modifier "Shotgun Damage" won't apply. And it's why it won't increase yours dots; your dots are "hitting" as "status effect damage", not any sort of weapon type. Similarly, splash damage is a global on-hit modifier that applies to all things splash, but dots are not splash. They are not "gun", so Personal Space doesn't apply. They are status effect damage, so the only on-hit modifiers that will increase them are the ones that increase *all kinds* of damage: V1, Guardian Angel, and elemental damage (dots are an element). Dots can be applied one per element per damage source. So your gun's main element must be different from your bonus element anointments, in order to apply as many dots as possible and get the most damage. GUNS Anything that can be shot a single time with a high listed dot damage, with ASE Status Chance/Damage anointment. That anointment says 75%, but it's actually 40% increased status effect damage. Regardless, it's multiplicative with Anima's status effect damage, so it's still very strong. The increased chance also makes your dots much more reliable. Good guns for this build: Moonfire, Recursion, Storm, Major Kong, Kickcharger, Slow Hand, x4 Fearmonger . All of these must be fire, shock, and/or corrosive. Do not choose radiation weapons (outside of the Radiation Loadout), and do not choose cryo weapons. Radiation is much more effective as a bonus element, and cryo does not have a dot. The Major Kong is fucking crazy with this build. That's all that needs to be said. It is possible to use non-elemental guns, such as the Bird of Prey seen in the gameplay video. That gun is anointed with a Next Two Mags anointment, essentially making it an elemental weapon. It does lose the consistency of the ASE Status Chance/Damage anointment, though. SWAP GUN Guardian Angel, with Killstack anointment. Swap to this to increase the damage of the dots you applied with your main gun. Beware that swapping makes you lose your ASE Status Chance/Damage anointment on your main gun. The Killstack anointment, however, attaches to the player, so if enemies die while you're holding the Guardian Angel, that gun damage will still be there when you swap back to your main gun. Dots are increased with gun damage. For quicker raid bossing, you can take advantage of a Guardian Angel with the Elemental Critical Hit anointment. You can trigger this anointment with a grenade that matches your main gun's element or one of your bonus elements. CLASS MOD Phasezerker, with as many points into Anima as possible. Anima is hugely important to this build. Recommended passives: weapon charge speed, action skill cooldown rate, weapon damage, splash damage radius (for larger radsplosions). Weapon charge speed can be very useful for guns like the Recursion and the Major Kong. The Kong normally takes 5 seconds of charging to reach its maximum damage, but with a passive on your Phasezerker, it reduces it down to about 2.5 seconds. SHIELD Amp shield, with ASE 50% bonus radiation anointment. The recommended one is a triple amp purple Pangolin shield, called a One-Shotter. It amps for 100% damage, and has a pretty quick delay and recharge rate, allowing you more amp shots faster. A 0.m amps for more damage, but it takes significantly longer to refill. If you want to use the Major Kong regularly, a double-amp Big Boom Blaster would help you recover some ammo, at the cost of some amp power. ARTIFACT Toboggan. Recommended passives: elemental damage, action skill cooldown rate, area of effect damage in the 2nd or 3rd slot. This amp multiplies with your shield amp to even further increase dot damage. This means you must slide between each shot. Don't worry, though, if you play correctly, every shot does a lot of work. You can carry a Cutpurse Launchpad to help keep up your launcher ammo, in case you get addicted to the Major Kong. GRENADE Any grenade that can be used for crowd control, such as the Mesmer or Hyperion Quasar (non sticky). Alternatively, if you're trying to Ele Crit a raid boss with your Ele Crit Guardian Angel, a grena de that can crit such as the Lightspeed, Hex, or Hunter Seeker, matching the element of the dot you want to explode. The anointment is important here. It must be a shock, fire, or corrosive ASE 50% bonus element, but it must be suited to your content, and be different from your main gun's element. Radiation is always a bonus element you want, but that's covered with your shield anointment. The element here must be the "2nd or 3rd best" for your content. GAMEPLAY LOOP Make sure your loadout is correct, with differing elements for your gun and your bonus elements. Make sure your grenade is of the appropriate element if you want to Ele Crit a boss. Grasp, slide, shoot, or slide, grasp, shoot. Your first grasp in combat won't have bonus elements, because your action skill hasn't ended yet. It will be a little weaker. You also won't have Overkill. Overkill is a huge increase to dot damage. Any damage can build Overkill, not just a gun shot. An enemy dying to a heavy dot will give you good Overkill. Miss your shot, but you still have Groundbreaker built up? Melee kill an enemy to get Overkill again. Miss your shot, but Remnant is going after an enemy? Let it land and get you Overkill. You shoot the grasped enemy, it doesn't die because you don't have Overkill, but a linked enemy died? Now you have Overkill, try shooting the grasped enemy again (make sure to slide again beforehand). You must be aware of your buffs for every shot you take. Did you slide before the shot? Is your amp shield full? Do you have Overkill? Are your bonus elements still active? Are enemies going to shoot you and damage your shield? Master the flow and pay attention to what's going on and this build will destroy everything. NOTES - RADIATION LOADOUT For a change of pace, for a more carefree, fast-firing, run-and-gun style, and yet still get big radsplosions and strong dots, ignore most of the normal loadout recommended above. Get a good radiation weapon such as the Beacon, Trevonator, Plasma Coil, RYNAH, or just a radiation version of one of the normal guns. Put a 250% Phasecast gun damage anointment on it. Switch to Reverberation. Equip a Re-Volter with Action Skill Start anointment. Equip an Atom Balm Victory Rush. Put ASE 50% fire or corrosive anointment on your grenade. And shoot away, no worrying about an amp shield or sliding for Toboggan. The 400-level/AP course for this build: use the radiation loadout but instead put ASE 50% radiation on your grenade and use the Hellfire or DNA, with 250% Phasecast anointment.

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.

Tips for how to best utilize powerful and underrated grenades at endgame. Grenades Grenades are an often overlooked form of attack, at least on Amara. I will cover some useful grendes here, dividing them up into damaging grenades and utility grenades. DAMAGING GRENADES Check out the Phase Yeet build to see what Amara can do with grenades. With the right build, she can make use of the Fastball, Whispering Ice, Hex, Porcelain Pipe Bomb, Ghast Call, Core Buster, Doc Hina's Miracle Bomb, Lightspeed, and purple grenades with 2 or 3 Sticky parts. These are of varying strength, but the top tier of them can defeat raid bosses rather handily. The Fish Slap, of course, can be used to wipe out anything. It's the most powerful item in the game. Spec a few melee skills, a few splash skills, a few elemental skills, and grab a Guardian Angel and your Fish is now a destroyer of worlds. I tend to avoid that, however, because it almost completely removes the need to have a build. UTILITY GRENADES More often, though, I recommend grenades for utility on Amara. Two grenades in particular are great for crowd control: Mesmer and Hyperion Quasar (non sticky). Both of them, when used well, can make an off-meta build go from barely playable to breezing through content. Proper grenade usage increases build diversity for you. A simple Hex grenade can also help keep you out of FFYL, if you're specced Sustainment. Sustainment is not a cheat code; Amara does get put into FFYL, and it's often while she's reloading. However, if you're throwing Hex grenades (or any grenade that deals many instances of elemental damage) every now and then, they can Sustain you while you reload and find your next target.