Game Breaker / Borderlands 3

Amara

• Amara can become an absolute beast thanks to one weapon: The Face-Puncher. Since it shoots your melee damage and Amara has multiple melee buffs, this can potentially deal huge damage. To maximize this, get a two-shot version with a "+200% melee after using phaseslam" anointment and a White Elephant artifact that makes melee apply sticky bombs. The only downside is that combat arenas will really chew through ammo, but a Cutpurse artifact (melee attacks replenish ammo) will take care of that.
  • The same can be said of Fish Slap, for the same reasons. It's a bouncing grenade that scales off of melee damage, so with a sufficiently upgraded Amara, it feels like slugging someone with a cannonball.
• The Phasezerker class mod, if combined with Infinity and certain skills^note Samsara, Do Harm, Violent Tapestry, Restless and Infusion - throw in Laid Bare and Wrath for extra damage. Phasezerker is intented to be Difficult, but Awesome that gives you extra damage and action skill cooldown if you manage to keep it stacked (it fills your Rush stack every time you use her special, but the stacks also decay now) - but when used with Infinity, Samsara and Infusion, it gets difficult to lose stacks, since the gun's infinite ammo keeps inflicting Amara's enemies with her chosen element, which causes Violent Tapestry to give you more Rush stacks, each of which adds you 3% gun damage per stack, reduces her action skill cooldown, and adds damage to her next special. When the skill is then used, it activates Samsara which boosts weapon damage even more. The end result is a woman who never stops shooting and keeps gaining stacking damage bonuses that, while capped at 15 or 25, allow her to take down even anointed in less than a minute. The only problem is that once you wipe out most if the battlefield, you'll have less opportunities to keep Rush stacked, and Phasegrasp (Which has the shortes recharge of her Action Skills) cannot trigger Samsara without a upgrade deep in the red skill tree.
  • Phasezerking also allows Loophole Abuse; it's activated when the skill is used, meaning you don't need to hit enemies with it. Phasegrasp instantly refills your Action skill if it doesn't hit anything. With the blue capstone skill, missing Phasegrasp on purpose builds you stacks quickly, ~25 per activation. The game breaking part comes from the fact that Rush's bonuses don't come from the stacks consumed when the action skill is used but from a separate buff given afterwards. While Rush stacks max out at 25, the buff that gives the bonuses can go up to 99 if you use your action skill frequently. With full 99 stacks, Phasegrasp augmented with Revelation (The nova augment) deals an insane amount of damage, enough to take at least a full bar of life from TVHM Mouthpiece (His shield kicks in after each bar, so it could theoretically deal even more), and regular Pandora TVHM Mooks take around 79k damage, enough to detonate the victim on contact. Combine this with "Ties that Bind", and the damage is applied to everyone around the target. It's so easy to abuse it's hard to tell if it's intentional or not.
• The Lob has been changed multiple times, and its current iteration is extraordinarily powerful, especially in Amara's hands. It's a Torgue Shotgun that behaves like no other - it fires a massive ball of elemental energy only stopped by walls - completely ignoring riot shields and barriers that usually block gunfire. It repeatedly does damage to anything in its wake, and it does heavy amounts of damage with each tick, so using it on large enemies can shred them in moments. It's also incredibly ammo efficient, only costing one shotgun shell per shot, it has a large clip, and it's one of Torgue's faster-loading guns. The biggest drawbacks are the fact it's got a relatively short range due to the limited uptime of the slow-moving projectile. However, this is something that is extremely exploitable with Amara, as Personal Space - Found on the very first tier of the Brawl tree - amplifies damage at close range, increasing the already staggering damage of the weapon by 54% when maxed out. Combine this with the considerable amounts of Elemental Damage buffs in her various trees, and you can vaporise most enemies you come across, especially if you can find more than one to cover the various elemental weaknesses.

FL4K

• FL4K is a Critical Hit Class per excellence thanks to their Stalker tree, and with the right gear you can make them a critical hitting monster with infinite ammo. Especially when used with Jakobs guns, all of which come with the common ability of ricocheting a bullet to another enemy on every critical hit. FL4K was so crazy overpowering that from release day they were the most played Vault Hunter of the 4. A series of balance patches around late-September 2019 nerfed the effectiveness of FL4K's Stalker tree and the weapons FL4K worked best with.
• One of FL4K's mid skill tree perks is extremely potent for something that can be obtained so early. Once equipped, it lets their pet revive them during FFYL and even gives them a damage bonus if successful. This is already useful in large firefights, but it becomes even more potent against single tough enemies such as bosses and/or badasses where it can be hard to get a kill quick enough for a revive. Better yet, even if the pet somehow fails it can often buy just enough time to deal enough damage for a second wind normally. This is powerful enough on its own but when combined with skills that boost the damage and health of the pet it becomes even more useful. With a good build FL4K and easily handle the bigger waves against weaker opponents with critical hits and rely on their pet when facing lone targets with a large health pool.
• FL4K also benefits from the legendary Robin's Call shotgun, as not only does it returns 1 ammo from every critical hit. When used in conjunction with Megavore, Leave No Trace, and Fade Away, enemy mobs become meat salsa.
• One of FL4K's Tier 1 skills, Interplanetary Stalker, has a bonus where kills against Robot types activate a unique 7.5% Corrosive Bonus that stacks thrice. Being that this is a Hunter Skill, it is able to be boosted by Big Game, which brings it upwards to 29.25% Corrosive Damage with 3 stacks of IPS & 3 points into Big Game. On the surface, this looks to be rather unexceptional. But this Bonus Corrosive is Pre-Additive, meaning that instead of adding with other elemental bonuses, it instead acts as a multiplier for other sources of elemental damage. This when paired with a Flesh Melter artifact for up to 5 stacks of 32% Bonus Corrosive & Spiderant Scorcher for 10% Corrosive (Amplified by 3x with 5 points into Barbaric Yawp for 30% Elemental), this amounts up to 274.825% Corrosive Damage.
  • This when combined with a bug involving the Bounty Hunter, where any kill activates all Interplanetary Stalker bonuses (barring the Movement Speed Beast Bonus), allows for FL4K to not only negate the damage penalty of Corrosive on Flesh, but even dethrone Fire as the most strongest element on Flesh with Flesh Melter equipped (2.275x Matching Element Damage with Incendiary on Flesh vs 2.4363625x Matching Element Damage with Corrosive on Flesh). This interaction alone, simply titled as FL4CID, is considered a big reason as to why the Bounty Hunter is such a powerful class mod for mobbing, compared to St4ckbot from DLC 1 or the Cosmic Stalker also from base game. This is made even better by the playstyle being 100% base game compatible, with the main recommended gear being the Reflux (A staple shotgun for FL4K that makes excellent use of Megavore/Head Count/Leave No Trace for both ammo sustain and damage) from GenIVIV that drops it at Mayhem 6 & above, & the Breath of The Dying that double dips on several of FL4K's damage bonuses with the orbs it spawns.
    • In some sense, the Breath of The Dying can be considered to be a major factor as to making FL4CID one of the FL4K's strongest playstyles outright, as each orbs not only get 18x the damage of the killing blow, but each of those 13 orbs reapply all of FL4K's immense Global Damage (commonly nicknamed as V1 Damage), Elemental Damage, & even Crit Damage Bonuses (the latter of which is made far more consistent than other characters thanks to Megavore). It's such a stupidly powerful combo that it almost feels like the Breath of The Dying was made in mind for FL4K.

Moze

• With proper investments, Moze's Iron Bear action skill breaks the difficulty of most fights in half. You don't even need any skills designed to boost damage, just the ones that let you use the Iron Bear mech as much as possible along with the basic Vanquisher Rockets, and everything short of very lengthy enemy encounters will pose a genuine threat.
  • On a similar note, place the V-35 Grenade Launcher in both Iron Bear slots, add the augment that causes every seventh grenade fired to be a singularity grenade, and then fire both weapons at the same time. Moze can and will tear through a small army's worth of bad guys within seconds.
  • Specialist Bear on the Bottomless Mags tree makes this even more ridiculous, as it gives a flat 60% damage boost if Iron Bear uses two of the same weapon. Moze will kill anything in her path with this enabled.
• The "Shield of Retribution" tree is pretty good on its own, but it becomes a game-breaker when combined with the Bloodletter: legendary class mod. With the bonus to Thin Red Line, up to 120% of her health is reserved (bringing her down to 1) and turned into a boost to her shields. However, having health permanently at 1 means she gets a permanent bonus to Desperate Measures (which with the class mod bonus means a 100% bonus to gun damage), and the Selfless Vengeance skill does no self-damage since it can't reduce health below 1. Furthermore, there are plenty of other skills in the tree to boost shield recharge, such as Full Can of Whoop-Ass (immediately starts shield regeneration when entering Iron Bear), and Force Feedback (immediately starts shield regeneration on a critical kill). Phalanx Doctrine, meanwhile, increases Moze's shield capacity (as well as gun damage) for every kill she scores for a period of time, and this has no limit. And the tree's capstone skill, Tenacious Defense, causes her to immediately regenerate 40% of her shield whenever her shield goes down. The real benefit, though, is that any healing effect (including healing hypos) will restore shields instead. A decent health-leech grenade and the Vampyr skill (which restores health on grenade damage), combined with Moze's various grenade-regeneration skills, make her very difficult to kill.
• The Deathless artifact reduces the user's health to 1 in exchange for doubled shields as well as improved shield recharge rates and delay. Moze's health bar is usually considered a Dump Stat due to her general lack of health recharge and augment skills, while focusing almost entirely on boosting her shields and shock resistance. Do the math.
• Downplayed with the Iron Cub action skill. While the damage is reduced and can only equip and use 2 weapons from the remaining Action Skill slot, it can be used in areas inaccessible to Iron Bear and still do decent damage to enemies.
• The Boogeyman's trait of sometimes not consuming a bullet makes it a must-have for Moze players. Being a Vladof sniper, this turns it into an endless long-range machine gun, with homing skulls that spawn to help you cause even more destruction.
• The Anarchy, when combined with Moze's ammo regeneration, can be a perpetually superpowered beast. With very little risk of reloading early (and thereby losing your stacks or downing yourself), you can get it going by blasting down a few weak enemies like skags, then go and fight something stronger with the shiny new 300% damage boost that will last the whole fight.
• The Flare class mod gives Iron Bear a 100% damage increase that gradually lowers as fuel is expended. It synergizes very well with builds that focus on keeping Iron Bear active as long as possible as well as boosting his damage (primarily including skills like Stainless Steel Bear, Deadlines, Really Big Guns, and Specialist Bear). With this class mod, Moze can start a fight and lay waste to all sorts of enemies, demolishing them while they're unable to fight back due to getting blasted so hard.
• It's widely agreed upon that the generic purple grenade mod called the Cloning Maddening Tracker is Moze's best grenade. Because it splits the most and homes in on enemies, it works wonders with her grenade-hit healing skill. This works well, no matter what level it is, but an anointed one with a "bonus damage on grenade throw" trait makes it even better. Unfortunately, because it's a generic purple, it's FAR rarer than any legendary and finding one will require really scrutinizing loot drops and religiously visiting ammo vendors.
• The Lucky 7 normally has limited usage due to starting as a normal Jakobs revolver and needing a good combo of bonuses on reload that only lasts for a single magazine. But with Moze's ammo regeneration, you can keep that super-buffed magazine going for a long time. Just the combination of auto-crits, x7 shot, explosive bullets, and optional full auto can be enough to tear through most enemy gauntlets and boss fights.

Zane

• The Redistributor SMG in Zane's hands. Normally, the SMG amps and ricochets every seventh shot. However, when all shots are amped, say, by Zane's barrier, all of the shots ricochet. Room clearing suddenly becomes trivial.
• Once you get your hands on the Seein' Dead class mod from the Handsome Jackpot DLC, you will never need any other class mod ever again. The mod can activate all of Zane's kill skills by merely DAMAGING an enemy, as well as making the skills 25% stronger (later nerfed to 10%). One kill skill gives an increase to the duration of your active action skills, so you can keep them going almost forever. And since Jackpot-exclusive mods drop in abundance, you'll have near-endless variations to pick from that suit your style/equipment the best.
• A mundane example: There's the possibility of shields and artifacts granting a speed boost (the former usually if the shield is full or depleted). Next, there's the possibility of there being anointments that increase movement speed when SNTNL is active. And then there are various skills that boost Zane's speed as a kill skill and whenever his action skills are active. Put these all together, as well as Seein' Dead for good measure, and Zane easily becomes the fastest moving character in the game.
• An early game example is Calm, Cool, Collected. This skill relies on Zane freezing an enemy. In order of priority, this starts Zane's shield to recharge, then grants health regeneration, then resets Zane's action skills cooldown/duration. Coupled with various other skills in the Under Cover tree (such as Brain Freeze, which grant automatic cryo damage for critical hits), and this skill can be instrumental in survival as well as bringing more hurt should he do well.
• The Digi-Clone is moderately useful by itself, but two certain upgrades make it a lot more so; one early skill increases damage done when Zane has any action skill active, and the capstone skill gives the clone your current weapon and a 25% damage boost after swapping places with it. Take any already powerful weapon (like the Ion Cannon or the O.P.Q System), and you can more than double your already impressive damage output - not to mention the clone consumes no ammo. With certain skills, the thing can even heal Zane. The fact that the clone usually aims for weak spots also means that it'll often trigger the "Lootsplosion" mayhem modifier (if active), covering the arena with extra loot.
  • If you give the Clone the Grease Trap from the Revenge of the Cartels Event, it will fire its default Fire Starter mode. By having Zane fire at the enemies Clone shoots at while you have the pistol in Hot Grease Mode, you can constantly apply a debuff to enemies for your Clone, allowing you to annihilate a variety of enemies in the game (Up to and including raid bosses).
• The MNTIS cannon means Zane can join Amara and FL4K in having a spammable action skill that can take great advantage of all "action skill start/end" anointments. And since Zane can also have another action skill at the same time, this can get out of hand pretty damn quick.
• Possibly one of the most broken interactions of the entire franchise; Boresplosion is widely considered to be Zane's most strongest playstyle by a large margin. It utilizes the Hustler class mod to activate fake-crits, which can in turn activate Eraser (A skill widely considered to be the successor to Zer0's B0re skill), & those fake crits are able to activate on splash damage. Those instances of splash damage can also activate eraser again, which repeats several times over dealing an ungodly amount of damage (A chain of increasingly powerful explosions also akin to Krieg's green tree capstone, Bloodsplosion). The catch? It is a complete nightmare to build farm for as it outright requires splash radius buffs on the class mod & artifact (the latter of which requires having Area of Effect Damage as the second or third roll, as that's the only way to get splash radius on an artifact).
  • Pair it with a Complex Root, & you hardly need to aim because of a bug with the Complex Root, where splash radius bonuses makes its very projectiles spread across wide distances.

Other

• The Star Helix is a(n almost) Master of All assault rifle made by Dahl, boasting high damage and good stats all around. Its main trait is that it fires three bullets for every shot, with one bullet taking a straight path and the other two oscillating and connecting with the main one during flight. Its only major flaw is that the fast fire rate means it chews through its magazine fairly quick, but this can be remedied with gear or skills that increase magazine size or return ammo to the mag. It's a solid choice for an assault rifle, and though it only comes in Shock, Radiation, and Cryo flavors, it can still be handy for multiple builds.
• The Handsome Jackpot DLC has the ION CANNON, an actual BFG. With the right character builds, a fully charged ION CANNON blast can decimate regular enemies even if they are armored and/or shielded, make short work of the aforementioned Anointed enemies, and can take big chunks out of a boss's lifebar. Even after the nerfs, it still has amazing firepower and is worth using on tough bosses. And with the current level cap and FL4K's "Fade Away", it can go up to 8-9 million in damage! And the Mayhem 2.0 updated its damage to go further beyond!
  • An update to Arms Race introduced the Kickcharger, an even stronger version of the ION CANNON. It can deal much more damage per shot than the ION CANNON while consuming only 1 rocket per shot. This makes it extremely efficient at killing enemies with the right build. The only downside is that the Kickcharger doesn't have any splash damage radius, but groups of enemies that are close together are a rare sight, so this isn't much of a downside.
• The Night Hawkin is an easy to obtain SMG due to it having an increased drop rate from an enemy accessible in the early game that can be fought in a vehicle. The weapon itself switches between cryo and fire bullets depending on the time of day. With Zane's various cryo-centric skills, it could potentially fill in both roles at the same time.
• Hotfixes boosted certain weapons particularly The Lob and the Sickle. The former fires three elemental orbs while the latter has increased weapon damage that puts even a Jakobs shotgun to shame. An April hotfix reverted The Lob's projectiles back to 1 per shot but increased its damage.
  • Speaking of The Lob, even after its nerf, it's a serious damage monster. It fires slow-moving orbs that deal extremely high damage as they pass through enemies, and the slow speed means that enemies will get shredded as it comes through them. And since it comes in all elements, there's many builds that can make effective use of The Lob.
  • The Shocker from the Guns, Love, and Tentacles DLC is the pre-patched version of The Lob. While it's only shock-only, it's perfect against groups of shielded enemies as it fires 3 orbs per shot.
• The Dictator assault rifle is essentially the previous game's Veruc on steroids. It normally shoots three projectiles in a horizontal row, but with the bipod enabled, now shoots seven. If used correctly, it can seriously damage large bosses or crowds at no extra cost. It's Mayhem 2.0 counterpart, The Monarch, works similarly. However its wild spread of bullets means having to use the weapon at close to mid-range. Nevertheless when used properly especially in bipod mode, bosses go down easily.
• The Cutsman is a powerful SMG that shoots rows of deadly energy with devastating damage over time if it’s elemental status goes into effect. They move rather slowly, doesn’t do much damage point-blank (requiring a short distance before the projectiles split into two with the energy connecting them, which is when the gun is at its most effective), and the projectiles spread further apart the farther it goes, significantly reducing its usefulness in tight quarters as the beam will disappear if any of the projectiles hit a wall or object. All of this combined makes the weapon a tad bit difficult to use against common enemies. Against certain bosses, however, the deadliness of these projectiles can be used to maximum effect. The Agonizer 9000 and the Graveward are prime targets for a corrosive and fire Cutsman, respectively.
• The Epicenter grenade is the premium source for incendiary grenade action. It emits a circle of fireballs akin to Troy Calypso's attacks, burning everything it touches into a crisp with little effort.
• The Transformer grants the user complete immunity to shock damage, instead actually restoring shields upon taking shock damage, as well as providing a decent chance at ammo absorption (but not to the extent of The Sham from the previous game). A shield like this proves invaluable in the Maliwan Takedown raid, and turns Killavolt's boss fight into a breeze (coincidentally, Killavolt is the boss that has the augmented drop chance for this item). It can be abused (especially by a Thin Red Line Moze) to quickly refill your entire Shield bar by pointing a Shock weapon with splash damage (such as a Shock Lob) at your feet and pulling the trigger.
• The Brainstormer is a shotgun that's essentially the embodiment of Chain Lightning. Enemies near the target are zapped just as hard. This is an essential weapon against the Maliwan troops. Its Mayhem 2.0 counterpart Reflux is Brainstormer that fires chain acid bullets instead, which makes it devastating against armored enemies like Loaders and Crime Bots.
• The Nemesis is essentially the pistol version of the Thunderfire laser from the Pre-sequel, but also comes in corrosive flavor. To iterate: The Nemesis deals bonus shock damage as well as either incendiary or corrosive damage, depending on the weapon's primary element. It also always fires in a quick burst. This handgun can make short work of shielded enemies, bionic or robotic.
• The Shlooter artifact (obtained from the Tales from the Borderlands themed Vault Card) boosts legendary drop rates upon killing an enemy for a brief time, but enough time to make places such as the Slaughter Shaft a gold mine for legendary gear.
• Early into Borderlands 3's release, players discovered the Porcelain Pipebomb. Imagine a MIRV grenade with Zer0's B0re skill from the second game, and you get a weapon that multiplies its radiation damage so many times that it can kill bosses in seconds. Gearbox caught on quick this time, as of September 27th The Pipebomb was weakened significantly for a more balanced experience.
• Guns, Love and Tentacles gives us the Unseen Threat, a sniper rifle that doesn't only deal a lot of damage, but ricochets homing bullets upon critical hits, making it capable of taking out bosses and mobs alike with ease. Best used with a Fade Away-focused Fl4k or a Zane with skills that augment his damage while using Action Skills.
• Though it has a charge up time, tears through your ammo stocks, and has a fairly long reload, the Maliwan Krakatoa sniper rifle is an absolute monster. It does a sickening amount of damage per shot, combined with a rate-of-fire usually found on a machine gun, and enemies it kills turn into meteor-spewing volcanoes. Find a way to deal with the ammo consumption, like a cutpurse artifact, and it can become the only weapon you use on non-fire-immune enemies.
• The Hellwalker, a Legendary Jakobs aftermarket shotgun, turns you into a murder machine on par with its inspiration, the Doom Slayer. It's a Jakobs incendiary shotgun that uses its entire mag in one shot, with the ammo consumption and damage output this implies. As mentioned in Fl4k's entry, they can do serious damage with their Megavore and Fade Away skills when equipped with this weapon. A Zane with a Hellwalker can also bring deep hurting with his Seeing Double skill.
• The Yellowcake rocket launcher, introduced in the Revenge of the Cartels event. It spits out a gob of radiation that splits into four projectiles, annihilating anything in its path. While it has a range and the projectiles are affected by gravity, the sheer destructiveness of this weapon can clear a room in a matter of seconds, as well as decimate bosses. It also makes an excellent FFYL weapon, provided you’re not facing any aerial enemies.
  • The Globetrottr is a Difficult, but Awesome counterpart to Yellowcake made as compensation for Yellowcake being left out in the recent level cap. It fires elemental sawblades that bounce up and down. When used properly, it can clear out a room full of enemies in seconds like Yellowcake. It comes in all elements as well while Yellowcake is Radiation-only.
• The O.P.Q. System, also introduced in the Cartels event. It's an Atlas assault rifle that doesn't have the trademark lock-on tech that most Atlas weapons have, but in exchange, its secondary fire spawns an extra gun that will open fire for a few seconds. Aside from that, it's a relatively straightforward gun. So what makes this a game breaker? It fires two projectiles for the price of one bullet, said projectiles are extremely powerful, and it has a chance to cause a shock explosion in addition to the initial damage. When used correctly, ^note at mid-range, so both projectiles hit the target and making sure you stay out of range of the shock explosion, which WILL ravage your shields if you're not careful the damage adds up ridiculously quickly, reducing the unfortunate souls staring down the business end of it to a chunky gory paste in a matter of seconds. Think "One-Pump Chump as an assault rifle" and that's what this gun is. "Over Powered Q System" indeed. In conjunction with the Transformer shield, it turns enemy fire into more ammo to fire a few more guns to devastate bandits.^note To put this in perspective, the gun deals ~3500 x 2 damage per shot on mayhem level 1 - on higher levels it's a lot more. Obtain one on mayhem 4-5, go back to mayhem 1, and witness even the toughest opponents turn into goo. Even with the level cap, it can still bring down enemies.
• The Plaguebearer is a legendary Torgue launcher available in any element. Uses 3 ammo per shot. Fires an energy ball that constantly generates up to two pairs of additional projectiles which spiral around the main projectile. The smaller projectiles home onto enemies. Even if the high-damaging energy ball misses the enemy, they'll get sucked in by the singularity point and get hit by the smaller projectiles. A Difficult, but Awesome weapon to use. When used by Fl4K with Megavore and Fade Away, it decimates mooks and takes big bites out of bosses' lifebars.
• From the Bounty of Blood DLC, we have the Gargoyle, a corrosive pistol so powerful that it not only melts armored enemies but unarmored enemies as well. Its only drawbacks are overheating and breaking (typical of CoV weapons), high ammo consumption, and less damage against shielded enemies. It's a perfect weapon for the Maliwan Takedown, where the two bosses there only use armor under their shields. The Gargoyle can shred their armor like you wouldn't believe. If nothing else, it will drastically lessen the time until a boss kill. A superior Spiritual Successor to 2 's Gub and Infection.
  • The Dowsing Rod from same DLC is nothing home to write about, until you switch to its alt-fire mode which fires six grenades at cost of 1 ammo. Moze can make the best use of the Dowsing Rod, as she has many skills in the Demolition Woman tree to enhance the lethality of the grenades, and her ammo generation skills such as Forge and Redistribution can allow her to fire grenades for much longer than normal. A FL4K with Megavore and Fade Away can also turn enemies into gooey chunks with this weapon as well.
  • The Light Show is a gun that boasts an extremely high damage output with its projectile pattern and ammo efficiency of 1 ammo per shot. Despite its drawback of having to be limited to close range due to its projectile trajectory, it's still amazing weapon that both of its fellow Vladof pistols the Infinity and the Magnificent should have been.
  • The Unkempt Harold makes it return and it comes in five new flavors: incendinary, shock, corrosive, cryo, and radiation (replacing the original gun's explosive). All characters can benefit from this gun. For example, Amara users can phasegrasp their enemies and fire away with the UH to get most if not all of hits in just like they did with Maya back in 2 and FL4K with Megavore and Fade Away can do some serious damage with the UH. The only drawback is that it no longer has the Double-Penetrating prefix.
• The Designer's Cut: DLC introduced several gamebreakers in the new Arms Race Mode.
  • The Plasma Coil is easily the single best SMG in the game. Extremely high damage (comparable to some rocket launchers), high rate of fire, large magazine and high accuracy. It's the whole package.
  • The Tizzy is a COV pistol (thus has no magazine) that has its already high fire rate increase greatly upon overheating resulting in a bullet hose that can empty all of your pistol ammo in seconds. This will shred just about anything in the game. It's basically the Chopper from the previous games in pistol form.
  • The Boogeyman is a high damage sniper rifle that has a high chance not to consume ammo, high damage, good rate of fire and has the ability to spawn homing grenades on a kill. Thanks to its special abilities, it is functionally a super accurate assault rifle-grenade launcher that can keep on firing indefinitely with ammo regeneration skills active.
  • The Dark Army is the Spiritual Successor to the O.P.Q. System. It's a Tediore SMG that automatically summons three drones whenever you equip it. When you reload it, the drones fires whatever element that came with the SMG. A Zane with a Seein' Double skill becomes a force to be reckoned with as his Digi-Clone is equipped with the Dark Army along with the drones.
  • The Res handgun by Atlas is, at best, a Healing Shiv, but it's great at healing not only other players but NPCs such as the crew of Sanctuary III, as well as restore health to FL4K's pets, Moze's Iron Bear, and Zane's Digi-Clone. It can also be used to quickly revive teammates in situations where you can't do it normally like being under heavy fire or aggressive enemies that like to interfere in reviving your partners.
• Arms Race itself becomes easier when playing with Broken Hearts Day active. The hearts will still spawn there, including the gold ones with a chance to drop high-end or even legendary loot. Hard to lose when you're suddenly toting a Hellwalker and Destructo Spinner.
  • With the Vault Cards active, you can save up some keys and actually buy one of the new guns during Arms Race. If you get Troubleshooter (which automatically swaps to an enemy's elemental weakness) from card 2, this guarantees one much easier round.
• The Ionic Disruptor from the Director's Cut is the Tresspasser sniper rifle from 2 ramped up to eleven, or the Spiritual Successor to the Amigo Sincero. Not only does it bypass enemy shields, but when they're killed by the weapon, they disentegrate Duck Dodgers-style. Melee attacks cause a Shock debuff on enemies for 10 seconds. Also like its fellow Jakobs Rifle the Blade Fury, the Ionic Disruptor ignores immunity phases.
• The June 2021 buff to The Butcher made its "chance to partially refill magazine" effect happen MUCH more often, to the point where it's difficult to empty even one mag, even on non-Moze characters (this only applies to x3 variations, as x6 variants have increased ammo consumption). Combined with equipment/skills that up the fire rate and you have a Hyperion shotgun that fires almost as fast as a minigun that rarely ever needs to be reloaded.
• The Soulrender from Guns, Love, and Tentacles is a Dahl assault rifle that fires out flying skulls at your enemies that do 20 times the gun's base damage. The skulls also count as splash damage, which scales very nicely as you go up in mayhem levels. Even better, it's got a very easy and speedy farm method, even on consoles. It drops from either member of the Dual Boss, Tom and Xam, so just kill one, fast travel to right outside the arena, and repeat.
• The Needle Gun XXL from Revenge of the Cartels, thanks to a buff it got. It applies a debuff with every shot that hits an enemy, but you don't need to swap to a different gun to start dealing extra damage. Combine this with lightly-homing bullets and the gun automatically refilling its magazine after applying 10 debuff stacks, and you have a Tediore gun you REALLY don't want to be on the businesses end of.
• Director's Cut gives us the Re-Volter shield, which is essentially this game's answer to the Bee shield from 2. Upon depletion, you gain 15 seconds of triple shock damage on top of your shots. Combine this with an "action skill start shield break effects" anointment and every character except Moze can keep this mode going forever as long as they use their quick-ending skills.
• The Faisor's assault rifle mode might be nothing to write home about, but its shotgun mode is an absolute beast, no matter what parts or elements you get on it. If you're sick of trying to farm for a Boom Sickle, the Faisor's alt-fire is a more than adequate substitute!
• The Torrent from The Pre-Sequel! returns. It's limited to just Corrosive, Incendiary, or Radiation but it shares a hidden perk with fellow Dahl weapon the Nemesis: shock damage. Combined with its high rate of fire, shielded enemies become a joke and it may rival the Plasma Coil.
• The Troubleshooter from Vault Card 2 is a versatile SMG that detects the weaknesses of specific targets and modifies the element accordingly. Try it out on bossses like the Rampager.
• Do you miss the Swordplosion? Then check out its Spiritual Successor the Blade Fury! An aftermarket Jakobs Assault Rifle from The Bunker Masters Vault Card, it fires knives that deal both weapon and melee damage. A godsend for those who want the melee damage cash bonus in the Circles of Slaughter. Oh, and as a nice little bonus, it can damage bosses during their immune phases.
• The Free Radical, a Maliwan pistol that fires homing shock bullets that can decimate enemies, shielded or not and in terms of raw damage can put most Jakobs and Torgue pistols to shame.
  • The Beacon from the Bounty of Blood DLC is another Maliwan pistol fires a burst of projectiles after charge. On reload, it creates a nova around the wielder.
  • The Hellshock while not as strong as the aforementioned two, can still be a nightmare for shielded fleshy foes. Projectiles bounce once, starting as the chosen element and switching to the other after the first impact. The guaranteed dual combination of incendiary and shock makes the Hellshock effective at dealing with a wide array of enemies. By firing at a target's feet, it is possible to utilize the bounce properties to switch elements without ceasing fire.
  • The Blaster type Maliwan pistols from which the aformentioned Legendaries above are based on, make for decent weapons in Arms Race due to their short charge time and fast rate of fire.
• The Ember's Purge from Handsome Jackpot. When a projectile hits an enemy, it has a high chance to spawn a lava pool. Said lava pool counts as splash damage, which has very good Mayhem scaling and benefits from splash damage anointments. Get any non-fire version of the "bonus elemental damage for next two magazines" anointment, and it can tear through fire-immune enemies as well. The only real downside to this gun is that it can only be gotten once per character (barring good luck from the diamond armory or Maurice's weekly vendor), so definitely hold off on the statue bombing challenge until you're max level and on your preferred Mayhem level.
• The Frozen Heart and Frozen Snowshoe shields have the effect of freezing all enemies in your vicinity when broken. Combined with a "action skill start shield break effects" anointment, this means you can flash-freeze mobs at will. A melee-build Amara in particular benefits from this since frozen enemies take more melee damage.
• A great eridium farm has been found in Voracious Canopy. The bottom of the secret shaft with the dead Claptrap will always have nine eridium crystals very close to each other, some of which will be invisible. It's been found that crystals drop extra if you equip a non-radiation ^note because this method uses a radiation anoint, so a radiation Stone is redundant elemental Stone artifact, a Commander Planetoid artifact (or even better, a Stone Commander Planetoid legendary artifact), and the combination of a weapon with the "extra radiation damage under 50% health" anointment and either a Front Loader shield or temporarily putting on a Deathless to lower your health to 1 (so long as your character doesn't have health regeneration). Kit yourself out right and play on mayhem 10 or 11, and all nine crystals will drop a good 200-300+ eridium. From there, go up to the top of the shaft and activate the nearby checkpoint by the vending machine. Now you can just reload the area to respawn the crystals that are just a short jog and drop away. To speed the process up, you can reload the map directly by switching mayhem levels. Having the Mysterious Artifact equipped makes it easier to see the invisible crystals and quick way to get the "Might Beyond Sight" Achivement/Trophy, though you can stop using it once you memorize their locations since invisible crystals are breakable even without it.
• If you're finding that your favorite weapons are chewing through ammo too fast, then you'll want the Cutpurse Launch Pad. The homing projectiles caused by the slam will replenish your entire ammo supply when they hit an enemy. The only caveat besides getting one to spawn is that you'll need at least 100 Guardian Rank to unlock the Come On And Slam perk so you can do a slam from a regular jump height.
• The Lyuda sniper rifle from 2 returns and it still sends bosses to their knees. With its high rate of fire, it's treated more like a minigun. With the right builds, it can be a force to be reckoned with.
• The Sand Hawk also returns from 2 albeit in the form of a sniper rifle. It excels in close and medium range combat and can bring deep hurting to certain enemies and bosses. The only drawback is the limited ammo and being piss-poor at long range.
• The Baby Maker, now repurposed as a pistol is great for crowd control and it comes in leg and homing variants. Keep in mind that it consumes a magazine's worth of ammo in addition to the gun's reload so be equipped with a cutpurse artifact.
• Roisen's Thorns is a legendary Torgue pistol which in addition to being corrosive, also has a hidden incendiary effect upon impact. Great for dealing with armored [COV] Badass enemies.
• With Director's Cut, we have the Company Man artifact. This provides various bonuses to any weapon made by the listed manufacturer. Combine this with any of your favorite weapons from said manufacturer, and its killing power will be boosted significantly. While you can only get one by killing the raid boss, Hemovorous the Invincible, you don't need mayhem on for it to drop, and Hemovorous is guaranteed to drop at least one on death. With this, you can tear through him with a high mayhem weapon for a guaranteed drop. If you're on mayhem mode or TVHM, Vermivorous will join him, so you can kill Hemovorous while leaving Vermivorous alive, then fast travel out to reset the fight without having to pay more eridium.
• The Breath of The Dying is a powerful corrosive DAHL assault rifle due to its greatly increased damage and its ability to spread acid orbs after killing an enemy. In enclosed spaces, it can be an effective weapon for crowd control if kills can be consistently made as the orbs can weaken or kill other enemies. However, care should be taken as the orbs can damage the user as well.
  • Its Vault Card 3 counterpart, Creeping Corruption works similarly. After killing an enemy it spreads non-elemental debuff orbs to other enemies and they take 33% more damage. It can be stacked up to 3 times.
• The Ghast Call from the Bloody Harvest event is a powerful corrosive Torgue MIRV grenade on par with Breath of The Dying, Gargoyle, Roisen's Thorns, and Reflux. Upon impact, it spawns homing skulls that make short work on armored enemies. Not even unarmored and shielded enemies are safe despite the damage penalties.
• The Sureshot pistols (from which The Baby Maker is based on), Keenblast SMGs, and the Everblast shotguns from Tediore can have MIRV grenades which split and detonate upon contact. The Leg and Homing variants are even better as they seek out enemies even as they try hide for cover. If you can find any of these non-Legendary weapons in an Arms Race. you won't be needing another for the time being.
• The Duc is what happens when you make a Jakobs pistol and install Torgue firmware. The gun fires sticky bullets when combined with Jakobs' high damage and ricochet upon a critical hit, makes for a deadly weapon.
• The Skullmasher returns with a perfect attendance record. It fires five projectiles at cost of one ammo. Its two drawbacks are that it's only effective at close-to-medium range and the limited sniper ammo, so it's actually more of a shotgun with sniper rifle firmware. Still if you wanna see your enemies' heads turn into goo, give this weapon a try.
• The NoPewPew from Revenge of the Cartels is an assault rifle version of Ember's Purge. It fires 3 shots at the cost of 1 ammo. Fire rate increases the longer the trigger is held. Generates a pool of lava at the location of a killed enemy. The pools of lava allows for greater crowd control abilities against groups of fleshy enemies. Given the extreme rate of fire once in the hot zone, and the comparatively low repair time, players can feel free to overheat it as they see fit. The NoPewPew can sometimes spawn with a x4 damage or much more rarely with a x5, each increasing the ammo per shot by 1 additional round, with the x5 version using up 3 rounds. Because of this, this weapon is a vast improvement over both Pain is Power and Embrace the Pain.
• The Companion is an aftermarket Jakobs pistol with the special effect of setting flesh-based enemies on fire upon scoring a critical hit. Not even shielded foes are safe as the gun can still punch a hole through the defenses anyway since it's a Jakobs gun.
• The King's Call and Queen's Call are basically the same alien-barreled, aftermarket Jakobs pistol with the only differences are the names and different fixed elements. While its low fire rate and magazine size make it seemingly awkward to use, its true potential can be seen upon scoring a critical hit in which the projectiles home in on the enemy.
• The Rowan's Call yet another alien-barreled, aftermarket Jakobs rifle that upon scoring critical hits return 2 bullets to the magazine. While it's only limited to 3 elements ^note  Fire, Shock, and Radiation and more suited to close combat, with the right builds it can be a force to be reckon with.

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