BUILD: MEDEA THE OUTCAST
Sorry for the wall of text
This build is for slagging entire groups of enemies, crowd control, and never dropping below 75% health. The key is timing your Scorn and using Phaselock whenever it’s available (which is quite often).
Mod: Legendary Binder (Increases team cooldown rate. +5 Suspension, +5 Wreck, +5 Sweet Release, +5 Reaper, +5 Helios.)
Shield: I use Deadly Bloom, my shield goes through a lot of ups and down, so the nova triggers frequently. Other options: Evolution/Antagonist/Bee, etc. Depends entirely on personal preference. I suggest not running around with the Bee, it has no useful effects when it’s depleted and with this build that’s going to be often. This build focuses on massively regenerating health, not shields.
Relic: Bone of the Ancients, any element (shock/fire/corrosive).
Suggested weapons: Heartbreaker, Pimpernel, Sandhawk, Unkempt Harold, Ladyfist, etc. Most of these are quest rewards and are easily obtainable by simply resetting and playing through UVHM.
Why the points are where they are:
MOTION
3/5 Ward - The boosts are nice, and cause any non-Bee shield to be pretty darn speedy.
2/5 Accelerate - Mostly for the little bit of extra damage here, but it will also help Sandhawk projectiles without messing up Pimpernel sweet spots.
10/5 Suspension - Because the more Phaselock the better
4/5 Inertia - This adds much more DPS than you’d think, and it’s also one of her best survival skills. Catch a fire dot and have it eat through your shield? You die. Catch a fire dot and have your shield recharge through it? Yes please.
1/1 Converge - Because when the enemies are constantly getting disoriented, it’s easier to kill them.
HARMONY
5/5 Mind’s Eye - More critical hit damage can never be a bad thing
7/5 Sweet Release - Going 10/5 would be complete overkill in any setting, but by throwing just two points in this skill, there are enough orbs in the air to heal an entire team past healthgate
2/5 Restoration - Little bit of max health so Sweet Release and Elated do more for your teammates, and 12% of your damage becomes friend health when you shoot them. That’s as much as a Rubi.
10/5 Wreck - DPS!
5/5 Elated -
1/1 Res - In case you’re too lazy to revive your friends old-school
5/5 Life Tap - Turns you into a Moxxi weapon. pathetic dots that you set on an enemy will heal you to full. It’s that good.
1/1 Scorn - In case you Res a friend and lose your slag output, or go into FFYL and want it to be four times easier to get back up.
CATACLYSM
5/5 Foresight - Less reloading = more DPS. Faster reloading = even more DPS!
8/5 Helios - Because it’s on the legendary Binder CoM and it’s better than cloudkill
5/5 Immolate - You probably won’t go down all that often, but if you do, things will die quicker with this skill.
5/5 Chain Reaction - A multiplicative DPS boost. What’s not to like?
2/5 Backdraft - Because it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket (Helios) and because your shield will be going up and down a lot, triggering this effect often.
10/5 Reaper - 80% Increased gun damage until an enemy has lost both their shield and half their health
1/1 Ruin - The best slagging skill of any character. Combined with Converge, everything will be slagged until your Phaselock is ready again.
Why I skipped the skills I did:
CATACLYSM:
Flicker - Because a multiplicative boost to DoT chance is meaningless
Cloud Kill - Because it’s a DoT skill. Enemies regenerate their health literally five times fast than this skill takes health off them.
Blight Phoenix - Another skill which is both ranked and focusses on DoT damage. If an enemy is close enough to melee you, Phaselock one of its friends and let Converge do the rest.
Harmony:
Recompense - Due to the way your health scales relative to enemies, you won’t even notice their health bar tick down when this activates. It’s useless.
Sustenance - A tiny percentage of missing health returned every second is useless. Handy for healing above healthgate between fights, if not for the fact that Elated and Sweet Release healed you to full after Phaselocking the enemy, or you Phaselocked his friend and had had Life Tap active when you killed him. Either way, it’s not useful for healing you since you ended the fight with full health.
Motion:
Kinetic Reflection - Again, due to scaling, the reflected bullets will hardly tickle them. Also, it’s a lot more situational then you’d expect, as there are entire maps without gun-based enemies. Whereas Inertia will always serve to increase both survivability and DPS.
Fleet - Great for the novelty Breakneck Banshee build, but with 3 points in Ward, and depending on your shield delay, this becomes almost useless. Add in that we have Inertia for the DPS boost, and this skill could theoretically never activate.
Quicken, Sub-Sequence, and Thoughtlock - There are simply not enough points. I’m willing to miss out on these skills because the additional cooldown isn’t desperately needed, as a result of the relic and CoM boost. Sub-Sequence’s AI is a real turn-off, it glitches and likes to get stuck or chase surveyors. Funny as it may be, it serves no purpose in these situations except to lengthen the cooldown time. Thoughtlock is a skill taken on player preference, but again, there aren’t enough points to reach it in this build.
Notes:
–> Slag weapons are useless for this build, as are most Moxxi weapons. Heartbreaker is included in this build because it is one of the very best shotguns in the game, and is easy to acquire, not because it heals.
–> In this build, Slag does not wear off enemies until after Ruin is ready again. Scorn is here to keep you from designating a slot to a slag weapon which would only be needed in FFYL.
–> Don’t hang back, this build is most effective when the kill buffs are up, and hanging back makes it easier to lose these buffs and get put down. Phaselock and converge will hold off most of the aggression, your job is to keep up ridiculous dps while healing back through Lifetap.
–> Kill Skills are harder to maintain in The Peak, where everything has increased health. That’s when I switch to a Transformer shield and leave Shield Surveyors alive until I need kill skills active again, since they have so little health.
–> Against Raid Bosses with minions, it’s important to try and phaselock a minion to trigger Wreck, then when the timer is running out, kill the minion to activate Life Tap and Inertia. Against Terra, tentacles are easy enough to kill, and phaselock is useful only for slagging the behemoth.
This is the most effective build I’ve ever used. Playstyles vary greatly, and you may hate it. But I thought I’d put this out there for anyone looking for a Binder build to try out.
Gameplay video coming soon
Edit: Bolded “Suggested weapons”, entered gaps between the gear types, and restated the purpose of Scorn in the “Notes” section to be more understandable. Also added gaps between skill tree titles in the list.