Hi there! New to the forums, but not the Borderlands franchise. I am an Amara player so far and I think she may be kind of overpowered. Her “Brawl” tree specifically.
While I’m only level 20 as of right now, I have discovered how strong she can be. Her “Samsara”, “Mindfulness”, and “Guardian Angel” abilities make her probably the most survivable character in the series. Let me tell you how these skills work.
Samsara: Overall, this skill would be pretty decent, but do to her “Downfall” Skill that you get in the Brawl tree (and probably some other ones), it’s a must have (in my opinion). You only have to hit one target to get max stacks. At max rank (3/3), she gets about a 30% Health regen per second, and stacked with her “Clarity” ability, she can get around 40%. That’s REALLY strong. Combine that with her “Helping Hand(s)” ability, and she also gets 40% damage reduction as well. It’s really hard to kill Amara like this. And even if she does go down…
Guardian Angel: This skill is just… wow. It gives you a free revive to 100% hp and knocks enemies back with a nova. I don’t even need to explain this. This is amazing.
Mindfulness: This skill is pretty simple and requires no effort, but is super good. Every time you take damage, you gain one stack, each stack gives you better shield delay and faster movement speed. Up to 80% (at max. 3/3). Yes… 80%. The shield delay is also really good. When you’re moving around at that speed with her shields going back up quite quickly, it might be hard to even lose your shields.
She might get nerfed (hope not cause it’s really fun). Amara is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. Good job dev team.
Really? Dang, I knew I should have picked her first.
Honestly, kind of glad to hear this. I like when Borderlands rewards min-maxing.
Right now, FL4K seems pretty cool. Strong, but not overpowered. Though I may be in the wrong skill tree. So it’s nice to see all the cool gameplay the others are capable of.
And then I joined 4 player co-op and got the crap kicked out of me. Sooo, maybe being OP solo would just be strong in a 4 player game?
I must’ve been doing something wrong, I was bashing everything just fine until I got to him and he just stomped me into the ground until I chucked a ton’s worth of Tediore at him.
We’re past him and back to happily turning everybody into red mist now though.
Playing through as Amara right now, level 32. My melee dmg is crazy…rocked a lvl 7 gun with 120% melee dmg (After upgrading to a level 23 version there was no change in my playstyle or dmg output), a 50% hp boost shield, with another 60% or so from skills. Class mod that gives the 75% melee dmg and converts it to your element…so its at 150% total from dropping a skill point. Between that and the obscene life regen that gets doubled when using your action skill and the 40% dmg reduction for 15s…just spam phasegrasp on a 15 second cool down and just smash away. I just done know how melee scaling will be later. She definitely can get tanky quickly. Also, as mentioned theirs always guardian angel for when things surprise me.
Overall, shes a lot of fun currently playing through with my friend and one or two shotting anything thats not a badass. Just running around killing the small things then phasegrasping the big stuff and meleeing them down works great. I really want to try out her Elemental fist tree on my TVHM playthrough. I would be curious how rush builds are working out as well if anyone has any input.
Would a few of you guys mind posting your skill builds? Curious to see which skills everyone is favoring. Just started Amara and I am a little underwhelmed by the Phaseslam action skill but I am only level 14, so I’m glad to hear that she gets s lot better soon.
This sounds (!) totally awesome, but apparently Samsara is not wrking correctly right now: i tested it several times and with 5 stacks of Samsara, i dont get nearly what it should be, 25% HP per second, it is way, way less!
I am lvl21 right now with 537 HP and i was regening around 15-20 HP a second so this does not even come close -.-
The Clarity perk heals missing health per second, which is obviously not remotely as strong % health per second of max hp. The tooltip of Samsara is wrong, intented or not, only time will tell. It says health reg of max hp but its actually like clarity healing % of missing health. 40% dmg reduction is of course nice. On the flip side amara’s trees dont give that much dmg increase, compared to the other chars.
Take fl4k for example, he can skill that the gamma burst rift stays for the action skill duration (20 sec) and heal 20% of max hp a sec while standing close to it. He also has like 5% hp reg of max hp all the time on top of it. And if you skill like this you run around with 200%+ increased weapon dmg while being stupidly tanky. TLDR i dont think she is op.
Brawl is a good tree to start into with, especially since the melee attachments range from 40 to 120% from the get-go and only make it all the easier to keep dealing strong damage while developing survivability. For endgame it still works in tandem with either Mystical Assault or Fist of the Elements alike because of the damage reduction and boosts to other attributes like low shield delay and increased gun damage in tandem with melee and Action Skill use.
That said it definitely makes her reliant on her gear for what sort of experience you want before you make it to level cap. If you don’t have a good melee boost weapon and/or roid shield, you’ll be struggling with melee and likewise if you aren’t finding stronger guns, neither of those will help you out with a lot of stronger enemies and boss fights. So you have to be really thorough with how you choose some of your gear, maybe more so than the other Vault Hunters.
It can get a little broken on the good side though, I just had a level 27 Legendary Artifact drop that boosts elemental damage by about 125% and adds a Shock effect to slide and melee alike, so with Illuminated Fist it doubly affects her melee damage and works on her Action Skill and elemental gun damage too, and I’m at level 35 now with it still working, probably still be useful at level cap.
I disagree with some of this. She isn’t as survivable as kreig or lilith with her base kit and rockets from badasses almost 1 shot me so even with max samsara I go down sometimes from a bad hit. Guardian angel is relegated somewhat because if you have a weak enemy near then you’d of got up anyway and just wasted the 120s CD for no benefit. Mindfulness is great fun and I hope they don’t touch it… Its kinda awkward to find points for it so thats enough downside for movement speed.
Overall, idk how she could survive without samsara though up close with rockets that can literally take me from full shields down to a hair of health in 1 shot and I’m not even on TVHM yet. If she become unable to play close range I’ll be very unhappy. Besides, they already nerfed the elemental DoT on some of my best guns by hundreds. Dot on 1 went from 330 dps to 90, another went from 440 to 130. If they nerf her stuff they need to buff something to even it out… who needs nerfs in a non competitive game anyway?
You do realize that effect is procced separately from the artifact damage boost itself, right? I’ve been hitting 4000+ damage against enemies who were using kinetic weapons and without being affected by any DoTs.
I’m Just saying how the relic works man. The relics that have a high elemental boost +125-150% are the relic that give you that damage boost only while your being inflected by that element. Your shock damage on slide and melee will work fine but not the top elemental boost.
