I love Zane and his complexity, but it has been frustrating – both the fact his skills are a minefield of useless skills that don’t work properly, or having to meet his various requirements for skills when other vault hunters can just point and shoot for better bonuses (and this is outside of the ridiculous broken/over-resourced skills like Moze’s means of destruction/Vampyr/drowning in brass/phalanx and Fl4k’s Fade away/guerrilla in the mist/leave no trace/head count).
These are my thoughts for Zane streamlining his abilities:
Barrier tree
Really needs some damage. This is the only defensive tree so weak in offence on purpose (compare it to Amara’s brawl tree or Moze’s shield redistribution). It should have high reward especially as it’s requirements call for maintaining your shield up, which is much harder than say Fl4k’s need to be high health. My thoughts for the damage it should be crit-based, so Zane presents as an expert build (avoid damage, hit crit points).
Rise to the occasion – should be switched with ready for action , so that non-shield users can exploit the 5% health regen without investing in shield skills
Confidence Competence – should have crit damage bonus on top of its others
Best served cold – the nova damage and radius is so negligible that increasing skills towards this is pointless. It should have increased vulnerability damage bonus to those cryo’d/slowed, so that it boosts cryo build damage, and also adds to the team support aspect.
Nerves of steel – again add on crit damage bonus. Again this is rewarding you for never getting hit, which is the hardest requirement in the game. You should have been rewarded damage as such
Retaliation augment - 20% damage bonus, as your barrier doesn’t get hit all the time, and 10% is like nothing.
Digi-clone tree
Really the main fix is for it to work properly, particularly double barrel . It is meant to be powerful, but because of the ridiculous amount of damage penalty to the clone, as well as the various bugs to the clone firing it properly, it comes off incredibly weak.
Borrowed time – increased duration 3 to 4%. You should have some benefits from a single ability, which at the moment adds only about 2 seconds for 5 points (ridiculous)
Donnybrook – needs max health regen not missing health, the regen amount is laughable
Duct tape mod – should be 3/3 skill, higher percentage, reduced cooldown and make first 25% of magazine to proc to make it viable, as the only people investing in this are unlikely to be using the 3 grenade consumption for the clone (note fractal frags and drone grenade are both completely free, I’ve checked). At this point it isn’t reliable at 5 points.
Supersonic man – 5% bonus instead of 4% per point, again should have enough reward for single ability use so far down the tree
Hitman tree
Really the bonuses are too weak for kill skill requirements, and seems to already depend on death follow’s close to make it just below average. Should really achieve its goal of kill skill blitz with a stacking mechanic i.e. up to 3-4 stacks with diminishing returns. This could be added on Death follows close and Seeing red capstones.
Drone – cooldown reduced from 60 sec to 45 sec, don’t know why the cooldown was increased so much for its damage output. It should also have some scaling attached to it e.g. to movement speed.
Cold bore – a really useless skill at the moment. Should be 3/3 skill, increased cryo damage with it applying to first 25% of magazine to be usable.
Playing dirty – should have a bonus on levelling of additional shots proccing e.g. 5 shots becomes 9 at 5/5
Thus for Zane he would present more as the expert tree options:
Barrier tree – relying on crits with maintaining full shield
Drone tree – blitz stacking kill skills at high speed
Digiclone tree – 2 ability management, whether to combine for burst or time it.
With options available for cryo and grenade builds.
Would welcome your thoughts, but I feel it needs to be continuously reported, as all the popular streamers are just showing off Fl4k/Moze/Amara and it won’t be talked about.