Zane, Zane never changes.. at least not this patch! (or does he?)

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

hey guys, I have been palying around with the new patch that is suppose to buff Zane.
for reference:

  • Digi-Clone Damage Increased by 38%
  • Drone Damage increased by 50%
    • Cryo Bullets damage penalty removed
    • Drone Rocket damage increased by 50%
    • Almighty Ordnance Rockets damage increased by 75%

so early testing shows that nothing much really changed…
yes I would say you notice a tiny little diffrence, more so for the drone… it is nice that we see that gearbox acknowledges that Zane needs help, and this is only the first step hopefully… but we still have a long way to go to make him stronger…

instead of doing absolutly no damage the drone now does do a little damage

  • the cryo rounds are a nice feel good buff, since it made no sence for it to have lower damage and just felt bad (honestly this change need to be done to EVERY augment in the game… even on amara a 15% reduced damage or 20% more cooldown doesn’t even hurt, nor would it be op without it… all it does is make you feel bad about it…), but now it feels nice! this augment alone though does really little to help you, since the little pea shooter almost never freezes.
  • the rocket is now maybe worth using… it does an okay 4k damage and actually is pretty good at freezing when you combine it with cryo rounds for some nice CC.
    (also there might be a new fun build actually, using drone and shield, because the drone is THAT good at freezing now, so long as you have enemys to shoot you WILL refresh your duration on both constantly, now we only need a good shield in this game to actually go with “distributed denial”)
  • Almighty ordnance is still not worth an augment… it now does 5k per rocket for a total of 20k, so basically ONE bullet from my jakobs pistol. yes it resets the duration if you time it right, but there are far more easier ways to get duration, also the other augments on the drone are just to good. augments are the only reason to use the drone, by itself it does nothing, and this only makes it do nothing for longer…
  • static field is still garbage
  • Bad dose is still the best augment by far on its own.
    but I might swap to cryo rockets now maybe.

the clone on the other hand really hasn’t changed that much for it to be noticable… the huge thing is that damage really is not the only and not the biggest problem… it just FEELS so bad to use “double barrel”, when it is supose to feel so amazing! you get TWO guns! your salvador on two people split! but it is not that… its like “one and half barrel” it STILL only does about half damage with your gun than you would do AND it also has a lame AI that not only shoots WAY slower than you could fire the gun BUT ALSO has so many weird interactions with guns that no gun really feels good on it… it either shoots WAY to slow, stops attacking for no reason even when using an autofire gun with a target right on front of it… it ALWAYS burstfires, no matter the gun, which makes only burstfire rifles, or REALLY FAST shooting guns (butcher or lyuda for example) even remotly usable… lasersploder is still a joke and you can get a good laugh at the clone using it xD he does this tiny little spurts… and it is even white when using cryo xDD poor little clone…

so yeah… buffs are nice and welcome, surely a step in the right direction, but these change dont do a whole lot for zane currently

BIG EDIT: Maybe I found something guys!


well maybe he did change?

for further discussion please visit this thread and contribute:

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#2

The cryo rounds for the drone are best used in conjunction with Brain Freeze + Calm, Cool, Collected. Otherwise they don’t offer much. Even then, you will want to take the cryo rounds off for something else a lot of the time because they will never freeze a target on their own, and many targets either heavily resist or are immune to cryo/being frozen.

The rockets are just reliable output. They were already okay but now they are decent. Nothing special but it’s noticable in mobbing. Still doesn’t compare to Bad Dose and Static Field.

Almighty Ordnance is just poorly designed from multiple aspects. The projectiles are still very slow, they don’t hit very hard, they tend to “sway” and hit objects instead of the target because they launch upwards before moving to the target, and the action skill reset is redundant - you already do this with one of Zane’s bad class mods or with Calm, Cool, Collected. Rocket Pods already do the job of doing additional explosive damage. This should simply be scrapped for something else entirely imo, like converting the drone’s damage to deal fire (stacking atop cryo rounds, if you use those as well).

Static field isn’t good for damage, but it does keep your shields up pretty noticably. Though right now, Zane’s best builds use the Rough Rider to better use Calm, Cool, Collected or the infinite kill skill duration build, so arguably it is bad for end game.

The problem with the Digi-Clone is that it doesn’t know how to shoot properly with a lot of weapons you could give it with Double Barrel, especially some of the legendaries like Lasersploder. This limits its usability. It also doesn’t really leverage a damage boost at higher difficulty, because it simply dies in Myahem 2/3 from lack of HP. The legendary class mods for the Doubled Agent tree are also quite bad. As of right now, in end game the best use for Digi Cone is to use Dopplebanger to kill it early so that it is ready most of the time to deploy to activate Seeing Red in the Hitman tree for the infinite skill skill duration build.

#3

Where did you get a Jakobs pistol that does 20k damage and how do I get one?

#4

@Slif_One
unforgiven
the duc
queens/kings call

just to name a few

you can farm tyreen for queens call or just get lucky finding the others as world drop

#5

I have a Queen’s Call that does like 1k damage. I’ve seen Unforgivens that do over 2k. But 20!? Whatever that is, I want it.

#6

then you are probably doing it wrong mate ^^ these weapons you want to go for crits, thats how they do damage, then you give one to fl4k and they do 40-60k :slight_smile:

also always check your mayhem modifiers!

#7

I’ve found the clone to be much improved. Even the weapons he used to fire like a complete ■■■■■■ he is slightly better with

However he excels with burst fire weapons. I give him a crossroad or nemiesis for example and we just go to town. The difference between this hotfix and yesterday was night and day for me.

Don’t get me wrong old Barry the clone has a long way to go since he should just be getting all the damage buffs I have (I think that is his biggest issue not being effected by everything)

But doing CoS today solo on mayhem three was a much less stressful experience.

The drone however, I played around with him some but still not worth using at all. It’s saying something when it’s better to use the clone to proc kill skills than the drone. Honestly they should just put a % chance per shot to proc your kill skills on the drone, or even change the class mod to do this rather than the 5% reset. That way your free to just dps and hopefully the clone can proc kill skills (especially good for bosses without a tonne of adds)

#8

Buffing damage output for the drone or clone does literally nothing. The core problem is the fact that there are not enough options on the passive tree that benefit combining 2 different action skills.

The best part about having 2 at the same time is literally 80% more damage with a +5 class mod but that’s about it. For bosses having 2 action skills is great simply to buff your own damage but other than that both the clone and the drone are useless. There dps output isn’t even worth mentioning.

My Cutsman does between 50k and 130k crits vs tyreen per hit depending on map modifiers. My drone or clone would need to attack for like 5 minutes to reach the amount of damage my gun does with 1 “bullet”.

Outside of farming bosses there is literally no point in even using 2 action skills. I’m currently running a 40k shield build with barrier and 16 nades doing the same thing as every moze player right now and that is to throw nades non-stop because it’s the only viable option to deal a ■■■■ ton of dps to multiple targets.

#9

for me this is absolutly NOT the case… the best results I got where when I gave him a double lyuda and even that was meh in comparison what I do with it… he hits 12k headshots at best, I hit 42k headshots at best… (also I do it 10 times per second in theory… and he does it 10 times in 20 seconds… if I had unlimted ammo and 93% relaod speed, you BET I would shoot faster than this lazy guy… ^^)

the drone I am more happy with honestly the more I play with it… but yeah… I might doenload a trainer later (for TESTING PURPOSE!) because I heard you can scale your damage, and try to see what a drone would need to have to be considered viable.

#10

@PrimeOP yeah… I agree… and the sad part is, moze just does this 100% better in every way…
I mean okay it is JUST because of hex grenades… but I dont think hex is the problem here… it is zane… ^^

#11

They buffed the wrong aspects. It’s kind of crazy how as the only cryo specific class he actually doesn’t get much in bonus cryo damage, no stacks, no scaling damage, just an x1.3 for the first bullet after swap.
He should get stacks for doing cryo or something. Or they should make his speed damage actually scale properly.

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#12

He’s very wep specific he loves burst fire guns for some reason. A Lyuda although great in our hands is terrible in his.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying his damage is where it needs to be. He just needs to be effected from every buff we do, class mods artifacts and everything in all the skills trees.

But it’s certainly made my circle of slaughter runs allot less painful.

#13

Honestly the buff did help the clone with double barrel. Give him any dhal weapon, constantly swap places for the DPS buff and use a proper build. I’ve been wrecking mayhem 3! 26 pts in doubled agent ,11 in the other two, executor class mod and night hawkin and everything but bosses melts. Just my 2 cents

#14

guys, I might have just found something… will keep you updated… :smiley:

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#15

big tease haha

#16

They should’ve put a lot more efford into the cryo part of zanes tree tbh.
“Best served cold” for example is complete garbage. Basicallly 5 points for nothing.

Should’ve been like:

• Kill Skill: Whenever Zane kills an frozen enemy, they create a cryo nova, freezing all enemies around them. +20% cryo damage for each enemy frozen within the past 10 seconds.

Cooldown: 8 seconds

A lot of his talents are decent for leveling but they are totally useless in “endgame”. And his class mods and especially Anointed mods are mostly underwhelming.

#17

so I made this really quick, so pardon the low video quality and the low gameplay quality xD

I want to share with you my findings in detail though…

I’ve been going through almost aaaaall the diffrent guns I still had availabe to me to see if anything comes up… and INDEED I found some guns that actually work really well with the clone now (maybe also did before, but as you can see it works quite well now anyways)

what you did not see in this video, and what I was talking earlier about is actually the night flyer (this is also the reason for the weird shield I used ^^)
if you and the clone both uses the night flyer, while also having spect into “trick of the light” one of you will not be focused… so if you shoot the same target as the clone, the enemys will melt in a seconds (because night flyer damage is insane) and then you trigger the kill with either schock from the skill, the shield drone, or your SNTL drone… or grenades… so you have actually many ways to bypass the downside. this is pretty fun and fast ^^ maybe Ill do another video about it.

but what I also found is that “secondary” explosions on guns seem to be unaffected by any damage penalty the clone suffers…
so the duc does insane damage, I dont know if you can see but it hit from anywhere from 8k, 20k, up to 40k at one point so it is really really good.
and then there is the scourge, and for whatever reason, when the clone fires it, it travels REALLY slow… and that is actually PRETTY benefical, since the big rocket will constantly spawn these tiny homing rockets around it which do like 8k each, so one rocket fired does easily do 50-80k. and since it reloads after every shot, the clone uses it quite well, because if he is good at soemthing it is reloading!
so yeah, these three guns are pretty nice now! but -bullet damage, or - non elemtal really really hurts and basically insta kills this strategie… thats why the good ol’ crossroads and cutsman are still here, and as you can see even with -50% corrosion the cutsman still shreds…

EDIT: also the Hive works pretty good on the clone!

so yeah… let me know what you think, and what you find.

this is the first time I managed to clear a trial in 5 minutes on mayhem 3 with zane using a double barrel build btw.

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