Looking for Advice on a Leveling Build

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

Hey everyone. I’m at level 26 and just got the key fragment off the Jacobs’ ship.

I’ve been looking for a good build/guide for leveling and i’ve been having trouble finding it. Every build/guide I’ve been able to find are focused on being level 50, which makes perfect sense. Unfortunately many of these builds seem to only fall into place once you’re max level to have enough points.

Can anyone point me in a good direction in regards to a build I can use while leveling? It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

#2

I used the green tree for levelling. Focus on Cryo damage. It was really OP at lower levels

#3

first of all you can find my thread you are playing zane wrong

secondly you can specify what play style you want to go for and i can give you a build idea.

#4

Your guide is actually one of the two things I was able to find. Thank you for making it. I think where I had the biggest challenge with your guide is that it has many options. Being relatively ignorant to the class, I wasn’t sure which route to go.

I was wanting to play with the sentinel, but I read many times that it is trash. I noticed it was listed in the hotfix notes as being buffed. Is it worth running now?

I just got a +80% cryo artifact, not sure if that is high enough to be worth building off of.

#5

no it is not worth building off off, there is no building through leveling anyway. play around guns and things you find. zane can alter between dps and burst damage easily. sentinel for mobbing is super viable and u can use it to your hearts content. it is just long cool down that does not suit high octane game play of mine.

#6

Hey there!

When I was levelling Zane, I stuck to the blue tree for the first 26 skill points or so. I didn’t equip a second Action Skill until after hitting the capstone, as grenades were pretty helpful until I had more points to throw around later.

As far as the blue tree goes, even before the recent buff, I found SNTNL worked well enough for levelling through normal mode. Plus, the blue tree itself has a lot of skills I’d consider to be very solid basis for most Zane builds too.

Violent Momentum is a great damage boost just for walking while shooting. Cool Hand may not seem like much, but you reload at the end of every mag, and it all adds up. Death Follows Close significantly enhances all your Kill Skills for just one point, and Salvation adds some great burst heal too. Other than that, and later down the tree, Playing Dirty is fantastic for high damage, low rate of fire weapons; just grab a class mod to boost the percentage. If you prefer high rate of fire weapons, run with Violent Violence instead, as this can really bump your damage output via rate of fire. Once you hit the capstone, you’ve got all your Kill Skills on demand, and that’s a huge power boost in itself.

That said, you can always mix and match from other trees if you find things aren’t working for you. Skills like Synchronicity (Digi-Clone tree) are a solid early damage buff, and Ready For Action (Barrier tree) can help with your shields and survivability.

After maxing the blue tree, I focused on Cooldown, as I wanted my action skills activating as much as possible to trigger kill skill bursts. I also switched my Action Skills over to Barrier/Digi-Clone at this point, to make use of their low cooldowns. Adrenaline (Barrier tree) is the place to start beefing your cooldown, and I worked my way up to Confident Competence (Barrier tree) for another decent damage buff.

I found this approach worked great with shotguns for the majority of the game, though you could do just as well with SMGs or Assault Rifles if built correctly too.

At any rate, there’s certainly many different ways to level, and I’m sure others will give your their methods too. That was how I did it however, and it got me through to level 50 well enough. :+1:

Good luck!

#7

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I’m going to give this a try. Around level 10-15 I respeced to the green tree because I was having trouble staying alive and I didn’t feel I had enough points to make any significant difference to playstyle. Now that I have enough points to hit a capstone I’d like to have a real “build” where the skill points are more than just stat buffs.

Around launch I remember reading quite a few posts about people respeccing and losing their skillpoints. This made me nervous to respec at all other than the one I risked previously.

I haven’t seen many posts about that recently so I’m guessing that was either very isolated or it has been sorted out?

Thanks again.

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#8

Back up your save and respect to your heart’s content.

Most people reporting problems are simply dumbasses who override their save files back and fourth from cloud to local saves and then blame game. There are legitimate bugs tho but I never lost anything I did del my own save and it was to blame on my stupidity

#9

I use brainfreeze with high fire rate or high pellet guns. You can pop frozen enemies with the butt plug, that’s usually a one shot. I switched to the middle tree after I got a rough rider, so I can’t help you with the last 20% of the game.

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#10

You’re most welcome, hope it helps!

If you’re running with a Zane Kill Skill build, some things to consider might be:

  • You want low cooldowns to trigger action skills as often as possible for all those beautiful buffs.

  • A decent Cooldown bonus can make a big difference. Especially for boss fights, where kills may be harder to come by.

  • Alternating between Digi-Clone/Barrier, you can get 100% up time without any major gear or guardian rank buffs. With Adrenaline, and shield bonuses, a half decent Cooldown relic is usually enough to get by.

  • Avoid any skills/gear that increases Action Skill duration. Only Digi-Clone can be cancelled early (and early cancelling is sloooow), so added Duration only increases the time before you can retrigger.

  • If you don’t have 100% up time as yet, take out a weaker enemy at the start of each fight to get your kill skill momentum rolling. You can always trigger an AS if that doesn’t work out for some reason.

As far as the missing skill points go, I haven’t had any issues myself (touches wood), though that’s not to say issues don’t exist.

The best solution is what @Hexxusz0r has mentioned above: back up your save files, and restore if need be. Just be 100% sure you’re restoring the right file(s) if it comes to that. :+1:

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#11

I’m playing on Xbox. If I read correctly I think you can’t manually backup on Xbox right?

#12

I’m not sure on Xbox sorry. For PlayStation, I know you can copy your save files to an external USB.

Maybe there’s a way to do the same on Xbox?

#13

Unfortunately I don’t believe there is.

Any chance I could ask you for a huge favor? Can you show me on one of the planner sites what skills you would use? I’m currently level 32 and respeccing now. I’m intrigued by the kill skill build. Sounds fun.

#14

Sure. Here’s what I have right now, though the last few points are still a work in progress.

Zane Build: Kill Skill Cult

Once I’ve refined it a bit more, I was planning to post a build page in the relative section, but that should get you going at least.

Good luck!

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#15

Awesome, thank you. Time to try it out.

As i’m only level 32 how would you recommend prioritizing the final bit since I won’t have enough points?

#16

man depends on what playstyle you are in for and what guns do you run.

#17

You’re welcome!

I would spend the first 26 in Hitman (Blue), then your last four points in synchronicity (Digi-Clone, Red).

Once you max synchronicity, start on Adrenaline (Barrier, Green) unless you already have a decent Cooldown bonus from a relic or elsewhere.

After that, it’s all the Green tree I think. The extra point in Digi-Clone is to try and get some utility from heal grenades and the like, but I’m finding the proc a bit unreliable so far.

If it helps, I’m currently using a purple Troublemaker CMOD, with big bonuses to Playing Dirty (Blue tree).

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#18

Thanks again. Time to go test it out.

1 Like