Theorycrafting; non gear-dependent build

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

I say ‘in theory’ due to how incredibly broken many of Zane’s skills are. However, if we take them all at face value, I’m wondering what everyone thinks of this viability (link below);

Clone (Schadenfreude, Which One’s Real?)
Synchronicity 5/5
Borrowed Time 5/5
Praemunitus 1/3 (random point)
Donnybrook 5/5
Fractal Frags 1/1
Quick Breather 1/1
Supersonic Man 3/3
Like A Ghost 3/3
Boom Enhance 1/1
Double Barrel 1/1

Drone (Bad Dose, Static Field)
Violent Speed 5/5
Violent Momentum 5/5
Drone Delivery 1/1

Barrier (not active)
Adrenaline - variable
Hearty Stock - variable
Ready For Action - variable
Stiff Upper Lip - variable
Confident Competence 1/1

https://bl3skills.com/operative#531010100000005050100000051551010033101

My idea here is to emphasize Zane as the most ‘techy’ of the Hunters. You get the maximum movement = damage bonuses between the Clone & Drone trees, and most of the grenade skills. I specifically avoided Duct Tape Mod because of the ‘only procs on the first shot’ limitation being highly impractical when your end-game SMG can easily have 50 bullets per magazine. Might work with certain low-mag shotguns.

You also get the maximum Skill duration, and potentially cooldown depending on your Barrier choices. On that note, I listed Barrier choices as ‘variable’ b/c how you distribute those really depends on your playstyle, gear, and Guardian points. The only must-have in Barrier is the final point; Confident Competence.

Right now I’m using entirely M1 and lower gear. My Guardian points have the first tier of Red & Green, with 2 Tiers of Blue. Using a Purple quality random shield, I’m sitting at 19k shield & 5.5k hitpoints. Both of Zane’s Skills for shield regeneration are broken (Quick Breather, Static Field), but if those are ever fixed, in theory you should be able to consistently refill your shield. Would be nice if Static Field gave you regen based on damage instead of enemy shields, since a lot of critters don’t have one, but oh well.

So that’s what I’m trying right now, without any of the top-tier Legendary gear. If Zane’s skills are ever fixed (especially the Clone only shooting in burst-fire mode, regardless of weapon), then he might be the speedy run & gun, constant-shield that can keep up with end game.

#2

Not bad. Some nitpicks I’d make are I think you should be choosing Death Follows Close over Drone Delivery and Cool Hand over Violent Speed because the impact/dps you’ll get out of those skills will be more. Death Follows Close may not be impacting a ton of kill skills, but an increase of 25% and 7 seconds on them will still be very useful. Also, Violent Speed doesn’t scale enough with Violent Momentum enough to be worthwhile for damage. If you want it for speed as well I understand, but otherwise the reload speed bonus will give more dps in long-term battles.

Also, most importantly, unless you’re really feeling like your survivability is problematic I would highly recommend moving all your points out of Like A Ghost and into Trick of the Light instead. While not quite as intuitive to get benefits from, if you’re using Which One is Real it should be fairly easy to get most enemies to target your clone instead of you, which gives you quite a bit of multiplicative bonus shock damage. Great for shield-strip and general dps increase.

Otherwise, good write-up. Should be a decent build especially for someone who’s just starting to catch up with gear and leveling.

2 Likes
#3

I don’t think there are enough points to get 2 capstones, are there? Even still, this build has so few Kill Skills that it would not be useful. My idea was to stack as many passives as possible, with the blitz damage of both Drone & Clone.

Violent Speed vs. Cool Hand; I honestly don’t know which one yields better dps per time. I chose Speed b/c I was specifically avoiding Kill Skills, but it may actually be better if the scaling / pairing is as bad as you say.

Ghost vs. Trick Of The Light; You are 100% right here. I’ve been mostly soloing my starting end-game, but if you are playing in a group, Trick Of The Light definitely seems like a better option.

Again, my current gear is all Normal Mode Mayhem 1. Few random Legionaries, but nothing special, and I’m rocking 19k shield 5.5k hp. The Drone/Clone combined damage really helps, especially with a good grenade.

#4

You’re on the old skill calculator. Death Follows Close has swapped places with Seein’ Red in the live game. So you need only swap points from Drone Delivery to Death Follows Close, rather than anything drastic.

Violent Speed is also a kill skill, so reality is either one is going to require kills. The scaling isn’t bad, it’s just not great. The reload speed bonus provided is going to help a lot vs any enemy that takes more than one mag, which to be fair on your difficulty currently will be very few enemies. But when you start taking on TVHM mayhem modes, that will be a different story. So… For now you’re probably getting more benefit from Violent Speed, but when you see a lot of enemies take more than one mag to burn down, might be time to think about playing around with the other version.

Trick of the Light will also work if your enemies are targeting your clone, so it will also work solo. Would certainly be something worth playing around with and seeing how often you can get it to work.

At the end of the day though, I’m only making suggestions. I think you’re on the right path for sure.

#5

Ah, I see now. For speed vs. reload, I think you’re right. The reload provides a passive bonus without the KS, but the speed one is entirely kill-dependent. I didn’t see that Death Follows Close actually buffs the effects of KS as well, not just duration. That’s actually pretty crazy.

#6

Yeah Death Follows Close is very nice =)