I’ve REALLY been excited to start up a Zane but I’ve repeatedly read that a majority of Zane’s skills either don’t function as read or simply don’t function at all. Also have read that his skills sometimes interact wonky These issues have obviously turned me away playing him, which sucks because he looks ■■■■■■■ cool!
However, I just read somewhere that his skills where ninja-fixed at some point without announcment. Is this true?
Can any of you folks super familiar with Zane’s skills verify what’s working and what’s not?
I’m just not trying to get into a character where I’m not even sure if spending skill points is gonna do anything but I’m super interested in getting some Zane action going.
Please only respond if you have hands-on experience or verified first-hand knowledge and thanks in advance for replies!
I’m pretty sure if Gearbox had fixed those skills, they would have mentioned it in the patch notes. The explanation rather is people overreacted - the initial testings which concluded these skills were bugged weren’t done with the proper rigour. There is a post of reddit where someone tested all those so called ‘bugged skills’ and found most were working as intended. I think this post should answer your questions nicely:
I leveled Zane to 50 last week and I didnt feel anything was broken. maybe something was, but you would have to make very specific tests to notice it. For normal play, it’s working fine
Yeah I think it was a little bit of confusion on the tester’s end, some bug-fixes by Gearbox, and confusion in general about how skills work.
So far, it seems now on the most current hotfix, no Zane skills are bugged, but not all of them act exactly as they say they do on the tooltip. But from what I’ve seen, this is only a significant deviation for the barrier augments and the Under Cover capstone Distributed Denial. Only All-rounder and Deterrence Field actually continue to provide benefits when the barrier is picked up and held. All other augments will stop providing buffs within a few seconds. Distributed Denial works with Nova shields, aura shields, reflect and absorption, but won’t work with amp shields. You don’t get extra amp damage like it says. Most builds right now avoid Distributed Denial because it’s too finnicky and doesn’t provide much impact.
Aside from that stuff though, there’s not really any broken or bugged stuff. Some skills are not actually as good as they look, while others are better than they seem. But play around and experiment and you’ll find a way to make him work. He’s quite flexible and can be played in a variety of ways.
Another thing to note about distributed denial that makes it difficult to build around, is that it only works when not picked up like the other action skill augments. At least from the testing I’ve done. I used the impaler which would be a pretty decent combo, but couldn’t get the barrier to proc the homing corrosive projectiles when picked up. So in it’s current state, it’s still pretty niche.
When I played a couple days ago, zanes radiation augment for the drone was still bugged. At max level on mayhem 3 it was ticking for 3 dmg a tick (yes…3 dmg) instead of the 210 damage a second from the tooltip in the menu. I double it ticks like 75 times a secons. Someone I was in a slaughter with asked me if he was still bugged and I used that specific skill as sort of a quick check. I know for a fact this augment is still bugged.