So i finally got to SLAUGHTER SHAFT M3 and did it without ccc

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

Hey guys i have finally reached endgame and done slaugherhouse which is impossible with zane of course or you have to “abuse” ccc with bully approach.

okay first of all we all also already know that is not true and both double barrel and hitman builds can also do this challenge, me loving me some fun opted to not count on double barrel and purely rely on doing the job myself. now did it take me best items in the game to do it? yes but it is also a horse ■■■■ of a challenge and here is why: it is just constant rocket launcher hitscan to almost hitscan spam by badass enemies with triple health bars and it only tests your ability to face tank.

before i dive into how i did it gotta post some proof since i did not record it.

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yes i also dno how to take screens and i don care. i only died once at 5th round but that was also me playing the arena first time in solo and second time in general (did it in co op before) is it possible to do without dying? absolutely is it a testament to how good or bad a character or player is? absolutely not.

the build

now i am not going to explain this here but if anyone has questions regarding skill choices i will answer. cold bore is there in case i need double flakker or double scourge and generally helps with guns i use (slow and powerful over high rof) clone and drone together drop enough nades in this setup.

inventory: oh boy what does it take for zane to deal with almost all modifiers? well everything
pistols: thorns;foursum;duce;unforgiven.
since pistols get nerfed or buffed with smgs and shotties i usually use them over pistols so it is not super important.

SMGs:cutsman (shock;corrosive;fire);i am against using crossroad but since i don have rad i use rad crossroad if both shock and fire are nerfed.

ARs: Lasersploader (shock,rad,fire,cryo) now if smgs are nerfed i have to go to AR’s so there you have it for non elemental variant i do have helix and if cryo gets hit in modifiers for armor i also have barrage (super underrated gun) not great on zane but fire rate +dmg and quick reload get you by. i do have rowans calls just in case but since this stupid arena alwaysspams you aiming is not in the option menu, it is all hipfire and reposition town here.

Shotguns: flakker (rad;fire;kinetic) i also run either shock recursion or wisp in case i need to deal with shields, no butchers needed.

snipers: storm for shield stripping (8 balls with playing dirty per shot) lyuda-self explaantory i don have it in elements but to hell with it.

heavy:scourge [corrosive/kinetic/fire] i don’t often use it but it is a beast with playing dirty and if i have luxury of ammo i spam it to clean and go back to either smg or whatever utility i want, usually flakker

shield: transformer
nade:rad hex (sorry not sorry i don use this nade anywhere outside of two arenas shaft and house)
artifact: just +40 mag size +21% cool down
class mod: depending on modifiers either one with smg dmg or AR dmg it does not rly matter much, i either take ones with +4/5 synchronicity or playing dirty.

play style, it is all about killing fast enough to have your drone and clone up; speed to reposition and get rid of 4 heavy weapons spaming you. and yeah just prey that your salvation is up, usually it is up and while it is up and game allows you to see anything on the screen amidst constant barrage of blinding cryo or shock aoe Rl spam, shoot things and you will stay on your feet. 3 points there is enough but you can go for 5 for max life steal. well ■■■■ i guess i will have to explain a lot still, for example hide your clone, it is there to be up not to engage and die but he can take few hits with transformer and boom enhance, so you can also use it as eemrgency and drop it mid arena to escape yourself. it is also there to start recharging your shield, as long as transformer is 1% full it will absorb some bullets.

how to deal with triple health bars, well run 1 element that can do two bars or do triple matching. i do advocate that one of your main guns has either cryo or rad so you can deal with shield/hp or armor/hp but it is not needed. if you want to have easier time you can use crossroads and brainfreeze but i find it less engaging, plus this way of building is ton of fun for regular m3 mobing.

tl’dr i did m3 shaft on my second only play with 1 death with trashass of a character without gimmicky CCC and it is not fun, but it is not fun by design and for any character.

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P.S. yes it is even stronger in co op so people who struggle with CCC bs, rejoice. if you love relying on purely yourself not the helping A.I. or kill grabbing, you don need to worry.

2 Likes
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#2

I get more and more of a “I´m a special snowflake”-vibe from your posts. I will try to engage productively anyways so just one point about that: You call using CCC abusive while farming graveward on lifestream by weapon switching from scourge to trick unforgiven. I won´t elaborate further but let people make their own opinion about that…

As for the approach you took: Yes you can clear slaughter shaft and the like on any combination (hitman + double agent as you´ve shown included). I would definitely prefer using double barrel instead of Seein’ Red as it is (close, but not quite) useless in mobbing. The two benefits it has are

  1. you get to start every round with kill skills active. This is not really necessary as every round (correct me if I am wrong) starts with small enemy spawns which you can oneshot.
  2. The occasional situation where you have only anointed enemys left. This can be a pain and Seein’ Red helps here. I ran a somewhat similar build (I posted it a while back) in slaughter shaft and had that issue. But I noticed if you do the following kill order you do not get into a situation like that: Whenever kill skills run out, kill a small enemy. Otherwise focus Zealots because ■■■■ them. Next priority are anointed enemies. Only after that start killing the rest (no particular order).

Meanwhile double barrel actually significantly contributes to your overall damage output. Following the advice given in this thread actually makes the clone do meaningful damage which, in my opinion, outweighs the benefits of Seein’ Red for Slaughter shaft.

1 Like
#3

i do not call it abusive :d it is just name that stuck bully zane from lazydata also first sentence is clearly ironic. anything you do on zane and get results is a win!

also the very same stream you mention includes lyuda only kills or cutsman kills i do not even condemn farming with whatever from pipebomb to unforgiven swapping, i also made a thread asking for crit swapping to be removed. So in no way i am being a hypocrite lul.

as to my titles yes they are click bait titles. that is how you get kids to actually go there an see that cryo crossroad play or some movement speed investment builds are not the only ways or even best ways to play.

and as to seein red vs double barrel you action skills do run out at worst moments and there is no kill to be found, seein red is for having salvation up at all times over anything else. as in small enemies are often not an option because hex’s kill them easily and you are left bone dry against tink tanks and Rl enemies, since there is not many places to hide i’d rather rely on having my kill skills up on demand rather than double barrel getting me there but that is just personal preference. i do not see a need for more dmg output as well as hate relying on a.i. companions with passion also clone does get killed off unless i position him with lets say scourge in best case scenario. also in co op seein red makes it further easier to get your hitman going without actually finding a kill on a trash mob or getting one “Stolen” as you mention yourself it is just personal preference people who like DB will make it work it is just not for me and maybe some other people like me. ist all good thanks for the reply.

cheers.

P.S. i have witnessed zane threads go from he is bad in tvhm to he is bad in mayhem to he is bad for slaughter shaft to now multiple ways of doing slaughter shaft. I am lovin it.

#4

“i do not call it abusive :d it is just name that stuck bully zane from lazydata also first sentence is clearly ironic. anything you do on zane and get results is a win!”

I did not read it that way but it matters how you meant it, so apologies for the implication.

On topic: Yea, for group play I definetly agree. Having neither Seein’ Red nor CCC (which is actually easy to proc in groups with good gear) is a pain on zane. I also agree that crit swapping should be removed, it annoys me to have mechanics like that in the game.
As to slaughter shaft, I count tink tanks amongst the enemies that you can kill quite easily to trigger skill kills. Any decent incendiary weapon with +50% cryo damage while SNTL is up burns through them in no time. I am not exactly sure how the damage bonus of that annointment is calculated but it appears extremely strong to me. My hunch is that it does not take 50% of the damage you actually do but just adds 50% of the weapon specific damage on top and then calculates it seperately when you actually shoot.

I was just annoyed by my reading of “abusive” but I got that wrong so: Yes all is good :smiley:

I have seen and written in the same thread and have actually taken a similar stance as you did. Zane deserves some buffs in specifics skill but is overall a fine character to play endgame and a ton of fun. Certainly more interesting to craft a build as opposed to the others, in my opinion.

#5

the way 50% works is same as always on trick of the light. it is basically multiplciative buff to elemental type, it is a very strong annointment stronger than 130% dmg on in swap some cases. also by tink tanks i wanted to say badass ones with 3 health bars. i consider other types trash mobs.

while 130% is additive gun dmg the way bonus elemental dmg works it is multiplicative in dmg formula. so depending on where your base gun dmg is either one can be better than the other. the more gun dmg you have in the base the better multiplicative bonus will perform. (correct me if i am wrong, but from formulas i have seen for bl3 this should be the case)

since zane does ■■■■ all without his action skills out and movin ( he literally has no passive gun dmg without condition) i try to never go down, because if i do i won’t kill a badass mob in time unless it is in a cutsman range or flakker range. so that molded my approach, again it was on the first try so obviously i can do better with learning wave spawns and such, sadly i don rly see keeping a killable mobs around as an option with hex in slot.

#6

Yea figured as much, it seemed far too strong to be an additive bonus given that I mostly use it in conjunction with CCC+Synchronicity and some other additive gun damage. Just to be clear though: There is not a simple distinction between multiplicative or additive modifiers. Is usually implied that multiplicative means multiplicative with respect to ALL additive modifiers. This is not necessarily the case, you can have wildly different ways in which modifiers apply multiplicatively. Its essentially a third grade excercise to see how it works, the problem is that we cannot easily access the formulas and there are difficult ones to test.

Keeping enemies around worked well for me and I am certainly not particularly skilled at the game. Hex damage is low enough to keep medium, but easily killable mobs alive. I see your point with Seein’ Red, but from my trial and error it worked better for me to use double barrel. That might come down to a difference in playstyle though.

#7

Well, two things here:
1: I don’t think anybody ever claimed it was impossible to do the salughtershaft without CCC, just that CCC happens to be one of Zanes strongest and most efficient skills for mobbing which is why you see it in most of the recommended builds.
2: You know you can and should capitalize certain letters, right? Not to be a grammar nazi but your tendency to start of sentences with uncapitalized letters makes it surprisingly hard to read your post properly because it becomes really easy to miss the end of a sentence. I trust that your keyboard has at least one working Shift key, so please make some use of it.

2 Likes
#8

My man i had people argue me that zane was not even viable in regular tvhm and they quit playing zane because it was so ■■■■… due to reddit youtube and forum thread influences. Lord is allmighty there has been panic about zane being unable to do the endgame content. So yes a lot of clueless people claimed it was impossible to do slaughtershaft with or without ccc. There is a huge thread right in this category, let alone reddit stuff. I am not against ccc at all :d i used to run it for the longest time before all the people started doing build videos and stuff. It makes regular game so trivial that i don even resort to it.

All i wanted was to check if shaft was doable with hitman because both double barrel and uncercover builds are up there posted with video proof. I went in there and did it first try. Would make me big time happy if it was not every day people opening threads about how they can not kill a vault boss in normal playthrough cuz “zane”

#9

hey, since I was linked here I want to give my 2 cents as well, I think Zane is in a good place right now, he has multiple diffrent ways to play now and I think it is really diverse! any combination of skills has a viable option and of course he can clear everything. And I never doubted that.

he only lacks in raw killing power, meaning that he right now just is the slowest of all 4 VHs to clear any content and needs more attention at the same time, meaning he is somewhat harder to play than just spam nades, be invis all the time or just smash face.

but still I am very happy at where he is right now.

When his class mods get some love, the skill tree get some number improvements and the clone AI gets better, he will be top notch.

He was my first, and in my heart is still my main, even though I love moze more now, but she has a lot of other problems right now on her own…

1 Like
#10

You could also do that by being informative rather than condescending.

1 Like
#11

well yes but,actually no.

#12

A la “if you can’t beat em, join em”? :joy:

#13

Zane can spam grenades just about infinitely by just maxing out his grenade regeneration on kill, bonus to kill skills (improving the regeneration speed further) and using a Hex.

#14

well the great thing about Zane is he doesnt even need to use Hex (although it IS still the best grenade^^) BUT as I said I was going for Zane as my first character with a grenade build in mind, and of course it worked… but then I played moze… and I saw the heaven… it really is a WHOLE other level with her… ^^

#15

I main Amara and haven’t even found a hex yet. It might be the best, but I don’t think any character needs it.

#16

Here is a video post Hex flakker and crossroad nerf after salvation healing does not take in nades anymore keeping on your feet is much tougher but still possible. i just wish people would shut up about slaughter shaft 3 it does not mean jack ■■■■ if your character can do it or not.

#17

credit goes to @kbk160008

sure his modifiers are good for jacobs but extremely admirable run.

1 Like
#18

Thanks.

#19

i need me a level 50 bekah i have had 6 lyuda world drops but have not seen a damn bekah.

#20

Yes. You need it. And can get a mail from HammerRock after finish all the legendary Hunt.