Big Boom Barrier - new zane cryo meta

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

What’s up guys, I just wanted to share a new build I think adds the most consistency for all you folks who love calm cool and collected. This build feels so rewarding activating your action skills over and over, it’s pretty great!

Big shout out to SspyR in the borderlands discord once again :slight_smile: he came up with this genius build

Game Version: 10/24/2019

Category: Mobbing or Bossing

Level: 50

Summary: This build looks to solve some consistency issues with all the stock calm cool and collected builds. It does so by using a capstone barely used, and using new shields made great by the hotfix!

Video: Big Boom Barrier - Full in depth build guide and some gameplay, made by me. Drop a like and a sub if you want to :). I worked hard on this build and video!

Skills: Big Boom Barrier (skills)

Required Skills - Calm cool and collected, Distributed Denial

Gear:
Weapons:

  • Cutsman - Fire with sentinal anointment for 50% bonus cryo damage
  • Crossroads - Fire with sentinal anointment for 50% bonus cryo damage
  • Lucians call - Fire with sentinel anointment for 50% bonus cryo damage
  • Maggie - totally awesome with brain freeze, sentinel anointment :wink:

If you don’t have anointments, that’s fine, just run two fire weapons + a corrosive to cut through armor.

Shield:
Big Boom Blaster - mix this with distributed denial and you have so much consistency in this build now.

Class Mod
Cold Warrior - Max synchronicity

Grenade Mod:
Cryo Recurring Hex

Artifact
Ice Breaker Victory Rush

Gameplay: Focus on ramming rockets head on, so they don’t get a chance to deal splash damage to you, and avoid getting dynamite tossed under your feet by tinks! I think the Big Boom Blaster will become the new meta for these cryo builds, considering it’s insane getting double boosters that heal for so much shield! It solves a major problem lots of people had, since zane doesn’t directly regen shields.

Credit: Like I said earlier, shout out to SspyR for the Big Boom Blaster plus Distributed Denial, the rest of this is his build as well!

4 Likes
#2

wait I dont get it… what is the point of restoring your shield when you already have barrier up?
you dont get damaged anyway, with barrier up time builds?
what does the big boom blaster add here?
what I COULD see is a grenade build with this, but you are not using grenades yourself. or a rocket launcher build, but you aren’t use these either.
restoring shields seem to do nothing for you, even in your video your shield is always full with barrier…

1 Like
#3

Truthfully your shield is not always up in the slaughter shafts. There are many attacks that get around the barrier, rockets dealing splash damage, dynamite from tinks under your feet, vortex goon tornadoes, anointed goliath shock claps, e tech laser beam guns. The fact is I’ve seen a lot of people complain about being able to keep their shield up, and there is even rough rider versions of this build to help with the consistency of keeping calm cool and collected always refreshing action skills. But when playing rough rider in this build, you waste 5 skill points in the first row, and lose 20% damage from confident competence.
So this build aims to help with that consistency a lot, while not having to sacrifice a shield and losing 5 skill points + confident competence. I can’t say in my video if it was clips of the better moments (which I am naturally inclined to share) or if it was because of shield boosters I was picking up that kept my shields full. But, I can tell you that playing this build, the shield boosters helped more than once. When you are about to freeze an enemy, you look at your shields, and if not full, you run towards the nearest booster, then freeze an enemy refreshing action skills.

#4

this is why you should use a purple shield with high recharge rate or the “band of sitorak” this will instantly resotre your shields to full. and is even more so reliable then relying on pick ups, even with 60% chance.

I agree I dont like the rough rider version either, thats why I use band of sitorak now when I use this build. you should probably try it out.
because all you really want is full shields, and this gives you full shield the fastest

1 Like
#5

Yes, the band of sitorak is one of my favorite shields! But, you try this version out! With distributed denial, that makes it nearly every single time you get shot at, boosters drop, anytime your barrier takes damage at all, it’s a 60% for boosters to drop, so you don’t even have to take damage yourself to make them drop. There’s also boosters with bonus weapon damage I like a lot too. And don’t forget you can DEFINITELY run an rpg lol, I like the hive, but obviously the scourge is great. I just wanted to try this build out with the different guns, and test the most effective ways to proc calm cool and collected :slight_smile:

#6

Also just wanted to say I saw your video with the ammo steal/facepuncher combo! Very unique, you test some cool stuff in this game, I liked and can’t wait to see more from you :slight_smile:

1 Like
#7

I DO see the Value, and I use this in one version of my infinite grenades and launcher spam build.
so I have some experience with its functionality.
and I think that this is the real advantage of this shield for zane.

its just somewhat wasted potential in this, and the reason your are using it for here is for shield uptime. and any high recharge shield just does that job better, and more reliably imo.

its a diffrent take and I like it for that, dont get me wrong. but you can get more from it than just shield. And for JUST full shields there are better options.

#8

I think we have to agree to disagree here. It seems to me as if you don’t like this because of “wasted potential”
But, all that means to me is this can be expanded upon. The fact is what I am using it for is very good at doing what I want it to do. I have tried band of sitorak, fast recharge rate shields. But the band of sitorak still has a ~3.2 second uptime before it is full again, and a very small capacity, meaning you will likely take health damage. The shield boosters are instant. They require no waiting, no downtime, AND with distributed denial, they are literally all over the field, all the time. There are many times when a round is over, I will refill my ammo, come back to start the next round, and just see these things laying everywhere. The fact that only the barrier has to take damage to trigger boosters, means that all the rockets you take, that don’t hurt you, also help you by spawning boosters for later use.
I am by no means trying to force this strategy down your throat by the way lol, you play what you think is good, however I just think that instant recharge is greater than fast recharge.

#9

Also keep in mind that this shield has a very high recharge rate on top of that, so even more bonus.

#10

its true that you can take health damage. boomblaster has a really low capacity too though so you often may take health damage aswell.
health is never a problem though since it lifesteals right back to full anyway.

but with your recharge you might just have a bad version, it can be as low as 2.1 seconds. with recahrge delay in mind this most of the time comes down to less than 2 seconds.
but that doesn’t even matter, since you recharge it anyway when you kill something, which should happen way more frequently.
I am also not trying to force this on you. ^^
and I see your points for boom blaster.

you seem to know what you are talking about and doing, so I will just leave it at that.
I mainly wanted to say that putting 5 "wasted"points in this skill tree for just a more unreliable (even if more effective at times) method of restoting shield is just not all that great compared to other options you could spend those points into.

BUT I just saw that you also have an infinite grenade build with this, so you DO know how to maxamize this shield :smiley: I like your grenade version of this MUCH more. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#11

LOL, thank you I’m glad we can come to an understanding. Yes I am more a fan of tossing grenades, a friend of mine actually built this version, but I liked playing with it a LOT. You do have a point of sitorak being far less, I forget about Ready for Action. I think my sitorak is about 2.4 or 2.9. Anyways, I really have just found the boosters to be super helpful lol, and I’ve seen a ton of people complain about not being able to make CCC work all of the time, this is a good solution to that. And we’d have to have another argument another day to really say if those 6 skill points are wasted, or going into worthy skills xD. But I enjoyed this conversation, I’m sure we’ll meet again in the gbox forums sometime :slight_smile:

1 Like
#12

the main problem I think most “casual” people have with CCC is that it has diminishing returns just as any other skill, while not exactly beeing described to have them.
so it will eventually run out, and people probably think they are doing it wrong because of this missing information.

1 Like
#13

Very true, I like to look at it as a really good skill, that can also have extreme bonuses! I’m very okay with it running out, that just means duck for cover for a moment lol.

1 Like
#14

Red suit ist even better imo, radiation immunity and everything considered

#15

all I say is don’t knock it til you try it :slight_smile: I promise I would not be making this post if I didn’t think this was a big enough deal to post about lol, these auto pickup shield boosters is some insane meta, and Zane’s distributed denial capstone takes full advantage of it.

#16

can i get the crossroads with sentinel cryo anoint? psn: DarbeliMatkap_