Zane Pain Points and Areas for Improvement

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

I’m sure there’s a billion Zane posts reporting on Zane’s viability compared to the other VHs. What I want to do is lay out different pain points from my perspective as well as take suggestions to consolidate for easy viewing.

What I think is very important to understand with Zane is that he requires a lot of effort compared to other VHs, but he is also not completely useless. I want to talk about mechanics, gear, and skills I feel aren’t up to snuff.

Let’s start with Gear, which I consider to be one of the largest offenders for Zane feeling clunky:

Zane has three Legendary Mods that give good stats, but their Legendary Effect are extremely lack luster.

Cold Warrior: Upon freezing an enemy, apply a random DoT to them.

  • Why is it bad? Synergizing with Zane’s cryo skills is a great idea, applying a random DoT that does barely any damage is not. The fact that this Mod boosts Sychronicity is amazing since if you’re playing cryo Zane you can have Action skills indefinitely.

  • What would be good? Since damage is one of Zane’s largest issues having something that gives a benefit to freezing, such as frozen enemies take +50% extra damage from all sources.

Techspert: Kill Skill: upon killing an enemy you have a 5% chance to refresh the duration or refresh the CD of SNTL.

  • Why is it bad? 5% chance, it feels bad and is essentially useless do to Calm, Cool, Collected doing it for both Action Skills.

  • What would be good? Since the SNTL tree is ALL about kill skills, you could have it be focused on refreshing Kill Skills on damage. So, “When SNTL deals damage it has a 3% chance to activate any unlocked Kill Skills.”

Shockerator:Grants Zane’s Digi-clone the Binary System augment. Whenever Zane’s Clone receives melee damage, it creates a Shock Nova around it.

  • Why is it bad? You get a regular augment, and a pretty bad one at that. Even after the Digi-Clone buff, in Mayhem 3, you do not want to incentivize your clone potentially being destroyed since it’s augment effect is so strong.

  • What would be good? One of my largest issues with the Clone is it’s AI just not attacking what you need. I would add a hold function to the Legendary Mod that allows you to “aggro” your clone to a target for 15 seconds during which Zane gains increased fire rate and reload speed.

The other Class Mods are pretty good, so I won’t list them.

Now onto Mechanics, I know that Gearbox is working on some Digi-Clone Buffs so I’ll hold off on that front but I think that SNTL and Barrier need some tweaks.

SNTL: I think that with how long SNTL’s CD is, I’d really like for it to have a recall function like Iron Bear, just hold down the action skill button and you’ll recall SNTL and be refunded for the remaining duration.

Barrier: Hoooo Boy, one of Zane’s best skills and the source of many of his issues, while other VHs get the pleasure of being blinded by Badass Enemies with Rocket Launchers, we get the pleasure of blinding ourselves, so let’s just agree that the effects of the amping shots NEED to be much less blinding. Secondary, when we deploy Barrier allow us to Press for the group Barrier and Hold for the personal Barrier, let’s just streamline it!

Now this is starting to get long, but bear with me, now we’re onto skills, I’m not going to list my ideas for changes, just why they feel bad:

Cold Bore: Increases swap speed and after weapon swap adds cryo damage to the first shot. I really want this skill to be good, but the boosted 1 shot feels bad except for a very limited amount of weapons.

Best Served Cold: Killing an enemy makes them explode in a Cryo Novo. Really cool concept, really bad in practice, it does terrible damage and is not worth the Tier 4 spot. If you want it to be utility based, make it stronger in it’s freezing effect, if you want it damage, you gotta crank that up to 11.

Schadenfreude and Digital Distribution: While on paper these skills would essentially ensure that Zane’s Topped off on shields. They don’t really work as described, maybe they’re broken?

Double Barrel: Good Lord, this Capstone is hit or miss, the Digi-Clone just forgets how to gun sometimes and does so little damage compared to the “Duped” gun.

Violent Momentum: This skill doesn’t give enough of a boost for how much speed you need to pump in. I want Zane to be a speedy boi, but this skill doesn’t make it worth it most of the time.

Ok, that’s what I got. I’m tired and should be sleeping.
What would you add or subtract?
Think I’m Crazy?

Let’s get this going, let’s get zane to where he needs to be.

3 Likes
#2

All Buff Zane Threads Are Good Threads. +1

1 Like
#3

I really like that idea!

#4

good post, everything raising attention is good, especially to his class mods, which I have been neglecting completly up until now here on the forum.

this is pretty much the exact same that Fl4k has for hunter skills, so I would want something diffrent.

would not work since you can have “almighty ordnance” which works the same way.
ofcourse this augment could then just replace the ability to recall, making it even more useless than it already is. ^^
But if they buff almighty ordnance AND give us baseline recall than its pretty good I guess.
but actually not needed.

nice, I like it. but the game has some issues with holding buttons, would need to fix a lot of things for this to be even possible.

while I highly agree with its AI beeing bad, it really isn’t all this bad when you focus around him, but for general use and the average player it is probavbly more often miss than hit.
my whole schtick here on the forum and in the game is try to make it work. and it definitly can work extremly well, you can read about it here: Zane's Clone Weapon Tier List! (shameless self plug)

this is damage I dont complain ^^ can it scale more linear? yes of course it could. but just beeing 20% damage is fine with me.

I think you have some good points,

in addition:
like a ghost and borrowed time just feel bad though
like a ghost is just useless and unnoticable and bad implemented in its current form
and borrowed time just has really low numbers for how conditional it is and has to much cometition in its rows to be taken.

#5

This is definitely a good way to buff Zane’s damage but Ice Breaker artifacts already do that (minus the all sources part) and knowing Gearbox I doubt they’d want to infringe on that territory. Maybe something like a mega buff to the effects of all cryo-based shields and artifacts? That way you still get the same thing while keeping the Ice Breakers special (heck if the effect is big enough it might even make slam and slide damage actually worthwhile)

re:the Shockerator, I think it should somehow keep to the shock theme because judging from the COM’s (awesome-looking) skin it’s clear that Gearbox really liked the name. I like your suggestion for the clone but imo the COM should somehow turn Zane into Shocker Electro.

#6

With the extra damage I don’t think it would be too much of an issue, I mean look at Moze:

*Thin Red Line: Decreases Health adds to Shield.

*Front Loader Shield: decreases Health adds to shields.

*Deathless Artifact: Reduces health to 1, Increases shield capacity.

So yes, the new Cold Warrior would double dip, but that’s not a bad thing in my eyes. Especially due to the actual damage, I run a +90% damage Ice Breaker, get the extra 50% from Cold Warrior. That’s an extra 140% damage to frozen enemies which is still less than half of what Amara’s Phaseslam Annointed effect offers.

In my eyes, the reason why Zane needs help is because you need God-Roll weapons and perfect Aim to get to the same place that Moze, FL4K, and Amara do all the time at no effort.

#7

I’m talking aesthetically; having a redundant buff like that is just boring and there are plenty of far more creative ways to implement buffs like that

wait what I thought it only goes up to +35% at level 50

1 Like