How to fix Violent Momentum

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

The problem with Violent Momentum is that, by nature, it’s harder to aim the faster you move. If you’re shooting while you’re sliding with a slide speed relic and all your speed boosts going, you’ll likely be missing with a substantial number of your shots.

If Violent Momentum were your only damage bonus, they’d balance each other out, but it isn’t, and missing doesn’t just reduce your bonus from VM, it hurts you everywhere.

So, because difficulty aiming at speed scales exponentially, VM also needs to scale exponentially, to not only give a bonus, but to counteract the downsides of reduced accuracy.

The current bonus for VM looks like this:

APhmRwH.png772×432 15.8 KB

Or, Y=X/5. As you can see, at 100% speed, you get 20% damage. At 200% speed, you get 40% damage. And so on.

What it needs to look like is this:

9acIcMH.png772×438 18.9 KB

As you can see, while at 100% speed you still get the same 20% bonus damage, past that it scales reasonably rapidly upwards. At 150% speed, you have 45% bonus damage, and by 200% speed, you’re looking at 80%. The player is heavily rewarded for moving quickly, because moving quickly and remaining accurate is difficult, and difficulty should be rewarded.

This way, the player is no longer best served by moving as slowly as possible and maintaining accuracy, but rather by trying to achieve as high a speed they can maintain and still not utterly fail to hit. It encourages fun, rather than actively working against itself, and I think it would improve the skill a lot.

6 Likes
VM scaling with movementspeed
#2

I mean, I wouldn’t complain about this, but this could absolutely make a Kneecaps busting shotgun build even more deadly.

#3

I wholeheartedly agree with this idea. Right now, the best way to utilize Zane is by NOT focusing on speed, since those points add such a minor increase to your DPS, while also making it more difficult to score crits, which is crucial for Zane. The only reason people spec into Violent Momentum now is because Zane needs the damage, and 20% for just moving normally is at least something.

1 Like
#4

Lol, I play with a Splattergun Artifact and no Brainfreeze (wish I could get brain freeze without the other stuff, but que sera sera.) but speed and firing is the name of the game with a Splattergun Artifact.

#5

Your opinion is fascinating. It makes sense and will make play more interesting.

#6

Yeah this won’t happen my man, there are too many guns that are too easy to utilise without aiming it completely breaks mirv reloads hive and scourge and also it does not take a lot of skill to forward slide into something with fairly hipfire friendly guns.

I agree however that scaling should be upped but not that much. Also gearbox does not consider such a thing as skill ceiling in their design, what they make in their mind… is accessible to both ex pro cs players and Minecraft players equally.

Just because you are sliding somewhere your dmg can not be upped tremendously maybe 50% tops. Here is a better suggestion buff amara and half nerves of steel values now this is sth gbx would do.

1 Like
#7

I didn’t think of this. You’re right.

#8

The skill is definitely not great for every type of gun or build, which dose kind of suck. The skills dose lend itself well to a kill skills build. The nice things about Zanes Kill Skills Build is he can really use just about any gun. The amount of extra, ROF, Reload, and Accuracy he is able to get makes just about any worthwhile shotgun spectacular.
To counter that point the skill is at the top of the double agent tree. Most skills at the top of Skill trees should be fairly easy to consistent use of and become more powerful the more points you put in to synergising skills.

#9

you want to take advantage of violent momentum? move back and forth, not side to side. it still qualifies as moving. its not as much damage going backwards because it’s slower movement, but it’s much easier to sustain on target crits and dps. you don’t need to be sliding with zane to take good advantage of VM either, especially if you’re using a roughrider + boom infiltrator setup. with action skills and kill skills active, your move speed is fast enough to effectively capitalize on VM.

#10

What I do is sprint forward, and jump to the side. You lose no speed, maybe even gain some it feels like. Jumping makes Violent Momentum very much easier to take full advantage of. Especially if you have a snowdrift, you can slide-jump and keep that momentum and hit shots much easier while midair. What you want to avoid doing is turning your camera too drastically while on the ground as that completely kills speed, but has no effect while mid-air so another thing you can take advantage of by jumping.

#11

I finally got my Moze to tvhm completion, found a cloning maddening tracker grenade mod and a com that gives me up to 100% splash damage as long as I don’t reload. I run an Ogre and as long as the grenades or the gun scores some crits I don’t lift my finger from the trigger and continuously pelt grenades that split into two, mirv into six, bounce and home into targets. It’s kind of brain dead gameplay.

Reading this thread reminded me of all the effort I had to put into my Zane main to squeeze every ounce of damage out of him. Typical planning “ok so I am using a ccc build, but I need to keep moving to take care of violent momentum, and try to make sure both action skills are up to maximize synchronicity, have to keep getting crits, and should I put the barrier down here or keep carrying it?”

The fact that we have an entire thread where we are debating the scaling of a conditional 20% buff and how to maximize by performing acrobatics is both the best and worst of Zane. Part of me kind of thinks if they do buff the character in a way the mental and real gymnastics are no longer as necessary he will lose some of his charm.

2 Likes
#12

It’s not that hard to achieve all of Zane conditional skills. Don’t know why people keep saying about it like some kind of a big accomplishment. You as a gamer probably have already seen worse. This is a game about synergies with character skills and items, not a game with skill checked level of Souls series. Hell, even CS:GO require more skill than this game. As I see it, people look at Zane as he’s some kind of extremely complex character that require a lot of skills to pull off and unless you play him, you’re brainless.

True, he has a lot of things to go through to reach his full potential, but saying other vault hunter are brainless is just sound exaggerated. It’s not brainless unless you go afk and still win the game. They require less effort, but that is effectiveness. You do less and get more. Two person have to solve a math question, A solves it with 2 lines and B solves with 10 lines. You don’t say B is smarter and A is brainless. When you play a character like Zane, all the things that you have to do just come in nature. Problem is, when all of that accomplished, his dps is still far behind the others.

PS: Sorry if this offends you somehow. I just see so much of it that I feel like I want to say something out.

1 Like
#13

Lol, you can’t make a comment on the internet and have thin skin. Besides we all take license to exaggerate a point either for effect, a laugh or drama. No worries.

It was funny to me that a poster above me was going on about jumping and sliding to try to maximize Violent Momentum’s effects and how after finishing my Moze build it was simply aim, press buttons. The real crux of the issue with Zane is your last sentence, after you go through your ten lines of math solving with Zane the result is still less than the two lines Moze went through.

2 Likes
#14

Seems like with this skill that Zane should have gotten Rushin’ Offensive, not Moze,…

2 Likes
#15

That might be the perfect way to buff it without increasing the damage it gives (which I feel personally is in a good spot). It might be that I’m just using it as a bonus in my build and I’m not built around it that I feel that way though.

#16

i think a lot of people’s issue is just that they see how much more effort they have to put into their Zane gameplay compared to the other 3 characters, and they still have slower clear speeds and are more likely to die.

i don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with that. if anything, the other VHs should be brought down to Zane’s level, rather than Zane be brought up to theirs.

1 Like
#17

Oh really? You think that, do you? Hmm… …:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#18

I got a build that does 800 cryo damage to the bandit tactical standing stil and 9000 when sliding. The damagescaling is really nutty.

#19

Yeah? Have you seen this video yet ? No sliding required https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d18FYEjUp_0&t=607s

#20

ugh can’t take anything this guy does seriously anymore.

I tried watching his stream yesterday and he was using a modded class mod that gives +5 to a +3 max skill and then saying he didn’t think it was modded. :confused: How much of the rest of his ■■■■ is modded now I wonder.

1 Like