Hello hopefully gearbox employee! And everyone reading! If you don’t know me I go by ThiccFilA on youtube, and I am a Zane main since day 1 of this game. I play this game every single day literally as a job. I have a huge community with tons of Zane players. I’m part of the official borderlands discord, knowing many members in there. I’m part of other discords, communities, etc. Why am I saying all this? Not to brag, but to hopefully show you that I have the knowledge to make this sort of post. So what is this post? It’s the skill reworks I think Zane truly needs. I have a firm belief that Zane’s damage is up to par, and that bad skills/augments/synergy is to blame for why people struggle to play with him or call him gear reliant. So keep in mind this whole entire article is written as criticism out of love, and not out of hate. I truly love this game, this character, and the community.
So with intros out of the way, I’ve revised Zane’s entire skill trees. It is my belief, we can’t just take skills out and add completely new ones, that takes a ton of time, manpower, etc. I truthfully also believe that some bad skills just need tweaked a bit to make them actually viable, and people will have an easier time overall playing with Zane this way.
If you want to contact me personally my email is flightx3aa@gmail.com
I would like to stress, if any of this stuff is changed, please let it be the augments and class mods. Action skills are used more than anything, and a lot of Zane’s augments are not working or at least not up to par with what they should be.
Here it is:
Doubled Agent Tree
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Synchronicity - +5% per action skill - total of 25% per action skill
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Praemunitus - +10% per action skill - total of 30% per action skill
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Like a ghost - Zane and his Digi-Clone gain a chance to ignore bullets, this chance is increased while an action skill is active. Zane and his digiclone become invulnerable for 1 second on swap.
Ignore Bullet Chance 6% per level. -
Boom. Enhance. - I love this skill, but it possibly needs buffed because clone is underperforming even in mayhem 3 if we’re being honest. I’m not sure if this is the skill to buff, but seemed like a fine time to bring it up.
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Trick of the light - Zane deals bonus Cryo damage while one of his action skills are active.
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Double Barrel - I LOVE this cap stone, but the clone AI is so bad with tons of guns, this could take forever to fully fix, but would be insanely appreciated
Also please just give a permanent 75% buff to digiclone at least, you can stack this up to 75% by swapping, but it is not plausible based on the duration it lasts, and half the time clone is looking the wrong way. Like I mentioned in boom enhance, clone is extremely underperforming.
Clone Augments:
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Binary System - just buff efficiency so freezes are possible when you and your clone are both near enemy.
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Which one is Real - buff the radius of enemies this can effect while swapping, enemies far away do not focus the clone.
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Digital Distribution - Add 50% damage reduction on top of the rest of augment, then it could be great option for tanky clone.
Hitman Tree
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Violent Speed - Add a passive like cool hand
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Cold Bore - After Zane swaps weapons he deals % more cryo damage for 6 seconds
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Violent Momentum - just want to take a moment to say THANK YOU gearbox for the damage scaling. You’re the best
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Cool Hand - This skill is fine, I’d like to see all of zane’s kill skills mirror this.
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Violent Violence - Add a passive, but this skill is lackluster, fire rate as a tier 4 skill? How about adding this: Kill skill: Zane gets 3% (15% total) chance to automatically reload his gun. That would reward finding class mods with points in violent violence.
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Playing Dirty - Great skill, but, allow this to stack like other kill skills, preferrably up to 3 times for 15 shots.
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Good Misfortune - I actually am a fan of how this skill works, but I suggest adding cooldown in addition, Zane has tons of uptime skills, so a cooldown one would actually be amazing. And while this skill is very good, it does not work with seein red.
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Seein Red - This is a great skill, but a bad capstone. Allows kill skills to gain more stacks. This is a unique effect that is cap stone worthy. Also would be great to activate 2 stacks of kill skills, since that was recently added. One of these options would make it a real capstone.
Sntnl Augments: I want to preface this section saying IMO sntnl is his worst action skill, it’s because of the augments. Drone delivery is the best thing about SNTNL and it’s a skill.
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Winter’s Drone: Please add at least 1% cryo efficiency, this effect does not slow enemies, which it should.
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Bad Dose: This effecet is hardly noticeable, would work much better as an It’s Piss grenade type of effect, actually debuffing enemies. 20% damage
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Boomsday: Make this kind of like death follows close, but for other augments, adds more efficiency and possible freezes with Winter’s drone, adds extra debuff with bad dose, steals more shields with static field, increases % chane of almighty ordnance(my version)
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Almighty Ordnance: If you guys change nothing else on this list, please give me this because it’s my favorite idea I’ve ever came up with: Zane’s drone fires two of his currently equipped grenade mod. You can only fire this once per action skill. Kill skill: 10% chance to fire this again.
Undercover Tree: Zane’s most consistent tree lol
There’s really only a couple skills that need changed here.
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Best Served Cold - Add some insane cryo efficiency to this skill, because the damage is not worthwhile, and the freeze chance from what we’ve seen is also not worthwhile, especially with a cooldown.
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Nerves of Steel - Scales with shield - like confident competence. Also awards up to 15% crit bonus with each skill point.
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Distributed Denial - this capstone is AMAZING with shields it’s good with. And really bad every other time, possibly just look at what shield work with it/don’t and make it less narrow :). This didn’t even work with messy breakup last time I tried it.
Barrier Augments:
Literally one change: Make the left augments work when I pick up the barrier. If you want to stick to reduced effects, then fine(even though you shouldn’t). But like, I have 0 incentive to use any augments on the left, I’m not going to put my barrier somewhere and sit there. Like it’s not plausible.
Finally I have a couple class mod updates. I need to really highlight how low impact most of these are. Even Infiltrator and Executor need work. Executor would be much better if the passive skills were better. Infiltrator just deletes survivability.
Cold Warrior: Frozen enemies take 50% bonus crit damage, 100% bonus explosive damage, and 300% bonus melee damage. (this is a great easter egg for TPS
Techspert: Needs buffed to at least 15%
Remove really expensive jacket, add death follows close. (to be honest this will rarely get used anyway, but this change would at least make it not bad)
Antifreeze: Needs cryo immunity (to the DOT, maybe not the damage) this class mod is basically false advertising. Also needs to give bonus while moving, and not sliding or jumping. gearbox pls
Shockerator: I don’t even know what to suggest but, this is a game of guns, not melee. I understand melee happens, but geez. Also the augment it adds is the worst one. We need a good clone class mod, even if you don’t rework this one, please give us a good clone class mod in the future. We want clone to be good.
Anyways thank you to all those who read and support this topic! I want to continually hammer in actual ideas of how to make Zane become a more playable character! I am not going to just post about him needing buffed without offering what those buffs should be. I also try my hardest not to straight up change skills as much as possible, but some things definitely need it.
@Noelle_GBX I’m sorry to randomly tag you in something like this lol, but you seem friendly, I would like these suggestions to be heard. I’ve been making and planning this post for a while.
