Fl4k Critter Lab

Borderlands 3 FL4K the Beastmaster
#1

Hello everybody,

To avoid spamming other threads and keep all the videos in one place, I’m going to put all of the videos of my test runs with FL4K’s pets here. I can’t math well, so a lot of this is meant to provide some numbers for the community to sort through. Some things are just to confirm some less known mechanics of the pets.

New values for level 57

Basic melee - 2,222
Sidekick Jabber shot - 1167
Beefcake Jabber shot - 2952 from melee range
Gunslinger Jabber shot - 323 per bullet, seems to do a burst of 40 over 2 seconds before it needs to reload.

Attack Command Damage (not accounting for elemental multipliers)
Skags
Guard Skag - 2888 for 4 ticks
Horned Skag - 8887
Eridian Skag - 6221

Spiderants
Centurion - Roll attack 3333, Stomp 5332
Scorcher - Roll attack 3910, Stomp 5332
Countess - 17330 (I know it’s weird, but it does 8665 on flesh, so x2 is this)

Jabbers
Sidekick Jabber - 8887
Beefcake Jabber - 8887
Gunslinger Jabber - 17330 per rocket
For starters, here are two video testing how attack commands interact with bonus elemental damage boosts during Gamma Burst. From what I was able to tell, Gamma Burst doesn’t increase the damage of the Jabber’s attack command at all. It may not have worked on the skag either, but I’m not as familiar with its damage. If someone could double check that’d be ace.


Secondly, I wanted to see whether certain Mayhem modifiers affected the pets. They’re performance can change drastically depending on what modifiers you get. I think I can say for certain that they are definitely affected by +normal bullet damage.
Neutral Modifiers

+Normal Bullet damage


Just a run to showcase Gunslinger’s damage.

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Has anyone worked out a decent M4 pet build?
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#2

A few notes.

For anyone who kept gear with the terror anointment for FL4K’s pet (Attack Commands consume all terror stacks and deal bonus damage as 50% fire), it turns out it’s…weird?

Like Hidden Machine, it activates incredibly inconsistently. Even while having terror on 24/7 with a Rakk Attack build, and chaining commands immediately, I couldn’t consistently get it to activate. It just did sometimes, a lot of the time it didn’t. Also, if you have Gamma Burst and this active at the same time, Gamma Burst will take priority, which sucks because Gamma Burst doesn’t buff pet commands so you loses out on a huge chunk of damage.

It does basically double your damage against flesh targets, so that’s cool.

For people who don’t have this (99%, because who would keep this anointment of all things?), it doesn’t activate often enough to even miss. It’s great when it works, but terror is a pain to deal with on this anointment, so I would bother unless you want to buff the spiderant and skag (10k melee damage vs flesh on normal melee ain’t too bad).

5 Likes
#3

Thanks for doing all this testing… this is awesome, although kinda disappointing! Awww. I actually hoarded a whole lot of terror fire pet anointment things to mess around with, in case it turned out to be good, but when I tried using it I just ended up very confused as to if it was even working at all and I gave up really quickly without doing much testing. I was hoping it could do some sort of cool Gamma Burst + fire very strong attack commands on a pet build but uhh… it sounds like that does not work on so many levels.

2 Likes
#4

Thanks! I didn’t think too many people would actually be interested, but it’s great to know I’m not muttering in the wind here.

When it does work it’s beautiful, but getting that to happen is the tough part. I’m going to do some more runs today to figure out how to get it to proc consistently. This is currently the only way to buff the beefcake Jabber, since Gamma Burst forcing melee completely ruins its attack command.

Since beefcake does shotgun blasts as its primary melee, you can guarantee that Go For the Eyes will always proc on the attack command. Gunslinger doesn’t care much because you have the option to go either or forego both completely (its definitely the strongest of the bunch) but for Beefcake you really need that extra damage to ensure 1 shots.

4 Likes
#5

BTW, setting some goals here.

30K was a safe number to instagib the trash mobs in M2. M2 has enemy stats of +75% health and +100% armor and shield.
M4 has +850% health and +1000% shield and armor.

So we basically need to multiply 30k by 9 to ensure this play style will still function in M4. So once we can hit at least 250k damage (either with beefcake’s bat or the entire volley of gunslinger) this should be M4 viable.

To hit that number, the simplest fix would be cryo damage and Gamma Burst (3X melee and 75% from Gamma would bring us to 240k). Since that only applies to beefcake, and neither of those work right now anyway, the next best bet is debuff gear and playing the mayhem mod roulette.

An Eruption would debuff enemies by up to 200%, almost as much as cryo. It would less than that normally however, lets just assume you get 60% from it. Then you have normal bullet modifiers giving another 30%. That brings us up to 62k per rocket, or 180k per volley.

Now to figure out the other 70k :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
#6

Testing terror anointment activation, so far it seems that the most surefire way to activate it is too only activate the attack command at 3 stacks of terror.

One shot a badass ratch in one of these, and took Chuppacabratch below half health with one volley.



Also did a run with Fade Away instead of Rakk Attack, playing closer to how I normally would. Still had pretty good uptime on the anointment.


3 Likes
[Guide] FL4K Pet Compendium (UPDATED LVL 72)
#7

It was the only Terror anointment I cared about, but it completely takes me out of my play to try to activate it on purpose. I tried a shield with that anointment and a grenade with terror ase. Then I wind up with stacks and no weapons to use them.

So I tried a melee terror Crossroads. But I run Dominance. You can tell that won’t work. I could try a melee terror face puncher. But then I’m down a weapon for a possibility of trying to activate this.

1 Like
#8

I always figured the terror anointment for buffing the pet was like the healing one, sure it consumes all terror but it needs zero terror to heal the initial 25%.

#9

The one that heals you for chunks of health based on your terror stacks? That one can heal you without terror?

#10

Yea I’ve got a whole rakk healing build that uses that on their shield and can carry randos, unless they use deathless, through the slaughter star 3000.
Not the highest dps Fl4k but rarely do I go into ffyl.

2 Likes
#11

Yup. 25 percent per Rakk throw. If you’re in need of health. Switch to a weapon with that and boom. No terror necessary.

Sadly, Fire Doggo does need at least a stack

#12

Does anybody know if the “Enemies damaged by Rakk Attack take 100% more damage for a short time” anointment increases pet damage to enemies?

Also… I totally did not know that the 25% heal on action skill end thing works without terror. I need to mess around with that now.

#13

It doesn’t unfortunately, Demonite tested it and it only works for the gun the anointment is on.

2 Likes
#14

Awww that’s a bummer. I keep really wanting that anointment to work as a universal debuff. I miss Zer0’s Kunai so much. :joy:

#15

thanks for all the work that went into those vids, quick question, Head on stick was broken I see you have it now, was it fixed in the Patch ?

1 Like
#16

@sammantixbb Actually tested this. It does work, there is just a visual bug that prevents the skill icon from showing up on the screen. Psycho Head works, so grab it if you want it.

3 Likes
#17

Yep thanks for the reply, used to use it in one of the builds but then was told it was fkd, glad to hear they where wrong lol

1 Like
#18

So, bit of a realization.

That bit about needing 250K damage for M4 was off for a few reasons. First is I’m still on Normal M2, so it’s probably a bit closer to 300k for comfortable M4.

More importantly though, what I posted was the damage needed to bring an enemy from 100% health and shield to zero. It’s kind of silly when I think about how horribly that would work in practice. The Deadeye bonus is active as long as the enemy has over 75% health, so ideally I’d like to deal as much damage to the enemy as possible when they are close to 75% health. Also, the terror anointment deals bonus damage against flesh and reduced damage against shields. Why should I waste a rocket getting through a shield? My bonus from terror is severely reduced, and I now only have 2 left to kill the enemy, and the last one won’t be getting any bonus damage. The most sensible thing to do would just be to strip the enemy shields before lighting them up.

This brings up a minor but interesting gearing possibility. While before I would’ve focused on debuff gear (it’s piss and the eruption), I think that all of that damage would be too much hassle to maintain on top of managing terror. So why not just focus on stripping shields and freezing enemies so the pet doesn’t have to move? A Hex with ASE shock or cryo damage would probably be one of the best options for this play style.

I’ll try an M4 ratch run and see if the damage we have now is sufficient. I’ve barely done M3 so this should be a fun time. Wish me luck. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
#19

First try at M4. Went about as expected. Need way more damage. Got lucky sometimes though.


BTW, does anyone know what that Red Aura at 01:26 does? I keep seeing the Jabber do it, but it doesn’t like it does any damage and it doesn’t seem to be a damage buff.

So, 03:43 is interesting. The enemy still had barely any of its shield and full health, yet I was just short of killing him. However, I also didn’t have the anointment active. If I did, he would have been dead. I didn’t do a good job of stripping shields either. I may try a run with Gamma Burst, just to see if having the pet strip shields for me will be easier.

I also really didn’t need to use any weapon except for the executor on the unshielded fleshies.

1 Like
#20

I mean, I don’t think there’s a difference between M2 on “normal” and “tvhm”. So that part wouldn’t have been wrong. But yeah. Shield Stripping is probably a good choice…maybe even irradiating enemies in the process so the pet killing them does damage to other nearby enemies? Idk

1 Like