Is Gamma Burst AS That Good on M4?

Borderlands 3 FL4K the Beastmaster
#1

Trying things out with Fl4k and I keep dying using Rakk AS and taking advantage of annointeds but it can’t keep me alive. I don’t know about Fade Away since FA annointeds are hot garbage (why is there no damage related FA annointed?). Never tried Gamma Burst but it has an annointed buff. Is it that good, pairing off with a Com that pets taunt enemies?

What bothers me using this VH is how the pets don’t know when to stay near me and I feel annoyed they dying off. If GB is good can I get some recommendation on what skills are a must have?

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#2

Go red/blue tree. Have an enormous supply of Gamma Burst items. During Gamma, everything will be taunted and your pet is unkillable/can’t die. Out of gamma burst, use a brainstormer/high pellet weapon to get your cooldown insta-reset with megavore. Repeat. Simple as that.

It’s really tedious to go super in-depth about skills. Lot of forum resources for you to use here, and many videos on YouTube of great builds. Gamma builds nowadays look almost exactly like a rakk attack build anyways.

Use meta weapons with gamma burst annoint. Maggie, brainstormer, wedding invitation, scourge, ion cannon, stagecoach, etc. Any shield but I recommend stop-gap. Have a hunter-seeker, maddening tracker, or pee grenade with 25% damage on throw.

& Yes, it’s as good as every other build. A rakk build will always do more damage, but have less survivability. It’s a trade-off. The new gamma annoint, with perfect gear, makes it only 60% less damage (115% during gamma + 25% dam on grenade throw) than a fully procced rakk build (100 ase + 50 ase + 50 ase). It’s all about keeping the cooldown low, having maximum uptime on gamma burst, and your pet (during gamma) will never go below 1 hp and everything will target it. It’s M4 certified, M4 True Takedown mode solo certified.

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#3

Now I’m really interested to try that out. Going hop on this game and tinker my build around it. Seems promising and fun. I’ll see what I can do with GB build. I hope I have Red Fang on one of my mules

#4

Personally i like to run a shield with ase elemental damage and one gun to swap to right before gammaburst ends to give me a second burst of high end damage for several seconds, you’re skill is back by then anyways.

#5

For me it doesnt work as Well as a rakk build on m4. It is sometimes really hard to survive when gamma burst is not active and for the benefit of beeing able to Land crits i am not able to skill my Pet that He can revive me.

#6

So I tried GB on Slaughter arena. I can’t believe how fun it is. Pet feel invincible, my cooldown is nearly available before my pet past 75% in bleedout, I’m not getting aggro for once.

Not to mention the WI sniper has GB annointed (luckily). Due to new level cap I’ll have to farm for good few element weapons to strip down armor and/or shield

#7

With my gamma build I’ve been able to solo takedown and slaughter shaft both with a splitscreener logged in. I do have a pretty solid gear build though.

#8

Fade away is my go to, along with ase anointments. Never use fade away anoints.

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#9

Fl4k seems like the only character where all 3 skill trees are viable. Or am I wrong? I play fl4k only, but played amara and mozr a bit.

#10

I had the same problem when running blue/green before the M4 update. The cooldown was too high, especially if I accidently used GB when the pet was down (which doubles cooldown). After the M4 update, I ran the blue/red trees and discovered the brainstormer, or even a 25x pellet stagecoach procced megavore so much that it refunded my cooldown super fast (depends on mob density). It’s much easier to survive now. I have god-rolled gear though. Only Wotan gives me trouble with survivability in the last phase sometimes due to the pet’s AI wonkiness (getting one-shot running under Wotan). Also, regardless of the taunt, the bottom half of Wotan still targets the player with the exploding disks and artillery strikes.

I also use one ASE annointment on the shield due to it “creating” an additional projectile that can chain brainstormers ability and can all crit for even faster refunding in- between gamma bursts.

In terms of Fl4k skill-wise, IMO he has the best synchronization of the trees of the four. If Dominance was changed (IMO dominance should’ve been the Red Fang class mods ability), he’d be perfect. Amara is close second, however it’s green tree is mainly focused on melee barring the driver class mod. Zane and Moze’s are all situational and depends on the mod, with IMO Moze having the worst skill trees.

#11

I swapped to gamma burst around mid-December and I’ve had a hard time playing any other character because its so much fun.
Just like @Cjb said, swapping to a weapon that’s good at chaining can make the downtime between pet taunts negligible. However, I stopped using a brainstormer because I found a kill o Wisp that is just too much fun lol

I run a fire Kaos, kill o Wisp, wedding invitation, and breath of the dying and usually steamroll everything on MH4, though Wotan gives my pet trouble sometimes since she occasionally runs into the shield and auto dies which is a nuisance but luckily it doesn’t happen every run

Edit: wedding invitation is a little overpowered and I’m worried gbx will nerf it so for now I just use it for second winds

#12

I hope they don’t nerf it. All they do is nerf too much things that what make Borderlands well… Borderlands to me.

Going look into trying the Takedown and see where I stand with it. Already having fun with the AS. It’s on par with Zane in terms of how much fun I’m having in this game.

Perhaps so much fun and now with Fl4k that I’ll be playing this bit more that to try this build out (though I recently bought Division 2 and it catching my attention)

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#13

Gamma is the most fun version of fl4k. You feel like an actual summoner and now with the buff you can dps as well as zane with the build. Splash damage is your friend with radiation burst and guns. I love having a rico or red suit and casting gamma in a group of mobs and running into them and blowing em all up before they can switch targets.

Gamma isnt without its issues. Need a rakk weapon to keep anointments or fake cast. Rad is weak to the only takedown right now since its bots. Taunt is kinda weird since it ends as soon as your too close/deal too much damage/ doesnt work right away. And still I find it more fun than blandaway and crap attack

#14

Wish people would stop saying this. Over in the Moze section we’ve been talking about adding it to the top gear list and it’s been brought up that the Headsplosion is capable of the same if not more power then the WI. The only issue with the Splosion is it’s wide range of base damage on card but a good roll can out perform the WI and it’s a sniper we’ve had all along. Not only that but I’ve been wrecking face with Monocles since the game came out a sniper people have always slept on because they don’t like scoping in or something.

Check out what a Headsplosion can do-


If you want to call something OP put the blame where it actually belongs - Overkill and Hollow Point.

The more people jump on the “this is OP” speech bandwagon the more chance GBX keeps hearing it and just decides to nerf it regardless of the fact we’ve had things this strong in the game since the beginning. Much like people wouldn’t shut up about the ION even though the Scourge was always stronger then it.

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#15

I ran True Takedown using just the WI and only reloaded 5, maybe 6 times? On my Fl4k.

Ion cannon was never my favorite so I didn’t really use it anyway. Monocle is okay, used it plenty for my GB build and it didn’t perform nearly as well as WI (granted, that could be due to the synergies of Scorcher pet if it boosts the initial hit and Cryo + GB anoint).

I’ve never argued for a nerf to any gun and never will because by golly it’s a fun weapon, but I’ve also played the Borderlands series long enough to understand when something may be performing a fair bit too well. And this is one of them.

#16

That’s exactly why I’m giving this a month to see how GB reacts. It’d still be a good gun even if they nerf it, but GB has inconsistent definitions of what makes something “overperforming” while they are incredibly slow to fix things that are underperforming, so I’m not about to jump on this train just yet.

#17

Seriously. Once you get Overkill going, any high base damage weapon will hit like a truck.

#18

Guys what anointments are you using for GB on shields and granades? The only viable on shield seems to be 20% AS recharge ASE. What to use on a granade? GB feels kind of slow for me. With a rakk build i play so much faster.

#19

This universal shield one seems good since the cooldown rate is much needed

  • On action skill end - 20% increased action skill cooldown rate.

and grenade

  • On Grenade Thrown - Weapon, Grenade, and Action Skill Damage are increased by 25% for 6 seconds.
#20

What I’m trying to tell you is we’ve had a sniper which has many of the same features and performed just as well since the beginning of the game(even better on a good roll, and has actually three ricochets) and it’s called the Headsplosion. It’s easily capable of the same damage, has the same extra explosion on crit, more ricochets, and splash damage. The only thing it’s missing from the WI is the ammo not being used on a crit.

I get that you aren’t arguing for nerfs but the more people who wrongly call it OP the more likely it gets nerfed, that kind of talk spreads like the plague then GBX kneejerks to it.

Turn off Overkill and go see how well it does in True Takedown.