For what it’s supposed to do, Gamma Burst kinda sucks. I don’t mean for anointments or gun boosts or anything like that. I mean it’s function as a pet steroid.
I think we can all agree that Gamma Burst is supposed to be the pet action skill. It buffs your pet’s damage, makes them immortal, and gives them access to all of these cool augments. It’s the only Action Skill FL4K has that gives the pets any bonus. In spite of all that, it actually doesn’t do a lot for them.
Gamma Burst is supposed to buff the pet’s damage, but its increase actually becomes relatively worse as you add more pet damage. Since GB is basically just elemental ASE splash for the pet, it ignores the majority of multipliers the pet can access. Gamma Burst ignores Go for the Eyes (the only other multiplicative pet damage boost in FL4K’s skill trees for normal melee attacks), splash damage, and cryo, if/when it is fixed.
Normally adding these extra damage sources would scale the damage the pet does overall, however, since Gamma Burst basically only takes the base damage multiplied by the additive pet bonuses into account, it stops scaling far below the max damage threshold of the pets. You can take an attack that does 50k damage and bring it up to over 200k, yet Gamma Burst will still only add the same 39k damage for both damage hits.
This is significant because the only bonuses we can scale past max level are bonuses that GB doesn’t account for. Splash damage rolls on gear continue to increase with level, and we still have the possibility (in the future) of using cryo as a debuff for 3x more damage as well. Unless Gearbox adds more pet damage to FL4K’s skills, Gamma Burst won’t contribute any meaningful damage at all.
Unfortunately, this is an issue for all pet attacks. Go for the Eyes is the only skill FL4K has that multiplies the damage of normal melee attacks, and Gamma Burst is extremely inconsistent with how it applies the damage. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, with little rhyme or reason as to why it does so. In essence, you have no multipliers except for COM bonuses (of which only Deadeye works atm) that work with Gamma Burst, and that is only an assumption on my part since I haven’t tested that specifically yet.
Pets are not guns: they deal way less base damage and have far fewer things that effect their damage. While elemental splash is great for guns, it was a horrendous decision for pets that likely can’t be undone now. As we are able to stack more multipliers onto FL4K’s pets, Gamma’s extra damage will become more and more insignificant until it basically doesn’t matter at all. And while the immortality it provides is a wonderful bonus, the lack of contribution it makes to the damage of the pets leaves a sour taste in my mouth. No other pet skill in the franchise scales as horribly as Gamma does. Make It Sparkle didn’t suddenly become worthless once you added roid damage, it scaled up.
I don’t know how feasible it would be to do this at this point in the game’s life cycle, but to keep Gamma Burst from being more than an immortality button for the pet and make it more impactful to its damage, I would suggest removing the elemental splash from Gamma Burst and replacing it with a mechanic similar to Fade Away: give the pet increased base damage that counts towards critical hits. Instead of dealing 75% bonus damage as radiation, the pet can deal an extra 75% base damage that would then be multiplied by all of FL4K’s pet skills. That way, same as Fade Away, the pets could take advantage of on crit effects like Go for the Eyes. Implementing this change would give the pets an automatic 3X multiplier upon activating Gamma Burst with 5/5 Go for the Eyes and would allow its bonus to scale far better with additional multipliers.
Please consider making this change so that FL4K’s pets can be competitive with their other builds. I can tell there was a lot of love that was put into them, and there are so many of us players who want to take these critters out into the Borderlands and smash some faces! We just need their lack of damage to be sorted out.