QoL woes with melee Amara

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

So now that it’s possible to get Avatar + max melee damage from the skill trees, and stuff scales with mayhem, I gave melee Amara another try, and quickly got reminded that even though on paper, everything is there for it to be fun, in practice there’s a bunch of tiny frustrating things that hold it back:

  • have to wait too long between successive action skill casts (rakk fl4k also dislikes this)
  • Can’t cast action skill during slide
  • finicky Blitz targeting. What I mean by this is that she doesn’t dash when it feels like she should. Aim slightly off to the side? Another enemy nearby? A pebble between you and target? No dash.
  • Amara only dashes if the target is in range. Should work more like Zer0 or Athena.
  • Dash itself is janky. I’ve seen all manner of ways for it to get messed up: going through an enemy, hitting an enemy but doing nothing, aforementioned pebble gets hit instead, playing the animation but Amara stays in place, to name the obvious ones
  • Entering slide is not responsive enough. Yeah, you need to accelerate , I get it. The time between pressing sprint and being able to enter slide could be less though. My relic gives +50% melee damage for melee out of slide, and doing it is a damn hassle. I had no issue with this in Warframe. (A single enemy with a cryo weapon also ruins this)
  • THE CAMERA LOCK ON PHASESLAM. Holy jesus, please find a way to get rid of this. Also one of the main reasons why Downfall feels terrible.
  • Way too long recovery after groundslam. And annoying camera lock, again.
  • CoV weapons get the equip delay after action skill cast. You can’t do anything during this, not even melee. CoV weapons should be great for the playstyle: no reload, big bayonet bonuses, but they’re mostly unusable because of this
  • (no roid shield with long delay. Brawl tree even has a skill that reduces delay. I guess there’s random Rough Riders.)
  • (melee hitbox could be a bit bigger)
  • a clear indicator for when Blitz is up would be nice. A different colored icon at the bottom skill bar, something

Just the general snappiness of a melee/phaseslam build is lacking. Nuclear Throne this aint, unfortunately. It’s great when it works, but there’s too many technical stumbling blocks.

5 Likes
#2

Crits on melee

2 Likes
#3

On the one hand, yes, it’d be cool, on the other hand, having the melee even register at all is enough of a diceroll that I’d rather not have to worry about the headshot not counting too.
Also, the ragdoll effects from knockbacks, singularities in BL3 do look cool, but would mess this up too (they’re already a big culprit in Blitz not hitting stuff).

#4

Shouldn’t you use Fracture? Less cooldown. They fixed the bug that stopped it triggering the anointment.

#5

I like slam because it’s easier to hit multiple enemies with it and get Samsara stacks. And it’s cooler :smiley:

That reminds me, did they fix issue that prevented the splash damage from Tandava Phasecast from counting as “damaging enemies with action skill”, for the purposes of other skills? As far as I saw, it still only counts a direct hit :angry:

#6

I have a Black Hole with the anointment which triggers shield effects on action skill start. I’m looking forward to trying it on melee Amara. I’m wondering if the Frozen Heart could also be good for melee as it’s always frozen things very easily for me and frozen targets take 300% more melee damage.