Distributed denial advice

Borderlands 3 Zane the Operative
#1

I love running Distributed Denial with my Dome+Clone build. Having the shield effect happen on the clone… the barrier and Zane himself is some fun chaos.

Suggestions for some fun shields to use with the above combo, I would love to find some I’m missing out on … My favourite two

  1. Messy Breakup: if they would just mayhem scale this I wouldn’t have this post. So much fun getting multiple drones out and them all screaming like a crazy ex girlfriend.

  2. Void Rift: I wish I could finally farm one of these. Getting both the cryo impaler effect on bullets And the singularity when a shield breaks is so much chaos

Any suggestions?

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#2

I could imagine, that Rico can work to some extend now. If it works with DD, that is.
Maybe faulty star works as well.

#3

I think this video should help you out:

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#4

Interesting video… Shame on gearbox to release such bugged crap for capstones… I think ever vh has one

#5

In terms of bugs only Zane has such a buggy Capstone. Moze’s work as intended, Amara’s are fine for the most part and Fl4k only has to worry a bit about Dominance at times just not working. But that capstone is still pretty terrible, so it’s no major loss unfortunately. Zane had over a dozen of bugged skills at launch, so yeah, he is fine now comparatively, but Distributed Denial is still not reliable at all.

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#6

Moze’s red capstone is a bit of a tricky one. The build encourages you to sacrifice health for shields but if you go all the way with that and have 1 HP then the capstone doesn’t work because if the hit that takes away your shield also takes away your last bit of health then the capstone doesn’t trigger and you just go down. They need to fix it really.

Amara’s green capstone, Blitz, often gets caught on the environment. The cooldown also feels extremely long. They could do with shortening it or, my preference, reset it whenever you score a melee kill.

Back to the topic at hand, I really want to go Distributed Denial (especially with a Void Rift) but it just feels like you have to sacrifice too much damage to get there. Green tree could do with some buffs overall.

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#7

I think that DD really is best used with a Big Boom Blaster to just spam away rocket launchers and maybe grenades. I mean in theory it should be possible to profit from the “+150% grenade damage while action skill is active” anointment for pretty much all the time if you can just freeze stuff fast enough.
But I don’t know if that gimmick is really worth sacrificing a whole other skill tree for. Zane’s Under Cover tree really lacks damage, not just compared to Zane’s other skill trees, but compared to pretty much all other skill trees in BL3.

And what really gets me is that there are obvious solutions to that problem: Rework Nerves of Steel to grant a stacking bonus to critical hit damage, handling and accuracy. That bonus then just needs to build up for every second of Barrier uptime and for every kill while the Barrier is up. That way the skill would basically complete the Calm, Cool, Collected playstyle. The stacks could just vanish as soon as the barrier disappears, but would otherwise just build up towards their limit.

#8

only fun i find with it is either red suit rad aoe setup (not m10 worthy) or nova burner setup which is okay but still you lose so much fun in exchange for it.

however having clone inside the barrier going off with the shield effects is dope for mobbing it is kinda hilarious to see all the red suit ticks

#9

I’d personally say that Distributed Denial and Dominance are about equally terrible, but probably for different reasons. If Distributed Denial actually worked with amp shields (or even most of the shields in the game), it would be an insanely good skill (and was in fact the reason that I started BL3 as Zane - I figured there would be lots of cool shield interactions that would be useful). Dominance, on the other hand, is just a completely useless skill. It’s not really bugged, but it just has no particular use in the game, especially with the Trainer COM. You know it’s bad when the developer tries to release a COM with the same special effect as a capstone. Just sad.

Both DD and Dominance are pretty awful. It’s kind of silly, really.

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#10

It was mentioned in the video but not in the spreadsheet but if you can consistently have 100% uptime on the Barrier- the caffeine shield from Lorelei gives really good Fire Rate and Reload, but it hurts when the Barrier goes down.
I also like the Revengrenader, especially with Barrier and Clone, since it proccs on Clone Death twice.
It also made me realize WHY Zanes left Barrier augements dont work when you carry them. The Barrier projector requires line of sight to you and your friends, but it doesnt cause its in the ground.

#11

*cough* … Seein’ Dead … *cough*

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#12

@renfried we WISH seeing dead was a capstone… I wish Zane had more than one good capstone… He’ll untill the clone buff not too long ago… he had no good capstones…

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#13

Completely agree. If they’d just change Seein’ Red to do what Seein’ Dead does, we’d have a lot more options open to us.

#14

I might be in the minority but I don’t wish the seein dead effect were his capstone. Kill skills are meant to be a play style - you are rewarded with a large buff for killing an enemy, adding momentum to engagements. Skills that give you a core play style bonus for free seem kinda … cheap?

Part of Zanes whole identity is skill skills - not having to kill anything to have them up 100% of the time seems to undermine that.

Not arguing at all that’s it’s not a huge boost for Zane or that I want it taken away now … I just think they could have come up with more imaginative ways for Zane to trigger his kills skills without a kill than just any enemy damage. Maybe like CCC on freezing an enemy or something. Make us perform some kind of action to get the freebie other than just shooting which we would be doing anyway.

Probably a moot point now though, with the game scaling and atrocious balance, Zane needs it to be competitive now.

#15

@renfried it would not open up options. Because all his other legendary classmods range from meh to what’s the point. Legendary classmods should be something to build on… his are just extras that don’t matter. Even the okay ones are bugged and underpowered.