Amara needs a buff

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

I haven’t played much with her new skill tree but I feel Amara’s damage is often lacking in comparison with the other vault hunters, (including Zane with his new buffs and skill tree reworkings). Amara is great for mobbing but falls off significantly for tankier enemies or bosses. On top of that, Amara has many bugged skills and virtually useless skills that need to be reworked or fixed.

Here are some possible changes that could make Amara a better character overall:

Mystical Assault

Violent Tapestry - This skill seems next to pointless on Amara and could be buffed by adding a small increase to elemental damage. This would incentivize players to pick up this skill or at least put more than 1 point into it. They could also change it by giving it an increase to status effect damage, which could make coupling this with wildfire and high status effect damage weapons a viable playstyle.

Fist of the elements

Wildfire - This skill could use another effect such as those listed in violent tapestry. Either increase status effect damage or elemental damage.

Catharsis - Either increase the explosion damage or give it splash damage/elemental damage to make it more worthwhile to pick up.

Conflux - Same thing as the above listed skills.

Forceful Expression - This skill should be doubled at the least. 18% just isn’t enough when we consider that the tier 1 skill Personal Space gives 36% or that FIre in the skags den gives a whole lot more with mayhem scaling. It does not act or feel like a capstone skill.

Brawl

Samsara - This skill looks good but often doesn’t proc, which makes it feel useless in many situations. It should be fixed and should have the damage increased on it as well as change the health regen to x percent of health instead of x percent of missing health. This could allow Amara to be more diverse in builds.

Vigor - This skill looks flimsy when compared to Mindfulness which is in the same tier as it. It’s drastically outclassed and should either be increased significantly or perhaps have a flat increase to action skill damage accompany it. This could help make action skill damage builds more viable.

These are just a few changes I would like to see made for Amara in order to make her feel more like a badass siren than she already is. Let me know your thoughts down below!

#2

Amara definitely has some lackluster skills, but she is far away from needing a buff to general damage. With the new tree, she has more splash damage skills than Moze. She already had a decent source of crit damage. She gets the most flexible general “Element” damage buff (in a tier 2 as well). Granted, she is the spottiest when it comes to general “Gun” damage, but you can more easily fill the gap with anoints here than if she was missing a different damage source. Plus with the new tree, there is a general “Damage” skill as well. That being said, if there were not anointments in the game, I would be way more open to additional damage sprinkled through out in general.

This procs quite reliably. It doesn’t work with grasp skills for the most part, but it is easy to build stacks with the three other AS’. I will give you the tweak to the healing. That would be nice, and allow for more reliable healing off of it.

Never actually specced into this one, but could use a buff to speed and duration. Amara doesn’t need another source of AS damage

It doesn’t really need a buff, but it does need to work with sustainment. That 18% goes a little further than it would appear on paper

Totally a lackluster skill, but it does have it uses

Range and a little buff to the damage wouldn’t be bad

Actually can be a decent skill. If DOTs were more effective in general, this skill wouldn’t be half bad

Agreed on this one. DOT damage instead of chance would rule here

2 Likes
#3

Good feedback!

1 Like
#4

Amara, if built correctly, can do just as much single-target damage as anyone else, while still dominating in mobbing.

Face Puncher is sublime on Amara, especially with a Muse COM. It will one-shot any enemy in the game outside of bosses, and will drop them in a single clip at worst, with basically zero setup.

Phaseflare or Light Fantastic are EXTREMELY potent action skills against single targets (or multiple - it’s really a do-it-all). Flare, with a couple of melee taps, will annihilate anything in the game.

Burn Both Ends is a very strong damage skill that synergizes well with her sources of other kinds of damage.

Nobody can use a Stinger build like Amara. And it actually got better when GBX agains screwed up their patch. Ties still absolutely carries nova and other non-weapon or non-melee damage. :slight_smile:

With the addition of cryo and all of the cryo-dependent skills in the purple tree, Wildfire is actually not horrible. More spreading cryo means slow or frozen enemies, Ice Breaker damage multiplication, and lots of extra damage and other boosts thanks to the “on status effect” and “on frozen” skills in the tree.

Samsara is hit or miss: health regen is weak compared to life steal. Gun damage is great, but Samsara isn’t that much of it. OTOH, Samsara works really nicely with Phaseflare: it’s trivial to max stacks and keep them maxed.

OTOH:

I agree completely that Forceful Expression has been left behind. Before mayhem scaling, it wasn’t a terrible skill to basically give free damage in the element of your choice. But now, a single point in FitSD (a tier 1 skill) for example gives like 5x the damage of Forceful, a capstone. That’s ludicrous. I don’t spec Forceful ever now. An easy fix would just be to apply some level of mayhem scaling to it.

They definitely need to fix the integration between cryo AS element and her skills. It not working with infusion and forceful is simply careless coding on their part.

tl;dr : Amara can equal anyone in single-target damage with the right setup, she’s still better than anyone at mobbing. Yes, she’s not as good at ST damage without the right build, but she’s still fine there.

1 Like
#5

Yeah I definitely think she could use some buffs. All other classes have had tons of buffs since the game was released, but Amara has barely been touched (heck, they haven’t even bothered to fix some broken skills over a year later, and Samsara still doesn’t do what it says in the tooltip). Meanwhile, Moze runs around with 200k+ shields outside her mech and nearly a million shield in her mech and kills bosses in 2 seconds. That’s on Mayhem 4-5 so I can’t imagine how crazy high her shields will be on Mayhem 10+. I feel utterly useless on Amara in comparison.

#6

Please no. I do agree Forceful Expression needs a buff, probably to +30%. That would put it in line with other DPS capstones like Power Inside, Confident Competence or One Man Flint - which are a little stronger, but more conditional.

It is clearly the skills receiving Mayhem scaling which are problematic, and they should be fixed, rather than increasing the number of skills which receive such a bonus. There’s absolutely no reason why FiTSD should deal 90% damage per point, or Big Surplus +150% per point. FE is a little underpowered, but more or less in line with an average to good damage skill. Its just that any skill which double-dips Mayhem scaling (FitSD, SF, BS, WtR, Kensei, Phase Flare) becomes ludicrous - and GB should be focusing on fixing that rather than imbalancing even more skills.

2 Likes
#7

LMFAO!!! only someone who just absolutely doesn’t understand anything about Amara would say this… she is extrenly strong wtf. Go to youtubr watch like ANY Amara build you’re welcome