Viable (Insane) Pet Build. Finally

Hi All. It’s been a minute since I’ve posted here. It’s also been a minute since I’ve played BL3, primarily because my excitement and anticipation for a proper pet class in a Borderlands game was quickly deflated upon release. As most of you know, Fl4k’s evolution into a pet class has been a painfully slow process. Every few months, it seems, pets are given a buff or a skill formerly pointless gets a tweak that adds a splash of value. Then, the purple tree dropped.

And now I just destroy absolutely f$&#@%* everything.

I have solo’d the Maliwan Takedown. I have solo’d all Proving Grounds. I have solo’d the Slaughter Shaft.

On Mayhem 11 (mods annoy me).

Here’s the build:

You probably have questions. Feel free to ask. Let me jump into a few details first:

Overview
This set up is ridiculous. Your damage output, utility, and survivability are all insane. It’s also easily the laziest possible build. The build itself and the mechanics are what make it so powerful, not the player. Once I finalized the build and snagged some half decent gear I didn’t do ■■■■, man.

  • Gamma & War Bot build.
  • You and your pet have absurd shield and health regen.
  • There are fail safes in case things get nasty; pet can revive. Also, Mutated Defenses.
  • You’re going deep into three trees. But not too deep.
  • This build is only reliant on two pieces of gear, but really just one; Red Fang.
  • You’re not touching the Hunter tree.
  • Pet does 99.9% of the damage. You just stand there and flex.
  • Pet uses your shield.

Gear
Keep in mind, all I really had going for me was the Red Fang mod when I put this thing together, and getting new gear was a noticeable improvement. However, when I say “noticeable” I mean it went from “damn this is really easy” to “hack the planet!” If Red Fang is the only thing you have going for you, that’ll get you through most of the things. Just assign the points and go kill stuff. Even if you don’t have Red Fang, learn to hide.

Beyond Red Fang, the only two suggestions I have are on shield and grenade. First, people are going to tell you to get the shield that explodes every time it breaks because your pet is going to constantly be breaking and filling their shield. Bad idea. War Bot actively avoids melee. Both bots do. You’re going to have brief moments where the enemies swarm your bot, but that’ll be over in about 5 seconds between the shotgun to the face and the gamma. Defense is more important. Get the shield with the 5 second immunity-on-break. Or don’t, I’m not your dad.

Grenade is really personal preference but I highly recommend the HEX nades. Multi grenade with homing abilities will literally clear the room when your Bot launches it. It’s just fun to watch. Again though, it’s your call. Just remember your pet is so damage buffed that those nades will straight murder everything, so multi-hit is better.

As far as guns, idk man, use whatever anointed ■■■■ makes the most sense. I swap guns all the time and the boss still dies horribly in less than a minute regardless. So basically whocares.png.

Preemptive QA
Why didn’t you put points into Success Imminent?
See above about melee. Your bot avoids it. Also who cares.

Was Combat Vet really a good idea?
Not really, no. It doesn’t do a hell of a lot for regen unless you throw 11 grenades, but it does help when things get brutal. Also, I needed 1 more point to open the next tier.

No Dominance? No Power Inside? Why?
Because they’re trash, and we’re focused on making the pet a monster. Period.

Seems like you put quite a few points into regen and stuff. We all know regen isn’t great.
It’s not great. You could go out of your way to dump every conceivable point into things that aren’t regen, but we’re trying to be lazy and survive. In Mayhem 11 I basically just stood in the line of fire and waited. Your pet does more than enough damage without having to min/max his output constantly. Focus on attrition; pet kills, you live. Happy balance.

Only two points in Fast and Furry? Madness!
This build comes with two skills that can swap points; Fast & Furry and Fuzzy Math. This is just my recommendation. You’re sacrificing 10% damage for another 3% shield regen on crit. Basically, swap points between Fuzzy Math and FF. I went with 2 points in both skills. Do what feels the best.

Go Kill Things
My specialty in games, often irritating to others, is to find the easiest, laziest build, spend hours tuning it and testing, then executing. And by executing I mean drinking whiskey while my automatons murder stuff. That makes me happy. I think I played through the entirety of Outer Worlds without actually firing my gun. My FF12 party fought the optional post-game boss without me touching the controller. You get the idea.

Lastly, I can tell you that I was legitimately surprised how effective this was. In the Proving Grounds, I routinely cleared them at around 23-24 minutes (25 being the ultimate bonus goal with a party). I threw down gamma and watched. Good times. Anyway, have fun yall.

Much Love,
Brew
P.S. It’s good to be back.

EDIT: Link fixed. My bad. Thanks boombumr for the heads up.

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There’s no build in the link.

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Fixed. Thanks man.

I am curious how TPI and Dominance are trash. While I understand they might not have synergy with a specific build I would hardly say they are bad.

Other than that it’s cool to see pet builds see some spotlight.

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That’s effectively what I meant when I said they were trash. They have no place in this build (or any solid pet build imo). The introduction of the trapper tree made those two skills even less viable.

Regardless, maybe I misspoke about TPI, but I still think Dominance sucks, even with the recent tweaks.

I see it’s been a while since your last post. I remember your name from the Fl4k Isn’t A Beastmaster thread, so first and foremost welcome back!

With that said, are you aware of the changes that’ve taken place in the game lately? Because there is a lot of power being left on the table with this build.

Faulty Star creates a nova centered around the attacking enemy, so the loaders being in melee doesn’t matter.

For pets it isn’t. They have millions of health, several %based regen skills (which for their health pool equals 10s of thousands of health per second), 2 life steal skills based on your damage, your shield and shield regen from purple, and literal immortality in Gamma Burst which you are using for this build. The Stop Gap isn’t doing anything for you or the pet.

Since pet survivability is so high, there isn’t any reason to take a defensive shield, especially when you are also using Red Fang and not getting shot yourself. Even if you don’t want to use the Faulty Star, you’re leaving so much damage on the table by not taking any offensive shield for the pet. They can add 10-100s of millions of DPS to your pet.

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Thanks for the welcome.

Honestly, I didn’t even know that shield existed. As far as defense goes, maybe I’m just pushing the limits of a pet build, but my War Bot has absolutely died multiple times in end game content. His damage output was so (objectively) ludicrous I just felt like I was missing out on that last piece of survivability. I’d love to see things die even faster, as long as my Bot isn’t one of them. I’ll definitely give that shield a try; thanks for the input!

Was it in Guardian Takedown? Because War Loader and Countess spiderant are bugged and will be instantly killed by some attacks in GTD even through Gamma Burst.

Aside from that, it is literally impossible for you pet to die during Gamma Burst, and even if it does you can always revive it with Gamma anyway so speccing for pet survivability tends to be a wash.

Nope, it was everywhere. He dropped a few times during the Slaughter run, once at Maliwan, and at least a few times through six proving grounds. No ■■■■.

You’re right though. I’ll definitely try a damage-based shield. No doubt I went overkill. Like I said, I’m super lazy. If my pet goes down I’m over here like “oh my god I have to actually play the game? get up you piece of ■■■■.”

EDIT: Also, I’m pretty sure there are more bugs with Gamma, because if I recall correctly he died with Gamma at Maliwan, but I could be mistaken.

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How does one measure pet’s health? It is ‘conveniently’ not listed on screen, and, of course, health/shield bars can be displayed in a misleading way anyway.

Just curious.

I’d recommend the Res from the Arms Race DLC for this build. Being able to revive the pet from a distance, even while in FFYL, makes it almost impossible to die.

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Did you know the res gun instantly revives your pet with no cooldown? Because it invalidates every health skill for your pet.

@vulcan estimated the pet’s health during the 57 cap using He Bites to see how much damage it took to kill the pet. IIRC it was around 160k health then. Using the pet scaling formula of 1.105 x level and mayhem scaling (which to be fair, I’m certain is way too high), you get over 10 mil.

The other method is by shooting a Backburner until the pet dies, which still puts it at least over 1 million. I know that 1 mil - 10 mil is a huge range, but somewhere in there (more than likely around 2 or 3 mil since that is about where Iron Bear and Cub are) is the pet’s health.

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Thanks for the responses. I apologize for not knowing about the Res gun. Definitely makes a difference. You could probably shift the shared regen skill points elsewhere.

Also, to boom’s point, the damage-based faulty star sounds like a great alternative.

Clearly I’m not great at gear-based builds, so you’ll want to make a few minor changes to the regen/health based skills, but other than that, I encourage you to give the build a try regardless.

I destroyed all endgame content without the ideal gear, evidently. I assume with the Faulty Star and Res Gun you’d be infinitely more OP. Silver lining.

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Thanks for detailed writeup - really fascinating. Would’ve never guessed that pet is much tankier than VH, based on HUD info only.

:+1:

Edit: So, if pet is rocking multimillion health bar, giving them a ~50K shield should have very little impact then (minus special effects on that shield).

I tried to heal the Loader with the Res - the healing was around 10k, ticked a few times. But the health bar was barely moving. “Ok little buddy, you have WAY more health than I ever thought” :joy:

In general, this build is really insane, I saw a similar build on Youtube with the Faulty Star and nearly no health-/shield-regen, it turned out pretty good. Spawning the Loader with Gamma-Burst in a large group of enemies and when they are attacking it because of the Red Fang, they are just dead. I’m only standing there, watching them or doing the missing software updates from the last 30 years for FL4K :grin:

There’s only one problem: Bosses like Graveward and Psychoreaver. The Loader does all the damage, so you can’t kill them by yourself (ok, you CAN, but it will take forever especially the Psychoreaver) - those bosses aren’t affected by Red Fang and the Loader only attacks them when you force it to do so with the attack command. I mentioned that behaviour in another thread here (“Loader doesn’t attack some bosses”).

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It isn’t worth it for healing. You want to pull it out when your pet goes into FFYL as you can instantly revive him by shooting him with the gun.

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I know, thanks :slightly_smiling_face: It was just a test^^

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Thanks for this build, I just returned to BL3 after a long absence (since the base game) to complete the DLC and was really pleased to see a viable pet build.

Despite the other users pointing out some minmaxing I had no problem with the base build described in the OP with none of the additional items from the comments.

I’ve since grabbed the shield (Faulty Star) and it really doesn’t seem to make a difference. The one that dropped for me isn’t great, mind you.

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The only areas that have given me trouble on this build are in the new DLC. Locomobius has so much HP and my pet can’t seem to target it properly. Same deal with some of the Dark vault hunters.

Any suggestions for weapons on this build? I’ve been using light show and the doom shotgun because they’re the highest base damage guns I can find. I realize the majority of damage from this build is intended to come from the pet.

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