I’m really having fun with Zane but I’m not a fan of using the clone so I prefer to use drone/barrier but I’ve found that the clone seems to have so much of Zane’s damage dealing potential, like Zane himself doesn’t do the damage but the clone does. With the ‘Boom Enhance’ and ‘Double Barrel’ skills the clone does so much more damage than Zane can do and make it seem to be necessary for killing bosses as Zane doesn’t have anywhere near the damage boost that the clone gets as most of what Zane gets are ‘utility’ skills in a sense as they increase fire rate, handling, reload speed but not really boosting damage as much so it feels really lacking. For a while I thought it was fine but then I went on my deputy Fl4k built and started vaporising mobs and bosses with insane damage, but then Fl4k would get downed stupid easily while my Zane build would rarely get downed unless I got caught in an explosion which is nice and all but staying alive forever isn’t useful if I can’t kill anything
All of Zane’s damage is only in the Clone if you aren’t utilizing Violent Momentum. That is where, proportionally speaking, all of Zane’s gun damage is (obviously discounting DLC 5 since it doesn’t seem like you have that content).
Clone is the easiest damage, and I won’t say gun Zane can surpass it because I honestly don’t play Zane enough to know, but your char shouldn’t be hitting like a complete wet noodle in comparison.
Zane clone damage is considered action skill and is currently a bit over the top especially at high mayhem( action skill is scaled to mayhem). Action skill balancing is weird as Iron Bear and Clone hit like trucks without much investement while phaseslam for instance is still very poor even while fully investing
Violent momentum doesn’t give damage anywhere near clones tho so it just feels like Zane is just gonna sit back and watch his clone deal all the damage while he does barely anything. My problem is just it seems that Zane can’t even get close to the clones damage so it feels like you need to use it sometimes, mainly on bosses with large health bars
I don’t think the clone dealing high damage is really a bad thing since it is an action skill and since it only stands in one place that can make it harder to use but Zane himself can’t even get close to matching the damage with drone and barrier
i assume you are talking about synchronicity and donny brook which is zane’s “core damage” outside of violent momentum and it mold’s him as two action skill character and was a necessary pick to gather the damage before gbx changed violent momentum scaling and later purple tree.
but anyway you have to understand damage is many things for example in blue tree you have violent violence -fire rate playing dirty-extra projectiles cool hand-reload speed and cool hand -multipicative first shot damage so broadly speaking most of zane’s damage still lies in a hitman tree and if we consider TOTL to be relaible double agent tree would come second so what is your question exactly? while hitman and double agent are offensive skil ltrees under cover is defensive therefore damage is distributed between former two for vanilla zane which all makes sense.
as to double barrel as action skill itself it only does more damage than zane due to mayhem scaler. in normal mode zane comfortably outdoes the clone it is just gearbox assigning arbitrary damage number to make action skill damage viable in end game that caused them to be OP (clone iron bear ties that bind old rakks were nuts too afaik rn they get half the damage they used to beofore last patch)
Focusing on using the Barrier at all is kind of a handicap, honestly. Most of the augments don’t work properly when Zane has it picked up and Distributed Denial only works well with a handful of shields due to how he “holds” the Barrier projector underground. The more you try to invest in the green tree, the less points you have to put towards other direct damage sources in the other trees.
The Drone itself isn’t a great AS, but the blue tree has the bulk of his kill skills and the 100% Cryo Anoint was until recently his best means for additional damage. So even using the Drone and Clone, you’re still getting the most damage out of a build for him whether directly or through the Clone.