What skills have Mayhem Scaling, and how can one see that?

Borderlands 3 Moze the Gunner
#1

I hear that some things have Mayhem scaling, but it’s not at all clear what does and does not, especially from in-game tooltips. For example, I hear that Fire in the Scag Den, which appears to offer a rather pedestrian +15% Incendiary Damage, actually offers over 100%.

When evaluating options, it would help to know if things do or do not scale, to what extent, and what things are additive with each other vs multiplicative. Any good guides or resources out there with that kind of information, since I would be stunned to ever see the tooltips in game updated to accurately reflect that info?

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#2

What gets mayhem scaling is not shown in game at all unfortunately. For Moze the mayhem scaling skills are Short Fuse, Fire in the Skag Den, Big Surplus and Baby Nukes.

At Mayhem 10/11 Short Fuse gets a 7x mayhem scale. The other three get 31x. So Skag Den is 3%x31=93% per point.

If you want resources on Moze stuff here’s where you can find them

Should cover everything from good practices to the nitty gritties of the math. Unfortunately info on Purple tree is sparse as the testing community for Moze on this forum almost all stopped playing before Arms Race release.

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#3

So let me get this straight - Short Fuse, instead of providing a 20% chance to deal 75% of your damage (ignoring damage calculation redundancies which make it more), has a 20% chance to deal 525% of your damage at Mayhem 10, singlehandedly more than doubling it? And Skag Den, rather than increasing your damage by 15%, picking it or not means potentially losing out on an over 450% damage increase?

That’s insane. Makes it very hard to not invest heavily in Blue on high Mayhem modes as well. Who needs a capstone that provides a +30% damage boost on shield break, after all, when you can more than double your damage all the time instead?

Well, regardless of what I think of that from a game balance standpoint, it’s useful information and greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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#4

Yea, I attempted to make a M10 build with no SF, or FitSD, and it just doesn’t work at all. Well not without relying on Iron Bear.

#5

Yeah you get the picture.

Short Fuse in a meta spec provides a 2 to 3x increase to Moze’s overall dps. Pre mayhem scaling it was am amazing skill already. Now its unfortunately a must pick for any semi serious Moze focussed build.

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#6

Given that, as much as I love a Green / Purple Moze, running around all the time with my Iron Cub with a more than 50% uptime and infinite ammo, the following should be far more viable and successful on M10?

Any significant errors or missed opportunities in that, or is it pretty close to the “meta”?

Edit: I have the char code in properly but it doesn’t seem to work. What am I doing wrong?

#7

That spec is blank.

Try this website instead. Its far more user friendly to work with and as a bonus is more pleasant for amalyzing builds on.

I should also note that I haven’t played Moze since purple teee released, so my knowledge of meta is a couple months out of date amd saved only by purple tree not offering much.

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#8

Thanks!

The idea being you drop Iron Bear, use it for a hot sec, pop out to get it on cooldown and proc big surplus since it’s an absurd boost as well, then go to town with splash damage weapons, ideally getting regular crits to keep ammo up. Rinse and repeat.

#9

That much red tree is definitely not meta. Using consecutive hits as an anoint just does the job better than heavy red investment. 10 points in red to get 5 Drowning in Brass and Capacitive Armature is a standard for heavy Moze focus. Or for a more balanced style add another 5 to red tree for sabot rounds.

End of the day anything past Drowning in brass is just opportunity loss vs investing in green for better damage.

Lack of auto bear is a puzzling omission, no reason not to take to take it. You could also push it further by using rocketeer to lessen how often you need to hop in ib. 3/5 EP and no vamp is also not standard. Though I guess you’re going low hp which makes not vamp a fair choice.

Rampant amd I never updated this for 4th tree, however there’s enough free points you cam just spec 3 big suplus and follow the guide if you want to see what meta is like. The skill choices should be well detailed here.

Gear hasn’t changed much, just 300/90 Plasma Coil is meta rather than Flipper which was top dog at the time of writing.

Edit: Here’s an example spec for what I assume meta has progressed to Skill Calculator • Moze • BL3 | Lootlemon

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#10

I appreciate the feedback! The reason for avoiding Auto Bear is because the 15 seconds it’s out is 15 seconds I’m not getting a 465% incendiary damage boost from Big Surplus, and adding that much delay to my giant damage windows seems counterintuitive. Considering I expect Big Surplus to be additive to FitSD, I expect it’s actually a doubling of damage rather than a quintupling of it, but unless Iron Bear provides more than 50% of my damage it’s still a better option than Auto Bear, unless I’m missing something?

The main reason for heavy investment in red was survivability rather than damage, but looking at the guide it looks like the main things I’m giving up from Green are as follows:
Stoke the Embers - Should be additive to FitSD and Big Surplus, right? So rather than a 30% boost, it takes me from 930% Incendiary damage to 960%, or a 3% damage increase. Am I wrong on that?
Scrappy - Definitely will miss it, I love Scrappy, so good in so many ways. A huge miss for sure.
Scorching RPMs - In general I worry that increasing ROF limits weapon selection and has counter synergy with the most obvious damage focused mod for this, Blast Master, as it makes it more likely to need to reload. The Crit Damage is a big miss for sure of course.

On the basis of the info in there, I do think it’s worth moving the 3 points from Explosive Punctuation to Vampyr, and moving a point from Thin Red Line to Vladov Ingenuity, to preserve health gating capabilities. That should improve survivability quite a bit, while maintaining the impact of Tenacious D I would think. Again I greatly appreciate your input and feedback, and am curious what things I’m missing in my analysis. Perhaps I’m overvaluing Big Surplus, but to me the idea seems to be to get Iron Bear out of there as fast as possible, cycle through it sure to have more consistent procs on weapons which are ASE anoints, but in general try to have it on cooldown pretty much at all times.

#11

Auto Bear being out doesn’t affect Big Surplus. IB is still on cooldown for this time.

Correct

Nope, Stoke is an elemental multiplier not a bonus element. Its multiplies BS and Fitsd.

Sandhawks the only high tier weapon that would care. And that guns fast enough it doesn’t matter either way. Rof increases are nearly never a problem for Blast Master. It should be said though Rocketeer will output similar damage numbers if you roll a high fitsd version.

Specialist Bear is also a pure multiplier in the IB damage formula, so having it has a big impact on how fast auto bear kills stuff in the harder content.

You might need to scroll a bit, however Here I did quite an extensive breakdown in the comments about deep red vs deep green investment.

#12

So in your analysis, you focus on the damage difference between them, but do not discuss survivability. Based on the other comments in the guide, my expectation is that the reason for this is that damage tends to come in massive spikes, against which health gating is your best defense, as it works even against infinite incoming damage. As such, swiftly and effectively getting back above 50% health is paramount from a defensive side, and anything else is nice, but not hugely valued. Am I reading into that properly?

Since from my perspective, looking at that breakdown, it would seem Red and Green give somewhat comparable damage boosts, but in the hypothetical situation laid out with 10 stacks of Phalanx Doctrine, you’ve also got a bonus of +150% to max shields, with shield recovery both on break and on kill.

As such, when I assess it, I see relatively comparable damage numbers, and the main difference would be increases in shield capacity and recovery (red) vs increases in the ability of Iron Bear to contribute and kill enemies (green). Your assessment if I read it right is that Iron Bear being out and alive contributes significantly both defensively (due to aggro pulling) and offensively, if built right, to the point where it’s more advantageous than the shields provided by red. Definitely an interesting analysis and I’ll have to do some testing, see what feels better to me. Again, thanks so much!

#13

Yeah thats a good read on the differences. The last piece I have that I’m guessing is where it doesn’t click for you is that shield recharge in combat is difficult. You face enough incoming damage that a shield won’t naturally recharge, Moze lacks artificial means to refill the shield so unless you rely on either Bloodletter or shields like Big Boom Blaster/Transformer. That capacity boost is a one time thing. In content where min maxing has tangible effects on performance like the takedowns or dense cov areas you’ll find a variety of enemies that are capable of making really short work of your shield. This leads to you face half the battle or more with health tanking being the thing that keeps you afloat. Something that Vampyr and a cmt does phenomenally. Lastly Fight for Your Life is easy to recover from if you have the newer guardian rank perks. So this further minimizes the effect survival has on a build.

#14

If you’re using Iron Cub, it’s worth ditching the red tree entirely and aim to have it always out.

Run blue and green meta and put 11 points in purple.

Big surplus, two in the health regen, three in status effect chance and damage, and two in movement speed.

Then grab the mid point one pointer for fire rate increase while causing DoT.

Iron Cub is the equivalent DPS of rocketeer without the downside of being stationary. As far as FFYL is concerned having Cub out will res you as long as there are mobs to kill. The combination of the purple health regen and redistribution in green are enough for mobbing considering the aggro is split.

For coms I’d suggest the flare, raging bear or eternal flame. Chase your splash damage through the stat sticks on the coms and artifacts instead of blastmaster.

Edit: also I give over taking two points in vampyr to put them in deadlines for cub uptime. I use a cloning fire hunter seeker grenade for the short fuse procs. But a CMT is still gold standard.

I agree with everything else @Prismatic has said though.

#15

Worth noting that Scorching RPMs also increases the incendiary dmg from both Skag Den and Surplus by 5% per skill point. Stainless Steel Bear too but @ +4% per point. That’s based on shooting the dummy so haven’t confirmed those values hold up on M10/11.

#16

They do. Acton skill damage on coms also increases skag Den and big surplus damage. All 3 are additive to each other.

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#17

Ok, having spent extensive time now playing in M10, as well as the other mayhem modes, I’ve gotta say, I’m loving my build. I’ve tried heavy green as well of course, but with Vladof Ingenuity, Guardian Rank, etc I have baseline 115k shields. Phalanx Doctrine stacks get it to 200k after 4-5 kills, at which point Force Feedback is 20k shields restored and Tenacious D is 80k shields. I’ve seen it go over 400k before, but most of the time I’m at 200k. I don’t find it difficult to recover shields at all, and I’m Never Health Tanking (I only have 15k health anyway so it would be crazy).

Vampyr gets me back to capped health (60%) instantly whenever I get health gated, so the only time I ever go down is either when I’m just standing there checking loot, deciding if I want to pick it up while ignoring enemies, or less commonly when a badass hits me with a rocket while I’m standing next to a barrel or something. At which point getting back up puts me to full 200k+ shields, so I haven’t died from something other than falling off the map or gross negligence in a long, long time.

Here’s the current build:

I miss scrappy the most, Forge and Fired Up are close behind, but overall I just don’t go down, and all enemies do, very easily. The point in Auto Bear is of course useless since I run Iron Cub, but it’s impactful enough that if I get some weapons whose augments warrant switching in order to try them, out I don’t want to have to respec every time.

My current gear:
Shields - My current is a Bullet Vacuum Madcap. I consider this to be The most important piece, 80k base shields with a 2 second recharge. I was previously running with and loving the Recharger, just based on how it works, but it’s not nearly as good in practice. The 50% reduction in FFYL time just doesn’t matter since I’m never in it.
Artifacts - I’ve been using a Lustrous Deathrattle. It has 48% splash damage increase, which is why I use it. I really need to get a good Pearl to use instead, as this is sorely underwhelming in terms of benefits just based on current gameplay. Notably, it was way more impactful when I was running with the recharger as I went down more often.
Class Mods - I’ve been running Blast Master, but I’m experimenting with other options right now, including Mind Sweeper and Flare, as I really don’t like how pidgeonholed I feel in guns and tactics while using Blast Master. Mind Sweeper feels pretty good, curious what folks think would be best here.
Grenades - I’ve been running with a MIRV Hex w/ 25% OGT, not the worst, not the best.
Weapons - I’ve got a non-anointed Plasma Coil, Flipper, and Boogeyman which are my bread and butter weapons, they melt everything. The Lob, Flakker, Roisens Thorns also see play to mix things up, and of course whatever I happen to pick up gets a spin, especially if it has an interesting anointment. I really want to try out a Monarch, but have not yet prioritized getting one. Any other great weapons for this build out there I should be targeting?

Anyway that’s where I’m at and how it’s going currently, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions so I’d love to know your thoughts!