Heya Buddies, with the raise of shields like Re-Volter and Infernal Wish we are slowing seeing less and less build diversity with our shield slot. And even before these staples to the meta we had stuff like the Old God dominating. In Borderlands 3 the bottom of the barrel for shields have been the Nova Shields in general. Despite this a user on YouTube by the name SentencedtoBurn decided to experiment with a couple of shields to try to find a diamond in the rough or even something to compare to strength of the meta shields. Collaboration on this idea we found one that is able to deal 550 Million damage with each Nova Proc and thus I am excited to present to you: Meme or Meta? The Nova Berner
Click Here for Build Showcase:
Humble Beginnings Originally SentencedtoBurn experimented with the Torch shield and he was able to cap at 8 M damage with each ball that hit. This was good but I knew somehow it could be better. After he shared his save file with me I got right to work and was able to Cap the damage with that particular shield at 10m Damage per hit… not off to a great start. Sure 20% more damage is great but I knew we could get so much more. I looked into which Nova shield could deal the most damage and discovered that all sources said the Nova Berner deals the most damage per nova so of course I decided to pick up where I left off with that one.
(Keep in mind all Shields we tested are with the Anointment: Action Skill Start activate shield break / fill)
Because we are using this anointment we are knew the best character to spam this would be Zane with his Mantis Cannon. Using the Augment to make his charges max out at 5 we were able to spam any nova we’d want as much as possible. Upon switching to the Nova Berner our damage increased to 30M per nova with a gun ASE increase splash damage by 125%. And what’s incredible with this shield and the anointment together is that the anointment causes the shield to drain immediately thus creating the on break effect but Nova Berner also has the ability: when Shield is filled send a nova.
Because of the way the Anointment is programmed the shield breaks once → sends a nova → shield fills immediately → sends a nova
Originally I didn’t notice this until testing on jack’s dummy since all the enemies would die with one nova thus only creating one number on the screen but since the Dummy has infinite health I was able to properly see the damage number from the full effect which means this shield essentially procs twice with each use of the anointment. Okay perfect so our damage isn’t capped at 30m its capped at 60m. Next I needed to confirm which parts of Zane’s tree actually increases the damage from the shield and which ones doesn’t.
Okay so to make a long paragraph short none of his skill tree points I found to increase Nova damage. Very disappointing. Not even Violent Momentum which might be obvious for Zane Mains but I could have sworn it would have worked. Nevertheless we need to keep moving, so If none of our skill tree points will increase our damage then I’m going to just focus on Action Skill Cooldown and utility which makes our skill tree super wonky not gonna lie, it looks really weird to see since no other build required me to build this way. This mean all of damage has to come from secondary stats, artifacts effects, anointments & particular gun effects.
Main Gear: Guardian Angel w/ splash damage anointment. Elemental Projector Victory Rush w/ secondary stats splash damage & dual rolled fire damage. The Hustler Class Mod w/ secondary stats splash damage, splash damage radius & action skill cooldown. Various grenades with ASE element. Low Level Sellout.
Good ole Guardian Angel came to the rescue and increased our damage from 30M per nova to 100M per nova even if the enemy was really close. I find this to be really weird because 1: I was already using a splash anointment gun & 2: Guardian Angel shouldn’t increase our damage by that much if targets are close. So I believe it’s right to assume Nova Shields work funny with the Guardian Angel but its too our advantage so <shh don’t tell gearbox>. With max distance the damage was around 140M and max distance is tricky since our nova’s can’t span out infinitely so our range is limited thus making the distance multiplier handicapped at a set amount. We sorta fix this problem with the Splash radius secondary stat from the class mod but its only increases the distance by a couple feet and our splash damage from our artifact cannot enable its hidden effect of also increasing distance since its not our second or third stat roll on the artifact.
Hustler Class Mod We are mainly using this to proc the skill tree point Calm, Cool, Collected to get our action skill charges back whenever we freeze an enemy. 5 Points into Brain Freeze allows us to freeze enemies very easy using any weapon with high fire rate since the Hustler crits proc Brain Freeze which freezes the enemies. I prefer to use a Monarch since the amount of bullets it produces per second is highly favorable to get a charge back on Mantis Cannon on demand when mobbing.
Elemental Projector Victory Rush is another essential artifact for this, but mostly for the Elemental Projector part. I didn’t quite test if the Victory rush bonus damage increases our nova damage so it might/might not help. But that doesn’t matter to me since our elemental projector is able to increase our elemental damage by 129% on demand with our Sellout Pistol. Since we are running a nova shield that only can ever be fire the sellout is the perfect weapon to use to proc our Elemental Projector, just one shot at our feet and we are lit on fire every time with no fail. Keep in mind if you want to try this make sure you are using a low level sellout because otherwise it would put you into Fight for Your Life.
With the Sellout + Elemental Projector combo (and all the secondary stats which is a lot of math so I won’t list why those impact the damage so much seeing as this post is long enough) we were able to cap our damage to a whooping 275M damage per nova which makes our total damage per activation on a action skill 550M Damage!
All that’s left is to decided whether or not I consider the Nova Berner shield to be Meme or Metaa and Its hurts me to say but despite being able to get more than half a billion damage per activation from the shield I believe that this is a Meme piece of loot. There are several problems with this build that causes me to feel this way first being is that when running this set up I would constantly be downed not because of enemies but because of myself. Because the increased radius for the nova shield I would constantly trigger barrels with my novas that also benefited from the increased radius which means that every time I destroyed a barrel it hit me without fail instantly downing me. Once I’m in FFYL I had a lot of trouble getting back up since our skill tree was set up so janky, I didn’t have much to increase my regular gun damage. I used a Plasma Coil w/ Splash damage anointment to deal decent damage but if I was downed I could only ever kill a regular enemy which means if there are only badasses near by I was done for. And Since barrels don’t activate health gating I had no way to counteract this besides learning where each and every barrel was on the map and detonate them manually with a gun shot. All enemies are easily defeated with the Novas but since there is no way for me to proc them in FFYL It felt really bad whenever I was downed. If you become a master of map awareness you can essentially disable this factor and speed clear all enemies around. It’s a damn good meme build but the problems listed above prevent me from granting it a higher score.
Another huge shout out to SentencedtoBurn for collaborating with me on his idea, if it wasn’t for him even I wouldn’t have even tried to do this. I’m thinking about continuing the Meme or Meta series hopefully to continue to find really cool builds or even discuss interesting Ideas from pieces of gear that normally don’t see the light of day. Its possible there will be some pieces of gear I discuss that aren’t even remotely as powerful as this but I’ll try everything in my power to optimize new pieces of gear for this. There might be some installments that are just saying something is really bad since I don’t believe every item can be saved but if that’s the case it won’t be as long as this post.
Its a ton of fun and I would love for you guys to try it as well. . Alrighty that’s all I have for today, Have a great day everyone 
Feel free to add any tips you think will help another player in the comments, you will probably help a fellow vault hunter out & strengthen us as a community.
