Pick any bear build and use the new Eternal Flame com. You can have almost 99% uptime. 1% for the time when you’re out of IB.
The usual battle flow is:
Rinse and repeat.
Alternatively grab a raging bear, spec up the left and right side of the purple tree, and use plus ultra. Never run out. And if you do, Topped off will do the job.
Even without the 4th skill tree you can basically be in Iron Bear all the time as long as you are smart about keeping your shield up + getting a couple of kills after getting out of Iron Bear or alternatively just sit in Dakka Bear for 15 seconds.
I was able to solo true guardian takedown with Iron Bear only using the cryo minigun + normal minigun and it was easy. I mean not as easy as plasma coil but still.
You can complete solo true takedown without the 4th skill tree and the 5th DLC. I’ve done it with Rocketeer, Raging Bear, and Flare. It just depends on the level of interaction you want with IB.
The Eternal Flame adds another way to do it. Basically you can bring a Moze focus on foot build which in most cases sucks at piloting IB due to poor fuel and cooldown synergies. But with Eternal Flame, you can have a Raging Bear like uptime.
Aw shucks. I did exactly this yesterday, with this skill tree https://borderlands.com/en-US/characters/moze/#t="cb__2329045862___p__2092648103-5_3994848790-5_3415027114-1_1495983387-3_1617167598-1_4061376329-5_1728906816-5_2047577627-1_1188370385-1_411933563-1_3720693987-4_1557093796-5_3654186729-1_1064863104-5_3066753877-3_1229408354-1_63742876-5_976063232-1_630894015-3_696258140-2_924392435-5"
And it was very very very stupid. TMTD in 12 minutes, with two and a half IB usages. Barrel explosions healed me instead of killing me. And I didn’t even had a plus ultra.
I am going to tape a TMTD run later so I can showcase it.
Very similar to mine.
I took the purple capstone instead of the the midpoint wonder, splurged on Experimental munitions and Vladof Ingenuity for Sabots and safety and only pick up nine points in green and go to auto bear in blue with one point in TCP.
I have a 300/90 Plaguebearer in case of ejection. Gets the job done.
On a side note, I firmly believe that specialist bear is a waste of points and highly recommend a split homing rocket/sabot set up. Any more damage is overkill.
True. I feel when piloting Iron Bear I wanna make sure he’s not doing too much damage to have some “kind” of challenge.
But I was trying to go overkill. The only serious limitation of my build are shocktroopers, but I can just use hell on rails+caparm and dispatch of everything I want.
Fair enough. Horses/courses. I was aiming for fuel efficiency, there’s an argument that more damage is more fuel efficient.
Sometimes I’m shooting for a minute with a fire weapon like Kaos but Eternal Flame won’t kick in.
I noticed this multiple times. Am I just unlucky with that 15% RNG? Most of the timr EF will kick in though but there would be those minutes where NOTHING is happening.
I wonder if this is related to FFYL bug.
Well I think it only activates when it procs the effect, so if it’s already ignited it wont work until that dot is off and you apply it again. I noticed it’s a bit harder to reliably proc it when you have just one enemy. Kaos also has a very low dot chance so maybe that’s your issue.
Ah good point.
I noticed this too.
Its good for switching fast between Iron bear and a heavy hitter with some for the road
I use iron bear as my main damage until I need a extra punch of damage with 180 splash annoint and some for the road. Really the complete opposite experience from using iron bear at lower levels.
I dont find the new skill tree worth speccing into if youre gonna be running iron bear especially with the eternal flame. The other trees seem have alot more damage capabilites
you need to apply a DOT and ignite the enemy, meaning that you need to go through the shield first or it won’t work. Same thing when you are damaging yourself. Until you have an active shield nothing whill happen.
I haven’t tested the scenario proposed by kabflash, but I can do it later if you are cucrious.
But I know that Running on Fumes doesn’t need a new DOT, and works “as intended” even if you re-ignite a pre-existing DOT.
Are you saying the DOT and ignite will only work on an enemy only when their shield is gone? And the DOT and ignite will work on you only when you have a shield up?
I’ll have to observe if that’s the case because for the enemy because I’d been seeing insta cooldown in Maliwan TD and most enemies there are shielded.
The enemy part here where you have to deplete the shield is not true in my test. So I purposely killed my IB with Miniguns explosions to ensure that his cooldown is long.
I am in Proving Grounds. First three enemies came out with shield. I shot the first one with Flipper (higher DOT chance than Kaos), the enemy’s shield was chipped by 5 to 10%. And my IB’s cooldown is ready to go.
Ok, then what I stated above works only on yourself. I tested it several times for my Infinity build, and I was able to reset AS cooldown only when my shield was broken and I was on fire.
Good to know, I will test more stuff later during the day.
I did another run in Maliwan Takedown. I saw the same thing against Valkyrie and one of those badasses. Valk is at 50% shield when my AS reset while with the badass it was about 70% shield.
I tried the cryo augment. The dual cryo is fun until I hit a badass with a cryo immunity. I had to switch to normal minigun + cryo augment to account for that.
I find the minigun augments more fun to use as well against Wotan. The railgun augments are too easy against Wotan and his minions.
The Flame class mod can serve a couple of niche purposes and while it’s not amazing or even the best COM for pilot builds, it doesn’t diminish the entire range of Moze’s legendary class mods either, unlike poor Fl4k who got the worst deal out of everyone in DLC for new class mods.
However, the one thing about Flame that is giving me a serious ‘Gearbox, what on Pandora were you thinking?’ moment is including Nitrotrinadium Engines as a bonus skill. The most obvious problem is that it offers a paltry amount of cooldown rate when the class mod’s special effect is about subverting cooldown duration entirely.
But what’s also counterintuitive about it and isn’t really mentioned, is that 5% of extra maximum fuel on top of the base capacity is 6 seconds and when the COM offers a free skill point for Running on Fume (the capstone) which buys you an extra 6 seconds of (idle) time on the fuel metre per ignition, why would anyone want any points in NE and miss out on bonus damage from RBG?
Biofuel, Double Time and NGtGYU would have been far more intuitive picks than NE for what this class mod is trying to aim for. Hell, even Harmonious Havoc would have been a better overall pick despite element-locking as Moze could get around 100-120% bonus gun damage.