Since people are starting biting in the thread, might as well give my personal input. Big Wall of Text coming, so faint of heart beware. Might change some placement here and there tomorrow once I read it again from top to bottom.
From worst to best, taking into account not only power, but how well designed they are, how easy they’re to play…basically a bit of everything:
C Tier
Roland: The worst character in the series.
First, his action skill is a turret that only functions in a radious of 180º, so it can’t actually shoot enemies behind you, with a pretty small shield that barely covers you even when crouched. It also isn’t very durable, so when a couple of enemies attack it, expect it to go down very quickly. Additionally, it doesn’t do any damage to anything other than basic skags until you spec into it, and even then it falls off in the higher levels, where the only use left for this is the passive bonuses it brings Roland, such as ammo or health regen.
His build variety is very low, you basically build him up as tanky as possible and make it so that you can get Saber Turret out as much as possible and pick all his passives. If you play with friends, you can also pick his support skills, but that’s about it.
C+ Tier
Brick: The first melee character in the series that, while having some good ideas and fundations, was quickly overshadowed by Krieg.
In terms of his action skills, Berserker is a melee override that constantly gives you health over time, which is solid, albeit a far more awkward to use Rampage, that doesn’t really work well at all on big enemies likes Skagzilla or Crawmerax and falls off in late game, where you want to use a more splash related build with rockets and grenades to deal damage, only using Berserker to heal you up to full or to kill an almost death enemy that you don’t wanna waste bullets on.
Axton: An improved, slightly less dull version of Roland.
His sabre turret is a straight up upgraded from the one on BL1 in terms of damage and utility (thanks to his 360º vision and capstones), even though this one for some reason can still die incredible quickly, so you need to position it in a place that can give you support, but can’t be easily spotted by other enemies. Compared to Gaige’s Deathtrap, this leaves a lot to be desired, you will notice this extremely quickly if you go from one character to the next in a new game, since whereas the former cleared entire rooms without a struggle, the later can die if a badass gives it a couple of shots. Additionally, Axton’s skill trees could be way better and are basically “choose between a terrible, crappy skill that gives your turret accuracy or something that actually gives you damage in the form of reload speed/fire rate”. Not as bad as Gaige’s trees, but still pretty boring, lackluster improvements.
Where Axton starts to shine is in TVHM and up, where you can finally get a couple of skills that make your turret more impactful, such as the ability to slag enemies, using nukes to throw them off balance, use it from a very long distance with the “Longbow Turret” skill. Additionally, this is where you can start getting into some niche builds that use stuff like “Grid”, where you’re basically immortal up to a certain point.
This probably doesn’t really make him a lot more fun to play or interesting to play as, but he certainly a bit of an improvement over the BL1 soldier.
Claptrap: Very interesting character, with some of the funniest dialogue in the series. However, he is very flawed.
His skill trees have a give and take kind of approach, in the sense that they give you a net positive while also giving you a potential negative effect as well. His action skill “Vault Hunter.exe”, while potentially being able to give you a lot of value, tends to be very randomized and difficult to work with properly, since instead of a constant, known power boost that you can rely on like any other Vault Hunter, is an unreliable variable that you have to adapt to. Also, like every single Presequel character, the fact that he has so many skill points he can work with makes it so that at the end of the day, there is not that much variety in how his different builds look like.
Even if his weaknesses are offset the more you build him up, like how his action skill isn’t as random once you know what triggers each status and get more positive modules that you can trigger from his skills trees, he can definitely be a nightmare to deal with as your first character, as well as not being able to reach his full potential unless you’re with friends, which will also hate you if you play as him due to how annoying he is.
B- Tier
Wilhelm: The emotionless bounty hunter that wants to be a robot and was good at fights.
Wilhelm is a very average, run of the mill character. His action skill summons two bots (Wolf and Saint) that give him a constant health regen+fire power boost, so you want this out as soon as you get it. His skill trees are designed in a way to boost either Wolf, himself or Saint and for your first playthrough you probably want to focus on his green skill tree since it’s the one that will help you out the most in killing enemies faster.
His main problem is not that he’s bad, he’s just overshadowed by other characters, because he’s just a slighty tuned version of the soldier from previous games with quality of life improvements, such as your “turret” being a flying vehicle that follows you everywhere, can respawn again with the skill “scramble”, but doesn’t really have an interesting playstyle, just a couple of interesting ideas (such as being able to change his appearance and voice the more skills you get in “Cyber Commando”), so I do feel he deserves a bit more recognition, enough at least so that he gets out of the C tier spot.
Gaige: Very fun character with great and memorable lines/voice acting, but her design and skill trees are all over the place and have tons issues.
She power spikes as early as lvl 5, since Deathtrap is easily the strongest action skill at that point in the game, and can clear entire rooms of enemies without you doing anything at all. She then gets another incredible power spike at lvl 6 with Anarchy, with all (or at least most) of the accuracy penalty flaws negated by the skill “Close Enough”. With all of this, Gaige at lvl 11 feels much more complete and finished than other BL2 characters, who need to reach their capstone before you get a feel for what they can achieve.
So what’s the problem? Well, the issue is that’s more or less where her strengths vanish. Once you reach TVHM, Deathtrap is basically a pretty distraction at best unless you build him up with the best equipment you can find for him, negating a lot of potential damage you could do as Gaige. Her entire blue skill tree is garbage besides “Make it Sparkle” and BFF (her green tree) is mediocre, with just a couple of stand out skills (upshot robot, Sharing is caring, close enough) that save it from being as bad as her blue tree and finally her red tree is only worthwhile to help you build up stacks of anarchy faster and more efficiently. Not to mention that if she dies, all those stacks that took a while to hoard have now banished and with that a lot of your potential DPS.
However, even with all of this, Gaige is still a very easy character to master, and you can technically avoid a lot of stress by simply building up her stacks on Sanctuary or with easy to defeat mobs before moving on to harder, more challenging content, as well as being able to clear entire rooms of enemies by hiding behind something and shooting at the ground while the ricochets kill every single enemy in their path.
B Tier
Aurelia: An interesting playstyle that combines sniper play and the new ice cryo element from TPS, which go hand in hand to allow you easy headshots.
Unfortunately, if you don’t like the use of the new elemental type, the use of snipers for damage, or have a friend that can take full advantage of her contract system from her red tree, you’re probably not gonna find much more here. She is locked (or at least gravitates more towards) a certain playstyle than the rest of TPS characters.
Mordecai: The drunk, bird loving sniper of borderlands 1.
Mordecai has a pretty lackluster action skill at first, since it has a pretty step cooldown and it doesn’t do as much damage as you would think. This is mitigated the further you spec into him and, unlike Aurelia, he doesn’t only gravitate towards just snipers, since he has a fair share of abilities he can make use of, such as building him up for the sake of using revolvers that pack a big punch in close range, use snipers from long distances to also refresh the cooldown of Bloodwing even further so that you can spam him faster and can make for an interesting melee hybrid playstyle with “Lethal Strike”.
Maya: The blue lady Siren of borderlands
Like a lot of BL2 characters, has a very slow beginning. Her action skill “Phaselock” throws enemies into the air, but a single enemy being CC doesn’t mean much if you’re surrounded by 5-6 more and it also doesn’t garantee that he will be dead by the time your action skill runs out. She gets going once you reach her “Acid Cloud” skill, since that is pretty brutal in NVHM, but is not until TVHM that you get “Ruin” and “Sub-Sequence” that you unleash her full potential.
That being said, you can see her really struggling late game compared to other characters regardless, and her blue tree “Harmony” is kind of worthless unless you’re running some kind of support build, since you really need the damage from “Cataclysm” and the Crowd Control capabilities of “Motion” for other mobbing and bossing scenarios, and you can outplay almost anything her blue tree can bring (besides support stuff for your alies like Rez) with a healing weapon.
Athena: The slightly autistic mercenary with a heart of gold.
Her “Kinetic Aspis” shield can absorb all damage that is dealt in front of you, but if an enemy hits you from behind or from an angle your shield isn’t facing at, you eat that like it’s nothing. Her ability it’s good, but is basically a beta Zane barrier, being inferior in almost everyway, especially when you get augments like “All-rounder”, she just can’t compete.
Unfortunately for her, she also suffers from the Gaige syndrome, where you have one skill that is amazing in her red tree for one point (Maelstrom) and basically carries most of the character. Sure, you can build her up as a melee character, but basically the center piece of most of her builds is gonna be “Ceranic Storm”, while the others are cuestionable. Half of her skill tree “Phalanx” are boosts to it’s shield damage (which is crap) or boosts playstyles that play around with co-op, so if you play solo, you’re not gonna pick those up. “Xiphos” is a slightly better tree, but you basically need to play around debuffing enemies left and right and is more an hybrid playstyle than a pure melee build, which is not as straightforward as other characters.
So basically, you’re left with Maelstrom/red tree builds if you want to deal more damage, which while isn’t a mechanic that it’s easy to mantain, a good storm front grenade can basically carry you and aleviate the pain of building those stack up. I don’t think she’s really as good of a character as most people seem to imply
B+ Tier
Krieg: The iconic crazy psycho
Early on, his melee override “Rampage” is not very practical, because he lacks the life regen of Brick when he initiates it and only gets a full heal when he kills someone else, so you have to use him at the right time, otherwise you risk going down fairly quickly and often. Is not up until you get “Release the Beast” that his melee playstyle starts shaping up into something more exciting, since your health gets refilled instantly, as well as getting a big boost in damage and making him more durable.
He can also make use of non-melee, gun builds by specing heavily into Bloodlust + Hellborn. While I find the fact that he can make use of such a playstyle satisfying, I also find the lack of an additional Action skill for this purpose hurts the character, because you relegate what makes him special in the first place and pretty much abandon it in focus for a different run & gun playstyle.
Personally, I feel he could’ve been a much better character if he was designed like a Class from BL3, with different action skills. You would have Rampage for his melee centric builds, where you focus on his “psycho side” and then something else that will help him stand out more with his guns that focuses on his “sane side”, creating an interesting balance between the two.
Nisha: A very strong cowboy girl with an aimbot action skill.
The Lawbringer, while very strong and powerful (probably has the highest damage output in the game on bosses), she is very lacking survivability, a true glass cannon. If you’re building her up with skills from her blue tree to maximize “Showdown” uptime and damage from her red tree, you also probably want to use either dual wielding or Moxxi’s laser weapon (I think it’s vibrapulse, the laser you get from the chest of Moxxi before attacking Helios).
She also has an interesting playstyle in her green tree with her Order stacks and can be build to be a weird mix of melee with her whip skills, which can easily destroy normal mobs with ease, even if it struggle against certain bosses, which makes this playstyle not as easy or powerful due to not having an action skill that builds around it.
A Tier
Zer0: The cool, mysterious cyborg ninja.
You can do quite a bit with it’s Deception skill, like melee builds, snipers builds…the main problem he faces is that he is a very skill dependent character. You really need to know how he works, what he does, how he moves, when you have to engage…otherwise you’re basically screwed. You can have a pretty good equipment, a great build, the best guns in the game…and still fail miserably over and over again because you missed your deception shot or you didn’t kill the enemy you were looking at and therefore can’t chain kills with him.
So he has that barrier of entry. He is extremely weak at the beginning of the game, where you can only shoot once or melee someone once and then you have to wait a while you’re a sitting duck. If you fail your shots or you attacks didn’t kill the enemy with a melee strike, you’re not getting value out of Zer0. It’s not like someone as Wilhelm or Gaige, where you summon your action skill and you instantly gain value and he is not as flexible with his skill as FL4K is with “Fade Away”, because with the later you can keep on doing melee damage until you shoot your 3 shoots or time runs out.
Like Claptrap, he is not a constant, he is a variable, but unlike the former, your skill is the variable instead of mostly pure RNG. I don’t think he should be as high as some character like Salvador, where you press a button and you’re unstoppable or you press your Gamma Burst with FL4K and if you have Red Fang, every enemy gets aggro’d and it’s a walk in the park. He can be very good and very strong though. I’m also not keen on skills such as B0re, that can kill bosses with a white pistols, broken interactions don’t sit well with me, to be honest.
Lilith: The “I am speed” of Vault Hunters prior to Zane being introduced.
In terms of early game, Lilith is probably the weakest character by far. Her phasewalk doesn’t actually do anything besides allowing you to reposition yourself and the damage it does with it’s melee is a complete joke. Once you start leveling up however, you will reach a point where you can heal and have a fast cooldown with your action skill indefinitely, as well as completely daze hordes of enemies so they can’t even hit and you will speedrun the game faster than any other character without the need of a vehicle.
Lilith is a character that starts slow, but pays off the longer you keep playing, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with her. Her only downsides are the fact that you will find the game insanely easy (since you can just shoot, pop in and pop out of your action skill when you’re in trouble, rinse and repeat), skill trees in BL1 really leave a lot to be desired, so you will probably end up picking the best skills every time with very little skill tree variety and that you basically play and act exactly the same way as when you were at lvl 5 (so you don’t get a mid tree skill that gives a perk like BL2 or TPS or an augment that changes whatever you do like in BL3) you just do it better and more often, which can get boring.
Zane: The funny Irishman. Easily the best dialog lines in the game alongside FL4K’s deadpan humor.
Zane feels like a pretty obvious mix and match combination of Vault Hunters from TPS. He has a drone that follows him everywhere dealing damage, just like Wolf, he has a clone that can do the job for him like Timothy, he has a shield that can defend him from all sources of damage like Athena and he has a cannon, similar to how Wilhelm got one in his “Cyber Commando” skill tree capstone.
Because he can combine multiple skills or sacrifice his grenades, he has a lot of combinations he can make. Drone+Clone, MNTIS+Clone, Drone+Barrier, Drone+Grenades…there is a lot of different ways you can customize Zane, he is really versatile in that regard.
However, Zane has a couple of issues that need to be ironed out before he can move out in rankings, despiste his overall satisfying and fast playstyle, along with his build diversity:
- A lot of his classmods need a buff (techspert, shockerator, cold warrior…). It has gotten better for stuff like Infiltrator, Executor or Hustler thanks to the buffs and certain builds (like recursion Zane), but aside from that, he basically uses Seein Dead or Spy because of how well they synergyze with every skill.
- His green tree past “Brainfreeze” and his barrier dome augment doesn’t offer anything useful. It needs more damage in the lower half of the tree and 40% gun damage with “Confident Competence” doesn’t cut it. Effectively, “Undercover” has been powercreeped by it’s “Professional” purple tree and it shows
- Commitment is overwhelming, easily one of the strongest skills in the game, and pretty much better than almost any capstone in the game. Having all the power of a character in a non-capped, non hard to achieve tier 2 skill isn’t good game design.
- Most of Zane’s strengths are locked behind a paywall. Unlike most other characters, Zane’s god tier powers need the help of DLC1 & DLC5 to reach it’s full potential
A+ Tier
FL4K: The murder hobo, a machine of destruction and mayhem, arguarbly the most interesting addition in Borderlands 3.
With an improved version of Bloodwing in the shape of Rakk Attack, a much more flexible, easy to use Deception (3-shot Fade Away) that can be further costumized into something that can be used for high fire rate guns (Gorillas in The Mist Fade Away), their own pet steroid with “Gamma Burst” that can also grant FL4K bonuses and “Gravity Snare” being a sort of Phaselock 2.0, the Beastmaster is a very interesting character that brings a lot to the table, with very clear and distinct playstyles depending on which Action skill you take with you, giving a very unique experience even when you go through a new playthrough, with tons of classmods to choose from (even if stuff like Trainer, Rakk Commander or the new purple classmod are trash).
FL4K’s main issue lies with them being a very squishy, glass cannon character without any proper lifesteal build into their kit unlike Moze, Zane or Amara (some people might see this “lack of cheese” as a mark of good character design, however). Additionally, their purple tree also leaves a lot to be desired if you don’t have a pet build in mind and their gravity snare action skill is only used on very niche builds with it’s “Blind With Anger+Wide Net” augments, not adding any offensive capabilities, just like the tree itself.
Salvador: The overpowered midge- I mean, tink.
Gunzerker is a very interesting action skill, in the sense that it allows the user to pick up any of two different guns a the same time. This, alongside the power he holds, makes him able to pretty much run with almost any gun in the game. A grog in one hand with a rocket launcher, a lady fist or unforgiven with a sniper rifle, a moxxi healing gun with a DPUH…pick your poison.
The problem with this kind of character is that, like Moze, it relays on broken mechanics and interactions with stuff like Money shot, that allow you to instantly kill bosses like they’re made of paper. Also, while it’s certainly true that you can equip whatever you want, you not only need those guns to be creative with him (which makes Salvador very gear dependent), but also the difference in fire rate, reload speed…can make for what is a very clunky playstyle. It always feels better to use something like two shotguns, or two pistols, or two norfleets…because the gameplay is more fluid, so to speak.
Additionally, because he can carry a second gun in his hand and how much damage enemies deal at higher OP levels, is probably a good idea to always carry out a healing gun on one hand while gunzerking, which effectively makes his “Brawn” skill tree worthless and powercreeped out of existence by a Moxxi weapon or a grog nozzle. You want as much damage and uptime on Gunzerker as possible, everything else is irrelevant.
Amara: Basically an improved version of Maya on steroids. She should always be a tier above her by merit of having an improved version of her action skill, as well as more build diversity.
With a more fleshed out version of Phaselock (Phasegrasp and it’s variations like TTB or Eternal Fist), the ability to run as fast as Lilith or Zane (Spiritual Driver) while also being able to mantain herself alive with lifesteal, a melee hybrid playstyle like Zer0 and Athena, well designed skills trees with useful augments, lots of valuable skills and her own unique spin on a melee wizard with her unique action skills (Phaseslam, Phasecast, Phaseflare) with different variations, she’s probably the best designed Siren to date.
Her main flaws are the lack of gun damage (which, to be fair, can be offset by a Pearl and Phasecast+Phaseslam anointments) and only half of her Legendary classmods (Phasezerker, Spiritual Driver, Muse, Kensei, Breaker) being good or decent, with stuff like Golden Rule, Nimbus, Dragon and Elementalist in severe need of buffs. Besides that, she’s an extremely well designed and fun character and has no problem beating or even speedrunning the hardest of content with something like a Facepuncher.
Moze: The soldier dork that loves robots, with a playstyle straight out of Titanfall
You can build up her mech in very different ways and have very different experiences on each playthrough even if it’s the same action skill. You can go as a melee oriented Bear Fist user, shock your enemies with your railguns, blow up everything up with nukes, throw grenades that have singularities, fire your miniguns at full speed…and that’s only with her mech.
You can then make it so she uses almost unlimited ammo with her green tree, you can take advantage of splash weapons and certain grenades thanks to “Demolition Woman”, you can have an unique playstyle while lowering her health and leaving only 1HP for more damage, you can use healing Moxxi weapons with an AMP shield and a “Bloodletter” to regenerate your shields constantly, etc.
Additionally, almost every single classmod of hers is good. You can use Blast Master or Green Monster to take full advantage of her unlimited ammo capabilities, you can use Rocketeer for a “soldier-like turret” build, you can keep Iron Bear up a long time with Bear Trooper, mob like crazy with Raging Bear, be on foot with Cub and destroy everything with Flare, bring your Iron Bear back up with Eternal Flame…Moze it’s overall an incredible character.
Her problems are as follows:
- Her purple skill tree is very underwhelming. Besides Iron Cub allowing you to have a new playstyle for her similar to the Mechromancer, the tree itself doesn’t do any damage, is full of pointless cooldown reduction skills, and all it’s power is relegated in a couple of skills, such as Big Surplus, Fired Up or Efficiency Engine.
- Iron Cub AI is pretty wonky and even with “Double Time” active, moves very slowly.
- Moze relies pretty heavily on her blue tree for Damage for every single build. This is because stuff like Fire in the Skag Den and Short Fuse (as well as Big Surplus) get insane mayhem scaling. If you aren’t using that tree, you aren’t maximizing Moze’s Damage and thus you’re screwing up big time.
If Gearbox could distribute the power she has on her blue tree to other skills (like Explosive Punctuation, Why Can’t I Carry all these grenades) and other trees (particularly purple) as well buff Salamander to make it a more impactful augment, she would be an S tier character, and it hurts, because she’s close, but needs a bit more better balancing.
S Tier
Timothy: I think this is probably the best designed class Gearbox has done thus far while still remaning incredible strong (which is why other stuff like Salvador isn’t at the top).
Very impactful character from lvl 3 onwards, you really can’t go wrong in how you build him. You want your clones to be stronger and spam as badasses while they do the work for you? “Hero of the Story” is your tree. You want your clones to be more like expendable assets and have them die fast to give you as many bonuses as possible? Pick “Greater Good”. You want your character to get bonuses and build up stacks of “Money is power” while using different weapon manufacturers, allowing you to do Tediore, Hyperion…runs, all feeling a bit different from one another? “Free Entreprise” is pretty fun. He can tackle every bit of content pretty easily, has no issues with aggro management or lacking people to play with because his clones accompany you for the rest of the game and he’s overall the strongest Vault Hunter in TPS after Nisha, while not having the glass cannon constitution that she has.
I can’t really think of anything wrong with him. Maybe that “Greater Good” and “Hero of the Story” go in opposite directions, so they don’t synergyze as well as they could? That’s the only thing that really comes to mind as of now. But yeah, he’s just an incredible character, he made a lot of bad parts of TPS extremely bearable because of how fun and good he feels to play.
