#24

A potential downside of the tree is if endgame gameplay turns into the BL2 health gate festival. Having all of your survivability tied to your shield (including sacrificing max health) can be problematic if there isn’t a fast way to restore it in the middle of a firefight (popping into IB is a decent emergency move). Same thing that Brick had to deal with if enemies outdamaged Unbreakable’s ability to reset his shields. Force Feedback is a nice bonus, but it’s not something I’d want to completely rely on.

I agree with the general sentiment that it seems to be the most attractive “total package” tree, whereas the other two seem a bit more specialized.

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#25

The other 2 tree have the same problem soooooo…

Demo woman and Bottomless mags offer very little to no survivability skills whatsoever.

#26

@smtrentcf Yeah, it’s kind of strange how they built out Moze to put almost all of her survivability skills in a single tree. The other 3 vault hunters all have their survivability skills spread out a bit more, even if they do have a tree that is mainly focused on survivability.

Amara has most of her survivability in her green tree, but the blue and red trees each have 1 survivability skill (life steal on action skill damage in the blue tree and life steal on elemental damage in the Red tree).

Zane has most of his survivability skill in the green tree, but he has a health steal skill in the blue tree and in the red tree he has a clone that can draw aggro from him, a health regen skill, and a skill that lets him sacrifice his clone for a fight for your life revive.

FL4K has his survivability almost evenly split between the blue and green trees, with max health, damage resistance, pet FFYL revives, and health regen skills in the green tree; max health, pet damage sharing, and health regen skills in the blue tree. He also has a tiny bit of survivability in the red tree, with 1% health regen per second from his spiderant, and a skill that makes his pet more likely to draw aggro.

Moze has almost all of the her survivability in the red tree, though the blue tree does have grenade throwing during FFYL and grenade health steal at least. Plus of course shorter Iron Bear cooldowns, allowing you to hop into Iron Bear to save your life more often than you can in the other trees. Green tree has no survivability at all, except for the fact that you can sprint and shoot, which makes it slightly harder for enemies to hit you.

#27

Truth be told, Shield of Retribution survivability skills are early ones like Armored Infantry and Vladof Ingenuity so almost all builds can get them.
Past them, the skills are basically to complement the Thin Red Line and Desperate Measures combo. Plus Phalanx Doctrine, of course.

#28

Is it possible to constantly keep the maximum damage from “Click, Click” with talents to preserve ammo? And even if this is so, I’m not sure that talents from “Bottomless Mags” (“Click, Click” and “Scorchin’ RPM’s”) increase the damage more than all the bonuses from “Shield of Retribution” (“Armored Infantry”, “Selfless Vengeance”, “Experimental Munitions”, “Desperate Measures” and “Tenacious Defense”).

#29

@Rino It should be possible to, though you will need to pulse the trigger once your ammo low, instead of holding it down, or else you will run out and need to reload.

As for damage vs. damage between the two trees, I do think that Shield of Retribution will beat Bottomless Mags in burst damage, but of course you are doing no damage at all while you reload (except for any elemental DoT’s that you might have procced), so what Bottomless Mags lacks in burst damage, it makes up for with consistency. Also, alot of Shield of Retribution’s damage skills are based on stacks, and it will be harder to build up stacks during boss fights, since there aren’t alot of adds, so I think that Bottomless Mags might be better for farming bosses.

I see 2 really good potential strategies for Bottomless Mags damage output personally:

  1. Go the all Vladof route, 4 Vladof guns and a Vladof shield to maximize the effect of Matched Set. The reason why Vladof is good is because their weapons have a really good mix of accuracy, high fire rate, and high magazine size, the 3 things that Bottomless Mags excels at. Bottomless Mags is focused on hip fire sprinting and shooting at the same time, while aiming for weak points for crit damage, so try to find guns with a good weapon handling stat (I’m pretty sure that weapon handling is hip-fire accuracy in Borderlands 3) and grab Scrappy for it’s handling boost to further improve hip-fire accuracy. If you pull it off, you’ll basically be firing infinite critical hits at enemies, and critical hits do alot of damage. You can further boost damage by getting fire Vladofs with the Bottomless Mags skill that boosts fire damage, and grabbing the Shield of Retribution skill that makes crits do bonus fire damage.

  2. Going the all Torgue route. Now this might sound a bit crazy, since Demolition Woman is focused on explosive damage, but hear me out. Like Vladof, you will really be able to boost torgue magazine capacity with matched set and the Iron Bank, and you will have ammo regen as well. Why is this useful for Torgue? Well, Torgue weapons in Borderlands 3 have a secondary fire mode that fires sticky grenades. Each grenade stacked onto a single enemy does 10% stacking bonus damage per grenade when they explode. These grenades don’t explode until you reload, and you won’t need to reload often with Bottomless Mags, which will allow you to stack alot of grenades onto a single enemy. Say you stack 30 stickies onto a single target before you reload. That is 300% bonus damage for each sticky when they all explode. This strategy will depend on rather or not there is a limit to the stacking bonus damage though, and how high that limit is. They might cap it at say 20 stacks, but even that would be 200% bonus damage when you reload and they all explode. If the limit is that low, you probably won’t need Matched Set though, and can put those 5 points elsewhere, Iron Bank + ammo regen from Forge should be enough to reach 20 stacks, better to put those 5 points into Fire in the Skag den probably.

#30

On the topic of the Shield of Retribution tree being too strong:
It is not stronger than the other 2 skill trees, it’s just more feature complete and thus the best standalone skill tree. This however also means that you get the least extra out of the other trees, or at least it will feel that way. It’s also the least gear-reliant tree.

On the other side are the Demolition Woman & Bottomless Mags trees. Those are more reliant on certain types of guns and want more focused playstyles, like splash weapons/grenades or quick-fire weapons with high mag size. They are basically enclosed environments and SOR is an open field.
But, both Demolition Woman and Bottomless Mags expand massively in power and potential when combined with other of Moze’s skill trees. Fire endlessly with a Shredifier, exploding every 5th shot while basically not consuming ammo and just destroying things because you can sustain the absurd DPS. Or get up and close with splash damage weaponry and grenades, blasting enemies out of existence while your massive shield softens every kind of blow. Basically become a running nuke. And that’s not even talking about the excellence that is the power fantasy of a walking mech!

So yeah, on it’s own Shield of Retribution is probably the best of Moze’s skill trees, almost certainly the best tree for leveling, but once you start complimenting Demolition Woman and Bottomless Mags, they explode in terms of power and expand endlessly in terms of possible playstyles.

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#31

Your strategy using Torgue weapons sounds interesting.
So far, I have identified two options for myself:

  1. Bottomless Mags max
  2. Shield of Retribution max

I think I will try both builds, and draw conclusions after that.)

#32

The demolition woman tree hasn’t gotten much attention, but it has the potential to be one of the strongest trees in the game when it comes to survivability. Vampyr could be ridiculously powerful with MIRV grenades or anything else capable of multiple hits. 5 grenade hits will take you from the brink of death to ~60% life, which resets the health gate. As long as you have grenades to throw you can’t die, which could be a guarantee if you combine means of destruction with an ogre or some other splash weapon that fires quickly. Not something you want to try and level with as it has pretty specific gear requirements, but the interactions are there to do some extremely powerful things.

3 Likes
#33

Baaaahhh…screw shields. Time to blow some s*** up! DEMOLITION WOMAN HERE I COME!

2 Likes
#34

Cant blow s*** up if you’re dead :sunglasses:

#35

Cant die if s*** is blown up :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

2 Likes
#36

Touche

#37

Not just that. We can throw grenades in fight for your life and regen part of our missing health for every enemy hit, so, its possible that we throw a grenade while “bleeding” and come back up with half our health and more.

#38

Also, the grenade splash can double in size, hiting more enemies and leeching more health.

#39

Yep. Unfortunately we don’t know yet if health regen in fight for your life still works like it did in the other games, but I assume that it does.

#40

I left some reeaaal sexy bombs back on Sanctuary. Oh, just thinkin’ bout 'em… come on, think about 'em with me. Yeeeeeah. Together now. Hohhhhh.

#41

Isn’t there a resistance cap?
You can’t truly become immune to shock damage right?

#42

You can … best way to do this is the Transfomer shield, which grants shock immunity and even heals you on receiving shock damage.

1 Like
#43

Ok lets go.

SoR pros:

  • Nice damage

  • Insane shield capacity

  • Shock resistance

  • Overall all in 1 tree, and by that i mean you can get away with just investing 100% in that tree.

  • The best class mods are based on SoR.

SoR cons:

  • Dmg isnt top of the line.

  • Biggest and most overlooked con, having less than half hp means you give up the most important thing in the entire game in terms of tankiness, the health gate, you can effectively get 1 shotted with SoR.

  • The capstone of the tree doesnt work at all, it has literally 0 uses unless you avoid all the health reservation bonuses.

  • Most of the dmg comes in kill skills, wich is not optimal in many cases, its fun tho, but not optimal.

  • Having 100k shields is nothing if there is absolutely no way of sustain the incoming damage, shields are so high that shield regeneration is nothing, even if the shields are low the regen is still quite horrible across the entire game and its items, there is no perk that allow her to keep regening even after recieving damage. So to make it sustainable you need to invest in other trees and abuse the game mechanics, in other words you end up playing the broken grenade build all over again.

I could keep going…

Overall i think SoR actually needs a buff, not in dmg, but in shield related stuff, and a fix in the last skill too, that is key.