Moze is my favourite VH and will always be my main in BL3 but as much as I lean towards her, I must concede that her skill trees are flawed as hell. What doesn’t make sense to me, is that most of her skills give such basic stat increases which you could easily mimic with gear alone. In fact they’re so basic that they don’t amount to much in total, at least not at M4 end game, and they don’t really help distinguish Moze as a VH who stands out from the others.
Even when she has Iron Bear for an action skill, the fact that it can have a cooldown period of up to 2 minutes makes it difficult for her to carve out her own unique identity within the pack, simply because the other 3 vault hunters can distinguish themselves in their own respective ways by virtue of enjoying way more frequent usage of their own action skills. Because Iron Bear is subject to lengthy periods of downtime, this makes it a requirement for Moze to be more self-sufficient outside of her action skill than the others, meaning she really needs her skill trees to bring more to the table than those of the other vault hunters.
The design of the Bottomless Mags skill tree is questionable as hell in my mind. There are numerous flaws with it, including Click Click which has already been mentioned. But it’s not just one or two skills alone that are the issue; anyone who wants to invest a hefty chunk of points into that tree, is likely doing so for ammo regeneration and magazine size.
Redistribution is one of my favourite Moze skills and it’s fantastic that it’s available at tier 2, but you can also get a class mod to buff it by +1 and get yourself 10% ammo regen - 6 skill points spent instead of 26, to get the same ammo regen as Redistribution + Forge and thus make the capstone redundant. And why should I spend 20 points just to maximise The Iron Bank for 35% mag size increase, when I can get a class mod or relic at lvl 50 which yields a passive bonus of 40% and saves me more skill points in the process? Such is the design of Bottomless Mags that if you find the right gear to give you the same bonuses or better, you can invalidate the latter half of the skill tree entirely. Any vault hunter can get ammo regen from terror-anointed gear as well.
Demolition Woman - For a tree that’s half grenades/splash damage and half Iron Bear, there are a hell of a lot of conditions involved in reaping the scant rewards. As already mentioned, you’re only getting splash damage increases from one tier 1 skill and the capstone, and Moze’s sole health restoration skill is down at tier 4. But other skills really don’t add a great deal to Moze’s arsenal. Iron Bear’s cooldown skills are gulity of this - they’re either so temporary and/or conditional in terms of activity that you’d be better off with a constant passive bonus for cooldown from a class mod or relic instead of wasting your skill points on them.
Means of Destruction is a very popular skill but even that can be negated by gear. The ammo regen you can easily get from the BM tree or a terror build, and wearing a BBB shield means your grenade replenishment rate is jacked up to 60% chance just for sustaining damage which in itself, is something that happens more frequently than you dealing splash damage let alone splash damage actually triggering a 6% chance of regenerating a grenade. I run with a BBB shield on my Moze with zero points in MoD, and I never run out of grenades.
Shield of Retribution is perhaps the one skill tree that makes more sense than the others, and yet it has its issues. There is nothing that offers simple (non-elemental) multiplicative damage that applies to everything which at least all other vault hunters have. Instead, there are just numerous gun damage skills, a significant proportion of which are momentum-based in that they require kills to accumulate. Thin Red Line is a good skill, but anyone can mimic that just by wearing a Front Loader.
Behind the Iron Curtain’s bonuses are so low for a tier 4 skill that it begs the question what Gearbox were thinking when they devised it. They made a skill tree where the shield factor is predominantly about boosting max capacity, but an ever-increasing capacity means that the overall efficiency of the shield’s recharge rate will constantly decrease the more stacks you accumulate for Phalanx Doctrine. Force Feedback is usurped by a GR perk which doesn’t demand a critical kill and Tenacious Defence seriously lacks synergy with the rest of the tree for a capstone.
Amara has a range of 11 action skills to choose from and skills like Mindfulness, Guardian Angel, Remnant and Indiscriminate. Fl4k has 9 pets, 3 action skills and skills such as The Power Inside, Megavore and a whole variety of skills with multiplicative damage on the menu. And Zane has 3 action skills and gets skills such as Brain Freeze, CCC, Playing Dirty and can also enjoy kill skills without always having to land kills to trigger them.
But Moze? She has just the one action skill with the longest cooldown, with a variety of hardpoints where some are superior to others by night and day. Now that’s not to say I’m bashing Moze for that; I appreciate what Gearbox did by making each character different not just with the action skills but in how they function as well.
However, if you look at her skill trees in isolation, her one biggest strength which can’t be replicated by other vault hunters is increasing shield capacity, that’s it. You could’ve added stacks of additive gun damage to that incredibly brief list too before Gearbox gifted Amara the Spiritual Driver. When Iron Bear is on cooldown, Moze’s unique identity amounts to being a walking turtle shield. The problem with Moze extends beyond just lack of sustain skills, I fear.
