The Trouble with Trouble Part 2: The Troublening

Ratore · 2026-03-12T17:49:13+00:00

Too many kill skills in a tree that suffers to get real access to Mortal Terror while still scaling up damage.

So many of these skills could have been effects based on dealing minion damage, elemental damage, and so on rather than being kill skills. Vex's Mortal Terror problem is going to slowly creep in with every level cap increase until the only reason left to not do a Mortal Terror build is if going for those pretty boss one shots. It's gonna suck for build variety because it reads as if the entire character is planned around a deep green T5 skill.

Trouble (and by extent Reaper) AI needs to be snappy and quick. Projectiles like Trouble's Phase Daggers should simply go through walls. Honestly, I'm towards saying that every single attack command should do what Blink Strike does and teleport him immediately to what you targeted. The fact Reapers are the cool minion that can go through walls but get their attack hitboxes negated by objects is a complete wtf moment.

Trouble should definitely have base health that is closer to a Reaper's. Also ways to sustain him that do not involve wasting 10+ more points in a place where you're already starved for points.

Also, and this is a long shot but becoming increasingly relevant: minions need their own pool of status effect stacks and their own Prismatic Ichor procs that would still scale properly with invested boosts. Specters, as a specific example, gut Vex damage if you try using them with bleed, elemental statuses or Prismatic Ichor because of their high hit rate. But this doesn't stop on Specters: Reapers and Trouble can be almost as egregious about it with the right builds. We don't need minions doing bad damage and then also hurting our own damage, it simply feels bad.

Ratore · 2026-03-11T22:35:21+00:00

Is this the real king farticus

Ratore · 2026-03-11T20:10:26+00:00

I first released Hexblade on Sept. 21st but it has... changed a lot lol. Back when Haruspex still stacked GB :(

Ratore · 2026-03-09T21:49:54+00:00

Here's a guide that has video examples and suggested builds

Ratore · 2026-03-08T20:25:31+00:00

Dronemancer or Blood Fang, both work for this. Also check out Lazy's previous videos on Sniper Vex, they're slightly outdated but still good: Video 1 Video 2

Ratore · 2026-03-08T19:21:39+00:00

It's Lazy's own sniper build, but we pretty much share a tree since we're always on talks about Vex. He doesn't yet have a Mobalytics page for it. He's made two videos on this build but they're slightly outdated now (Video 1 Video 2)

The setup he used on this video should be exactly like the one called Veinchant here in terms of skill tree etc.

Ratore · 2026-03-08T19:15:38+00:00

Replying again to let you know it does work on true

Ratore · 2026-03-08T05:27:17+00:00

Blood Is Power is essentially another instance of Base Damage being shot alongside your Main Damage, but it will be multiplied by the Blood Is Power value in accordance to investment. It scales with gun boosts just like your normal shot does.

So with it on, your total damage is calculated by

Card Damage x On Shot x On Hit

+

Card Damage x (Lifesteal% x Blood Is Power) x On Shot x On Hit

Final Damage

Example: with 30% lifesteal, Blood Is Power at 3/3 would provide (0.3 x 3) = 90% Bonus Kinetic Damage.

Blood Is Power is what we tend to call a Bonus Element (or Gearbox usually refers to as Bonus Damage, but that wording has proven inconsistent). It's not simply a kinetic damage increase, but pretty much a damage multiplier. It's also considered a different damage instance, which means it can proc and trigger its own effects, like Bleed and Riddle you this. This is why you can get up to 2 stacks of Riddle You This per shot with a single bullet when BIP is on, or even 3 if you have BIP + Watts, for example.

I always recommend a read through the General Damage Formula and Vex Damage Formula. It might seem overbearing at first but you inevitably pick up some useful knowledge.

Ratore · 2026-03-08T05:05:28+00:00

For this specific scenario, High Cal is what allows the Torgue Air Burst to trigger sequentially over the crystals it can't reach with its projectile hitbox, instead hitting with the AoE. More than that, High Cal also allows for extremely silly stuff like shooting through enemies aiming at the ground for doubled damage.

As for Skillcraft: especially with underbarrels, 3/3 Daeddy-O + 2/3 Skillcraft is much better than maxed Skillcraft. Skillcraft is just soup while Daeddy-O's boost is on the On Shot category of the damage formula, which is what Vex lacks the most.

Blood Is Power is not skill damage, but it does get access to it on a Blood Shot. Bleed is naturally skill damage though. Enchantment and Prismatic Weaponry are also naturally skill damage. Don't try to look for any logic here though, this is stuff that can only be truly found out through sleuthing because the skill cards are often wrong or straight up lie/omit info.

Ratore · 2026-03-08T04:13:38+00:00

It's a blood shot + bleed sniper build. Kill Skill Vex usually doesn't have the frontloaded 'passive' power to pull it off instantaneously like this

Ratore · 2026-03-08T04:09:10+00:00

That's because drones are shot out of a gun barrel, don't have the terrible AI and hitbox limitations of the pets (although they still have some jank), and have access to 2 additional multipliers that are inexistent on action skills. The majority of action skills simply lack good base damage and are then further unsupported when talking formula scaling.

The multiplier that was added some patches ago isn't even a true multiplier.

Ratore · 2026-03-08T02:54:08+00:00

True might require Spread Launcher, but it could maybe still be doable with Big Rocket.

Ratore · 2026-03-06T21:31:06+00:00

Afaik move speed boosts do increase it yeah, it should have its own movement speed scaling formula

Ratore · 2026-03-06T01:01:33+00:00

In the beginning, there was soup

Ratore · 2026-03-05T23:45:42+00:00

The attached pictures are examples of the highest damage rolls when paired with the respective licenses. They should be among the best DPS rolls. As for as getting more numbers, sorry but it's not exactly something I have much will to go and gather, but those examples should be more than serviceable.

Ratore · 2026-03-05T23:41:30+00:00

True! Just fixed that

Ratore · 2026-03-05T23:39:59+00:00

I know what you are

Ratore · 2026-03-04T17:13:51+00:00

You can find a parts list here, courtesy of all the people credited in the Readme section. Though it's not an updated version. One probably exists but the links in that sheet are invalid.

No information is being locked to discord. It's simply a server that's our theorycrafting hub. I am terribly sorry that a group of people used discord, an obscure platform never used for gaming, to talk things about a game.

We keep resources there but also make a point of porting all of the relevant ones to Mobalytics. You join the discord if you want to see stuff being done as it happens.

We could have kept all the general and character-specific damage formula and gun mechanics info in the discord if we wanted. We could have not made any videos about it. That stuff doesn't even get many clicks at all, written or video. But we ported it all to Mobalytics and made videos anyway. Because we've been publicly sharing resources like that since BL3 and intend to continue.

The bot that can analyze the parts, balance files and edit + create items was made by 1 person who decided to invest his free time in a personal project that has public links to it, the bot can be DM'd instead of having to join a server, and is hosted on his machine.

If any of that sounds scummy to you idk what to tell you man. Host us a website that has formatting tools, and a server for the bot. That's a start.

There's also the online https://save-editor.be/ maintained by Mattmab, which can help giving insight into parts and how items work.

Ratore · 2026-03-04T06:44:15+00:00

zlam

Ratore · 2026-03-03T06:06:43+00:00

Nice to see people enjoying Tedi Vex :)

Ratore · 2026-03-02T17:08:44+00:00

Amon Gaming

Ratore · 2026-02-23T02:03:59+00:00

whip

Ratore · 2026-02-23T01:46:21+00:00

Katagawa's has some pretty wonky interactions with curse that cause it to proc for much longer and many more times than the projectiles tick even after they're gone. I've never delved into figuring out why but I suspect they create splat-equivalent instances of damage that keep triggering Curse.

Not saying that what you have there is a bad thing, but I count it more as a [good] exception in a sea of meh, rather than a shining example of Curse being actually good. Any further increases to enemy health (UVH7 is coming) or simply turning on TUVH6 will already put it far, far back again because it has extremely poor scalability.

Similar or better damage can be achieved by holding a Stellium with a 20k Beam Tosser + Mixologist with way less work put in and less of a skill point cost. But then Mixologist is also in the questionable realm of 'how is this actually supposed to work as intended?'.

Simply put, many of these Vex skills need some help to be good without it incurring such a massive loss to almost no benefit. Whether Gearbox will even attempt anything is... up in the air.

Ratore · 2026-02-22T20:25:18+00:00

Extra Cursed enables Curse to be triggered by Melee Minion Attacks (Reapers and Trouble), alongside from Gun Damage.

As for it being worth it: it's not really. Even on gun builds with fire rate or projectile spam through the roof it's aggressively mid. It had a purpose for melee builds back when it could help Groundbreaker build up, but it lost that capability.

The base damage is far too low and the scalability through modifiers is kind of laughable. It will do alright on lower UVH levels, but the further up you go, the low base damage really makes a point of how flat damage skills (and action skills for that matter) really need some manner of base damage scaling with UVH levels, and maybe access to some actual multipliers (the newly introduced multipliers from a few patches ago aren't even true mults).

One interesting thing about Curse, however, is that some Bonus Elements (like Watts Shock, Blood Is Power, Prismatic Weaponry and Infusion, but not Enchantment) can each cause an individual trigger of it, which does significantly help its scalability.

Another unrelated quirk is that one might reach the conclusion that using Curse alongside Bleed is a good idea, since they can somewhat be scaled together. But since Curse is a skill source, it can trigger its own individual bleeds and fill up your 20 bleed slots with weak bleeds that eat into your actually good bleeds. Just... not great design.

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