Nothing is safe from Borderlands 4’s ‘infinite damage’ build that wipes out bosses in less than 10 seconds

Borderlands 4 players weren’t going to let the Diablo players have all the fun with builds that deal so much damage the game can’t keep up. It’s been less than a week since the co-op FPS came out and we already have a build that goes infinite.

The build, which I discovered through YouTuber NickTew, involves using a particular throwing knife in combination with a passive skill for Vex to overload enemies with critical hits, and if you want to try it, you should probably try it now, as it seems like the kind of thing that’s too broken not to be patched out eventually.

The entire build revolves around throwing knives that cause your normal damage to become critical damage. You can find the “Penetrator Augment – Damage” stat on any Vampiric Vivisecting Throwing Knife in the game and it’ll work regardless of the item’s level. NickTew’s character is level 50 and his level 35 knife works because the stat is the same no matter what.

Vex has a passive skill called Bloodletter that gives your guns a chance to apply a bleed damage over time effect. That bleed will deal critical hits when combined with the throwing knife, which is a lot of damage on its own. But where this goes infinite is with Vex’s Contamination passive skill.

Contamination causes critical hits to increase your status effect application chance up to 100%, guaranteeing that every individual tick of damage from your bleed will start up more bleeds on the enemy. All you do is throw the knife, pump one shot into the boss, and watch its health drain away in seconds.

NickTew says the throwing knife can be quite rare to drop, but that there are places to farm for it. A Reddit user made a thread about it and recommended heading to Splashzone in the southern part of the map. I found a pretty helpful guide for getting there by YouTuber Ki11er Six.

Once you get one, it won’t matter how much health a boss has as long as you can live long enough to watch it die. NickTew’s video goes into more details on how you can build around it, like putting points into Vex’s In The Zone passive, and he warns co-op players that the knife doesn’t seem to work if more than one person uses it.

While I know part of the fun of Borderlands is finding hilariously busted builds like this, I’m not sure this one is going to dodge a nerf. Gearbox has plans to add a lot of endgame bosses to the game that I’m sure it would like you to actually shoot at more than once, so abuse it while you can.