In Borderlands 3, the playable character Moze is the gunner class and she has some of the best skills in the game. She is an ex military badass that has the ability to tank damage and dish it out too, depending on your play style. Moze is likely to be a favorite among fans of the series. Let’s take a look and see what Moze’s skill trees are all about.
The best skill tree to invest in is ‘Shield of Retribution’. Focusing on this skill tree will make Moze a DPS machine. The focus on this build is damage and having strong, fast shields to keep you alive. Before we get into the breakdown of this build, I want to point out why we are not focusing on the other skill trees as much. The ‘Bottomless Mags’ tree is focused on making sure Moze can shoot longer, and spend less time reloading. That isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t make much sense if she doesn’t have the damage to go with all those bullets. For this build will invest about half way or so into this tree after we finish off the Shield of Retribution tree. The ‘Demolition Woman’ tree is about making explosions more deadly. This tree isn’t as practical for this build, but is the one we will focus on in the other build we have.
Back to the ‘Shield of Retribution’ tree. The main skills we want to invest into are Armored Infantry, Behind the Iron Curtain, Thin Red Line, Desperate Measures, Phalanx Doctrine, Force Feedback, and Tenacious Defense. Armored Infantry and Behind the Iron Curtain both are simple skills that either increase damage, shields, or damage reduction. Those two are pretty straight forward, but give a good boost to Moze. The best coupling of skills is Thin Red Line and Desperate Measures. Thin Red Line takes Moze’s health and converts it permanently into her shields. Her health is thus partially empty. Desperate Measures gives Moze increased gun damage based on how much health she is missing. You can get up to 50% increased damage from this, depending on how low your health is. Phalanx Doctrine is a skill that awards buffs after a kill. A stack gives Moze +10% gun damage and +15% max shields with 5 points invested. The player can have unlimited stacks, and they last for 30 seconds. Basically, the more you kill, the easier the next kills will be. One of the best skills I have seen in this game is Force Feedback. When Moze scores a critical hit, her shields will immediately begin recharging. All you have to do is keep hitting those criticals and take cover for a quick second, and you should be able to stay topped off . If you ever find yourself getting overwhelmed in a fight even with these skills, Tenacious Defense will cure that. This skill immediately restores 40% of Moze’s shields if they break, and gives her 30% increased gun damage. So if you need that extra boost to take down a wave of enemies or that difficult boss, this perk should do the trick. I recommend putting the remainder of your skill points into the ‘Bottomless Mag’. The skill we are after in this one is Scorching RPM’s. This increases Moze’s fire rate and critical hit damage. To get to this skill, you will need to invest in other skills in the tree. Cloud of Lead, Stoke the Embers and Redistribution are good choices to get you to Scorching RPM’s.
This build does best with certain gear. It isn’t essential, but having a couple of these really makes it a power house build. A few guns I recommend are the ‘Lyuda’, ‘Crossroad’, ‘Unforgiven’, and ‘Lucian’s Call’ are all good choices. They are high damage, accurate, and all but Unforgiven have fast fire rates. For shields, the ‘Bulwark Front Loader’ is ideal. There are other good shields too, such as the ‘Re-router’, but the Bulwark is fine too. The Bulwark helps increase your shields and reduce health, which is good for Moze since her gun damage goes up the lower her health. ‘Grave’ is a great artifact to have since the lower your health, the more bonuses you get. Other gear is up to the player, and the guns should be capable of easy criticals to capitalize on a couple of Moze’s skills.
As I mentioned earlier, the focus of this build is the ‘Demolition Woman’ skill tree. The tree is all about splash damage and Iron Bear Buffs. In this build, we’ll ignore the Iron Bear skills almost entirely and go for increasing explosives. The skill tree helps to increase the number and radius of explosions to maximize damage potential. Once we get the capstone skill, we’ll move on to a different tree. With the remaining skill points, we’ll put them into the ‘Shield of Retribution’ to get some buffs to shields and gun damage.
The skills to invest in are Fire in the Skag Den, Means of Destruction, Torgue Cross-Promotion, Auto Bear, Pull the Holy Pin, Vampyr, Why Can’t I Carry all These Grenades?, Too the Last, and Short Fuse. The key or most important skills here are Torgue Cross-Promotion, Pull the Holy Pin, and Short Fuse. The other skills are good additions to the build, but these are the ones that are most beneficial for dealing damage. Really quick, I would like to mention that using the Flakker is ideal for this build, so I made this build assuming the Flakker will be the main gun used. Moving on, Torgue Cross-Promotion gives Moze’s explosions to double in size. So she has a chance to deal damage to a wider area whenever she deals splash damage. Pull the Holy Pin allows Moze’s grenades to deal critical hits 30% of the time. So using a continuously damaging grenade is best here. Grenades will supplement the damage you’re dealing with the Flakker. Short Fuse gives Moze the chance to cause an explosion when dealing gun damage. Anytime an enemy is hit, even with a gun like the Flakker, there is a 20% chance for those bullets to explode. The rest of the points you have left over should be spent in the Shield of Retribution tree. These left over points should go into the same skills as the other build, except maybe not in Thin Red Line/Desperate Measures, so you can take advantage of the healing from Vampyr.
I would not recommend trying this build unless you have the Flakker. You could probably get away with not using it, but the build is perfect for it. It shreds through enemies, so it’s worth grinding for one. You could also play without using explosive weapons, and just rely on the last skill, but I don’t think that’s a very good way to use the build. Besides the Flakker, I would use a continuously damaging grenade, like the ‘Storm Front’, ‘Quasar’, or ‘Firestorm”. The last piece of gear I would recommend is to have a high capacity shield. With all the splash damage, you could be taking some self inflicted damage. Generally, you’ll be on the outskirts of that radius, so you won’t take too much damage, but you don’t want to get one shot by your own explosion.
Moze is a tanky, DPS character that is a good pick for solo play. She doesn’t need to rely on others for taking out enemies and staying healthy. I don’t have a preference for the Iron Bear’s loadout, and any augments you find useful should be fine. Overall, Moze is a strong endgame character, and can melt a lot of enemies and bosses with these builds and some legendaries. That’s it for the best build for Moze. As for the other characters, check back later to see what the best builds are for the other 3 vault hunters.
Borderlands 3 is out now and available on Xbox one, PS4, and PC.
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Includes several titles.
Which was showcased at E3 2003.