Each Borderlands sport has its drawback little one: that one weapon, perk, or interplay that manages to interrupt the legal guidelines of Pandoran physics and the builders’ finest intentions suddenly. In Borderlands 4, that title belongs, with out contest, to the Crit Knife. What started as a unusual throwing knife with a promising injury bonus has since spiraled right into a weeks-long rollercoaster of overpowered builds, emergency patches, and group meltdowns.
From infinite-bleed loops to critical-hit stacking chaos, the unassuming Crit Knife has change into the poster little one for Borderlands 4’s balancing woes and certainly one of its funniest ongoing sagas. So, many who’re late to the sport could also be questioning how we obtained right here.
What’s The Crit Knife in Borderlands 4?
Within the weeks following launch, a easy Jakobs throwing knife with the Penetrator/Predictor augment warped Borderlands 4’s stability. This knife causes all injury dealt to successful goal to be assured essential hits for a number of seconds. This makes it virtually unstoppable. Any construct that emphasizes essential hits or standing results out of the blue turns into hyper-powered.
Vex and the Infinite Bleed Loop
The Crit Knife’s most infamous synergy concerned Vex, a Siren character in Borderlands 4 whose ability tree can stack bleeding results. Right here’s how a few of Vex’s abilities kind the core of this construct and ship the Crit Knife into the stratosphere:
- Bloodletter: This ability is absolutely the core of the construct, making use of a stack of Bleed 50% of the time that essential injury is dealt. Paired with the assured crits from the Crit Knife, Vex is primed to construct tons of bleed stacks.
- Contamination: Paired with Bloodletter, this ability is a part of what ensures that bleed retains stacking it doesn’t matter what, with an opportunity to reapply to each standing impact Vex applies.
- Portents of Struggling: This ability actually begins to push bleed’s potential over the sting into turning into an omnipotent construct, because it provides 35% injury to each stack of bleed injury utilized.
- Prismatic Ichor: The entire level of Vex’s best build in Borderlands 4 is that she shall be making use of bleed as regularly as doable. What higher option to capitalize on that than by making use of further standing results each time bleed is utilized?
Vex’s Bloodletter passive offers her weapons an opportunity to inflict bleed on crit, and her Contamination passive almost ensures every bleed tick will apply one other bleed. This induced massively stackable injury. A participant might make the most of one crit knife and fireplace a shot: the bleed triggers one other bleed, again and again. It was an overkill burst so excessive that it made endgame content material trivial.
The Crit Knife Saga, Damaged Down
Borderlands 4 Launches
Gamers rapidly dubbed the phenomenon the Crit Knife exploit, as nearly any encounter might be trivialized as soon as the knife caught. This meant even the end-game bosses might be melted in a couple of seconds.
Gearbox Steps In
Gearbox’s builders shifted in stance. After Borderlands 4’s launch, some builders expressed little interest in addressing probably overpowered builds. Nevertheless, Artistic Director Graeme Timmins acknowledged on an X publish on October 9 that some builds would get successfully nerfed in an replace.
The devs had dedicated to a patch. Within the meantime, gamers continued farming for crit knives and making the most of the construct any approach they may earlier than the exploit might be closed.
Patch Pandemonium: The First Nerf (Patch 2.0 – October 23, 2025)
When Borderlands 4’s October 23 patch lastly arrived, Gearbox tried to interrupt the Crit Knife loop. The October 23 patch tried to rebalance participant ways by changing assured crits with a 30% improve in essential hit likelihood throughout a 5-second timeframe. In different phrases, as an alternative of auto-crits, the knife was supposed so as to add 30% crit likelihood.
Nevertheless, the nerf didn’t absolutely work as meant. As an alternative of upping their crit likelihood by 30%, a knife hit would set it to 30% for 5 seconds. The change did not merely nerf the crit knife however resulted in an outright DPS loss for some gamers. This meant that if a participant already had, say, 70% crit likelihood, throwing the knife really lowered their crit likelihood to 30%. In observe, the replace turned the once-deadly knife right into a injury loss on high-crit builds.
Patch Pandemonium: The Knife Returns (Patch 2.1 – October 30, 2025)
Sad gamers didn’t have to attend lengthy for a repair to the repair. Gearbox issued an replace on October 30. However this was merely reinstating the Crit Knife as Borderlands 4’s most OP item.
In observe, this patch made the knife behave as initially meant: it will add +30% crit likelihood for five seconds. However one other shock lurked: the added crit likelihood from a number of knife throws was now stacked. In impact, the nerf dance had reset: with a collection of knife throws and a little bit of crit-boosting gear, the Crit Knife loop was again in motion—bosses as soon as once more melted in seconds when the Vex bleed loop was relaunched.
What’s Subsequent for the Crit Knife?
Over a matter of weeks, the Crit Knife has swung from “destroys everything” to “worthless” and again to near-“destroys everything” once more. Gearbox’s Borderlands 4 patch notes and group reactions underscore the absurdity: one patch rendered high-crit builds worse, one other revived near-perfect crits, and gamers jokingly surprise if Gearbox will ever discover the center floor.
No closing resolution is but in place, and the builders will certainly watch rigorously as gamers experiment additional. For now, Borderlands 4’s Crit Knife saga is a textbook instance of unintended interactions and stability whiplash: a chaotic trip that’s as humorous as it’s irritating.
- Launched
-
September 12, 2025
- ESRB
-
Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Sturdy Language, In-Recreation Purchases, Customers Work together
