One in every of Borderlands 4‘s most overpowered weapons, if not the most OP, is a simple Throwing Knife with a Penetrator augment. It boosts your chance of critical hits and makes it easy to melt bosses in the process. Gearbox Entertainment has been trying to nerf the player-favorite “crit knife” for weeks but it keeps messing up, and now it’s again with a vengeance.
Again when the sport launched, the Penetrator increase elevated your crit probability to 100% for 5 seconds. With the best loadout, that was greater than sufficient time to fully deplete even a few of the largest enemy well being swimming pools. Right here it’s in motion:
Lmao crit knife completely must be nerfed pic.twitter.com/gXxYoZjSfE
— Nick (@TheOneSoVile) October 13, 2025
So the builders dedicated to nerfing the crit knife to convey some semblance of stability again to the meta, or a minimum of spice it up a bunch. This stability patch was due out in early October however bought delayed a few occasions. When it lastly arrived by way of the October 23 update, the crit knife was reworked to offer solely a 30-percent enhance in important hit probability during the buff. However that’s not precisely the way it labored in apply.
ATTENTION BORDERLANDS GAMERS!
The brand new crit knife units your crit probability to a goal at 30%, it DOES NOT ADD 30% Crit Probability. Which means in case you have above 30% crit probability throwing it’ll damage your harm.
Chatter talked about @Lazy_Data figured this out and I simply examined to verify. pic.twitter.com/cAnElpK3Gl— Moxsy (@MoxsyOG) October 24, 2025
As an alternative, Borderlands 4 gamers shortly realized that as an alternative of giving them a further 30 % crit probability, the Penetrator Increase was setting a flat fee of 30 % crit probability for all assaults throughout the five-second timeframe. That meant that when you began with the next crit probability for no matter cause, utilizing the brand new crit knife would truly convey it down. This took the Throwing Knife from good however not nice to actively unhealthy. So Gearbox pushed out another update to make it work as meant.
100% CRIT KNIFE IS BACK!
Yeah you simply throw it 3 occasions now lmao and get 90%. a 4th to go over or simply have another crit probability.
Foolish however yeah. lmao. This rattling knife dude. pic.twitter.com/R2d8yI3TZT
— LazyData (@Lazy_Data) October 30, 2025
Besides that the brand new patch added a wholly new bug. Now, the Penetrator Increase does give gamers an further 30 % crit probability, however much more importantly it truly stacks the crit probability with different makes use of of the knife. Which means you possibly can nonetheless stand up to a most of 90 % crit probability with it throughout that five-second window. A multi-week-long nerf dance has successfully concluded with the dreaded crit knife meta again in motion and almost nearly as good because it was originally of October.
It appears all however assured at this level that Gearbox will patch this bug out within the days forward. It stays to be seen, although, whether or not that arrives by way of a hotfix someday this weekend or is held till the following weekly replace on November 7. It appears followers of the crit knife are getting one final unexpected treat this Halloween.
