The October 2, 2025, update for Borderlands 4 delivers the game’s first major balance patch, aiming to improve build diversity and refine character skills. Amon receives extensive reworks to bring him closer to the overall power level of other Vault Hunters, while Vex, Rafa, and Harlowe also see important tweaks that enhance their late-game viability.
Beyond character balancing, the update refreshes weekly activities, relocates Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine, and improves PC performance through automatic shader clearing. These changes mark the beginning of a broader roadmap, with Gearbox investigating class mods, shields, and other systems to support deeper player experimentation.
Full Patch Notes
Weekly Activities
- Weekly Big Encore Boss rotated to a tougher variant with a more rewarding loot pool.
- Weekly Wildcard Mission changed, featuring a guaranteed Legendary drop.
- Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine moved to a new location with updated offerings.
Additional Changes
- Added auto-clearing of stale shaders on version update to prevent PC performance issues.
Character Balance Adjustments
Harlowe
- Stasis Slam Damage increased by 30 percent.
- Stasis Immune Damage increased by 14.7 percent.
Rafa
- APOPHIS Lance Damage increased by 10 percent.
- Project: Raiju Damage now scales by 12 percent per second, up from 10 percent.
- Project: Basilisk Damage increased by 15 percent.
- Project: Basilisk Hazard Damage increased by 25 percent.
- Project: Gorgon Damage increased by 17 percent.
- Various passive bonuses increased across melee and skill trees.
Vex
- Phase Explosion Damage increased by 16.6 percent.
- Eldritch Blast Damage increased by 9.5 percent.
- Energy Vampire Damage increased by 25 percent.
- Major buffs across augments, passives, and summons including Trouble health and damage boosts, higher melee scaling, and stronger airborne burst effects.
Amon
- Scourge maximum Vengeance increased by 50 percent.
- Forgewhip Damage increased by 27 percent.
- Massive improvements to augments, capstones, and passives including Blastchill, Eternal Winter, Wrathfall, and Worldbreaker.
- Crucible, Cybernetics, and Calamity skill lines all receive widespread buffs to cooldowns, critical hit chance, status effect scaling, melee boosts, and Forge weapon damage.
- Notable cooldown reductions across multiple powerful abilities.
These patch notes were initially posted by mistake, and now that the update is live, they have been officially released by Gearbox Software.
Borderlands 4 is a 2025 action role-playing first-person looter shooter developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K. Released on September 12, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, it serves as a direct sequel to Borderlands 3 and continues the saga with a new group of Vault Hunters on the planet Kairos. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is planned for release at a later date.
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