Borderlands 4 just dropped a small patch, but the real shake-up is in seven days. Creative director Graeme Timmins basically set a countdown clock for gear and builds that lean on unintended interactions — including the notorious knife setups — and it sounds like those days are numbered.
The warning shot: seven days
Timmins posted on Oct 9, 2025 that next week’s update will be a bigger one aimed at specific gear and those not-quite-by-the-book interactions. He even gave players a heads-up in plain language:
"This is your 7 Days Notice ;)"
If you’ve got a busted build that deletes rooms, enjoy the victory lap while you can.
How we got here
Last month, Timmins acknowledged the chatter around builds exploiting interactions — and the knife — but said the team was prioritizing buffs at the time. When the first major patch rolled out, Gearbox made it clear fixes were on the way because those exploits flatten the difficulty curve and make real build diversity impossible. In other words, if one weird trick nukes everything, there’s no reason to try anything else.
What’s coming next week
The larger update is set to nerf overperforming gear and squash unintended interactions, including in certain Vault Hunter skills. It’s not all reductions, though. Gearbox says it’s also tuning Class Mods, Repkits, Shields, and something labeled Firmware to give melee builds more viability and to shore up weak spots in a few specific Vault Hunter setups. Alongside that: stability and performance improvements and a batch of much-requested quality-of-life tweaks.
What changed today
- Ruby’s Grasp got a straight buff: +50% damage and +25% fire rate.
- Queen’s Rest now fires 50% faster and is easier to farm, with its spawn chance bumped to 50% (up from 30%).
- All Pets finally scale properly with Critical Hit Chance from Passives and Gear.
- Vex’s Bleed now counts as status effect damage.
One more hot topic: skipping dialogue
Players have been asking Gearbox to fold a popular dialogue-skip mod into the base game. Timmins isn’t promising anything there — not because he hates speed, but because it’s way messier under the hood than it looks. His caution:
"It’s way more involved and riskier than it appears" and could "lead to broken mission states that might not be recoverable."
Translation: skipping lines sounds simple, but in a quest-driven game, it can crack the mission logic in ways that are hard to unbreak.
The bottom line
Small buffs today, big balance surgery next week. If your favorite build relies on unintended interactions — especially anything knife-adjacent — brace for impact. The goal here is to bring challenge back and make more builds worth running, not just the one that erases bosses by accident.