Every Borderlands game has its problem child: that one weapon, perk, or interaction that manages to break the laws of Pandoran physics and the developers’ best intentions all at once. In Borderlands 4, that title belongs, without contest, to the Crit Knife. What began as a quirky throwing knife with a promising damage bonus has since spiraled into a weeks-long rollercoaster of overpowered builds, emergency patches, and community meltdowns.
From infinite-bleed loops to critical-hit stacking chaos, the unassuming Crit Knife has become the poster child for Borderlands 4’s balancing woes and one of its funniest ongoing sagas. So, many who are late to the game may be wondering how we got here.
It Is Officially the End of an Era for Borderlands 4's Most OP Build
To the dismay of those who once relied on it too heavily, Borderlands 4's latest patch has officially ended the reign of the game's most OP build.
What is The Crit Knife in Borderlands 4?
In the weeks following launch, a simple Jakobs throwing knife with the Penetrator/Predictor augment warped Borderlands 4’s balance. This knife causes all damage dealt to a hit target to be guaranteed critical hits for several seconds. This makes it practically unstoppable. Any build that emphasizes critical hits or status effects suddenly becomes hyper-powered.
Vex and the Infinite Bleed Loop
The Crit Knife’s most notorious synergy involved Vex, a Siren character in Borderlands 4 whose skill tree can stack bleeding effects. Here’s how some of Vex’s skills form the core of this build and send the Crit Knife into the stratosphere:
- Bloodletter: This skill is the absolute core of the build, applying a stack of Bleed 50% of the time that critical damage is dealt. Paired with the guaranteed crits from the Crit Knife, Vex is primed to build tons of bleed stacks.
- Contamination: Paired with Bloodletter, this skill is part of what ensures that bleed keeps stacking no matter what, with a chance to reapply to every status effect Vex applies.
- Portents of Suffering: This skill really starts to push bleed’s potential over the edge into becoming an all-powerful build, as it adds 35% damage to every stack of bleed damage applied.
- Prismatic Ichor: The whole point of Vex’s best build in Borderlands 4 is that she will be applying bleed as frequently as possible. What better way to capitalize on that than by applying additional status effects every time bleed is applied?
Vex’s Bloodletter passive gives her weapons a chance to inflict bleed on crit, and her Contamination passive nearly guarantees each bleed tick will apply another bleed. This caused massively stackable damage. A player could utilize one crit knife and fire a shot: the bleed triggers another bleed, over and over. It was an overkill burst so extreme that it made endgame content trivial.
The Crit Knife Saga, Broken Down
Borderlands 4 Launches
Players quickly dubbed the phenomenon the Crit Knife exploit, as virtually any encounter could be trivialized once the knife stuck. This meant even the end-game bosses could be melted in a few seconds.
Gearbox Steps In
Gearbox’s developers shifted in stance. After Borderlands 4’s launch, some developers expressed no interest in addressing potentially overpowered builds. However, Creative Director Graeme Timmins acknowledged on an X post on October 9 that some builds would get effectively nerfed in an update.
The devs had committed to a patch. In the meantime, players continued farming for crit knives and taking advantage of the build any way they could before the exploit could be closed.
Patch Pandemonium: The First Nerf (Patch 2.0 – October 23, 2025)
When Borderlands 4’s October 23 patch finally arrived, Gearbox attempted to break the Crit Knife loop. The October 23 patch attempted to rebalance player tactics by replacing guaranteed crits with a 30% increase in critical hit chance during a 5-second time frame. In other words, instead of auto-crits, the knife was supposed to add 30% crit chance.
However, the nerf did not fully work as intended. Instead of upping their crit chance by 30%, a knife hit would set it to 30% for five seconds. The change didn't merely nerf the crit knife but resulted in an outright DPS loss for some players. This meant that if a player already had, say, 70% crit chance, throwing the knife actually reduced their crit chance to 30%. In practice, the update turned the once-deadly knife into a damage loss on high-crit builds.
Patch Pandemonium: The Knife Returns (Patch 2.1 – October 30, 2025)
Unhappy players didn’t have to wait long for a fix to the fix. Gearbox issued an update on October 30. But this was simply reinstating the Crit Knife as Borderlands 4’s most OP item.
In practice, this patch made the knife behave as originally intended: it would add +30% crit chance for 5 seconds. But another surprise lurked: the added crit chance from multiple knife throws was now stacked. In effect, the nerf dance had reset: with a series of knife throws and a bit of crit-boosting gear, the Crit Knife loop was back in action—bosses once again melted in seconds when the Vex bleed loop was relaunched.
Borderlands 4 Pokes Fun At Recent Crit Knife Build Nerf
Gearbox Software pokes a bit of fun at the recent nerfs to Borderlands 4's popular crit knife build, but fans seem to be okay with the changes.
What's Next for the Crit Knife?
Over a matter of weeks, the Crit Knife has swung from “destroys everything” to “worthless” and back to near-“destroys everything” again. Gearbox’s Borderlands 4 patch notes and community reactions underscore the absurdity: one patch rendered high-crit builds worse, another revived near-perfect crits, and players jokingly wonder if Gearbox will ever find the middle ground.
No final solution is yet in place, and the developers will surely watch carefully as players experiment further. For now, Borderlands 4’s Crit Knife saga is a textbook example of unintended interactions and balance whiplash: a chaotic ride that’s as funny as it is frustrating.
Borderlands 4
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 82 /100 Critics Rec: 88%
- Released
- September 12, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
- Gearbox Software
- Publisher(s)
- 2K
