Borderlands 4: The Saga of the Crit Knife (So Far)

Each Borderlands game typically has one item or ability that’s unexpectedly powerful, breaking the game’s rules and the developers’ plans. In Borderlands 4, that’s currently the Crit Knife. What started as a unique throwing knife with good potential has quickly become a major issue, leading to incredibly strong player builds, urgent fixes from the developers, and a lot of frustration within the player community.

The Crit Knife, a seemingly simple weapon, has become notorious for causing major balance issues and hilarious problems in Borderlands 4. If you’re just discovering this, you might be wondering how it all started.

What is The Crit Knife in Borderlands 4?

Shortly after its release, a basic throwing knife called the Jakobs, when combined with the Penetrator/Predictor upgrade, created a major imbalance in Borderlands 4. This knife temporarily ensures that every hit on an enemy registers as a critical hit, making enemies incredibly vulnerable. As a result, any character build focused on critical hits or applying status effects became significantly overpowered.

Vex and the Infinite Bleed Loop

The Crit Knife weapon became incredibly powerful when used with Vex, a character in Borderlands 4. Vex has abilities that can repeatedly cause bleeding, and these abilities are key to maximizing the Crit Knife’s damage output, making it exceptionally effective.

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 had abilities that allowed bleed effects to rapidly stack on enemies. Her passive skills meant that a critical hit could cause bleeding, and that bleeding would almost always cause more bleeding. This led to incredibly high damage output – a single critical hit with a knife and a shot could trigger a chain reaction of bleeds. The resulting burst damage was so powerful it made the hardest parts of the game too easy.

The Crit Knife Saga, Broken Down

Borderlands 4 Launches

As a player, we quickly started calling it the “Crit Knife” exploit because once you got the knife to stick, everything became ridiculously easy. Seriously, even the toughest bosses at the end of the game could be defeated in just a few seconds!

Gearbox Steps In

Gearbox’s approach to player builds has changed. While some developers initially seemed unwilling to adjust extremely powerful strategies after the release of Borderlands 4, Creative Director Graeme Timmins recently announced on X (formerly Twitter) that an upcoming update will address and weaken those overpowered builds.

The development team promised a fix was coming. However, players kept playing to get powerful knives and using the game-breaking strategy as much as possible before it was patched.

Patch Pandemonium: The First Nerf (Patch 2.0 – October 23, 2025)

With the October 23rd update for Borderlands 4, Gearbox tried to fix a powerful strategy known as the “Crit Knife loop.” The update aimed to change how players approached combat by replacing automatic critical hits with a temporary 30% boost to critical hit chance – lasting for five seconds. Essentially, instead of guaranteeing every hit was critical, the knife was designed to simply increase the odds of a critical hit by 30%.

The attempt to weaken the knife wasn’t quite successful. Instead of increasing critical hit chance by 30%, the knife now forced it to 30% for five seconds. This didn’t just reduce the knife’s effectiveness; it actually lowered overall damage output for some players. For example, if a player normally had a 70% critical hit chance, using the knife would unexpectedly reduce it to 30%. Ultimately, the update made the once-powerful knife a detriment to players who already had high critical hit rates.

Patch Pandemonium: The Knife Returns (Patch 2.1 – October 30, 2025)

So, people were already mad about a problem, and then the ‘fix’ just brought it right back! Gearbox dropped an update on October 30th, but honestly, it just made the Crit Knife ridiculously overpowered again – basically the strongest thing in Borderlands 4. It was super frustrating!

So, this patch finally made the knife work how it was supposed to – a 30% crit chance boost for five seconds. But get this – throwing the knife multiple times actually stacked that crit chance! It was crazy. Basically, the whole issue with the ‘Crit Knife loop’ being broken was fixed. If you spammed knife throws and had some crit-boosting gear, you could melt bosses again, especially when combined with the Vex bleed build. It was like the good old days!

What’s Next for the Crit Knife?

The Crit Knife weapon in Borderlands has gone through a wild ride lately. It’s quickly shifted from being considered incredibly powerful to completely useless, and back to powerful again. Recent game updates from Gearbox and how players have reacted highlight how unpredictable it is – one update weakened powerful builds, another made the weapon nearly unbeatable, and players are now playfully questioning if Gearbox can ever strike a balance.

There isn’t a permanent fix yet, and the game creators are definitely keeping a close eye on how players continue to use this exploit. Right now, the situation with the ‘Crit Knife’ in Borderlands 4 perfectly shows how unexpected combinations can create imbalance – it’s a messy but amusing experience for players.

2025-11-01 01:05