Borderlands 2 – Zero Gamechangers and Capstone Guide

Zero, the the assassin an unknown being; is it human? A Robot? Or an alien? We don’t really know but he/she has some pretty awesome abilities such as invisibility and holographic cloning.  Portrayed in the game as a stealth ninja.  Special action skill of Zero? Deception, allowing zero to deal some really heavy damage and skills that augment it.  Deception has a really short cool down period of 15 seconds so it should be used as often as you can and if you wait until the very last moment to melee attack when the decoy is up you can grab huge boosts up to +650% Melee damage, +250% critical hit damage and +200% gun damage.

 

When using Deception there are two main things you can do.  The first is deploying deception to get out of a bad situation (run like hell) and secondly deploying deception to rack up damage on targets.

In Borderlands 2 each player class has 3 skill trees; Green, Blue and Red and for each character it will be named something different.  In Zero’s case its Sniping (Green), Cunning (Blue) and Bloodshed (Red).  Within these skill trees are special abilities know as “Game changers” located in the middle of the Skill tree’s on each level.  These abilities only need one skill point to be assigned to give it the equivalent of 5 skill points assigned on normal skills within the tree.

The Capston is the final skill within each skill tree.  This is generally a very powerful skill that turns your character into a kick ass power house, the caveat to this skill is only being able to use it one at a time.

You can see Zero’s complete Skill tree Here on the Borderlands 2 official site with Skill Tree Builder.

Zero’s Green Skill Tree:  Sniping

 This is the tree that builds up Zero’s sniping abilities.

Game Changer: Bore: this is an awesome ability for Zero for doing double, triple or even more kills at once.  This game changer basically gives Zero the ability to go right through enemy targets and hit targets behind the first target allowing a +100% damage for each bad guy it goes through after the first one, double kill, triple kill or even more!

Official Description: Your shots pierce through the enemies.  If your shot hits an enemy after piercing an enemy, it causes massive bonus damage.  Bore doesn’t work with rockets and some special projectiles.  Also when Deception is active, your visor will highlight enemy crit locations.

Capston: Critical Ascension: Allows zero to snipe on critical points of enemies and increases damage, the more critical you do in a row the bigger the damage increases.  If you keep scoring critical hits the effects of damage boosting are almost limitless.  When you choose Critical Ascension your basically locking Zero into sniper mode.

Official Description: Scoring a critical hit with a sniper rifle increases your damage and critical hit damage with sniper rifles.  This effect can stack up to 999 times.  Stacks slowly decay if you haven’t scored a critical hit in a while.  +6% critical hit damage per stack and +5% damage per stack.

 

Zero’s Blue Skill Tree:  Cunning

 A lot of different skills int his tree for Zero including sniping and a lot of damage increasing skills.

Game Changer: Death Mark: Lets you deal melee damage that marks targets for a short duration of time.  Marked targets take on additional damage from all sources.  This skill is perfect when doing team play but must be executed with a Melee attack.

Official Description:Dealing melee damage marks the target for a short duration.  Marked targets take additional damage from all sources.  Also its not an easy thing to live with.  Marked targets take +20% additional damage from all sources.  Marks last for 8 seconds.

Capston: Death Blossom:

Official Description: This is an action skill augment that can be used during Deception.  When used it will allow Zero to throw a handful of Kunai (throwing knives or darts.. it’s a ninja thing..).  Each Kunai will explode with a random elemental effect.

 

Zero’s Red Skill Tree:  Bloodshed

This is the skill tree that allows Zero to become invisible and many skills in this tree allow for huge damage bonuses.

 Game Changer: Execute: This is a must have skill if you are concentrating on melee attacks.  Choose an enemy within 3 meters of zero and hit the execute button to have Zero unleash a heavily damaging melee slash attack.  You need to have Deception enabled for this attack.

Official Description: Melee Overrride skill.  While Deception is active and a target is under your crosshairs.  Dash forward a short distance and perform a special melee attack, dealing massive damage.  Execute range: 3 meters.

Capston: Many Must Fall: This is the single greatest skill that increases deadliness of Deception.  Basically when in Many must fall mode scoring any melee kill will automatically re-activate and deploy another holographic decoy in  deception with no cool down period.  As you can imagine stacking up kills and bonuses in Many Must fall mode cloaked and basically killing everything in sight.

Official Description:  Killing an enemy with a Melee Attack while deception is active causes you to deploy another holographic decoy, restealth and add time to deceptions duration.  This can be done multiple times in succession.