It's been frustrating to play Moze for a while but even moreso now with Mayhem 2.0.

I am constantly outperformed by my brother who plays FL4K (who isn't even that strong himself compared to Amara and Zane) in almost everything, ESPECIALLY damage.

He doesn't use Fade Away, instead he uses Rakk Attack to have constant uptime on ASE annointments and relies on that as well as his pet, Stop Gap Shield, and Snowdrift Victory Rush Relic to sustain himself. His performance isn't crazy insane but it works and I think he's happy with the build he's made.

I on the other hand am constantly trying to change my build up to do better but can't ever come close in either damage OR survival. Moze is broken in the bad way, she doesn't work. I've got 5 things I want to talk about, Moze's Annointments, Iron Bear, and her 3 skill trees.

1: In general, Moze STILL has extremely poor gear support from annointments. ASE, Auto Bear, and Exit Iron Bear types either waste so much time the bonus damage you get is almost nullified by the time lost OR you lose the effect by getting downed (we will go over this in section 2). Not to mention a lot of her special annointments just got worse by comparison because the recent patch buffed general annointments but for some reason forgot to buff HERS. (Example, Splash Damage after exiting Iron Bear 160% versus what is now ASE Splash Damage 200%. Like hello? You made these annointments to help her out and now you forgot about them?) They tried to give her some help in the form of under 50% health 150% Radiation damage but I will go over the flaws of that in the Orange Tree section. To quickly sum it up her best annointment has and always will be consecutive hits and the second best is damage for magazine if you don't get downed immediately after leaving IB. This sucks because hunting for only 2 specific annointments is really hard. And don't forget this only applies to weapon annointments, she's almost completely out of luck on grenades or shields because they can't proc any magazine related damage boosts and her specific ones are complete garbage. Her best grenade annointment is 25% weapon/grenade/skill damage when grenade thrown and she has nothing to work with for shields.

2: Going into Iron Bear for annointments wastes so much time and also allows enemies to gang up on you. You can easily go down immediately after leaving it because in this day and age IB isn't going to kill shit so you are going to be greeted with a horde of enemies as soon as you leave the cockpit. Iron Bear itself obviously isn't viable anymore since Mayhem 2.0 came in and completely destroyed any viability it had. They "tried" to make it better by allowing Mods (or was it relics?) to have skill damage as an effect but the max value is not even close to being high enough to fix IB on his own. Obviously this means Auto Bear sucks as well, it draws no aggro and does no damage to it's foes.

Here's my notes on each tree and what I really dislike about each of them.

3: Shield of Retribution- (Longest section because it has the most flaws) The core issue with this tree is that Thin Red Line just sucks now. It used to be good because you had time to heal back up but nowadays enemy damage is so high that you can go from 80k shields to nothing in 1 second and the major flaw to this skill is that you LOSE healthgate safety. Stop Gap effects won't save you either because it will proc on the first hit it can while your shield is up and not when the shield breaks. In relation to the new annointment that gives her bonus rad damage for being below 50% health, you can see how this flaw really hurts her as not only is the damage specific to 1 type of element, it promotes her to be the LEAST tanky VH in the entire game which is such a god damn shame considering she is supposed to be one of the tankiest. For those who don't know, to get Healthgate to activate you need to be ABOVE 50% and this tree is all about getting your health as low as possible to turn it into shield bar. Yikes.

Her Capstone, Tenacious Defense is badly designed and just straight up doesn't work when you're trying to optimize and get the highest shield possible. It activates after your shield breaks and guess what happens if your shield breaks when you have only 1 HP? You die. No damage bonus or shields regenerated. If this activated when the shield was at a low % instead of being broken it would actually be good.

Phalax Doctrine/Drowning in Brass are both extremely lowered in effectiveness because with M10 she doesn't kill things in a timely manner. Her best damage skill is Desperate Measures and that REQUIRES you to have only 1 HP.

Selfless Vengeance is an odd one as we will see in the other partner trees Moze doesn't really even reload? Other trees promote high magazine weapons which typically have long reload times, which means you're giving up a lot of time just to get this skill to go.

If you look at the entire tree as a whole here's what her gun damage adds up to:

Consistent: 65% from Armored Infantry and Desperate Measures, 15% Bonus Incendiary for crits

Temporary: 20% per kill for 15 seconds, 10% per kill for 30 seconds

Never going to happen: 30% when shield breaks and 15% incendiary when you reload. Almost half of her damage potential from the tree hangs on being able to kill or just don't work. Her methods of survival are inherently flawed and her damage bonuses are either low or inconsistent.

4: Bottomless Mags- This tree is actually pretty good. They fixed the issues with the ammo regen interfering with the magazine so now you aren't forced to reload to get your entire mag size back. The only skill I have an issue with is Click Click, which really should give damage bonus based on how long you fire and not how low your magazine is, because ideally you would want a setup where you don't actually deplete your magazine. It's like they wanted you to find some crazy equilibrium where you would stay at low mag for a long time but that's really inconsistent. This is probably Moze's best skill tree because it gives her life regen from crits and from running. Though I dislike how you have to run towards your enemy to life steal with conventional weapons, you are basically forced to use delayed damage weapons to shoot and run away. Besides Click Click all the damage here is very consistent and the entire name of the game is to be constantly firing.

5: Demolition Woman- This along with Shield of Retribution is kind of why I think Moze doesn't really do well anymore. Like Orange Skill Tree, half of this tree, maybe more honestly, DOESN'T WORK. Every skill that has to do with Iron Bear or grenades is absolutely WORTHLESS. Iron Bear is not viable anymore, so let's not even talk about those. The grenade skills Pull the Holy Pin, To the Last, and WCICATG have been bad since Mayhem was ever a thing and let's remind everyone that Means of Destruction has an unwritten soft cap in which it can't proc until a small amount of seconds has passed. This leaves the only viable grenade related skill being Vampyr, which means the only thing grenades do for Moze is heal her. What a goddamn shame that there's so much nonfunctional grenade support in the tree and the only things grenades can do is this. Not to mention healing doesn't help her much when paired with the Orange Skill tree since she loses Health Gating. I will give some amount of hope that Mayhem 10 grenades might actually do damage and make it worth using the aforementioned skills but let's be real expectations are low for everyone right now. Out of 13 skills, 5 of them are actually useful. Jesus Christ.

If you made it this far I dub the honorary Moze Main, please leave some suggestions in the comments if you feel like it. I will as well because this post is hella long now.