SOLIDFPS | Rafa Red DPS Leveling Build

Rafa Red DPS Leveling Build

Goals with a leveling build are simple.
We want as many early damage/DPS nodes as possible to scale up our bad grey/green/blue/purple weapons during the campaign. Rafa's Peacebreaker Cannons with the Bullet-Buddy Deluxe augment are very reliable ways of scaling your guns in the campaign to get fantastic results on badass enemies and bosses.

Campaign on Hard difficulty with a focus on Main missions only will bring you to level ~30-33ish so the first ~30 skill points will have the most impact on gameplay. The rest of the tree is filled out as a template of where to go next with the current playstyle until we push max level and decide to switch builds based on any insane build defining legendary drops we see at level 50.

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Action Skill & Trait
Peacebreaker Cannons seems to be the most reliable action skill for Rafa with 18 sec Duration and 35 sec Cooldown. Activating it puts us in Overdrive for 10% more damage and 25% speed, which will last for at least 30 seconds (18 sec + 12 sec) after activating our action skill.

Augments
Use Instinto early on for reliable DPS and swap to Bullet-Buddy Deluxe if you find any weapons that deserve the ammo freeze.
Bullet-Buddy Deluxe will let us use weapons with mag size issues at full potential (double barrels, heavy weapons) and have them boosted with Vitriol and First Impression for many more shots when we press F after activating Peacebreaker Cannons.

Huge Early Game Weapons Tip
Look for Vladof guns with Shotgun and Grenade underbarrels as their damage scales incredibly well. Vladof underbarrels have their own independent cooldowns so you can equip multiple and just swap between them!

Also keep an eye out for Singularity grenades with multiple charges. Very powerful crowd control that can trivialize a lot of mobbing encounters, especially if you're overwhelmed by badass enemies.

Endgame

Once we finish the campaign and push UVHM, we'll reevaluate how many of these damage nodes we need and if we should transition to a proper endgame build with Resiliencia, Soltado, and Jaque for maximum damage reduction if survivability is an issue.

Rafa Endgame w/ max DR: https://mobalytics.gg/borderlands-4/profile/0c786622-8d96-40dd-aece-1f090e212b77/builds/10280d26-f3f3-4eb3-99c3-169c3a38b8a6

9/12/2025 - Finished my 1st playthrough of Hard difficulty yesterday after ~16hrs using this build and made some additional notes and minor passive changes.

9/14/2025 - Added some quick notes for Specializations and Kickballer Legendary gun guide