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Borderlands 4 Build

UPDATED CRYO Death Knight Leveling & Endgame Build

Amon

Scourge

End Game

Leveling

Creator

By italianspartacus

Updated on Oct 2, 2025

Oct 2, 2025

Build Overview

"I am the one horseman of the Apocalypse!" - a Death Knight

In this build we'll be using tons of Cryo Ordnance Damage from our Scourge ability to non-stop whip the battlefield with destruction from Glacial Rapture. You'll be able to melt everything - shields, armor, and health. You will struggle with shields slightly, but this build can brute force through most things with near infinite Action Skill uptime.

This build is built around the Shatterwight Legendary mod. While not required, it will drastically increase the synergy and damage of this build!

Strengths And Weaknesses

Can brute force through all health types.
Infinite action skill uptime if done right
Clears waves with little to no issue
Melts bosses of all types due to stacking damage and infinite uptime.

Struggles with shields due to no innate Shock damage
High end build potential is gated by legendary accessibility.
More builds aren't like it ;)

Build Variants

Early Levels

Endgame

In the early levels, you just want to focus on your Blue line, getting Scourge to a point where it starts to feel particularly crunchy. Your Forgeskill ability isn't going to be amazing until you get Glacial Rapture, but that's okay. It's the early game - just have fun.

Skill Tree

Early Levels

Endgame

Points Spent 0 / 49

LMB Allocate

RMB Unallocate

5/5

While you're leveling, you want to use Blastchill until you get 15 points into the tree to unlock Eternal Winter

For a full explanation of synergies and our choices, switch to the End Game build!

Equipment

Early Levels

Endgame

Weapons

Repkit & Ordnance

Utilities

This build only requires two things:

- A Shock Weapon entirely of your choosing. This will help you focus down shields and prime things for more devastating hits.

- Shatterwight - this is the big driving force for the build because it turns our melee damage synergies online as talked about above.

- Another weapon you should focus on is Any Cryo weapon as we have so much Cryo damage added into this build that it'll only add more punching power.

Firmware

Early Levels

Endgame

Repkit & Ordnance

Repkit FirmwareGadget Ahoy

Ordnance FirmwareAction Fist

Utilities

Class Mod FirmwareGOOJFC

Shield FirmwareGadget Ahoy

Enhancement FirmwareGOOJFC

Honestly, this is going to be dealer's choice, but I'm going to list some of my favorite ones and socket them into whatever firmware slots that make the most sense for you.

Action Fist gives us increased Melee damage, and each rank of this is particularly good - giving us increased Action Skill Damage on melee kill. Remember, Forgewave will COUNT as a Melee kill, so this can get disgusting

Reel Big Fist can get absolutely out of control. This will increase our Forgewave damage by 40%, AND it will cause massive explosions that do 200% melee damage. I'm not overly sure how the ordnance and melee damage attributes of Forgewave work with Shatterwight so more testing is needed to see how wild this can get.

Gadget Ahoy is a great firmware because it's just an out of the box flat damage increase to the build across the entire spectrum. Nearly everything we do is Ordnance damage focused and this will give us a total of 40% extra Ordnance damage - with 20% of that 40 being a flat damage bonus across the board. It can also lead to some real mayhem with your Ordnance slot.

GOOJFC is last but DEFINITELY not least because I think it's the strongest firmware on the list. It'll help you balance having Scourge up at all times. You can keep Scourge online, BUT it requires you to do damage to keep it running. This allows us to use Scourge at a faster rate in between engagements, thus giving us tons of damage potential.

Specialization

Early Levels

Endgame

Specialization 1I Am A Gun

Specialization 2Fragmentation Payload

Specialization 3Full Spectrum Arsenal

Specialization 4Bear Arms

This needs to be tested, but this should give you a baseline of what Specs to focus on!

Gameplay

The rotation - and thus gameplay - for this build is really simple, but extremely satisfying. You're essentially going to turn into a cryo whip master of doom. The Simon Belmont of Borderlands. An Icy Death Knight (because I love Warcraft Death Knights and I'll shoe horn them into anything I can).

Ability Rotation

This is pretty straight forward, but let me explain why you'll use this rotation:

Open up with Glacial Rapture. This will immediately trigger Berserk which is crucial for massive damage spiking via There Is Only Red. But also, it is Ordnance Damage, so it'll trigger Tail of the Comet which will in-turn trigger Primal Surge.
Then, you spam Scourge which will be doing melee damage because of Shatterwight which will trigger Tail of the Comet, Primal Surge, and The Best Defense for TONS of sustain as well as cascading damage from status effects.
Throw grenades if you have a solid one that does Cryo Ordnance damage or Slippy which does melee damage.
When everything is on cooldown, use Cryo weapons to maximize your damage