Pro tips on Borderlands 2 classes part 1: Maya the Siren

By BatRastered — January 14, 2013
Tags: blog guide how-to pro-tips video

Our first look at how to build out the Borderlands 2 classes starts off with Maya, the Siren. Let's see how her 3 skill trees work.

Let's start off with my least favorite tree, Harmony (the center tree). Here's a link to the build if you want to follow along.

I really don't like the "Scorn" cap on this tree, as you can see at the end of the video, it's very easy to hit yourself with it. Some of the other skills like the "Res" game changer in the middle of the tree, are only useful in co-op, so you'd likely want to re-spec if you ever played solo and put that point to better use somewhere else in the tree. In a full team of 4, and with a good Heavenly Nurse class mod, this build can greatly improve the survivability of everyone in the group. In fact, you should probably move the 5 points in recompense into Elated if you have 3 or more players as it will be less about your survival and more about the health of the group as a whole.

Now lets take a look at the Motion Tree build.

I like this build more and more the longer I use it... It works very well in co-op due to the Res skill (which you can spend elsewhere if you know you are going solo) but it also works well solo as the Thoughlock cap on the motion tree turns one of the enemy mob into an ally (and more importantly, a distraction allowing your shields to keep up). Once your ally is downed, if you still have time left on the skill, it will jump to a new member of the mob and lock them, while also releasing some healing orbs. Double win. Since the making of this video, I've since moved 3 skill points from Recompense to Sustenance and placed 1 point each in Flicker and Foresight as my new class mod buffs those two skills +5. (I used the Heavenly Nurse mod in this video, I now use the Legendary Siren mod).

Finally we have the highly offensive Cataclysm Tree Build.

As you can see, this tree is all about dealing damage, elemental damage that is. Without Res, you're not much of a team player, and you don't do much healing (only a minimal amount when a phaselocked enemy is killed). What you lack in that area, you more than make up for in bringing most of the mob you're facing into a small area, locking one up for a short time, and dealing fire, electric, corrosive, and slag effects to all of them. In a team, this is the moment when one of your buddies throws a grenade into the circle, or better yet a nuke turret from Axton. GoukiJones and I LOL-ed on that action more than a few times.

Here's a bonus vid of the Cataclysm tree in action, solo in the Torgue circle of death.

When a badass with shields is in range, you grab them with phaselock and wait for the electrical portion of the damage to kick in and strip their shields, by then they are slagged too, so open fire with a fire weapon and watch them drop!

You'll notice I use all Maliwan weapons. Two reasons, first I love Maliwan for their elemental damage, second I have a Maliwan allegience relic that gives me +30% damage to all Maliwan weapons. If you don't have that, I recommend a proficiency relic (action skill cooldown rate increase) which works well for all builds on all classes.

That's about it for Maya, I'll be working on the other classes soon.

Borderlands 2

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Pro tips on Borderlands 2 classes part 1: Maya the Siren

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