New Borderlands 3 Update Nerfs One of the Game’s Hardest Bosses

Borderlands 3 is getting a new update on Thursday that’s toning down the power of one of the game’s most challenging bosses. The update is taking a look at KillaVolt, the electrified thug who runs his own battle royale competition where he’s the grand prize. It’s a boss players encounter fairly early on in the game once they’re able to leave Pandora, but it’s proven to be one of the more difficult fights. As it turns out, it was never supposed to be that way.

KillaVolt is an enemy found in the Lectra City area who’s part of a side quest given to players by Mad Moxxi. He’s protected with a riot shield in the front, a giant bubble that encompasses him at times, and several blue bars of shields that players have to wear down before finishing him off. He’s hard enough to take on by yourself and deals massive AOE damage on top of his other annoyances, so even taking him on as a group is risky since he can affect multiple people at once. In line with his character but still just as frustrating, you can’t lower his shield faster with shock damage.

All those parts of the fight are frustrating, but the most troublesome part of the battle of all is in the late stages of the fight where he electrifies the entire floor. Not one tile is left unaffected which means players have to just jump around and hope they don’t go down before the effect wears off. Those who played Moze were really the only ones with a somewhat easy way to avoid it since they could hop in their mech to use it as a buffer. To make matters worse, this attack would kill any minions littering the outskirts of the fight that you’d normally use to revive yourself.

That part with the floor frustrations was never supposed to happen, according to 2K and Gearbox’s patch notes.

“Addressed a reported issue where KillaVolt’s Shield Storm attack does not disable the tiles around KillaVolt, resulting in the entire floor being activated (oops),” the first point in the patch notes for today’s update read.

So if you found the rest of the KillaVolt fight to be a pain and are hoping it’ll be easier, you’re still in for a challenge on your subsequent playthroughs. But if you can make it to the final stages, you at least won’t get blasted by unavoidable electricity this time.

The update for Borderlands 3 is scheduled to be released for all platforms on Thursday.