Borderlands 4 lead designer Nicholas Thurston cleared up the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage in comments on the game’s subreddit, and it matters because those terms affect how many builds actually scale.
Thurston used a simple comparison. Skill Damage is like Gun Damage; Action Skill damage is like Shotgun Damage. All Skills are skills, but only some are Action Skills. That means Skill Damage applies across the board, including passive skills and Action Skills, while Action Skill damage only boosts the specific Action Skill it is attached to.
He gave concrete examples. Amon’s Onslaughter does Melee Damage with his fist, so it benefits from Skill Damage, Action Skill Damage, and Melee Damage all at once. Forgedrones, which come from passive skills, only get Skill Damage and Melee Damage if applicable.
Thurston also addressed status chance wording, saying there is no real difference between “status chance” and “status application chance,” and that instances of the former should be the latter. If a tooltip still uses the old phrasing, that is a goof the team plans to investigate.
The discussion shifted to Reddit rather than within the game, highlighting a broader usability gap. Borderlands 4 has training dummies, but it lacks detailed mouseover combat logs that show the math behind modifiers.
Comment
byu/Inferior_Jeans from discussion
inBorderlands4
Want a combat log? It would make testing builds and tracking weird damage results much easier, and that is what many players are asking for 😅
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