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Borderlands 4 Loveless guide — measured RAM values and action skill uptime

Published: 9/4/2026 · Updated: 9/13/2026 · Version 1.10

Unofficial fan resource. Not affiliated with Gearbox Software, 2K or Take-Two Interactive.

Updated 13 September 2026 — this page now carries measured data. It originally went up before release with nothing but 2K’s announcements. Loveless launched on 10 September, and everything below was read off the in-game panels at level 30. Values that scale with level are noted as such.

Loveless is the sixth Vault Hunter, added with Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort on 10 September 2026 (Version 1.10). She is sold separately from the story content at $9.99.

Her class is Hacker. 2K’s announcements introduced her as “Loveless the Hacker”, but the character name in game is simply Loveless.

Her elements are corrosive and radiation.

Three things that catch people out on Loveless

1. Every action skill has a cooldown longer than what it leaves on the field — Plague Star gaps by ten seconds every cycle, Malignant Construct sits at 78% uptime
2. Visual Paradox Nexus is not a stealth button — the stealth and the clone are both gated behind a kill
3. The Contagion cap of 20 is what makes proliferat.exe situational — doubling 20 still gives you 20

RAM, measured

So you carry +30% gun damage for as long as you hold the meter, and the empowered melee is what you trade it for. Gun and melee share one resource, but in practice the tension is milder than it looked pre-release:

• The RAM-scaling gun passive (Siliconventional Warfare) tops out at +6%, which is too small to fight over
• engag.exe, the right-branch Hack / Slash capstone, fully recharges RAM on hit — melee builds sidestep the trade entirely

Still unmeasured: the meter’s ceiling, its build and decay rates, and whether gun damage scales smoothly with fill or only pays out at full. The one confirmed data point is the +30% at full.

The three action skills, measured

Tap for a Function (short cooldown, small spike), hold for an Executable (long cooldown, heavy finisher).

Plague Star cannot sustain itself

25 second cooldown against 15 seconds of Contagion. Run the action skill alone and Contagion is off the field for ten seconds out of every cycle — and every passive that reads Contagion stacks (Memory Leak at +4% gun damage per stack, for one) goes dark with it.

A Virology build therefore has to carry a way to apply Contagion with gun crits. That is a requirement, not a preference.

Malignant Construct sits at 78% uptime

35 seconds of Wyrm against a 45 second cooldown. There is a structural ten-second window with no Wyrm, and Symbiosis-scaling passives all switch off inside it. That is the argument for taking uptime nodes before damage nodes in Manifestation. Visual Paradox Nexus is worse at 62.5% (25s / 40s).

Visual Paradox Nexus is not a stealth button

This corrects what this page said before release. We had described opening a fight by cloaking. The in-game text does not work that way:

• The cast itself is a buff — +30% move speed, +25% crit damage
• Killing an enemy while it is active puts you in stealth briefly and leaves a clone where the enemy died
• One clone at a time, and stealth lasts 3 seconds

Both the stealth and the clone are kill-gated — nothing happens until you drop something first. And because base stealth is only three seconds, stealth-extension augments (sudo kill) matter more than we expected.

Tree structure

Tier thresholds follow the shared unlock rules with no Loveless-specific deviation. Augments and capstones both cost zero points.

Unlock rules are the shared ones

Loveless unlocks capstones and augment slots on the same rules as every other Vault Hunter — points counted within the tree, capstone and augment slots themselves costing nothing, each capstone tied to its own tree’s action skill. Nothing here behaves differently for her.

The point thresholds and how they are counted are covered in our skill tree unlock mechanics article.

The nine capstones, measured

Within Manifestation, nuk.exe at 3,184 is 5.7x barrag.exe and 4.2x enrag.exe, and it ties for the shortest cooldown at 10 seconds. For single-target burst it is not close.

enrag.exe comes with a cost. While it runs, the Wyrm bleeds health continuously and stops accepting Function commands. Manifestation is built around issuing those commands, so this one capstone changes how the whole tree plays.

The Contagion cap of 20 changes how proliferat.exe is used

proliferat.exe doubles Contagion stacks, but Contagion caps at 20. Doubling 20 still gives 20, so the doubling only does work at 10 stacks or fewer.

The real window is right after a death spread. When a Contagion-carrying enemy dies it spreads to up to three others, but the new hosts only receive half the stacks — usually well under ten. Doubling there takes them straight to the ceiling.

With Memory Leak paying +4% gun damage per stack against a 20 stack cap, a fully stacked target is worth +80% gun damage. Whether any capstone raises the cap itself is still unverified.

Localisation note

The Japanese build translates the .exe capstones inconsistently — seven of the nine are translated into Japanese words, two are left as katakana transliterations, and several other skills (sudo kill, CTRL/ALT/DEL, d://File) display in Latin script even in Japanese. Worth knowing if you cross-reference Japanese guides: the English name is not a reliable key.

Two errors found in third-party databases

Cross-checking the in-game nodes against MentalMars turned up two maximum-rank mismatches:

• Manifestation, left branch, T6 passive: 0/1 in game, listed as 5 points
• Hack / Slash, mid branch, T4 first node: 0/5 in game, listed as 3 points

Neither sits on a mainstream path, but it means a point allocation built purely from a third-party tree planner can come up short. Confirm ranks in game before committing.

Still unverified

• Percentage values on individual passives — we have measured 5 of the 106 nodes
• How to read x +1.1 on Refactored Damage Formula’s sniper damage. The description says the damage “doubles”, so it is either x2.1 or x1.1, and this is the only node using x rather than the usual max +20% percentage format
• Whether proliferat.exe’s doubling can exceed the 20 stack cap
• Wyrm durability and scaling
• The full mapping of node names to tree positions — the overview only shows icons, so each node has to be selected individually