Loveless, the Hacker, is the most input-heavy Vault Hunter Borderlands 4 has shipped so far. Every one of her three Action Skills has extra button states layered on top of it, and every one of her three skill trees expects you to keep pressing them. Her kit is built around a resource bar called RAM, a radiation-breathing pet called Wyrm, and a corrosive status effect called Contagion that jumps between bodies.
Quick answer: Loveless has three trees — Manifestation (Wyrm pet, radiation, Symbiosis stacks), Virology (corrosive Contagion that spreads on kill), and Hack / Slash (stealth, clones, sniper critical hits). All three scale off RAM, which fills whenever you land a critical hit or apply a status effect.
Loveless’ three skill trees and their Action Skills
Each tree is anchored to one Action Skill, and you can only have one equipped at a time. The full ability list lives on the official Loveless Vault Hunter page, but the short version is below.
| Tree | Action Skill | Core mechanic |
|---|---|---|
| Manifestation (red) | Malignant Construct | Summons Wyrm and grants Symbiosis Stacks that decay over time |
| Virology (green) | Plague Star | Corrosive shuriken that applies Contagion and spreads it on death |
| Hack / Slash (blue) | Visual Paradox Nexus | Movement speed and crit damage buff, plus Stealth and a Clone on kill |
RAM: what fills the bar and what it pays out
RAM is her Vault Hunter Trait, and it is the connective tissue for all three trees. Critical hits and status effects fill the bar. The fuller it is, the more gun damage she deals, so there is a passive benefit to simply keeping it topped off.
When RAM is full, her next melee attack becomes Empowered, hitting for dramatically more damage and draining the entire bar. RAM also bleeds away on its own if you stop generating it, which is why so many of her passives are written as “the more full her RAM is.” Several skills read the bar’s percentage directly rather than checking whether it is full.
Functions and Executables: the extra button inputs
Her Action Skills are not one-and-done. A Function is a quick follow-up on a short cooldown, triggered by tapping the Action Skill button again. An Executable is the heavier payoff, triggered by holding the button.
With Wyrm out, tapping teleports it to your target for a radiation nova, while holding orders a breath attack for area radiation damage. With Plague Star, holding detonates every active Contagion at once for corrosive area damage. With Visual Paradox Nexus, tapping swings the Kusarigama for a wave of radiation melee damage, and that swing is a guaranteed critical hit if you are in Stealth — though it also ends Stealth.
Deeper in the trees, skills labeled Function Override or Executable Override replace those inputs entirely. That is what the .exe skills do, and it is why picking one usually locks in the shape of your build.
Manifestation (red): Wyrm, Symbiosis, and radiation
This is the pet tree, but it is not a set-and-forget pet. Summoning Wyrm grants Symbiosis Stacks, which decay over time and are refreshed when Wyrm gets kills or through specific passives. Those stacks are what feed the tree’s Symbiosis Effects, so the tree rewards constantly re-issuing commands instead of letting the pet wander.
The early passives cover the basics — Host Privileges, defensive and utility picks like Antivirus, and damage scaling through Overclock, Finisher, and IDKFA. Storage Upgrade and Neurokinetics handle health and shield recovery, while Power Overwhelming and Perfect Execution push elemental and critical damage.
The bottom of the tree is where Wyrm changes shape. Each branch end rewrites either the Function or the Executable.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| barrag.exe | Wyrm grows wings and takes flight; the Breath Attack is wider, hits harder, and adds radiation shurikens |
| nuk.exe | Wyrm creates a Singularity that detonates after a delay for radiation damage across a large area |
| enrag.exe | Boosts Wyrm’s melee damage and lets it latch onto a target, losing health and ignoring Functions until the target dies |
| Solid State Destruction | Wyrm banks the damage it deals; Executables spend that bank as radiation damage, with Function damage counting double |
| Intelligent Artifice | Opens two Command Consoles — primary fire adds shock damage and an Overshield layer, secondary fire adds corrosive damage and armor |
| Hard Crash | Calls down a missile for area radiation damage; a kill refunds the Function cooldown |
| Dark Web | Tethers enemies hit by Functions to Wyrm so damage dealt to one tethered enemy hits all of them |
| Giga Bite | A heavy radiation melee bite that heals both Wyrm and Loveless, with a larger heal on kill |
One passive worth flagging is IDDQD. It hands Loveless and Wyrm flat damage reduction, and its Symbiosis Effect gives a chance to negate incoming damage outright based on your Symbiosis Stacks — a proc that itself grants another stack. Even a single point in it does something.
Virology (green): stacking and spreading Contagion
Plague Star throws a digistructed shuriken that pierces enemies, deals corrosive damage, and applies Contagion, a corrosive damage-over-time effect. When an infected enemy dies, the virus jumps to up to three new targets carrying half the stacks the dead enemy had. Holding the Action Skill consumes every active Contagion for a burst of corrosive area damage.
The tree leans corrosive and radiation, but it is broadly a status effect tree. High Data Rate raises status chance based on how full RAM is and guarantees the elemental proc on your next attack after an Empowered Melee. Established Gameplay Loop grants gun damage and reload speed whenever you apply an effect. Central Procing Unit can tack a second random element onto an enemy that had none, and doubles that chance when Contagion is involved.
Contaminant is the tree’s odd one out. Enemies killed with Contagion can drop a throwable Contaminant that explodes and infects everything it damages. Kaleidoscontaminant extends that to enemies killed with any elemental effect, with the Contaminant dealing the matching element.
| Branch | Focus | Branch-end payoff |
|---|---|---|
| Left | Action skill uptime, health and shield sustain, ordnance | replicat.exe — three Shurikens orbit you and can be thrown one at a time |
| Middle | Splash damage and corrosive explosions | fulminat.exe — corrosive explosions from her skills trigger a second delayed explosion |
| Right | Gunplay, status crits, and stack scaling | proliferat.exe — doubles every enemy’s Contagion stacks and grants Overshield based on the total |
There are also shuriken augments that change the throw itself. d://File swaps it to radiation, ricochets it off enemies, and leaves radiation hazards behind. Lag Switch slows the shuriken to a crawl as it passes through bodies, grinding out corrosive damage with a chance to apply Contagion. Burst Finish throws two shurikens that home into each other, detonate into a corrosive nova, and scatter homing mini shurikens. Host Compromise simply widens the spread when an infected enemy dies.
Hack / Slash (blue): stealth, Clones, and sniper crits
Visual Paradox Nexus runs for a duration, raising movement speed and critical hit damage. Get a kill while it is active and Loveless briefly enters Stealth and leaves a Clone where the enemy died. Only one Clone can exist at a time by default. Shooting does not break Stealth, which is the entire point of the tree’s sniper builds.
Two paths run through it. Jacked In and the crit-damage passives support long-range play, with Methodical scaling sniper rifle damage and Biathlon supporting it. On the other side, Footwork stacks movement speed to a genuinely absurd degree and turns her into a melee brawler instead.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| sudo kill | Stealth lasts until you fire, melee, or use Ordnance; stores Overkill Damage and adds it to stealthed shots on top of bonus crit damage |
| Stack Overflow | Entering Stealth banks the damage of your next three shots, then dumps it into your next Function or Executable |
| Bash Script | RAM builds continuously while VPN is active; crits can trigger radiation explosions, guaranteed on Empowered Melee |
| Swarm | Clones copy your Function attack, and enemies hit take stacking bonus damage — doubled for radiation |
| accelerat.exe | Spawns max Clones on activation and creates an Acceleration Gate that boosts three shots, plus extra shots per Clone absorbed |
| synchroniz.exe | You and every Clone spin the Kusarigama in a wide area; Dash pulls stray Clones back to enemies |
| engag.exe | Throws the Kusarigama blade, deals radiation melee damage, fully charges RAM, and yanks you to the target; refunded on a melee kill |
| CTRL/ALT/DEL | Turns the Function into a three-charge skill with escalating attacks that refill together on cooldown |
The cheat-code skill names
Almost every skill name in her trees is a reference to old PC and console cheat codes or programming terminology. IDKFA and IDDQD are Doom codes. UUDDLRLRABAS is the Konami code spelled out. sudo kill and Bash Script are command-line jokes. Power Overwhelming is a StarCraft cheat. It is cosmetic, but it makes the tree easier to navigate once you clock the pattern.
Loveless arrived on September 10th, 2026 with Version 1.10 and Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort. She costs $9.99 on her own and is already included for anyone who owns the Super Deluxe Edition or the Vault Hunter Pack. Twelve Legendary Class Mods built for her dropped into the existing boss pool at the same time, so there is gear to chase the moment you pick a tree.
