Vex hits her ceiling at level 70 because she can finally reach deep into three skill trees at once, and that changes what her kill skills are worth. Instead of picking between the green tree’s gun damage stack and the blue tree’s Grave Fiends payoff, you take both. The Living Weapon class mod then does the ugly work of keeping those kill skills lit even when nothing is dying fast enough.
Quick answer: Equip an Ascendant Living Weapon class mod, run Witchy Trigger Finger with the Vibe Check and Strike Me Down capstones, push green-tree points through Mortal Terror, and swap the mod for a Sadistic Teen Witch when you need to survive a fight instead of delete it.
How the Living Weapon class mod stacks kill skills
Living Weapon gives you a 5% chance to trigger your kill skills whenever you deal action skill damage, with a one-second cooldown between rolls. That sounds small. In practice, action skill damage ticks constantly, so the rolls never stop coming, and the kill skills refresh without you needing a fresh corpse every few seconds.
Stacked to their cap of nine, those kill skills are the entire reason this setup works. Fully ramped, the stat screen pushes past +380% gun damage and roughly +300% skill damage, on top of the +289% damage dealt the tree already provides. That is the difference between chipping a boss and watching health bars drop in chunks.
Vex skill tree allocation at level 70
Reset your points before you start. The order matters less than the endpoints, but the green tree comes first because it carries the critical damage, gun damage, and life steal that keep you upright while the rest of the build comes online.
| Tree | Skill | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Vexcalation (green) | Grave Sights | 5/5 |
| Vexcalation | Grave Implements | 5/5 |
| Vexcalation | Grave Power | 3/3 |
| Vexcalation | Guns and Needles | 1 |
| Vexcalation | Bloodletter | 1 (plus leftovers) |
| Vexcalation | Ars Arcana | 5/5 |
| Vexcalation | Essence Leech | 5/5 |
| Vexcalation | Blood is Power | 3/3 |
| Vexcalation | Keen Mind | 5/5 |
| Vexcalation | Mortal Terror | 5/5 |
| Here Comes Trouble (red) | Grave Sustenance | 5/5 |
| Here Comes Trouble | Enchantment | 5/5 |
| Here Comes Trouble | Mourning | 5/5 |
| The Fourth Seal (blue) | Sanguine Fiends | 5/5 |
| The Fourth Seal | Grave Assault | 5/5 |
| The Fourth Seal | Grave Fiends | 5/5 |
Grave Power is the small node people skip and then wonder where their damage went. It scales raw kinetic damage off missing health, which pairs directly with the life steal from Essence Leech, so you spend most of a fight in the sweet spot where you are hurt enough to hit harder but healing fast enough to stay alive.
On the red tree, Grave Sustenance, Enchantment, and Mourning are there for action skill duration and kill skill effectiveness, not for the minions. The blue tree exists almost entirely to unlock Grave Fiends, which pays out heavy damage per stack. Any points left over after all of the above go into Bloodletter for extra bleed.
Augments, capstones, and specializations
Witchy Trigger Finger is the augment pick, and it is not optional. Ammo regeneration is what lets you keep firing long enough for Mortal Terror to roll kill skill procs off critical hits, which is the other half of the stacking engine.
For capstones, take Vibe Check for the chain damage and Strike Me Down. On the specialization side, the picks are Riddle You This, The Best Defense, and I Am A Gun.
DPS or tank: swapping between two class mods
The skill tree above does not change between the two modes. Only the class mod does, which is why this build is worth carrying into both takedown runs and boss fights.
| Class mod | What it does | When to run it |
|---|---|---|
| Ascendant Living Weapon | 5% chance to trigger kill skills on action skill damage, one-second cooldown | Boss damage checks and anything you want dead quickly |
| Sadistic Teen Witch | Defensive profile, with bonus points into Grave Thirst for stronger crit life steal | Extended mob waves, higher difficulty tiers, solo runs where dying resets progress |
When you are hunting a Teen Witch roll, the stats that matter are gun damage, kinetic damage, status damage, damage reduction, and damage dealt. Extra points in Grave Implements are also worth keeping.
Best weapons, shields, and enhancements for the build
Weapon choice is looser here than in most Vex setups, because the damage comes from stacks rather than from one specific gun. What you want is a high rate of fire or a high pellet count, since more hits per second means more chances for Mortal Terror to fire.
- Surplus Socialized Exhibition — sniper, for single-target burst
- Quincunx Decompiler — shotgun, strong pellet throughput for proc chances
- Extolled Crow-Sourced — rifle, the reliable all-round option
- Hungry Dripping Stray and Excruciating Pumper — solid alternates if your drops disagree with you
For shields, Watts 4 Dinner is the standout, with the Berserker Panicking Cindershelly as the other pick worth slotting. Enhancements should lean into Torgue and Jakobs synergies, matched to whichever of the above guns you are actually holding.
Note: Standard Triple Bypass covers the repkit slot, and on firmware you want Skillcraft and Active Fire.
Grenade and ordnance picks
Bullseye Slippy is the grenade, and Promised Draupner handles ordnance duty with a large damage number attached. Neither is load-bearing for the kill skill loop, so treat them as extra output rather than something you need before the build functions.
How to confirm the build is working
Open the Skills screen and check the live stat readout mid-fight. With the tree filled in and nothing stacked, gun damage sits around +330%, damage dealt around +289%, and skill damage around +275%. Those are your baseline numbers.
Once kill skills are stacking, watch the same figures climb. Gun damage moving toward +385% and skill damage toward +302% means Living Weapon is proccing and the stacks are holding. If those numbers sit still during a fight, the loop is not running.
Why the stacks fall off
Running dry is the most common cause. Kill skills are on a duration timer, and if you stop shooting to reload or scavenge ammo, the stacks decay before you get back on target. That is exactly what Witchy Trigger Finger is there to prevent, so skipping it breaks the build more than any single gear choice.
The other cause is your action skill not being up. Living Weapon only rolls its 5% chance when you are dealing action skill damage, so downtime on the skill means no procs at all. Keep it active, keep shooting, and the stacks maintain themselves.
Set up this way, Vex clears Takedown at Hadron Abyss without needing a perfect gear roll, and Thol the Invincible loses health in visible chunks rather than slivers. Swap the class mod based on what the encounter actually demands, and the rest of the sheet never needs touching.
