Loveless the Hacker has three obvious directions to build in, and the loudest one right now is not her shuriken. It is Contagion, the corrosive damage-over-time effect that sits at the heart of her Virology tree, paired with melee-hybrid weapons that let you pile on stacks in under a second. The result is a setup that clears rooms on autopilot and still deletes a single target on command.
Quick answer: Run Visual Paradox Nexus as your Action Skill, stack Contagion to 20 with a melee-damage weapon like the Synchrotron Synodic Mantra shotgun, fire the Kusarigama slash to dump Stack Overflow, then land an Empowered melee to detonate everything.
How Contagion stacking works
Contagion is Loveless-only. It applies corrosive status effect damage over time, and when an infected enemy dies, the virus jumps to new hosts and hands them a portion of the stacks the corpse was carrying. That spread is the entire reason the build mobs so well — you seed one target, kill it, and the room infects itself.
The stack cap is 20. Getting there fast is the whole game, because the damage each stack deals does not care how hard the hit that applied it was. Contagion scales off action skill damage, skill damage, elemental damage, and status effect damage instead.
Note: that scaling rule is why a high-DPS gun is not automatically a good Contagion gun. What you want is a weapon that applies the effect many times per second, and stats that raise status and elemental damage rather than raw gun damage.
Why the build skips Plague Star
Plague Star is the Action Skill that sits at the top of the Virology tree, and it is the obvious Contagion button. It is also the one you leave on the bench here. You still spend heavily in Virology for the passives — Viral Payload, Central Procing Unit, High Data Rate — but the equipped Action Skill comes from Hack / Slash instead.
Visual Paradox Nexus does more for this loop. It raises movement speed and critical hit damage, drops you into Stealth after a kill, and its Function sends out a Kusarigama slash that deals radiation melee damage. If you are in Stealth when you use it, that slash is a guaranteed critical hit and ends Stealth — which is exactly the trigger the burst half of the build is waiting on.
The Plague Puncher combat loop
You know it worked when the target is showing 20 Contagion stacks before the punch connects, and the kill spreads fresh infection onto everything standing nearby. If the stacks are still climbing when you slash, you dumped Stack Overflow early and the burst lands short.
Weapons that stack Contagion fastest
The Synchrotron Synodic Mantra is the anchor. Its pellets deal melee damage, which means a single shotgun blast registers as a fistful of melee hits — and with Upload, melee critical hits apply Contagion. That is how the build reaches 20 stacks almost instantly instead of chipping away at them.
If the Mantra is not in your inventory, the Plotting Tempered Essence submachine gun covers the same job. It is the Vault Card alternative, and its rate of fire keeps status applications flowing well enough to hold the loop together.
Skill priorities in Virology and Hack / Slash
Virology supplies the status application and the elemental damage that Contagion scales from. Hack / Slash supplies the crit chance and crit damage that keep Upload feeding stacks. The points below are the ones doing real work.
| Skill | Tree | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| High Data Rate (1 point) | Virology | After an Empowered melee, your next elemental attack always applies its effect |
| Established Gameplay Loop | Virology | Gun damage and reload speed every time you apply an effect or Contagion |
| Central Procing Unit | Virology | Chance to apply an extra random effect or Contagion, doubled when inflicting Contagion |
| Cat 5 | Virology | Elemental damage and status effect chance |
| Toxic Chat | Virology | Corrosive damage, plus bonus corrosive on guns after a kill |
| It’s Super Effective | Virology | Status effects gain critical hit chance |
| When It Rains | Virology | Crit damage, and crit chance per status applied — Contagion doubles it |
| Depletion Load | Virology | Bonus radiation gun damage after an Action Skill, Function, or Executable |
| Turbo Button | Virology | Taken over Circular Logic for tighter cooldown handling |
| Upload | Hack / Slash | Melee critical hits apply Contagion — the core stacking engine |
| Stack Overflow | Hack / Slash | Banks gun damage in Stealth and releases it on the whip attack |
| Odium, Disdain, Ratio Technique | Hack / Slash | Crit chance and crit damage to keep Upload proccing |
| Footwork, Flow State, Methodical | Hack / Slash | Movement and uptime support for the melee side of the loop |
Death Begets Death, Hard Reset, and Wrap Around round out the blue tree, and Memory Leak plus It Pours sit on the right side of green alongside It’s Super Effective. Circular Logic is worth a look early, but the points come back out of it once cooldowns become the bottleneck.
Full gear list: class mod, shield, and firmware
The Everlasting Plague Engineer is the class mod the build is named around. Its legendary effect gives every status effect a 10 percent chance to spread to a nearby enemy, doubled for Contagion, and if there is nothing to spread to, it deals 50 percent of that status effect’s damage right away. It always rolls +40 percent status effect application chance, and its bonus points land in Established Gameplay Loop, Cat 5, It’s Super Effective, and When It Rains.
| Slot | Item |
|---|---|
| Weapon | Synchrotron Synodic Mantra (shotgun) |
| Weapon (alternative) | Plotting Tempered Essence (SMG) |
| Class mod | Everlasting Plague Engineer |
| Shield | Watts 4 Dinner |
| Enhancement | Vindictive Toile (Mixologist) |
| Repkit | Shiny War Paint |
| Ordnance | Bullseye Vivisecting Throwing Knife |
| Firmware | Skillcraft 3 or Active Fire |
| Specializations | Bear Arms, Groundbreaker, I Am A Gun, Contamination |
Subjugator and Thol the Invincible are the dedicated source for the Plague Engineer, with roughly a 15 percent drop chance from their lair off the coast of the District Plateau in the Fadefields. Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode nudges that up by 2 percent per rank. Vindictive Hat Trick works as a stand-in if the Toile roll is not cooperating.
Common reasons the burst underperforms
- Stacking gun damage instead of status and elemental damage. Contagion ticks ignore the size of the hit that applied them.
- Shooting before you are in Stealth. Stack Overflow only banks damage while Stealth is active.
- Firing the Kusarigama slash too early. It ends Stealth, so the stacks need to be at 20 first.
- Punching before RAM is full. Without a full bar there is no Empowered melee, and High Data Rate’s guaranteed elemental application never fires.
- Using a weapon whose shots do not register as melee damage, which cuts Upload out of the loop entirely.
Loveless is paid DLC, bundled with Story Pack 2 and the Vault Hunter Pack and included in the Super Deluxe Edition, so you will need her unlocked on your account before any of this applies — her full skill list lives on the official Loveless Vault Hunter page. Once she is in your roster, the build is level 70 gear at its ceiling, but the loop itself works from the moment you have Upload and Visual Paradox Nexus together. Get those two online, and the rest is just feeding the virus.
