Loveless is built around a single, very abusable idea: if you can keep landing critical hits, almost every other number on her sheet goes up. The Virology (green) and Manifestation (red) trees together turn that idea into a loop, where status effects feed crit chance, crit chance feeds RAM, and RAM feeds an empowered melee that hands you free crits for the next few seconds. It’s a level 70 setup that holds up in takedown content against targets like Thol the Invincible.
Quick answer: Fill RAM with crits and status effects, land an empowered melee to trigger Intrusion, then shoot for four seconds of automatic critical hits while stacked Contagion inflates your crit chance.
How the crit loop works: RAM, Intrusion, and Contagion
RAM is the Hacker trait. It fills whenever Loveless lands a critical hit or applies a status effect, and the fuller the gauge, the more gun damage she deals. When it’s full, her next melee attack becomes Empowered and spends the whole bar. RAM also drains on its own if you stop generating it, so the build wants constant elemental chip damage rather than clean single shots.
That empowered melee is the payoff. Intrusion is a one-point passive in the red tree that makes Loveless deal automatic critical hit damage for a duration after her empowered melee connects — roughly four seconds in practice. During that window, body shots register as crits, which keeps refilling RAM and keeps the cycle alive.
Contagion is the multiplier underneath all of it. When It Rains grants crit chance for every status effect on a target and doubles that value per Contagion stack, working out to around 6% per status and 12% per stack. Pile enough Contagion onto a group and your crit chance is enormous even outside the Intrusion window.
Combat rotation for mobbing and takedowns
Virology (green) skill priorities
The green tree is where the bulk of the points go. It handles crit chance, sustain, and the Contagion spread that makes the whole thing scale in crowds.
| Skill | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Established Gameplay Loop | Gun damage and reload speed on status or Contagion |
| Toxic Chat | Corrosive damage, plus bonus corrosive on kill |
| Central Procing Unit | Chance at a second random status effect |
| System Restore | Lifesteal, with excess healing as overshield |
| Conservation of Malice | Gun damage and fire rate from Contaminants |
| It’s Super Effective | Crit chance from status effects |
| When It Rains | Crit damage, plus crit chance per status and Contagion |
| Blackhat | Lifesteal from status effect damage |
| It Pours | Chance at an extra Contagion stack on crit |
| Memory Leak | Gun damage per Contagion stack |
| Depletion Load | Bonus radiation damage after Action Skill use |
| Turbo Button | Cooldown reduction scaled to RAM |
It’s Super Effective and When It Rains are the two that make body shots irrelevant. Between them, every burn, shock, corrosive, or radiation tick on a target is quietly raising the odds that your next bullet crits — and Contagion counts double.
Manifestation (red) skill priorities
The red side is a support tree here rather than a pet tree. You’re after the damage passives and Intrusion, not Wyrm uptime. Note that Symbiosis stacks are currently bugged, so don’t plan your damage around them.
| Skill | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Drift Compatible | Crit chance, plus crit damage scaling |
| Corrupted Path | Radiation damage and irradiation chance |
| Storage Upgrade | Larger RAM-related damage bonuses |
| Status Update | Synergy with your radiation output |
| Power Overwhelming | Elemental damage on empowered melee, doubled with a radiation gun |
| Finisher | Stacking gun damage from Functions and Executables |
| IDKFA | Gun damage stacks when you take damage |
| Pure Fusion | Extra maximum health |
| Intrusion | Automatic crits after empowered melee |
Power Overwhelming doubles its bonus when the gun in your hands is radiation element, which is a large part of why radiation weapons are favoured over corrosive here despite Loveless’s corrosive skills.
Augments and capstones to equip
Only one augment and one capstone can be slotted at a time, and they have to come from the tree your Action Skill belongs to. With Plague Star equipped, Host Compromise is the augment that matters — Contagion jumps to more enemies whenever an infected target dies, which is what keeps a takedown room permanently infected.
For the capstone, proliferat.exe is the one doing work: doubling Contagion stacks directly multiplies your crit chance and Memory Leak’s gun damage in one button press. replicat.exe, which puts three corrosive shurikens in orbit around you, is the alternative if you want passive status application instead of a burst. On the red side, Giga Bite and barrag.exe exist for Wyrm-focused play, but neither fits this rotation.
Gear loadout for the Loveless crit build
| Slot | Best pick | Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Class mod | Collecting Memory Hoarder | Insatiable Devourer, Vindictive Virophile |
| Shield | Watts 4 Dinner | MAD Exfoliatrix, Fireworks |
| Enhancement | Alacritous Pumper | Vindictive Hat Trick, Vindictive Primadiem |
| Ordnance | Atomic Supermassive Waterfall | Throwing Knife, Alignment |
| Repkit | Mega Triple Bypass | Shiny War Paint, Mega Outburst |
| Firmware | High Caliber | Active Fire |
The Collecting Memory Hoarder Hacker class mod is the clear best-in-slot because its RAM bonuses are enormous — around +80% melee damage and +40% gun damage. Since the build is constantly filling and spending RAM, you’re sitting near the top of those bonuses most of the time. Everlasting Plague Engineer and Typical Boomer are also in the Hacker pool if you’re still farming.
Watts 4 Dinner covers survivability with lifesteal and overshield mechanics, and it adds roughly 25% shock damage on top. MAD Exfoliatrix is the status-focused option, Cinder-Shelly, Super Soldier, Sparky Shield, and Fireworks all round out the rotation depending on what you’ve dropped.
For ordnance, the Atomic Supermassive Waterfall adds extra explosions on damaged targets, which means more status procs feeding the crit chance skills. Turbulent Quadratus and Fully Loaded Alignment are reasonable swaps.
Firmware is a straightforward call. High Caliber lets bullets pierce enemies, so a single burst applies status effects to a whole line of targets in takedown corridors. Active Fire is the fallback if you’d rather not run pierce.
Weapons that suit the rotation
The Quincunx Decompiler in its radiation version is the standout, since radiation is exactly what Corrupted Path and Power Overwhelming want. Anything with a high fire rate is useful purely for building RAM quickly, which is where the Hungry Eviscerating Stray comes in.
- Hungry Eviscerating Stray
- Ricocheting Pre-Emptive Hand Frag
- Synchrotron Sublunar Mantra
- Storming Shield Overflow
- Hungry Scraping Enumeration
- Looming Wind Skimmer
- Domino People’s Triplicate
- Cooking Ambushing Borstel Baliste
- Debauched Performative Critical Decay
Ceramic Pre-Emptive Bod, Sudden Looming Truck, and Surplus Socialized Exhibition also perform well if those are what your farming has produced.
Specializations
- Groundbreaker
- Bear Arms
- I Am A Gun
- Now With Caffeine
- Contamination
- Compounding Afflictions
- Riddle You This
Groundbreaker is the one tied directly to the rotation, since you’re already punching every few seconds to trigger Intrusion. Contamination and Compounding Afflictions push the status side that feeds crit chance.
Checking the build is working
Two things confirm the loop is running properly. First, after an empowered melee, shots that hit an enemy’s body should still throw up critical hit numbers for the next few seconds — if they don’t, the melee didn’t land as an Empowered hit and your RAM bar wasn’t actually full. Second, holding the Action Skill button with proliferat.exe equipped should visibly add an overshield layer while the Contagion stack count on nearby enemies jumps.
Loveless is DLC content, so the Hacker skill trees only appear if you own the Loveless the Hacker add-on, which ships with the Super Deluxe Edition and the Vault Hunter Pack or can be bought separately. Full skill descriptions for every node above are listed on the official Loveless Vault Hunter page.
