Borderlands 4 Vex minion builds that actually let your specters and reapers kill

Vex is one of the few Vault Hunters in Borderlands 4 who can genuinely step back and let minions delete the room for her. The catch is that the strongest minion setups lean on some very specific interactions between Dead Ringer, heirloom, ordnance, and green tree damage nodes. Built wrong, specters feel like paper turrets. Built right, they erase UVH5 bosses while you dash around.

How Vex’s minions actually scale

Vex’s minions come from the Dead Ringer action skill in the Fourth Seal tree. It can summon:

• Specters — stationary gun clones that deal gun-type damage and benefit from all generic “gun damage”, “minion damage”, and “action skill damage” bonuses.
• Reapers — mobile melee minions that taunt and scale from “melee damage”, “minion damage”, and “action skill damage”.

On top of that, Vex’s Siren trait Phase Covenant converts all action skill and melee damage to match the element of her current gun. So attunement and weapon choice are not just flavor; they define what element your specters or reapers are actually using.

Minion damage is then stacked through several layers:

• Blue tree kill skills like Grave Assault, Grave Fiends, and Grave Quickening.
• Green tree gun/skill nodes such as Grave Sights, Grave Implements, Grave Power, and Bloodletter.
• Minion-specific passives like Obedient Fiends, Ancient Rites, and Keen Fiends from the other trees.

Vex’s design encourages splitting points across trees: any node that literally says “Minion(s)” will help specters, reapers, or Trouble, regardless of which action skill you run.

Rocket specters: Bloody Summoner Vex after the bleed nerf

The most explosive minion build right now takes the original “Bloody Summoner” leveling concept and pivots it into a rocket-focused specter army that still leans on Bleed. The goal is simple: specters do almost all the damage while you just keep them alive and supplied with ordnance.

Why ordnance beats guns on specters

Heirloom is the pivot: specters copy whatever you’re holding when Gastrobate fires. If you hold a rocket launcher instead of a gun, the copied launcher behaves like a minion weapon:

• No ammo concerns — the clone effectively has infinite rockets.
• Launchers fire very quickly under stacked Grave Assault, Grave Fiends, and Mortal Terror.
• All those rockets count as minion and action skill damage, so they benefit from every minion, skill, and gun-damage-to-action-skill interaction you’ve built.

Bleed is still an important part of the package, just no longer a runaway bug. Launchers with strong status behavior, combined with Bloodletter and status-heavy blue tree nodes like Prismatic Ichor, let specters stack Bleed quickly while the main damage comes from the raw rocket hits.

Core skill picks for rocket specters

The rocket specter build runs deep in blue and green:

• Blue left/middle:
  • Sanguine Fiends (5/5) — heals Vex and minions on kill; crucial for specter survival in endgame.
  • Grave Assault (5/5) — kill skill fire rate for Vex and minions; more rockets, more kill skills.
  • Grave Fiends (5/5) — stacking kill skill damage.
  • Prismatic Ichor (5/5) — every status effect can apply an extra random one; specters get their own cooldowns here, so you see lots of elemental overlap.
  • Gastrobate (3/3) — extra specter that copies your held weapon for 10 seconds on dodge.
  • Keen Suffering (2/2) — lets your dots crit, important with Bleed and other statuses.
  • Heirloom — mandatory for cloning your rocket launchers.
• Green:
  • Guns and Needles (3/3) — repkit cooldown restore so you can keep recharging Dead Ringer via Triple Bypass.
  • Grave Sights — crit damage for you and indirect scaling for minions.
  • Bloodletter — core Bleed scaling node, usually pushed with class mod points.
  • Grave Implements — more gun damage, which feeds into action skill damage through specializations.
  • Grave Power — doubles the stack cap on kill skills, making Grave Assault and Grave Fiends much stronger.
  • Keen Mind — more crit chance for specters and Vex, plus scaling skill crits.
  • Mortal Terror — crits have a chance to activate kill skills; minion crit spam keeps every kill skill rolling.

Augments are usually Coven for crit chance on specter spawn, combined with Heirloom as the capstone.

Launcher and gun choices

Launchers define the build’s ceiling. A few stand out:

• Honey Bunches — a premier bossing launcher, used heavily on other ordnance-focused builds for its raw damage.
• Bottled Lightning — huge base damage and rapid ticks that can instantly hit high Bleed stacks if you park the specter right on a boss.
• Atling and Disc Jockey launchers — homing and area control options; weaker on pure single-target damage but strong for mobbing.

Because only one specter can hold your cloned gun at a time with Heirloom, normal guns still matter for general play. Good choices include:

• Katagawa’s Revenge (fire or shock) — wide AOE coverage to help specters with crowd control.
• Complex Root with Jacobs roll — multi-hit, multi-target AOE for clearing packs.
• The Stray — homing bullets make up for specter aim issues.
• High-impact Jacobs shotguns like AC May or Anarchy for strong single-target gun specters.

In practice, you swap between a launcher (for Gastrobate casts and boss phases) and one of these guns for longer mobbing stretches.

Managing Dead Ringer cooldown and specter uptime

Rocket specters live or die on how often you can keep them out, especially the Gastrobate copy that’s holding your launcher. Dead Ringer itself doesn’t get much direct cooldown investment from the tree in this setup, so everything leans on repkits, enhancements, and firmware.

The smoothest loop looks like this:

• Cast Dead Ringer to plant a specter, then immediately use Triple Bypass for healing and cooldown refund.
• Dodge while holding your launcher to trigger Gastrobate and spawn the rocket specter.
• Keep killing with rockets to trigger Mortal Terror and refresh kill skills, while Triple Bypass and Now With Caffeine quietly pull Dead Ringer back up.

Gastrobate’s drawbacks are important to understand: the cloned launcher only lasts 10 seconds, and the skill itself sits on a long cooldown. For pure bossing, that’s acceptable. For long mobbing sessions or drill farming, it becomes tedious.

A “cozy” specter variant: Dark Pact instead of Gastrobate

For players who want minions to do serious damage without depending on a dodge-timed rocket trick every 80 seconds, a variant drops Gastrobate entirely and takes the right-side blue capstone Dark Pact instead.

Key differences:

• No Gastrobate, no cloned launcher: specters just use their own weapons, but you get an additional specter from Dark Pact and can equip two augments.
• Dark Pact + Prismatic Weaponry + Obedient Fiends: specters fire fast, apply multiple status effects, and still lean into Bleed and gun damage for solid DPS.
• Significantly better quality of life: you aren’t punished for dodging at the “wrong” time or for forgetting to hold your launcher.

This version trades top-end boss melt potential for a smoother experience in drills and general mobbing. You still stack green tree damage, run specters, and let minions clear rooms — just without the launcher-copy micromanagement.

Specter status/crit build with Stellium and Teen Witch

Another high-end minion option leans almost entirely on status effects and crits. Specters are still your main damage dealers, but guns and shields are tuned for dots instead of raw impact.

The centerpiece is Malawan Stellium shotguns, especially in shock. Shock Stelliums have some of the highest dot values in the game, and their Beam Tosser alt-fire gives you a single-target beam that stacks shock dots and other statuses extremely fast.

The status/crit setup typically runs:

• Weapons: shock Stellium with Beam Tosser for bossing, plus general-use options like the Baud for mobbing.
• Enhancement: Malawan “Mixologist” (10% damage from the inactive mode’s element) with gun damage and status effect damage rolls.
• Shield: Protein Cell for 40% bonus shock damage that also applies to dots, gun hits, and elemental damage. It passes damage through to health, so it’s paired with strong sustain.
• Class mod: Teen Witch instead of a generic purple mod, massively boosting overshield and self-healing so Protein Cell is actually playable.

With Protein Cell active (triggered by a slam), every instance of damage — including specter shots and dot ticks — gets that 40% shock bonus on top. It’s essentially a universal damage amp for as long as you can keep your shield cycling. If that feels too fragile in mobbing content, players swap back to safer options like Watts for dinner, Super Soldier, or Sparky Shield.

Specialization choices here favor sustain and more skill damage:

• The Best Defense Is — bonus damage while your shield is full, which is almost always thanks to Teen Witch’s overshield loop.
• Now With Caffeine — again, for specter cooldown quality of life.
• Riddle You This and Contamination — more gun damage stacking and guaranteed status effect application from crit chains.

On the trees, this variant stays in blue/green, with strong investment in:

• Prismatic Ichor and Keen Suffering for multi-element dots that can crit.
• Keen Mind for skill damage crits — every specter shot and dot can benefit.
• Mortal Terror and other kill skills to keep the crit loop and kill stacks rolling.

Reaper-focused elemental minion build

Specters are the star in most Dead Ringer builds, but there is a fully viable minion setup that leans into reapers instead. It trades turret play for a more traditional horde of melee minions, tuned around incendiary damage.

This elemental reaper build revolves around:

• Dead Ringer with Reapers and Hellish Harvest: reapers periodically spin in place, hitting a wide area and self-healing based on enemies hit.
• Fire as the main attunement: boosts all those melee swings through burning-focused passives.
• A stable gun suite: elemental Vladof ARs like Wombo Combo and Lucian’s Flank, plus strong Vladof SMGs and shotguns like Rainbow Vomit for ad clear.

Gear choices are tuned to make generic gunplay solid, which then feeds back into minion damage through nodes like Recurrence and specialization gun-damage-to-skill-damage conversions. A Vladof enhancement with effects like Bullet Hose and Box Magazine can add extra bullets and fire rate, again scaling both Vex and her minions indirectly.

Defensively, Super Soldier stands out: when its regular shield is full it grants overshield, fire rate, movement speed, and passive ammo regeneration. That keeps you constantly firing to maintain Recurrence stacks and gives reapers time to work.

On the tree side, the focus looks like this:

• Green: enough points for Grave Sights, Bloodletter, and early Grave Implements. Bleed is present but more as a side dot than the primary kill condition.
• Blue: heavy investment in minion and status nodes:
  • Cold Iron for gun damage (also feeding minions).
  • Portents of Suffering for status effect damage.
  • Grave Fiends for kill skill damage stacks.
  • Cursed Blade and Extra Cursed so melee hits apply curse that reapers then detonate with their own melee attacks.
  • Prismatic Ichor for extra random elemental status effects.
  • Incendiary-focused branch nodes like Burning Attunement and Burnt Offering to push fire damage.

The result is a swarm of reapers that keep curse and multiple elements ticking on everything they touch. You play more aggressively here, moving with your minions, rather than hanging back and planting specters on high ground.

Reaper melee Vex and Groundbreaker abuse

The most extreme “minion” take flips the script: reapers do background damage to charge up Groundbreaker, and Vex herself delivers the finishing blow. It’s still a minion build because those melee clones are doing the heavy lifting between your stabs.

Groundbreaker (from specializations) stores non-melee damage and slam damage; the next melee attack or slam consumes the stored total and deals it as bonus kinetic melee damage. With reapers out, every slash they land is quietly filling Groundbreaker’s tank for you.

Combine that with Reverberations — a Here Comes Trouble melee node that gives Vex and her minions a chance to deal huge additional incendiary melee damage on any melee hit — and your dagger swings can spike into the multi-million range. Reapers stack damage, you cash it out on a boss with one or two hits.

This knife-assassin playstyle uses reapers as mobile aggro magnets. Enemies tunnel on them while you circle behind with a high-damage melee dagger. Skills like Fell Inscriptions for melee and health, Cursed Blade/Extra Cursed for curse synergy, Obedient Fiends, and Ancient Rites all help keep minion damage and durability up, which translates into larger Groundbreaker bursts.

Important nuance: minion command skills like Horoscows (Phase Daggers) and certain melee grenades do not trigger Groundbreaker themselves; they simply help build up the stored damage. You still need to connect an actual melee attack to spend the stored value.

Leveling into a minion Vex: Dead Ringer with specters

For campaign play, Dead Ringer specters are already strong without endgame ordnance tricks. A straightforward leveling setup can carry Vex through the story with very little gear dependency.

One of the cleanest leveling patterns is:

• Start blue tree and take:
  • Cold Iron (5/5) — broad gun damage boost for you and specters.
  • Grave Assault (5/5), Grave Fiends (5/5), Grave Quickening (5/5) — kill skills for fire rate, damage, and action skill cooldown.
  • Blood Sacrifice — triggers kill skills when minions die, giving uptime even on fresh packs.
• Then dip green tree for:
  • Grave Sights (5/5) — crit damage and gun handling.
  • Grave Implements (5/5) — gun damage.
  • Grave Power (3/3) — more kill skill stack cap.

From there, you can move toward Bloodletter and Material Components in green, plus small red tree investments like Hasty Fiends for movement, and backfill blue with Idle Hands for reload speed.

Leveling gear is simple:

• Any kinetic shotgun with high base damage works well, especially paired with a throwing knife that rolls the Penetrator augment (guaranteed crits) or Damage Amp Payload.
• Spread Launcher, Beam Tosser, Knife Launcher, Taser, or shotgun underbarrels on Vladof guns are overtuned; swap between two guns with the same underbarrel to bypass their internal cooldown.
• Look for repkits with 200% amp damage, action skill cooldown rate, lifesteal, or movement speed.

At low levels, Bleed is less impressive without a lot of scaling and crit consistency, so many players skip Bloodletter until they find Penetrator knives or reach endgame gear density.

Across all of these setups, one theme holds: Vex’s minion builds only feel powerful when trees, gear, and playstyle are all pulling in the same direction. Treat specters and reapers as actual equals in your damage budget — with the right skills and ordnance, they’re more than capable of carrying the run while you focus on positioning, cooldowns, and the occasional well-timed stab.