A community-discovered Borderlands 4 build turns Rafa into a hands-off damage engine, with his shoulder cannons doing the killing while you barely touch the trigger.

The approach leans on the game’s early meta around ricochet effects and weapon parts, where combining specific manufacturers and elemental setups multiplies on-hit projectiles. In practice, that lets Rafa’s cannons— which inherit traits from the gun he’s holding—blanket encounters while you move and aim.

How the Borderlands 4 Rafa ricochet build works

Ricochet is the core mechanic: when a weapon’s shots bounce, each attached element appears to generate its own additional projectile. With two elements active, every hit spawns multiple follow-ups, compounding damage and status procs across crowded fights.

Rafa’s cannons automatically fire toward where you’re facing, and because they mirror the characteristics of your equipped weapon, stacking ricochet and elemental interactions on the gun scales the cannons too. The result is a setup that can clear mobs while you reposition, reload, or even refrain from shooting altogether.

Best weapon and enhancement for Rafa’s cannons

  • Primary weapon: a dual-element Maliwan “beam tosser” shotgun for high base damage and two simultaneous elements.
  • Enhancement: the passive “Mixologist,” which adds 10% elemental damage from the inactive element on a Maliwan gun—crucially, it also triggers the second element to create more ricochet projectiles.

Because the cannons inherit your weapon’s elemental profile and behavior, this pairing amplifies every bounce into multiple, high-damage hits that spread status effects rapidly.

Rafa skills to increase ricochet and elemental damage

Skill point allocation prioritizes buffing the cannons, ricochet scaling, and elemental uptime. From the Remote Agent (red) tree, players are funneling points into nodes like Deft Hands, Juerga, Instinto, Maestro, El Valiente, Asymmetric Warfare, Errant Spark, Lateral Plinking, Double-Ought Autoshot, Vitriol, Pain Reaction, El Alacrán, and Concentrated Build-Up. That last pick notably grants bonus shock damage while aiming down sights—useful here because aiming still ramps the cannons even if you never fire a shot.

From the This Year’s Gimmick (green) tree, Midnight Oil is the key grab to stack corrosive damage, rounding out elemental coverage when your weapon and enhancement are focused on other types.

In the field, this configuration functions like an “almost AFK” build: you strafe, aim, and let the cannons and ricochets shred rooms. The synergy is strongest in dense encounters where extra projectiles can bounce repeatedly, but it also scales into bosses thanks to high base damage and layered status effects. Notably, reports suggest the build remains effective without deep min-maxing, making it accessible early in the endgame loop.

Borderlands launches are often defined by fast-emerging “broken” setups; if ricochet continues to dominate the meta, expect Rafa’s cannon-centric loadouts to remain a go-to path for efficient clears.