One of Borderlands 4‘s most overpowered weapons, if not the most OP, is a simple Throwing Knife with a Penetrator augment. It boosts your chance of critical hits and makes it easy to melt bosses in the process. Gearbox Entertainment has been trying to nerf the player-favorite “crit knife” for weeks but it keeps messing up, and now it’s back with a vengeance.
Back when the game launched, the Penetrator augment increased your crit chance to 100 percent for five seconds. With the right loadout, that was more than enough time to completely deplete even some of the biggest enemy health pools. Here it is in action:
Lmao crit knife absolutely needs to be nerfed pic.twitter.com/gXxYoZjSfE
— Nick (@TheOneSoVile) October 13, 2025
So the developers committed to nerfing the crit knife to bring some semblance of balance back to the meta, or at least spice it up a bunch. This balance patch was due out in early October but got delayed a couple of times. When it finally arrived via the October 23 update, the crit knife was reworked to provide only a 30-percent increase in critical hit chance for the duration of the buff. But that’s not exactly how it worked in practice.
ATTENTION BORDERLANDS GAMERS!
The new crit knife sets your crit chance to a target at 30%, it DOES NOT ADD 30% Crit Chance. Meaning if you have above 30% crit chance throwing it will hurt your damage.
Chatter mentioned @Lazy_Data figured this out and I just tested to confirm. pic.twitter.com/cAnElpK3Gl— Moxsy (@MoxsyOG) October 24, 2025
Instead, Borderlands 4 players quickly realized that instead of giving them an additional 30 percent crit chance, the Penetrator Augment was setting a flat rate of 30 percent crit chance for all attacks during the five-second timeframe. That meant that if you started with a higher crit chance for whatever reason, using the new crit knife would actually bring it down. This took the Throwing Knife from good but not great to actively bad. So Gearbox pushed out another update to make it work as intended.
100% CRIT KNIFE IS BACK!
Yeah you just throw it 3 times now lmao and get 90%. a 4th to go over or just have any other crit chance.
Silly but yeah. lmao. This damn knife dude. pic.twitter.com/R2d8yI3TZT
— LazyData (@Lazy_Data) October 30, 2025
Except that the new patch added an entirely new bug. Now, the Penetrator Augment does give players an additional 30 percent crit chance, but even more importantly it actually stacks the crit chance with other uses of the knife. That means you can still get up to a maximum of 90 percent crit chance with it during that five-second window. A multi-week-long nerf dance has effectively concluded with the dreaded crit knife meta back in action and nearly as good as it was at the beginning of October.
It seems all but guaranteed at this point that Gearbox will patch this bug out in the days ahead. It remains to be seen, though, whether that arrives via a hotfix sometime this weekend or is held until the next weekly update on November 7. It seems fans of the crit knife are getting one last unexpected treat this Halloween.
