Borderlands 3 Amara build guide: Best Siren builds
The best builds for Phasegrasp, Phasecast, and Phaseslam
Amara the Siren is the only playable Siren in Borderlands 3, and with her trio of explosive and spectacular powers, she certainly lives up to the Sirens' fearsome reputation.
In this Borderlands 3 Amara build guide, we've laid out the top-tier builds that you can use in the base game to get the most out of this no-nonsense powerhouse: one for Phasecast, one for Phaseslam, and one for Phasegrasp.
On this page:
- Phasecast & Gun Damage Amara build
- Phaseslam & Melee Damage/Close Range Amara build
- Phasegrasp & Crowd Control Amara build
Borderlands 3 Amara build guide
With an Amara build, as with the other Borderlands 3 characters, there's a lot of scope for customisation. With each of her three main skill trees you can push for different things.
An extra skill tree is also available in the Ultimate Edition, but for this guide we'll focus on creating the best Amara builds utilising the following skill trees found in the base game:
- Mystical Assault focuses on maintaining consistent high damage throughout a fight. Amara builds that use this tree often rely on building stacks of Rush to further augment her Action Skill and Gun damage.
- Fist of the Elements is all about status effects and elemental damage. Amara builds focusing on FotE will have great crowd-control and elemental strength.
- Brawl is for punching things really hard. Close-range prowess and very high melee damage are the benefits of upgrading the Brawl skill tree.
The below builds each focus on a single skill tree and Action Skill (Phasecast, Phasegrasp, or Phaseslam) - and therefore a different playstyle. As well as providing a detailed walkthrough of each build, I've also included a cheat sheet of the skill trees and skills acquired, as well as stars to indicate which skills would be particularly good to augment with Class Mods.
If you need a bit of a primer on the Borderlands 3 characters, how classes work, that sort of thing - look no further than our Borderlands 3 characters & skill trees guide. If not, let's skip right ahead to the Amara builds!
Phasecast & Gun Damage (Borderlands 3 Amara build)
- Primary Skill Tree: Mystical Assault
- Build Focus: High Gun Damage & Action Skill Damage; Versatile Playstyle
- Best Skills for Class Mods: Wrath (Highly Recommended), Restless, From Rest, Laid Bare
This Phasecast/Mystical Assault-centric Amara build is designed to strike a balance between Gun, Elemental, and Action Skill damage. Many Amara players will gravitate towards a very strong focus on melee and close range prowess (and we'll cover that with our next build), but this build provides a level of versatility that allows you to play at whatever range you want, with whatever guns you want.
You can start your journey by investing in the Brawl skill Personal Space, just to give you some damage potential early on - but then you'll want to go hard on building up your blue skills. Tier 4 of Mystical Assault is the icing on the cake, because all three skills (particularly Wrath) are sublime for upping your damage potential (even more so if you overcharge them with a good class mod!).
After completing Tier 4 of Mystical Assault (and picking up the absolutely fantastic Reverberation Action Skill), you should head back to Fist of the Elements and build that up with Infusion and Tempest, until you unlock Allure. Then head back and finish off the Mystical Assault tree by unlocking Avatar.
Hopefully now you can see the synergy we're putting together. An extremely powerful Phasecast which increases in damage the more enemies you hit; it creates a singularity which pulls enemies closer; and once you have Avatar, the blue skill tree capstone, you can use your Phasecast twice in quick succession to absolutely obliterate everyone caught in the singularity. And then you've got some absolutely diabolical gun damage with which to finish off those who somehow weren't disintegrated by your Sirenly powers.
Phaseslam & Melee Damage (Borderlands 3 Amara build)
- Primary Skill Tree: Brawl
- Build Focus: Extreme Close Range/Melee Damage; High Survivability
- Best Skills for Class Mods: Personal Space (Highly Recommended), Jab Cross (Highly Recommended), Samsara, Tempest
Okay, okay, I hear ya. It's Amara. Amara likes to punch things. And so do you. Well then, this build is most certainly for you.
It's pretty easy to see which skill tree you'll want to invest in for a close-range Amara build: Brawl covers everything from extra gun damage based on your proximity to an enemy to just straight up doubling your melee damage. Your first port of call is most definitely Personal Space, which you should level up to max before you move onto anything else. After that you can start to pick from the skills to either side (Root To Rise and Clarity) to improve your tankiness, because you'll need it if you're always dashing straight towards the enemy.
Keep upgrading through Brawl, and pick up the Revelation Action Skill Effect/Augment once you've unlocked it, because that'll give your Phaseslam a nice damage boost thanks to its Nova effect. Vigor we're not so worried about, but upgrade pretty much everything else in the tree to maximum until you reach the Blitz capstone, which is where you really start to become overpowered (pfft, as if you weren't already).
Once you're satisfied with your Brawl tree, it's time to round off your build with a few pickups from the orange tree: Anima and Tempest will give you greater power with elemental damage and status effects, while Illuminated Fist will up your melee damage even higher and convert it to your Action Skill element. Punchy punchy.
This is an extraordinarily powerful Amara build for getting up close and personal, and eviscerating enemies with your bare hands. It's a good build whichever element you're using, but Shock is particularly effective thanks to the extra buff given to it by Tempest.
Phasegrasp & Crowd Control (Borderlands 3 Amara build)
- Primary Skill Tree: Fist of the Elements
- Build Focus: Huge CC potential; Phasegrasp spam; fantastic team build
- Best Skills for Class Mods: Indiscriminate (Highly Recommended), Wrath (Highly Recommended), Tempest, Conflux, Transcend
Phasegrasp is probably the lesser used of Amara's three Action Skills. Phaseslam and Phasecast are much flashier and their immediate and high damage potential makes them a little more enticing. But with this CC-centric Amara build, you're likely to have more fun with Phasegrasp than any of them.
This time we're putting absolutely nothing into Brawl, because we want to get fairly far down both the other skill trees. Start along Fist of the Elements with Infusion and Tempest (and the Soulfire perk to boot), which will give you a very nice damage boost for the early game. After this you'll want to beeline straight to the fourth row of Fist of the Elements, where you'll pick up both Indiscriminate and the Ties That Bind Action Skill.
This is central to our plan with this Amara build. The idea is that you target the biggest and most dangerous enemy in a group, and Phasegrasp them, before blitzing them with your gun(s) until both they and everyone around them is nothing but a collective pile of vaguely sorrowful ash and bones. Because with these two pickups of Indiscriminate and Ties That Bind, you'll be dealing a tonne of damage to everyone else while you're peppering the enemy held in your grasp.
After this core is established, you basically just want to up your damage potential (both elemental and straight up gun damage), with pickups such as Conflux and Anima in the orange tree, and Transcend and Wrath in the blue tree. By upgrading the Mystical Assault tree you can also unlock the Stillness of Mind augment, which will add further crowd-control magnificence to the build by phaselocking all those near the enemy you Phasegrasp.
This is a flashy and enormously enjoyable Amara build that allows you to feel truly godlike as you eviscerate whole groups of enemies at once. You'll need to back it up with some decent weaponry (particularly fast-firing weapons such as SMGs and Assault Rifles), but if you're looking for a playstyle for Amara that's a little more methodical and tactical than "leap in and punch everything", or a great build to use for team play with your friends, then it doesn't get much better than this.
And with that, we'll conclude our Borderlands 3 Amara build guide. Hopefully one of the above builds suits your playstyle down to a T - and if not, you'll at least have gained a better idea of how to go about creating your own unique build for Amara the Siren.
If you need more help with Gearbox's looter shooter, then we've got you covered. Check out our pages on the Borderlands 3 Shift Codes, the game's Legendary weapons and our weapons guide. We've also got other build guides for FL4K, Moze and Zane.