Blood Soaked Shields

Blood Soaked Shields
Character	Gaige
Type	Passive Skill
Tier	Two
Maximum Points	Five
Skill Tree	Ordered Chaos
Minimum Level	Eleven
Effect	Killing an enemy immediately restores a portion of your Shields, but you lose a portion of your current Health.
Game	Borderlands 2

Blood Soaked Shields is one of Gaige's Tier Two Ordered Chaos skills, which causes her to forfeit a sliver of health to recharge her shields whenever she kills an enemy.

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Shield Restoration	+20%	+40%	+60%	+80%	+100%
Health Loss	-1%	-2%	-3%	-4%	-5%

^{There are no class mods that boost this skill beyond 5 levels.}

Effect

With one point in this skill, killing an enemy will immediately recharge 20% of Gaige's shields, but subtract 1% of her current health in the process. Even if Gaige's shields are full this effect does trigger, and Gaige will lose a percentage of her current health.

While the amount of boost given to the shield is based on the shield's maximum capacity, the amount subtracted from Gaige's health is not based on her maximum health, but her current health. This means the numerical amount of health lost becomes smaller as Gaige takes health damage, effectively preventing health loss past a certain (very low) level.

Usage

This ability works well with Amp shields with only 1-2 points invested, allowing Gaige to rapidly fire amped shots so long as she is killing with each one. Combined with Interspersed Outburst it can make a powerful sniping build. Alternately, at level 5, it works well with a close-combat build using a nova shield. Gaige will constantly be firing off a nova, getting a kill, losing her shield, and repeating. This is only truly effective in a large swarm and under heavy fire.

Cooking Up Trouble is helpful as it can regenerate the lost health; however, investing in the Ordered Chaos tree also means Gaige loses the ability to reload at will and may have to deliberately expend the current magazine, trigger Discord, or forfeit all anarchy stacks to start regenerating health.

Another way to eliminate the downside of this skill is through the use of Captain Blade's Otto Idol. This relic restores more health than lost with level 5 Blood Soaked Shields. However, it also has the side effect of significantly reducing Gaige's second wind duration.

Notes

• Deathtrap's kills do not trigger Blood Soaked Shields.
• When Gaige is slagged, the health cost triggered by Blood Soaked Shields is doubled in Normal and True Vault Hunter Mode or tripled in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode.