Challenges & Badass Tokens

Missions aren’t the only in-game goals to accomplish, and Achievements and Trophies aren’t the only system-wide accolades. There are dozens and dozens of smaller goals related to all sorts of things—exploration, killing particular targets, using particular guns, inflicting different types of damage, and even just exploring environmental curiosities. Completing Challenges increases your Badass Rank, which is a profile-wide measurement of your Borderlands 2 badassery across all your playthroughs and characters. Increasing Badass Rank grants Badass Tokens, which you can redeem for permanent stat bonuses to 13 different categories! Again, the effects are profile-wide, applying automatically to every character. Keep that in mind when assigning Badass Tokens, which cannot be unspent or taken back—what’s good for the goose won’t hurt the gander… but it might not help, either.

Discovering Cult of the Vault symbol hidden in Claptrap’s Place is the first Challenge you can complete.

There is no limit—repeat, no limit—on the level of Badass Rank you can attain. Thus, there’s no limit on the amount of Badass Tokens you can accrue, either. No, really. The catch is two-fold: first, the stat increases granted each time you dump another Badass Token into a particular category diminish as you assign more and more Tokens to the same thing, and second, the Challenges become harder to complete as you ascend into the higher tiers for each one.

So, if Badass Rank and Tokens are potentially infinite, how do you keep earning them if you’ve actually cleared every Challenge?

Challenges are character-specific.

Badass Rank and Tokens and the bonuses they confer are profile-wide.

Even if you cap Challenges for one character, Badass Rank can still be accrued on other characters.

So every character you make on the same profile contributes to the whole. Of course, your Badass Rank will stay the same between characters, so clearing dozens of easy Challenges all over again will contribute to Badass Rank. But don’t expect a ton of new Tokens very quickly just because you’re squaring away easy Challenges over and over. More and more Challenges are required each time to raise Badass Rank to higher and higher heights, but the bonuses you can accrue are potentially endless!

Each time you spend a Badass Token, only five out of 14 specific stat categories are available for boosting. With a particular Token, you can’t opt not to spend it just because none of the five available stat categories interests you—you’ll have to pick one, as the categories won’t re-roll just because you decide not to spend a Token to buff one right then. This forces you to diversify your Badass Token bonuses to some degree, as you won’t be able to only stack Tokens into one or two preferred categories. The smallest number you can really focus on, at least for a while, is about eight or nine of the categories. However, if you slowly work at favoring one over all others for a long, long while, eventually it starts to show up more often in the random list of five, enabling you to focus a lot more. But you won’t achieve that level of Token exclusivity for a long time.

Badass Rank Required for Badass Tokens, up to 500 Tokens

Rate of Diminishing Badass Token Returns

Fun fact: it takes 464 Tokens in the same stat for a total bonus of 100%, doubling your base ability in an area.