Gunplay on Pandora — Borderlands 2 Game of the Year eGuide

Most of your interaction with the natives of Pandora involves exchanging gunfire. That’s their loss—you’re probably a very nice person, so long as others don’t approach you by snarling and opening fire. But that’s what most people (and things) here are going to do, so you’ll need to be comfortable with munitions.

Each gun you receive has its accuracy stat on the item card, and of course the higher the number, the better it is for marksmanship, but that number doesn’t tell the full story. This figure indicates how likely the gun is to fire dead center, but it doesn’t reveal how the gun’s aim and spread are affected by the gun’s recoil. It also doesn’t account for the stability of the weapon, which is expressed as the natural, uneven sway you’ll experience just as a function of being a person holding an object and pointing it at other objects. Weapons may have unusual ammo types or behaviors that aren’t expressed on the weapon card, and pieces from different manufacturers handle differently, anyway.

Accuracy isn’t the be-all, end-all, and you might find that some gun types, or even certain gun types from only certain manufacturers, handle the way you feel like a weapon should handle for you to be happy with it, regardless of what the accuracy stats say. And higher accuracy isn’t even always necessarily better. Against swarms of wildlife scampering and swarming at close range all around you, like varkids or skags, accuracy will be the last thing on your mind.

If you fire without aiming down sights, the weapon will be hip-fired, and accuracy won’t be as good as it could be. Most weapons really won’t be viable when they’re outside of close or mid range and simply hip-fired. If a weapon happens to have an exceptionally tight reticle without zooming in, then perhaps it’s still viable, but apart from Hyperion weaponry, most guns require you to zoom for distance work. To draw a tighter bead on targets, you can aim down the sights of your current weapon. This improves accuracy greatly, and depending on the optics on your current gun, this may enable a helpful zoom view.

Accuracy is expressed visually via the cone of fire—a four-point reticle in the center of the screen that blooms or shrinks to show how stable the current weapon is handling. It expands while you’re firing or sprinting, which represents a decrease in the accuracy of the weapon in hand. When at rest, the cone of fire shrinks to a minimum width, which is finer or broader depending on the gun. Weapons with a particularly tight minimum cone of fire make good hip-fire pieces. When aiming carefully, aim down the sights. This shrinks the cone of fire down to the center of the screen right away, even while jumping. The recoil generated by repeated fire still means you’ll want to fire mostly in controlled bursts even while zooming in, unless the weapon in hand is extraordinarily stable. Take the extra time to find an aiming sensitivity setting you’re really comfortable with, then use a little discipline and aim carefully for critical areas!

Dealing All the Damages

So, where should you choose to aim? Well, you can just aim ambivalently in the general direction of whatever beast is drooling on approach, and some wild weapons even force that tactic, but if you’re toting precision hardware or a scope or both and have a little spare time to aim, you should go for Critical Hits.

Different types of enemies have different extra-vulnerable areas. Against flesh-and-blood humanoids, it’s naturally the noggin, so shoot those troops in the head. Other creatures have squishy heads, even if they’re small targets relative to the size of the creature, like with skags and bullymongs. But against loaders, their weak points are the red sensor “eyes” and the joints where their robotic limbs connect to their torso—there’s not really a vulnerable “head” to speak of. And some creatures, like spiderants and varkids, have their weakest areas around their tails or hindquarters, so they’ll seek to wall off access to their backsides with their sturdier fronts.

Apart from going for Critical Hits, you can take other measures to maximize damage. The new Eridium-derived Slag element, when applied to enemies, doubles all damage they receive from non-Slag weapons. This makes even damage from standard ammunition heavy, especially Critical Hits. Fire, Shock, and Corrosive weapons each have types of enemies where one will fare better than the others, pressing your advantage further if you arm correctly. And of course, every character has skills that give a straight-up increase in particular types of damage, like guns, melee, grenades, certain elements, and so on. And some skills between characters work beautifully together—Maya’s Reaper skill increases her damage against enemies with more than half health, while Zero’s Killing Blow skill radically ramps up his melee damage against low-health foes. Maya softens them up, and Zero finishes them off.

Dangerous Methods

In addition to shooting, you can also perform melee attacks up close. Each character’s signature move inflicts identical damage as a baseline (not counting Krieg’s Buzz Axe Rampage action skill), but Zero’s melee attack is the fastest by a hair and also hits the widest horizontal swath—the melee swings of other characters and of bayonetted guns require more precision. Krieg also boasts a Hellfire Halitosis melee override. Melee damage can be increased a few ways. Roid shields grant a bonus to melee damage as long as your shields are depleted. Guns accessorized with bayonets lend a new melee animation and increased damage. And there are skills, class mods, and Relics that further boost melee prowess. In particular (and far above other characters), with Zero, you can stack melee-centric skills in the Bloodshed tree to slash up close better than anyone. (Of course, you can also stack into Zero’s Sniping tree and make him the best long-range gunner as an alternative, but that’s beside the point.)

Maya with her Scorn capstone and Salvador with his Fistful of Hurt gamechanger can also develop above-and-beyond melee capabilities, if you desire.

You can also equip grenades, and you should use them liberally. (Just don’t kill yourself with them; you cannot friendly fire your friends, but you can friendly fire yourself.) You’ll pick more up all the time, especially if you pop open every container you can. And they are great supplements, shoring up gaps in your elemental game and giving you something to toss to help soften the enemy up before you unload with your main weapon. Grenade strength is primarily based on your level and the grenade’s listed damage and residual effects. But like the damage of melee and guns, grenade damage can be increased through particular skills and pieces of equipment. You can purchase Storage Deck Upgrades to get space for more grenades at the Black Market. It’ll cost you Eridium, but it’s well worth it to have more pineapples to toss. Grenades are almost as varied as guns. The Marcus Munitions Monthly section of this book spells out the types of grenades you’ll find.

Axton’s grenade capacity and strength can be increased by skills, and Salvador can gain the ability to throw two grenades for the price of one while Gunzerking. Maya’s Phaselock can be thought of as a sort of customizable Singularity grenade that you get to fire two or three times per minute on top of the grenade mod you’ll be sporting!

Maliwan-Tested, Mother Approved

Humanity at large has access to standard kinetic ammunition and explosive rounds, both at the lowest and highest levels of quality and technology. But the research and development of the Maliwan Corporation and the excavation of ancient Eridian tech and materials spearheaded primarily by Dahl have allowed the development of mass-market weapons that spew bullets imbued with special powers. (The Marcus Munitions Monthly chapter has even more details on elemental damage properties and status effects.) The short version breakdown is that you’ll make things much easier on yourself by paying careful attention to elemental affinities, and it becomes more or less required against the toughest monsters. During True Vault Hunter Mode, monster weaknesses and resistances become absolutely critical.

Elemental rounds have a chance to trigger their status effect. Once an enemy is afflicted, they’ll take damage over a period of time. An enemy can have every status effect draining them at once, with Slag on top of it!

The numbers you see in the following table are multipliers, which show you what potential of damage you’ll receive if you shoot specific surfaces with certain gun types. A couple important examples: if you shoot a shielded enemy with Fire or Corrosive rounds during your initial playthrough, the shields will take only 75% of the damage your weapon can output. Do the same thing during True Vault Hunter Mode, and you’ll deal only 40% of your damage potential! On the other hand, using a Shock weapon against shields during your first playthrough will deal double your base damage, and during True Vault Hunter Mode, it’s even more than that!

All status effects can be applied to YOU as well, so watch out! Getting Slagged or having your shield knocked off unexpectedly by a Shock attack is very bad news.

The game is designed at its core to balance itself around your path and your level. If you find yourself feeling totally overmatched in a given situation, and it seems like particular enemies are just too tough to kill, the first thing you should check is if you’re matching elements up properly to ease your battles, rather than inadvertently making them harder than they should be.

Elemental Damage Multipliers

Damage Type	Impact Flesh (Normal Mode)	Impact Armor (Normal Mode)	Impact Shield (Normal Mode)	Impact Flesh (True Vault Hunter Mode)	Impact Armor (True Vault Hunter Mode)	Impact Shield (True Vault Hunter Mode)	Slag Bonus (both playthroughs)
Standard ammo	1	1	1	1	1	1	2
Explosive	1	1	0.8	1	1	0.8	2
Fire	1.5	0.75	0.75	1.75	0.4	0.4	2
Shock	1	1	2	1	1	2.5	2
Corrosive	0.9	1.5	0.75	0.6	1.75	0.4	2
Slag	1	1	1	1	1	1	1

Reloading Tediore

One does not reload a Tediore weapon; the spent weapon is instead tossed forward like a grenade, and a fully loaded, identical weapon is digistructed in hand as the castoff weapon explodes. Tediore weapons become explosives when they’re done being firearms. The damage dealt by a reload-thrown Tediore weapon is determined by the number of rounds left in the magazine at the time of reloading, plus one round’s worth of damage for the weapon body itself; a Tediore that’s completely depleted of bullets before being thrown will explode and deal the damage of about one more bullet, while firing a single round out of a full mag and THEN reload-throwing the nearly full Tediore will deal about the same damage as an entire magazine at once!

Tediore weapons require more reloading discipline than other guns. You won’t want to reload out of habit when you happen to use only some of a magazine in a gunfight, as most FPS games have trained gamers to do over the years. Reloading randomly will result in you tossing useless exploding Tediore weapons at nothing, wasting ammo in the process and perhaps even putting yourself in extreme and unnecessary danger. A tossed Tediore explodes and potentially deals splash damage to your character, either directly or by touching off an unexpected chain reaction of nearby exploding barrels or canisters. You must take great care reloading Tediore guns during breaks in combat, since there’s no way to reload without first tossing forward an exploding gun. And you won’t be able to simply fire a single shot and then immediately reload for a very powerful explosion over and over for very long, as all remaining rounds in the magazine are expended. You’ll blow through your ammo reserve very quickly this way.

If you accidentally trigger a Tediore reload in a pinch and want to forestall it, perform melee attacks over and over again to keep interrupting the weapon throw animation! You won’t actually discard the gun until you stop mashing on the melee button or key.

Don’t Retreat, etc.

You’ll inevitably run out of ammunition in your current magazine while dumping outlandish firepower into the beasts of Pandora. When a mag runs dry, the character you control will automatically reload the weapon. If you wish to reload before every round is expended from the magazine, press the reload button or key. This doesn’t interfere with your character’s movement. So if you’re in a tight spot and low on ammo, there’s nothing stopping you from sprinting away from enemies while reloading! He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day, as they used to say back in the old Hyperion Claptrap factory.

Advanced Reloading Tactics:

Pressing the reload button sends your character into their reloading animation for the current weapon. The animation depends on the gun, but because almost all of them have a magazine of some sort to eject and replace and then a primer to cock or slide to rack, animations are relatively similar. You cannot fire while the reloading animation is underway, although you can do certain other things. Sprinting, ducking, and jumping can be accomplished while reloading without interrupting the animation. Using an Action Skill, swapping weapons, throwing a grenade, or using a melee attack while reloading WILL interrupt the reloading animation, however. With good timing and familiarity with your current arsenal, you can use this on purpose to cut short your reloading animation and get back to firing faster.

What you’re looking for is just the ammo counter ticking over to full in the bottom-right corner of the screen; once your current magazine shows full ammo, interrupting the remaining reload animation, however you do so, doesn’t matter. For most weapons, this means you just have to wait for the new magazine to be firmly seated into the weapon—but you usually DO NOT have to wait for the slide to be racked or whatever! The most practical way to use reload interruption to your advantage is to simply press the melee button as soon as the fresh magazine registers. If you’re in the thick of things in a scrum of enemies, then this melee strike is gravy before you get right back to your regularly scheduled bullet programming. If no enemy is nearby, that’s fine—you’ll still be ready to aim down the sights and open up on adversaries at range more quickly than if you’d merely let the reloading animation play out!

You can also swap weapons just after the ammo ticks to full, though this doesn’t give you a leg up on speed; it can just assure that whenever you cycle back to the appropriate weapon, you aren’t re-equipping an unloaded piece.

This reload trick is of course less useful for weapons with naturally quick reload speeds, or after you’ve invested skill points and Badass Tokens into a build tailored to increase reload speed, anyway.