Longevity on Pandora — Borderlands 2 Game of the Year eGuide

Shields

If you can’t manage to dodge attacks, the first buffer between your poor fragile flesh and the claws, fangs, and bullets of the locals is your shield. Shields take damage before it saps into the flesh-and-blood of your health pool, and they even soak up some of the damage from burning or corrosive sources entirely. Note that, just like enemy shields, your own shields are VERY vulnerable to Shock attacks. Those blue, sparking projectiles hurtling at you from a flying surveyor or an ION Loader or an electric weapon-wielding nomad are not just for show. They’ll knock your shield off just about instantly, leaving you totally vulnerable and exposed to damage from all sources. And excess damage against a depleted shield bleeds over into health damage immediately.

Every shield shares the stats of capacity, shield recharge delay, and shield recharge rate. Capacity dictates the most damage-absorbing energy the shield can hold at once. Recharge delay shows how long you’ll have to avoid damage for a diminished shield to begin recharging to full (a lower number is better), and recharge rate indicates how fast that recharging process will be (a higher number is better). Beyond these standard parameters, shields from different manufacturers have their own specific properties that make one or the other more appealing to you. Some of these will alter the look of the shield’s bar on the HUD to help depict the effects. Just like with guns, there are seemingly countless different shields you’ll discover, and picking the type you carry and use boils down to your preference, your character’s build, and the needs of the moment. A more complete breakdown of shield types is available in the Marcus Munitions Monthly section of this book.

It’s Best to be Flexible

Note

Along with Pangolin, one of the only two companies on Pandora that might be rightly called pacifist, Anshin focuses on shields that adapt to the elements in the area. Getting splashed with Fire from a Badass Pyre Thresher? Having Corrosive goop barfed onto you by a Goliath? Anshin’s Chimera-like shields can adapt to the situation and resist much of the damage.

Shield’s Log, Supplemental

Base shield performance can be expanded beyond the specifics of your equipped shield. Every character has skills that boost some of shield capacity, recharge delay, and recharge rate. You can also prioritize Badass Tokens earned by completing Challenges to spend on increasing those stats in particular. You’ll find pieces of equipment besides shields themselves that also contribute to shield performance—some Relics and class mods are accompanied by shield-boosting bonuses.

Or, you might not even focus too much on boosting shield performance. Depending on your style of play and potential support from co-op teammates, you might take an entirely different approach, building a character based around getting in the thick of it up close and having your shield shattered so you earn bonus Bandit-made shield Roid damage, for instance. Many skills also increase capabilities when shields are depleted.

Shield’s Log, Supplemental

Health

Your health is displayed in the bottom-left corner of the screen as a red bar and is determined primarily by the level of your character. Health can be further increased by using Badass Tokens to boost health capacity, or by purchasing certain health-boosting skills. As with shields, some class mods and Relics also buff up health.

Damage taken when shields are down injures health. If a shield is “overkilled,” that damage bleeds into health immediately… no free rides. Your priority when shields are down and you’re taking health damage should be getting out of harm’s way and giving your shield time for recharge delay to end, so the shield builds back up and you have a margin for error again. (Unless you’ve crafted some kind of build that involves rocking a depleted shield on purpose, in which case godspeed, brave warrior!) Damage taken to health doesn’t recharge naturally like shield energy. Instead, you must replenish health damage by finding hypodermic Health Now! medicine. Like ammo supplies, you may find these anywhere: off killed enemies, in loot piles or in containers, and in vending machines.

If a Health Now! hypo is dropped during a heated battle, you can simply run over it to replenish health if needed. These can otherwise be purchased at any Zed’s Meds vending machine. Don’t even ask if they provide clean transfusions; you probably won’t survive long enough on Pandora for this to become an issue.

A Pandoran Revival: Co-operative Triage

Co-op partners can try to revive you during a downed state. If there are relatively weak enemies nearby, the team might be better served just letting them live so downed members can score easy Second Winds without an assist. At the very least, in the middle of a gunfight, teammates can make this kind of decision on the fly, like if someone happens to be downed near something like a larval varkid.

Against more threatening and tougher groups of enemies, and against Badasses and bosses, you’ll need more coordination. If nasty enemies totally surround a dying ally, the foes all around them can be distracted or even relocated against their will in a number of ways. Singularity grenades suck all nearby enemies toward ground zero, which can be useful to clear a safe path to try to revive a friend. Maya’s Phaselock Action Skill with her gamechanging Converge skill on top of it can achieve the same effect. (This can be useful even if Maya has the Res skill that allows Phaselock itself to raise allies; too many enemies around an ailing friend might make it impossible to accurately target them so Phaselock hits friend rather than foe.) Zero’s Deception hologram and Axton’s Sabre Turret serve as great distractions to occupy enemy attention and enable safe revivifications; Salvador can accomplish the same thing with his own body through Gunzerking, especially in his Brawn tree.

There are also other ways to replenish health. Every character has a bit of a “survivability path” for skill assignment that somehow maximizes possible health regeneration (and likely health capacity and shield performance, too). Some Relics and class mods can increase health regeneration for your character or even your entire team. Everyone can equip Transfusion grenades, which suck health back from enemies caught in the blast; some rare guns feature a health-sapping effect, as well. And Maya can be a combat medic for an entire team through her Harmony skill tree.

Fight For Your Life

Your shield is down, your health is rapidly diminishing. Get health knocked all the way to zero, and you’ll fall to your knees, rattled at death’s doorstep. For a brief period of time, you’ll be stuck in a state called Fight For Your Life. This can also be called a “downed” state. While downed, movement speed becomes a literal crawl, aiming down weapon sights isn’t possible, and Action Skills cannot be activated. But there are exceptions—for example, Salvador can use his Action Skill if he has the Down Not Out skill, and Krieg can move freely and throw dynamite with his Light the Fuse skill.

Score a kill during Fight For Your Life, and you’ll rise back to your feet with Second Wind, rejuvenated by this brush with the end. Co-op partners can also rush to your side and revive you during Fight For Your Life; Maya equipped with the Res skill can use Phaselock to instantly revive downed allies remotely.

If the Fight For Your Life timer ticks all the way down before a teammate can revive you or before you can score a kill that activates Second Wind, then you’ll be dead. A shame, so young. Your body will be discorporated, and a new body will be digistructed at the most recent Hyperion New-U station you’ve passed nearby in the current area. For the humble feat of bringing you back from the dead, Hyperion will garnish about a tenth of your total funds. That might add up to a lot of money, but it’s a lot better than being dead, so don’t complain too much.

Second Wind

If you get downed near any kind of plentiful weak enemies, like rakk or skag pups, it should be easy to score Second Wind—just ignore anything nastier (which probably includes whatever tore off the last of your health), and gun down the poorest peon.

If you’ve started to burn, corrode, or shock a weak enemy, their exposure to an element counts as your Second Wind kill. So, if you’re playing as Maya and sporting skills that afflict the whole battlefield with damage over time effects, like Flicker and Helios and Cloud Kill and so on, make an effort to Phaselock a group of baddies and spray gunfire into as many foes as possible if your health is about to be totally drained. Some low-health loader you don’t even realize you’ve corroded might be the key to getting back on your feet. Similarly, when you’re playing as Axton and the Sabre Turret is ready for deployment, absolutely get that thing out there, if you realize you’re about to be downed—the turret’s kills will count for Axton, but he can’t deploy it once he’s already stuck in Fight For Your Life!

You’ll eventually be able to equip four weapons at once, so you can keep a gun equipped specifically for Second Wind use. Keep in mind you won’t have to worry about splash damage from your own explosives, so you can do something on purpose that would normally be foolish, like swap to a rocket launcher and detonate it into a peon’s skull at point-blank range. With aiming down sights off limits as your character uses one arm just to keep from collapsing, weapons like the Dahl line will be way less than ideal. However, other weapons help surmount this disadvantage, like Bandit weapons with deep magazines and Hyperion weapons with stabilization under continued fire. And shotguns can obviously be good in downed situations as long as the enemies aren’t too far away, since with no other weapon type does it make less of a difference whether you can iron sight or not.

Between your guns and your skill distribution, you can make pretty solid strategies for scoring Second Wind consistently, so you can play aggressively and skirt the edge all the time. Skills such as Maya’s Immolate, Axton’s Do or Die and his Last Ditch Effort, and Salvador’s Down Not Out boost fighting prowess while downed, making it much easier to score the kill needed to rise up with Second Wind. Beware that having your health knocked back to zero again too soon after Second Wind results in a shorter Fight For Your Life period before death. Keep getting Second Wind and knocked down repeatedly, and the Fight For Your Life timer will become so brief it will be impossible to get a kill in time to avoid death.