The Path of Most Resistance

You wake up semi-conscious, being attended to by a funny little talking robot. A man named Handsome Jack tried to kill you. You’re not happy about it, and seeing the story through to the end (while picking up some sweet guns and leveling up your character along the way) will keep you well-occupied. Completing Borderlands 2 takes dozens of hours, even during Normal Mode (the first playthrough), and that’s not even counting much of the game’s 100+ optional missions on top of the main story!

Whether storyline-related or optional, missions are obtained a few ways. You will receive many from characters embroiled in the main story, like Claptrap and Sir Hammerlock. Usually, you’ll be tasked with completing some objective; you’ll go do it, then you’ll return to the mission giver for your reward and follow-up missions. Of course, sometimes the arrow of time has other ideas and things won’t go exactly according to plan, but that’s just the story of a Vault Hunter’s life on Pandora. It’s said if you’re flexible, it helps you stay young. Anyway, you’ll also receive missions from bounty boards and from ECHO Recorders located throughout the world. A complete breakdown of story missions is found in our walkthrough, the Crimson Raiders’ “Path of Most Resistance.” Likewise, all optional missions are covered in the second half of that chapter.

Story Missions

From the very beginning, when Claptrap needs you to retrieve a crappy handgun with which to recover his eye, you’ll be tasked with missions. There are story missions, which deal with your servitude under Claptrap, and subsequent events involving the detestable but curiously dashing Handsome Jack and his Hyperion Corporation. Completing story missions will further your progress toward the game’s ending. You’ll also receive rewards in the form of money, experience points, and material inducements like equipment and Eridium.

Optional Missions

Optional missions are abundant. These also offer up rewards, while taking you off the beaten path and further into Pandoran lore, flora, and fauna. Completing optional missions will also build toward Challenge completion and the unlocking of certain Trophies and Achievements. Optional missions are a great way to farm XP and items, and to get to know more of the, shall we say, eccentric characters out and about.

Ignoring missions can be accomplished by pressing in the right stick while a mission’s details are highlighted. This places it in a list that sorts underneath all other lists, so these missions become easy to ignore. You might use this to clean up several trivial missions if you outlevel them. But note that missions you ignore during Normal Mode will still be sorted in the ignored list during a True Vault Hunter Mode continuation, so you’ll need to move them back out to pay attention to them again.

Friends with Benefits

The ideal Borderlands 2 experience involves co-operative play. The world of Pandora has been fleshed out and the story and characters expanded so that the game stands much taller than its predecessor as a single-player experience, but you’ll still get into the wildest and wooliest battles in online co-op, and you’ll watch the lovely ways the skills of the different classes can mingle with the cacophony of varied friendly firearms to really pull loaders and bandits apart in all sorts of beautiful, chaotic ways you simply won’t see all on your lonesome. Enemy health and damage scale up the more players join a co-op game. The XP and loot rewards scale upward, too. You can also trade items with your friends, or duel with them.

For the purposes of an enemy’s base health total and damage output multipliers, there are two classes of foes—peons, which are just any regular enemy, and Badasses, which includes anything with a name that starts with some variation of “Badass.” The Badass grade of enemies also includes bosses, unique named enemies, loot Midgets, and chubby foes. These figures are global multipliers that tweak each enemy’s base health pool and damage output.

Examples from opposite ends of the spectrum to help read these charts: if you’re playing solo during the first playthrough Normal Mode, both peon enemies and Badasses will have 100% of their base health values. But peons will deal 75% of their base damage output to you; Badasses will dish out 85%. On the other hand, when you’re finally playing True Vault Hunter Mode with three co-op friends for four players total, peons will have 175% of their base health—almost twice as much as normal—and deal 145% of their base damage. Meanwhile, Badasses will have eight times more health than their base value and deal over twice as much damage!

Base Enemy Health and Damage—Normal Mode

Base Enemy Health and Damage—True Vault Hunter Mode