Introduction

So, five years ago, four foolish but powerful mercenaries came to Pandora to find her fabled Vault and claim all the riches inside. Roland the Solider, Lilith the Siren, Mordecai the Hunter, and Brick the… Brick became the first “Vault Hunters” when they opened the Vault and found... heh... the largest and angriest known cephalopod. While missing all the incredibly valuable Eridium! Ha. Anyway, the poor dopes shrugged their shoulders and went their separate ways. Or they would’ve, if that Roland dick didn’t band them together against yours truly.

But we have other problems. Since we dug up that info on the new Vault, someone here leaked it to the common rabble. Now we’ve got all these new Vault Hunters lurking around, and I am not going to let them take this Vault from me! While most of these mercs are easy enough to dispose of with a bullet to the brain pan, four rise above the flotsam. Between their, well, impressive combat skill and irritating survivability, they may even surpass the original Vault Hunters. Which is the last thing I need right now. So, I want you to go out there and take care of them. And remember, if you can’t kill them and don’t at least die trying, I’ll kill you myself. Happy hunting!

- Handsome Jack

Your first skill point is earned at level 5, and another point follows for every level thereafter, so that you’ll have earned 46 points by level 50. The first point is spent unlocking the Action Skill for your character, so only 45 points are freely spendable among skill tree choices. More on gaining and spending skill points to work your way up the skill trees is found in Claptrap’s Guide to Minioning; this section is focused on the characters and skills, specifically.

The Action Skill is the raison d’être of each character, and it’s the starkest and most obvious differentiation between their abilities on the battlefield. You won’t be sparing your Action Skill and holding it in reserve, either, but rather you’ll be using your Action Skill almost every time cooldown is over and it’s ready to go again. Thus, considerations of aesthetics aside, much (or even most) of the decision about which character to play comes down to answering the question: which Action Skill do I want to use? The next question involves how to use it, as each Action Skill can be used for different purposes entirely depending on how skills are arranged.

Skills themselves are the building blocks that differentiate the performance of, say, your Axton, Maya, Salvador, and Zero from the Axtons, Mayas, Salvadors, and Zeros you’ll find amongst your meatworld friends offline and your cyberspace friends online. (Appearances are differentiated by heads and skins, which are earned in various ways detailed toward the end of Claptrap’s Guide to Minioning, and by your equipment, which is detailed in Marcus Munitions Monthly.)

The more skill points you earn, the more pointed your build can become. Early on, when you’re only sitting on single digit skill points and probably won’t have more than two or three skills, with none of them capped, their boosts won’t be obvious. But later on, once you’ve capped some skills and unlocked some one-point-wonder skills that immediately confer a game-changing benefit for only one skill point, you’ll see how both flexible and pointed a build can become.

The introduction of one-point-wonder skills especially means that even the same character can feel like three or more characters in one, depending on how your skills and gear are specced that moment. Don’t hesitate to use Quick Change stations to zero out your spent skill points and respec at a whim—the cost is negligible compared to the convenience and utility of swapping entire builds easily. And if you pick a build well-suited for a given situation so that you’re saved even one likely New-U station visit, then that respec paid for itself in full.