Systems: All of Them
Original Release Date: September 18, 2012
This post will be a lot like my article for Diablo because the Borderlands franchise is essentially a first-person Diablo with guns and like Diablo, all anyone who has ever beaten this game will want to know is my character build and my loadout going into the battle with The Warrior.
But before we get there, let us do a little groundskeeping and context first.
I played the entirety of Borderlands 2 as a single-player game despite the fact that it was heavily designed as a co-op shooter. Which was similar to playing Left 4 Dead 2 as a solo game. I mean, if there was not anything on the opening screen telling me that I could team up with three other players, then I probably would not know any better. This is to say that Gearbox did a great job not making me feel that I was missing out on anything by not playing co-op for the most part. There were a couple of skills for the Siren that I did not learn because they were team-heavy, like the Res skill that can use your Phaselock to resurrect a fallen ally or the Restoration skill that allows you to heal your team members by shooting them. But there were so many other skills to choose from, that I will get to in greater depth down the paragraphs, that I never felt that I was sacrificing skill points just to get to better skills. Great game balance, I guess you could say.
Before I get too deep into the skills I chose with Maya, I will briefly run down their primary class skill as a Siren, called Phaselock because several of the skills I chose from various trees were modifiers to her Phaselock ability. At the beginning of the game, Phaselocking an enemy pulls them into the air and incapacitates them for five seconds. As you level up, there are skills that can modify your Phaselock such as lengthening the duration that the enemy is held, causing them small amounts of damage, or pulling other enemies towards the one that is Phaselocked. At first, I was not sure if I really liked the ability because it singled out just one enemy and playing solo felt like I might want something more area of effect, but looking through the skill trees, I knew that there were skills that modified the Phaselock that I was definitely looking forward to.
After I gained my first skill point and took a look through the skills, I immediately knew that I was going to want to get the Sustenance skill, which allows regenerating health, albeit slowly (as in only 0.4% of your max health per second when you first select the skill and an additional +0.4% for each point after). This was important for me because I was playing a single-player game where I could not rely on allies to heal me with their own skills, but also because I love the ability to regenerate health in a game where you normally only heal by randomly finding health syringes that only heal you a little bit. Because Sustenance is only accessible by at least level 16, I had plenty of time to play without regenerating health to decide if that was where I really wanted to spend my skill points and by the time I hit level 16, I had not had a change of mind. As it turned out, a lot of the skills I chose were focused on healing and in the Harmony skill tree. Skills like Sweet Release that give a certain percentage of health when you kill an enemy that you have Phaselocked, and Elated which allows you to regenerate a percentage of your health per second when you have an enemy Phaselocked.
There were a couple of times throughout my playthrough that I paid to reset my skills, but at the time, the cost was not much because there were not a lot of skill points. Later in the game, as it got more expensive (more skill points, higher cost), I had already reached the point where I was loosey-goosey with my money and not worrying about the cost of respawning being between $1,500 up to $4,000, so forking over a couple thousand dollars to reset my skill points to toy with different skill load outs was never a problem. Before going up against Handsome Jack and The Warrior, I settled with the following skills:
- Ward (5)
- +25% Shield Capacity
- -40% Shield Recharge Delay.
- Suspension (1)
- Increase Duration of Phaselock by 0.5 Seconds
- Chrono Binder Class Mod
- +4 Skill Points to Suspension
- Increase Duration of Phaselock by 2.0 Seconds
- Kinetic Reflection (4)
- Killing an enemy causes you to deflect bullets against nearby enemies, reducing damage to you by 40% and dealing 80% damage for a short time.
- Converge (1)
- Your Phaselock ability now pulls enemies towards the original target.
- Sweet Release (5)
- Killing an enemy who is currently Phaselocked creates 5 Life Orb which automatically seeks out and heals you and your friends. The healing is stronger when you or your friend's health is low (up to 15% per Orb).
- Wreck (5)
- +50% Fire Rate and +30% Damage with guns while you have an enemy Phaselocked.
- Elated (3)
- You and your friends regenerate +3% health per second while you have an enemy Phaselocked.
- Recompense (2)
- Taking Health damage has a 20% chance of dealing an equal amount of damage to your attacker.
- Sustenance (3)
- Regenerate up to +1.2% of your missing Heath per Second. The Lower your Health, the more powerful the regeneration.
The guns and gear I had equipped going into the last fight were as follows (along with their required level and color rarity):- Gun 1: Bolshy Droog (Sniper Rifle; Level 31; Green)
- Damage: 1006
- Accuracy: 93.9
- Fire Rate: 5.2
- Reload Speed: 4.6
- Magazine Size: 24
- Slag Chance: 45%
- 4.0x Weapon Zoom
- Gun 2: Murdering Slagga (SMG; Level 19; Orange)
- Damage: 79 x 3
- Accuracy: 71.4
- Fire Rate: 8.8
- Reload Speed: 4.2
- Magazine Size: 99
- Slag Chance: 24.0%
- +18 Weapon Magazine Size
- Gun 3: Paraquat Panorama (Rocket Launcher; Level 30; Green)
- Damage: 9323
- Accuracy: 84.3
- Fire Rate: 1.1
- Reload Speed: 6.8
- Magazine Size: 3
- Corrode Damage / Sec: 375.5
- Corrode Chance: 31.9%
- 3.5x Weapon Zoom
- Deals Bonus Elemental Damage
- Gun 4: Slaged Stret Sweper (Shotgun; Level 30; Green)
- Damage: 379 x 10
- Accuracy: 36.0
- Fire Rate: 1.1
- Reload Speed: 4.1
- Magazine Size: 11
- Slag Chance: 12.0%
- Consumes 2 ammo per shot
- Shield: Listless Acid Nova Shield (Level 30; Green)
- Capacity: 3630
- Recharge Rate: 271
- Recharge Delay: 4.62
- Nova Damage: 3818
- Nova Radius: 912
- Class Mod: Chrono Binder (Level 29; Blue)
- Team Cooldown Rate +16%
- +4 Suspension Skill
- +3 Reaper Skill
- Increases Action Skill Cooldown Rate for Entire Team.
- Grenade: Longbow Corrosive Transfusion (Level 29; Green)
- Grenade Damage: 1335 x 6
- Blast Radius: 194
- Fuse Time: 3.6
- Spawns 6 child grenades upon detonating.
- Spawns a number of child grenades that seek out enemies and steal health upon impact.
- Relic: Proficiency Relic (Level 30; Blue)
Lastly, I should include information about my Bad Ass rank and the skills I spent all of those Bad Ass Tokens on.
Going into the final battle, I actually did look up a walkthrough and briefly read through it, only really finding out that the Rakks are constantly respawning and flying around to give you a second chance if you are wounded, that The Warrior was immune/resistant to elemental damage, that you do reduced damage at certain areas of the map and full damage at others, and to take out the Crystalisks shortly after they spawn after The Warrior jumps into the lava. I was primarily looking to see if the fight was going to be as atrocious as the BNK3R fight and from what I gathered it was not going to be. I ended up ignoring the part about areas on the map that do regular damage because that meant going into smaller areas surrounded by lava that I could likely get knocked into resulting in instant death, so I hung back towards the front of the boss fight arena, which ended up also being a buffer between me and the Crystalisks that spawned. To damage The Warrior, I primarily used the Phaselock ability to do damage (because it rarely if ever works on bosses and large enemies like Constructors or Saturn), would take pop-shots at it with the sniper rifle and the rocket launchers, but most of the time I would use the SMG because there were times when I would be hit with strong attacks, or attacks that did constant fire damage and having up to 99 rounds of ammunition to try and hit a flying Rakk (rather than spending nearly half of the second chance time reloading) was a much-needed benefit because I did nearly die multiple times (three to five times I think). I also did die once towards the beginning of the fight with The Warrior and I was afraid that the game would have me start the fight with Jack all over again, but thankfully I just started the fight with The Warrior at full health and I was able to restock my ammo at one of the ammo vending machines before reentering the boss fight arena.
I did really enjoy this game, otherwise, I probably would not have spent 83.4 hours playing out of obligation. There were times I was annoyed and that usually revolved around boss fights (as the bosses were essentially bullet sponges), any time there was a Constructor bot (see above link), and the last mission just because I ended up having to go through it three times before getting to the Handsome Jack/Warrior fight. The story missions felt a little daunting too because they would often span over a large part of a given map and would take between 45 minutes to an hour-and-a-half to complete and I usually do my gaming in 30-60 minute bursts because that is what I typically have time for, but thanks to Conklederp for understanding in me spending a little more time than usual to tackle the last couple of story quests. I did end up leaving a couple of mission incomplete because one was an escort mission, one was a timed fetch quest, a raid boss who again is a bullet sponge and has a nasty powerful attack that is likely to knock me out in one hit, and another wanted me to explore an area I had already been to a few times that was full of enemies that were bullet sponges.
While playing through the game, I had considered picking up a DLC bundle at a significantly reduced price, but by the time I got to the second-to-last quest, I felt that I wanted to move on from Borderlands 2. Besides, there is still Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Tales from the Borderlands, and Borderlands 3 that I would still like to play before I am completely Borderlands'd out; and a massive queue from Steam, Epic, and GOG that I would like to get to as well. We will be back Pandora, don' worry. Or one of the other dozens of vaults out there apparently.
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