BL4 Co-op Multiplayer , Everything About Playing With Friends

Okay so before we get into the details here's the thing about BL4 co-op.

So BL4 co-op supports up to 4 players online and the host's game progress is what matters cause quest progression only saves for the host wich is kind of annoying but that's how Borderlands has always been and I dont think they're changing it anytime soon. The connection is peer-to-peer so there's no dedicated servers, the host is basically the server and everyone connects to them, and if the host's internet is garbage then everyone's experience is garbage and that's just how it works unfortunately. Drop-in drop-out is seamless though, you can join a friend mid-mission and the game spawns you at the nearest fast travel station and scales enemies up automatically, you dont need to be at the same story point or anything like that. The level sync system is actually pretty good in BL4 because when a level 50 player joins a level 12 host the game applies level scaling per-player, so the level 50 player sees enemies at their own level and deals scaled damage while the level 12 host still sees enemies at level 12, it's not perfect but it's way better than BL3 where a high level player would just one-shot everything and ruin the experience for everyone else and stuff like that. And there's cross-platform play between PC PlayStation and Xbox wich is honestly the best feature they added, I remember the BL3 days when my friend on PS5 couldn't play with me on PC and it was just miserable, but BL4 has full crossplay at launch and you just need to link your SHiFT account and enable crossplay in the network settings and it works, there's no weird extra steps or anything. The matchmaking browser is decent too, you can filter by campaign mission activity or game mode and join random lobbies if your friends aren't online, but tbh random co-op is hit or miss because some people just run ahead and skip all the dialogue and that drives me absolutly nuts because like why are you even playing Borderlands if you're just gonna skip the story, you get the idea.

Anyway let's talk about loot because that's what everyone actually cares about ngl.

BL4 gives you two loot modes and this is probably the most important setting in the entire co-op experience so listen up. Instanced loot means every player sees their own loot and nobody can steal your drops, each chest enemy kill and world drop generates separate loot for each player and you never have to fight over gear, I honestly cant imagine playing any other way because the alternative is chaos and not the fun kind. Cooperative loot also known as "coopetition" is the old-school mode where all loot is shared and whoever grabs it first gets it, and look I get the nostalgia appeal for the BL1 veterans but in practice it just leads to arguments and someone inevitably ninja-looting a legendary while you're in your inventory and stuff like that, it's just not worth the headache imo. You can toggle between these modes in the main menu under Gameplay settings and the setting applies to the whole lobby based on what the host has selected so everyone in the session uses the same loot mode regardless of their own personal settings. Now enemy scaling is separate from loot and here's how it works, each additional player increases enemy health and shield values by roughly 75 percent per player so a full 4-player squad faces enemies with about 225 percent more health than solo play and the damage scaling is a bit less aggressive maybe 30 to 40 percent more damage per extra player but the real killer is the health scaling because bullet-sponge enemies at Mayhem 10 with 4 players are just ridiculous and you need actually good builds and not just whatever random legendary you found on the ground. I remember me and my friend tried 4-player M10 with random gear and we couldn't even kill a basic badass tink without running out of ammo, it was actually embarrassing but we learned our lesson and came back with proper builds and synergies and it was night and day difference.

I'm not even kidding about this.

The loot quality scaling is where things get interesting though. More players doesn't just mean more enemies with more health it also means better loot and more dedicated drops, I'm pretty sure the game has a hidden luck multiplier per additional player because I definately notice way more legendaries dropping in 4-player sessions than solo and that's not just confirmation bias, the dedicated drop rates from bosses go up noticeably with a full party and certain rare cosmetics and trinkets seem to drop way more frequently in co-op. Also there's a thing with badass spawns, more players means more badass enemies spawn during encounters and badass enemies have higher legendary drop rates so you're getting indirect loot boosts just from the increased enemy variety and not just from the raw drop rate multiplier, it stacks in a really satisfying way when you have a full group running through Slaughter Shaft or something. And enemy density scaling is worth mentioning because in 4-player sessions the game throws way more enemies at you compared to solo, like in some arena encounters I've counted and it's easily double the enemy count with a full party and that plus the badass spawn rate boost plus the hidden luck multiplier makes co-op the best way to farm for specific gear, hands down, no question about it.

Okay so connection problems in BL4 co-op and there are a lot of them ngl, this is probably the most frustrating part of the multiplayer experience and I've spent way too many hours troubleshooting this stuff. The biggest issue by far is NAT type because BL4 uses peer-to-peer and if your NAT type is Strict or sometimes even Moderate you're gonna have problems joining certain lobbies and the game wont tell you why, it'll just fail to connect with some vague error message and you'll be sitting there wondering if the servers are down or something. To fix NAT type you need to go into your router settings and enable UPnP wich is Universal Plug and Play and most modern routers have this on by default but check anyway, or you can manually port forward and the ports you need are TCP 7777 and UDP 7777 through 7790, those are the same ports Gearbox has used for Borderlands multiplayer since forever and they haven't changed them. If you're on PC and using a VPN turn it off because VPNs add latency and mess with peer connections and I learned this the hard way after an hour of troubleshooting, my friend couldn't join my lobby and it was litterally just NordVPN running in the background and I felt like an idiot when I finally figured it out. Console players have an easier time with network stuff generally because consoles handle NAT traversal better but if you're having issues try putting your console in your router's DMZ temporarily just to test if it's a NAT problem and if it works in DMZ then you know you need to fix your port forwarding and if it doesn't work even in DMZ then the problem is something else entirely.

Lag is a whole different beast and it's almost always the host's fault. So the host's upload speed is the bottleneck because they're sending game state data to all connected players and if the host has bad upload like below 5 Mbps you're gonna get rubberbanding and delayed hit registration and enemies teleporting around and all that fun stuff, and there's not much you can do about it other than switching hosts to whoever has the best internet. And one thing most people don't know, the host should be the person with the best CPU because hosting also puts extra load on the host's processor, the game has to simulate all enemies on the host's machine and then send the state to everyone else wich means the host's CPU is doing double duty and if their computer is struggling to run the game at 30 FPS then hosting is just gonna make everything worse for the whole lobby. Disconnects usually happen during loading screens and I've noticed it's most common when someone joins during a fast travel or a zone transition, the game sometimes drops the connection and you have to reinvite, and there's no real fix for this other than waiting until everyone is loaded into the new area before the next person joins, it's a timing issue and the game's netcode just isn't robust enough to handle simultaneous loading and joining gracefully. Also if you're getting constant disconnects check your SHiFT account status because SHiFT server outages can cause weird connection behavior even though the gameplay is peer-to-peer, the matchmaking and lobby system runs through SHiFT servers and if those are down you can sometimes connect directly via invite but the experience is spotty.

So here's the thing about co-op builds that most guides don't tell you, the best co-op setup isn't about individual damage output it's about synergy between the vault hunters and certain combinations are just straight up broken in 4-player. Like for real, a properly synergized 4-player team can melt Mayhem 10 bosses faster than the best solo build and it's because of stacking buffs and debuffs that multiply each other rather than just adding damage. The tank plus support plus DPS plus crowd control framework works really well in BL4 and I've tested pretty much every combination at this point and some of them are way better than others. If you have someone running a health regen and shield sharing build like the team support tree on whatever the new siren equivalent is, combined with a high burst DPS vault hunter that has glass cannon style damage and a tank that can pull aggro and revive teammates, you basically cant die and everything melts, it's almost boring honestly because nothing is a threat anymore and you get the idea.

For synergies specifically, elemental stacking between vault hunters is the big one that everyone sleeps on. So if one player is applying cryo to freeze enemies and another player is stacking shock damage and a third is running radiation for the explosion chains on death and a fourth is doing bonus damage against frozen targets, the combined elemental interactions create kill chains that clear entire rooms in seconds and the individual DPS numbers don't even matter because the synergy is doing all the heavy lifting. And I'm pretty sure the game handles elemental damage multiplicatively in co-op, like a frozen enemy takes bonus melee and critical damage from everyone not just the cryo user, so having dedicated roles where one person is the freeze setup and everyone else is the payoff is insanely efficient and probably the meta for speed farming. But here's the catch and tbh nobody talks about this enough, pet and companion builds are kind of bad in co-op specifically at high Mayhem levels because pets don't scale with the co-op health multiplier properly, so your FL4K-style beastmasters and any summoner-type builds fall off hard in 4-player M10 where enemies have 225 percent more health but your pets are still doing the same solo-scaled damage and they just tickle enemies basically, it's definately a balance oversight and I hope they fix it but for now don't bring pet builds to serious co-op sessions unless you're playing a support role with them. And the other synergy that's worth building around is ammo regen, if one vault hunter has team ammo regeneration and another has increased magazine size for the team then everyone can sustain through long fights without needing to restock from ammo crates, and on bosses like the Warden or the Graveward replacement where the fight goes for 5 plus minutes with 4 players because of the health scaling, ammo sustain is actually a bigger DPS factor than any individual gun or anoint, people don't realize this and then they run out of ammo mid-fight and just stand

Yeah.

there like an idiot while everyone else is still shooting and etc.

Trading in BL4 is done through the trade interface where you target another player and hold the trade button wich opens a menu showing both players' inventories and you can offer items and the other player offers items and both players have to confirm for the trade to go through, it's pretty standard and works well enough. But here's the thing about trading that isn't obvious, items retain their Mayhem level and anointments when traded so you can give a Mayhem 10 god-roll to a friend who just hit max level and they can use it immediately even if they've never touched Mayhem mode, and this is the fastest way to power-level a friend's gear, just trade them one good gun and one good shield and they can jump straight into M6 or higher without farming, it's kind of a cheat code honestly but it's intended and Gearbox hasn't patched it out so I guess they're fine with it. And there's also mail trading wich is the safer way to send items between sessions without being online at the same time, you go to your inventory highlight an item and select send mail then type the player's SHiFT name and they'll receive it in their mail tab next time they log in, this is great for gifting loot to friends who are in different time zones or whatever and there's no risk of the item being lost or duped accidentally because the mail system is server-side and persistent. One thing to be careful about though, items in your mail expire after 30 days so don't send something and then not log in for a month because it'll be gone and that's happened to me twice and I lost a perfect anointed Cutsman both times and I'm still mad about it.

Dueling is the dumbest and most fun part of co-op and I love it. You can challenge another player to a duel by meleeing them wich initiates a countdown and then you both fight in a small arena bubble and the winner gets a small amount of cash from the loser, it's not about the money though it's about pride and bragging rights and also testing your build against something that isn't a bullet-sponge boss. The duel arena has a limited radius so you can't just run away infinitely and movement builds with high mobility have a huge advantage because they can dodge shots by just not being where the other player is aiming and speed builds are kind of the dueling meta because of this. But the secret duel tech that nobody uses is the artifact swap, you can have a PvP artifact in your inventory with different passive rolls than your PvE artifact and swap to it before accepting a duel and most players don't do this so if you're prepared with a PvP loadout you'll win almost every duel, but don't be that guy who always has a dedicated dueling setup and challenges random people in public lobbies because that's toxic and weird and nobody likes that person. Also a heads up about duels in public lobbies, some people will challenge you to a duel just to kill you and then kick you from the lobby, it's a classic griefing move and the best counter is to just decline the duel, there's litterally no consequence to declining and anyone who gets mad about you declining a duel is not someone you want to play with anyway.

Split-screen co-op is available on consoles and supports 2 players on the same system and it's actually really well implemented this time around, way better than BL3's split-screen wich was a laggy mess at launch. The performance is stable at 60 FPS on current-gen consoles even in split-screen with a lot of particle effects on screen and the UI scales down properly so you can actually read item cards without squinting wich was a huge problem in BL3 and I remember having to stand up and walk closer to the TV just to read shield stats and that was ridiculous. But there are differences between split-screen and online that matter for gameplay. In split-screen both players share the same screen and the render distance is slightly reduced to maintain framerate so you can't see enemies as far away as in online mode and this matters on big open maps where sniping is important because the reduced draw distance means you literally cannot engage enemies at the same range as online players and sniper builds are definately worse in split-screen because of this. The second player in split-screen uses a guest profile on the same console and their character is saved separately but it's tied to the host's console account instead of their own SHiFT account wich means the guest player can't take their character to another console or PC and this is a pretty big limitation if you're playing couch co-op with someone who also has their own system, they're basically building a character that's stuck on your console forever and you get the idea, it's kind of annoying. And menu navigation in split-screen is still kind of a pain because both players can't use their inventory at the same time and you have to take turns managing gear and skills, the game pauses or slows down when one person opens a menu depending on your settings and it's better than it was but still not great and I'm pretty sure this is just a hardware limitation because rendering two full inventory screens at 60 FPS is actually demanding on the GPU.

Online co-op obviously doesn't have these issues because each player has their own screen and their own hardware and their own game instance, and online is just better in every way except for the social experience of actually sitting next to someone on a couch and playing together wich is a different kind of fun that online can't really replicate. And one nice thing about split-screen is that loot is automatically instanced and you can't change it to cooperative mode because having shared loot on the same screen would be absurd, so at least you don't have to worry about your couch partner stealing your legendary while you're looking at the map or whatever. And the split-screen orientation options are horizontal or vertical split wich is a nice touch, vertical split actually feels better on modern wide monitors and TVs because you get more of the game world in your half of the screen and less wasted space on the sides, tbh more games should offer vertical split-screen and I'm glad BL4 has it.

Alright so after hundreds of hours in BL4 co-op here's all the stuff I wish someone had told me when I started playing multiplayer and I'm just gonna dump everything here in no particular order because that's how my brain works. First off and this is the biggest one, don't join someone's game and immediately rush to a boss because the host might be mid-mission and you're gonna drag them into a boss fight they weren't ready for and ruin the pacing of their story progression, just follow the host and help with whatever they're doing and if you wanna farm something specific ask first and stuff like that, it's basic etiquette but you'd be surprised how many people don't do this and it's infuriating. Second thing, turn on instanced loot before you start your co-op session because the default is cooperative loot and the first chest you open your friend is gonna grab the legendary that was meant for you and neither of you will even know it happened and that's how friendships end over a video game. Actually check the setting and don't assume it's on instanced because I've joined so many lobbies where the host forgot to change it and we had to awkwardly negotiate who gets what drop after every boss kill and it's jus

Anyway.

t unnecessary stress and honestly kind of exhausting to manage every single drop manually and you get the idea.

Third thing about communication, the in-game voice chat works fine but the ping system is actually better for quick callouts because you can ping legendary drops chests enemy locations and mission objectives without having to talk and on console especially the ping system is faster than trying to describe a location over voice and I use pings way more than voice chat at this point and my friends do the same thing, we've basically developed a ping language that's faster than talking and it's kind of beautiful honestly. And don't be the person with an open mic who has background noise, nobody wants to hear your family arguing in the background or your mechanical keyboard clacking at 200 APM, push to talk exists for a reason and it's enabled by default so you had to manually turn it off and that's a choice you made and we're all silently judging you for it. Fourth thing about revives, the revive timer in co-op gets longer each time you go down and after the third or fourth down in a boss fight the timer is like 30 seconds and that's basically a death sentence in M10, so don't run glass cannon builds in co-op if you're dying constantly because every time you go down someone has to stop DPSing to revive you and the total team DPS loss is way bigger than whatever extra damage your glass cannon build was providing, survivability is a team stat in co-op and people don't think about it that way but they should. And the revive animation locks you in place for about 2 seconds wich means if you're reviving a teammate while a badass is charging you, you're both gonna die and now the team is down two players instead of one, so clear enemies before reviving unless the person is literally about to bleed out and the timer is at 1 second and you have no choice, it's a judgment call and over time you develop a sense for when to revive and when to let them die and respawn and come back with full health and ammo and sometimes that's actually the better play.

And here's a weird tip that saved my co-op group so much time, the host should be the person who is farthest behind in the story because quest progression only saves for the host and if the person who's already beaten the campaign is hosting then everyone else will have to replay missions later to catch up their own story progress, so always put the lowest-level or least-progressed player as the host and everyone else joins them and helps push their story forward, this way nobody has to replay content they already cleared in someone else's lobby and the whole group progresses together. And for Mayhem level in co-op, one thing that most people miss, only the host's Mayhem level matters for enemy scaling so if the host is on M1 and a player on M10 joins, the enemies are scaled to M1 difficulty and the M10 player will absolutly destroy everything and it's kind of funny but also a good way to power-level a friend's guardian rank and badass rank and stuff like that, just set the host to the highest Mayhem level they can handle and have higher-level friends join and carry, the host still gets full XP and loot at their Mayhem level and the carry players get to feel powerful and everyone wins basically. And definately use the SHiFT friend system instead of platform-specific friend lists because crossplay relies on SHiFT and if you add someone on Steam but not on SHiFT you wont be able to play with them if they're on console and vice versa, it's an extra step but it's the only way to make crossplay work consistently and I really wish Gearbox would just auto-sync platform friends with SHiFT friends but they don't so you have to do it manually and it's annoying but once it's set up you never have to think about it again.