I'm not gonna lie, when I first hit endgame in Borderlands 4 and started seeing anointed gear drop everywhere, I completely ignored the anointment text and just looked at the damage number like a total rookie, and honestly I wasted probably 15 hours of farming before I realized that anointments are literally the most important stat on your gear in Mayhem 6 and above. The right anointment can more than double your effective damage output, and I mean that dead seriously — I tested a standard Conference Call against an anointed one with "+200% weapon damage while an action skill is active" and the difference was honestly staggering, like going from a water gun to an actual cannon.

What Anointments Are and Why They Matter

Anointments are bonus effects that roll on weapons, shields, and grenade mods after you complete the main story and unlock Mayhem Mode, and they're Borderlands 4's way of giving your endgame build an entirely new dimension of power scaling. Unlike weapon parts which tweak base stats by percentages, anointments add entirely new conditional effects — think "+150% radiation damage while Gamma Burst is active" or "on action skill end, spawn a homing grenade that deals 500% of your grenade's base damage." There are over 45 unique anointment effects in BL4 across all gear slots, and they fall into four main categories: action-skill-active bonuses, action-skill-end bonuses, kill-stack bonuses, and conditional state bonuses like while-sliding or while-airborne.

The catch, and trust me this is the part that tripped me up for way too long, is that anointments are character-specific in terms of which ones actually work with your build — an anointment that says "while Fade Away is active" does absolutely nothing on a non-FL4K character, and Borderlands 4 is honestly pretty bad at communicating this in-game, so I died like 50 times in the Slaughtershaft wondering why my "busted" anointed gear wasn't doing anything before I actually read the fine print. The key strategic insight here is that you want to stack anointments that all trigger from the same condition — if you're running a Zane action-skill-spam build, you want action-skill-end anointments on your shield and grenade, and an action-skill-active anointment on your weapon, so everything procs simultaneously when you hit your action skill button.

Anointment Stacking Rule: You cannot have two anointments with the exact same trigger condition active on the same gear type — so you can't stack two "on action skill end" anointments on two different weapons you're holding. However, your weapon, shield, and grenade can each have different trigger-condition anointments that all activate together, which is how top-tier builds get those insane damage numbers you see in endgame build guides. The dream setup is weapon (action-skill-active damage buff) + shield (action-skill-end defensive buff) + grenade (action-skill-end offensive proc) all going off at once.

S-Tier Anointments for Each Vault Hunter

For Amara, the "+250% weapon damage after using Phasecast" anointment is honestly broken and I will die on this hill — it synergizes with her Phasecast cooldown being so short that you can maintain near-100% uptime, and combined with her elemental damage bonuses from the Mystical Assault tree you're looking at damage numbers that make raid bosses look like basic psychos. The "+200% melee damage after Phaseslam" anointment is also S-tier if you're running her melee build, and "+75% bonus radiation damage while Phasegrasp is active" turns every grasped enemy into a nuclear bomb that chain-reacts through entire rooms.

Zane's S-tier is pretty clear-cut — "+200% weapon damage while SNTL is active" is his bread and butter because SNTL uptime can hit 90%+ with the right build choices, and the "+125% bonus cryo damage while Barrier is active" turns Zane into an absolute ice machine that freezes entire waves in the Slaughtershaft. FL4K mains, I feel your pain because your best anointment depends entirely on which action skill you're running — "+150% critical hit damage after Rakk Attack" for multi-Rakk builds, "+115% radiation damage while Fade Away is active" for crit FL4K, and "+200% pet damage after Gamma Burst" if you're running the Gamma Burst pet build that honestly doesn't get enough love from the community.

Crazy Earl's Re-Roll Machine and Anointment Farming Strategy

Crazy Earl's re-roll machine on Sanctuary IV is genuinely the best quality-of-life feature Gearbox has ever added to a Borderlands game, and I'm not exaggerating — for 250 Eridium per re-roll you can completely change the anointment on any piece of anointed gear, which means you don't need to farm a perfect-anointment version of that one-in-a-million-drop legendary, you just need the gun itself and enough Eridium to roll until you hit the anointment you want. The re-roll pool includes all 45+ anointments weighted equally as far as I can tell from about 500 re-rolls of testing, so you're looking at roughly a 1-in-45 chance to hit your specific desired anointment, which averages out to about 11,250 Eridium per targeted anointment — not cheap, but way more deterministic than hoping for a world drop with perfect parts AND the right anointment.

For actually farming anointed gear in the first place, Mayhem 8 and above guarantees that literally every weapon drop has an anointment, and Mayhem 10 bumps up the chance of getting the "premium" anointments (the 200%+ damage ones) by about 30% based on community testing. The best farming spots are pretty well-established at this point — Graveward still drops 4-6 anointed legendaries per kill on Mayhem 10 if you can one-cycle her, the Slaughtershaft spits out anointed gear like a broken vending machine, and the Maliwan Takedown's final boss room is honestly my personal favorite because you get like 15 anointed drops in 8 minutes of fighting. Don't sleep on the Eridium farm loop in the Carnivora region either, since you'll need mountains of Eridium for re-rolling and that loop nets you about 500 Eridium per 10-minute run if you hit all the purple crystal clusters.