Getting Started
if you're brand new to Borderlands or you haven't played in a while and you're kind of lost honestly these are the pages I'd read first in my opinion because I skipped the beginner stuff when I started and it cost me hours of wandering around confused and not knowing what I was doing which was pretty frustrating you know
Beginner's Guide
so you just landed on Kairos and you have literally no clue what's going on
System Requirements
not gonna lie before you even buy the game you should probably check if your PC can actually handle it like CPU GPU how much storage you need all that technical jazz because I mean it would really suck to get all hyped watching trailers and then find out your rig can barely run the game at 30fps and you just wasted sixty bucks or whatever and I've been there with other games and it's the worst feeling honestly so just check first
FAQ
release date platforms editions crossplay the new gameplay features
Farming Guides
because let's be real here farming is like 80 percent of what you actually do in the endgame and if you're gonna spend hours killing the same boss over and over you might as well do it efficiently you know maximize those legendary drops per hour instead of wasting your life on bad routes and stuff like that and to be honest some farming methods are just straight up better than others and it took me forever to figure that out through trial and error and way too many save quits
Boss Farming Routes
which bosses actually drop good loot and which ones are basically a waste of time the fastest kill routes I've found after way too much testing save-quit farming optimization because some bosses spawn literally right next to a fast travel point and some don't and to be honest that makes a massive difference in how many legendaries you get per hour and I spent way too long farming the wrong bosses before I figured this out
Legendary Weapons Database
pretty straightforward stuff honestly
Endgame Builds
Mayhem-ready DPS setups that actually work not just theorycrafting nonsense support builds for co-op groups speed-farming builds when you just want to blast through content complete skill tree allocations with gear pairings and you know the stuff I've personally tested and can actually vouch for because nothing is more annoying than following a build guide and finding out the creator never even tried it themselves and some of these builds took me weeks to optimize so I hope they save you some time
Advanced Mechanics
once you finish the campaign and you're standing there wondering what to even do next
so this is BL4's endgame difficulty system and to be honest it's kind of brutal at first enemy health and damage scale way up but in exchange you get way better loot drops and higher chances for those sweet anointments and honestly it's worth the pain once you get used to it and figure out which modifiers to reroll and which ones are actually doable with your build I mean some modifiers are just straight up awful and you should reroll them immediately like don't even try to play with them because you'll hate your life
these are the conditional effects that show up on your weapons and grenades and not gonna lie getting the right anointment paired with your action skill timing is literally the difference between melting a boss in ten seconds or standing there plinking away doing basically zero damage and I cannot stress enough how important this is because I spent my first twenty hours completely ignoring anointments and wondering why I was so weak and it was honestly embarrassing when I finally figured it out
okay here's the deal with elements incendiary against flesh gives you like a 50 percent bonus which is decent shock against shields is a whopping 150 percent bonus which is honestly insane corrosive melts armor cryo for crowd control radiation for AoE splash damage basically if you're not matching your elements to what you're fighting you're gonna have a bad time and you'll wonder why everything feels so tanky and you can't kill anything I learned this the hard way trust me it was not a fun experience
this thing unlocks after you beat the main story and it gives you account-wide stat bonuses so every single character you make benefits from it I mean it's kind of like a prestige system or whatever where you keep getting stronger even after the credits roll and some of the bonuses are honestly game changing once you stack enough of them
every gun in the game is generated from this huge parts pool behind the scenes and the new crafting system actually lets you swap parts around using resources you get from dismantling guns you don't want which is honestly such a massive quality of life improvement compared to the older games where you were just stuck with whatever parts rolled and you had to pray to RNGesus basically and I still have nightmares about farming for perfect parted weapons in BL3 for weeks and never getting what I wanted
Co-op and Multiplayer
if you're planning to squad up with friends
enemy health goes up by about 100 percent for each extra player in your party but don't panic because loot is instanced so everyone sees their own drops and nobody can swoop in and steal your legendaries which was honestly a problem in some of the older games and I'm glad they fixed it because nothing killed a friendship faster than someone ninja looting a perfect roll weapon and then pretending they didn't see it drop which happened to me once and I'm still kind of annoyed about it honestly
Cooperation or Coopetition you get the idea
so if your high-level friend wants to jump into your low-level game to help you out there's this optional level scaling thing that keeps them from just one-shotting everything and making the game boring you can toggle it on or off in the lobby depending on whether you want the help or want the actual challenge and to be honest I usually leave it on because it's more fun that way even if you get carried a bit less and it keeps things interesting instead of just watching your friend delete everything on screen
Game Mechanics Guides
if you really want to go deep on the numbers and the systems and understand exactly how everything works under the hood here's where I've written up the detailed breakdowns for players who like that kind of nerdy stuff and I tried to make it readable even if you're not a math person because honestly some of these systems are complicated and the game doesn't explain them at all
Mayhem Mode Guide
all ten Mayhem levels explained in painful detail which modifiers are actually terrible and you should reroll immediately the best builds for each modifier combination farming efficiency calculations and honestly it gets pretty math heavy in spots but I tried to keep it readable for normal humans who don't want to do algebra just to play a video game
Guardian Rank Guide
how the account-wide stat bonuses actually work which tokens to farm and where the most efficient early unlocks that give you the biggest power spike XP optimization so you're not grinding for weeks and barely making progress basically max your guardian rank without losing your mind or all your free time because some of the later ranks take forever if you don't know what you're doing
Trading and Dueling Guide
trading without getting scammed bank sharing dueling rewards etc
Vehicle Combat Guide
Cyclone Technical Outrunner complete stats breakdown weapon loadouts for each vehicle type combat tactics that actually work on each planet because honestly vehicle combat is kind of underrated in this game and a lot of people totally sleep on it but some of the vehicle weapons absolutely shred and you can do some really fun drive-by stuff that you just can't do on foot and I think more people should give it a shot instead of just using vehicles as taxis to the next fight