BL4 Dahl Legendary Weapons

Legendary SMGs

Weapon	Type	Special Effect	Drop Source	Drop Chance
Sand Hawk	SMG	9 projectiles in bird pattern, high damage	Katagawa Jr. (Atlas HQ)	10%
Night Hawkin	SMG	Element switches cryo/incendiary based on time of day	Demoskagg (The Droughts)	10%
Kaoson	SMG	Sticky grenades, explode on reload or after delay	Captain Traunt (Athenas)	12%
Blood Starved Beast	SMG	Explosive rounds, damage increases with continuous fire	Evil Lilith (Krieg DLC)	15%

Why Pick Dahl

tbh Dahl is the manufacturer for players who actually aim and I don't mean that in a gatekeepy way I just mean if you take the half second to line up a headshot Dahl rewards you more than any other brand in the game because these guns have the lowest recoil the cleanest iron sights and the fastest handling and it's not even close, the burst fire mode when aiming down sights fires 3 to 5 rounds with zero recoil between shots and all of them land on the same pixel which on a crit build is 3 to 5 guaranteed crits per trigger pull and no other manufacturer can do that consistently at long range no matter how good their gimmick is, I've used Dahl ARs to snipe enemies across entire maps while my teammates with actual sniper rifles were missing shots because of scope sway and I was just sitting there with iron sights landing every single bullet

but what really makes Dahl special is the alternate fire mode system and honestly once you get used to having this flexibility every other manufacturer feels limited and clunky, every Dahl gun can switch between burst semi-auto and full-auto modes so you can go full-auto from the hip for close range mobbing then instantly switch to burst in ADS for precision shooting and then semi-auto for ammo conservation when you're running low, all on the same gun without any gear swaps or skill points and it's basically the most versatile weapon system in Borderlands, the Sand Hawk is the crown jewel of Dahl weapons because nine projectiles in a bird-shaped spread with almost no recoil is basically a shotgun that has SMG handling and sniper accuracy and there's a reason this gun has been top tier across multiple Borderlands games and probably will be again in BL4

Best Vault Hunters for Dahl Guns

Zane is the best Dahl user in the game and I've tested this extensively because I main Zane and Dahl is basically his soulmate manufacturer, his entire kit revolves around speed accuracy and firing while moving and Dahl guns already have the best handling and lowest recoil so when Zane's kill skills kick in and add even more accuracy and fire rate the guns become actual laser beams like you can hip fire across the map and every bullet hits the same spot, Playing Dirty gives a chance for double projectiles on the first five shots and Dahl burst fire means each trigger pull fires multiple shots that can all proc Playing Dirty which leads to these burst windows where you're doing literally double damage, the Seein' Dead class mod keeps his action skills active forever which means permanent accuracy and fire rate bonuses and Zane with a Sand Hawk and Barrier is honestly one of the smoothest gunplay experiences in any shooter I've played and I've played a lot of shooters

FL4K is the second best Dahl user and the reason is Fade Away because it guarantees crits on every shot and Dahl burst fire ensures every shot in the burst hits the same spot so one trigger pull during Fade Away with a Dahl AR is five guaranteed crits and if that sounds broken it's because it basically is, Stackbot class mod adds gun damage per crit and resets on non-crit but Dahl burst fire literally can't miss crits during Fade Away so the Stackbot bonus stacks infinitely and you get these damage numbers that make no sense, Breath of the Dying with Fade Away is particularly disgusting because the corrosive novas on kill chain between enemies and each nova can crit triggering more novas and it's exponential clear speed where one kill turns into the entire room dying in a chain reaction of corrosive explosions

Moze does well with Dahl full-auto ARs because her Bottomless Mags tree removes the only weakness of full-auto mode which is ammo consumption so you can just hold the trigger forever and never stop shooting and it's kinda beautiful in its simplicity, Amara pairs well with the Sand Hawk specifically because the nine projectiles all proc her elemental damage bonuses separately so each burst from a Sand Hawk is basically nine separate chances to apply her elemental effects and the damage adds up stupidly fast, she doesn't have as much Dahl synergy overall but the Sand Hawk plus Amara combo is so strong that it's worth mentioning even though she'd probably prefer Maliwan for most other situations

Hidden Mechanics

ok so the burst fire mode has hidden crit damage that isn't listed anywhere in the game and I only found out about this from testing because the numbers didn't match what the weapon card said, the first shot of each burst gets a hidden 10% crit damage bonus and the second shot gets 5% and the third and beyond get normal crit damage so if your burst fires 3 rounds the first one crits for 110% of normal crit damage the second for 105% and the third for 100% and it's a small bonus but it adds up over thousands of bursts to a noticeable DPS increase, more importantly the burst delay which is the time between bursts actually decreases with fire rate bonuses so with enough fire rate from skills and gear Dahl burst fire becomes almost indistinguishable from full-auto and you get the accuracy of burst with the fire rate of full-auto and that's the sweet spot for Dahl builds where you're basically firing full auto with zero recoil and every bullet is a crit

the Night Hawkin has the weirdest hidden mechanic in the game and I genuinely thought my game was bugged the first time I used it, its element changes based on the in-game time of day so during the day it deals cryo damage and during the night it deals incendiary damage but here's the thing the in-game day/night cycle is about 48 minutes real time so every 24 real minutes the gun changes elements and if you're farming at the wrong time of day the Night Hawkin might not be the element you want, you literally have to check the sky before you commit to using it in a tough fight which is kinda hilarious and also during dawn and dusk transition periods the gun can deal both cryo and incendiary simultaneously for about 2 minutes real time and that's when it's at its absolute strongest and it absolutely melts everything

the Kaoson SMG fires sticky projectiles that explode on reload similar to Torgue sticky mode but unlike Torgue stickies the Kaoson stickies also explode automatically after a 2 second delay so you don't have to reload to detonate them and you can just fire count to two and the damage triggers automatically without any input from you, this lets you fire a burst switch weapons and still get the explosion damage while using a different gun and it opens up some really interesting weapon swap playstyles where you're stacking DOTs from multiple sources

Early vs Late Game

early game Dahl is the most consistent manufacturer you can pick and I always recommend it to people starting their first playthrough because a green Dahl AR at level 3 handles basically the same as a legendary Dahl AR at level 50 and the recoil is non-existent the sights are clean and the burst fire makes every shot count, for new players still learning the game's movement and shooting mechanics Dahl is the most forgiving introduction because you don't need to understand complex gimmicks or weird alternate fire modes or anything like that you just point and shoot and the guns do exactly what you expect and that's honestly underrated in a game series where half the guns have some bonkers alternate mechanic, the Hornet pistol is available early from Chupacabratch and it's one of the best leveling pistols because corrosive damage is strong against armored enemies which are everywhere in the early game and it'll carry you through like ten levels without needing to swap

late game Dahl holds up surprisingly well and I know the pure DPS numbers get outscaled by Vladof and Torgue at Mayhem 10 but damage isn't everything and I've learned this the hard way after dying repeatedly with high DPS guns that couldn't hit anything, the consistency of Dahl weapons means you're landing a higher percentage of your shots as crits compared to other manufacturers and a Vladof Shredifier might have higher theoretical DPS but if 40% of your shots miss the crit spot because of recoil the effective DPS is actually lower and Dahl guns just don't miss, every bullet goes exactly where you aim it and this reliability is massively underrated in endgame content where enemies have massive health pools and you need sustained accuracy over long fights, the Sand Hawk at Mayhem 10 with the right anointment is still a top 5 SMG and the Kaoson sticky damage scales insanely well with splash bonuses and the Breath of the Dying on a corrosive-weak map like the Maliwan Takedown is arguably the best mobbing weapon available period

Pro Tips

so the number one skill that separates good Dahl players from great ones is learning the burst cadence because each Dahl weapon has a specific burst rhythm and once you internalize it you can fire at maximum rate without even thinking about it, the trick is to release the trigger right as the last shot of the burst fires and immediately pull again and if you time it right there's zero delay between bursts and your DPS goes up by like 20-30% compared to just holding the trigger, some players macro this but you honestly don't need to because the timing window is generous once you get the feel for it and after a few hours of using the same Dahl gun your finger just knows when to release and it becomes automatic

the Soulrender AR fires homing skulls on kill that track enemies but here's the thing that nobody talks about the skulls actually count as your damage for kill skills and on-kill effects so a Soulrender kill that spawns a skull that then kills another enemy counts as two kills for Zane's Seein' Red and FL4K's The Most Dangerous Game and you can stack kill skill bonuses incredibly fast in dense fights which makes Zane basically unkillable, the AutoAime sniper auto-locks to crit spots and if you're playing on controller or just have bad aim on mouse this gun lets you compete with the best players because the burst fire mode fires three shots that all track to the crit spot and on bosses with large crit spots it's basically three guaranteed crits per trigger pull regardless of your aim, the Star Helix AR fires bullets in a spiral pattern that expands outward and at close range all the bullets hit the same target for massive damage while at medium range the spiral covers a wider area for mob clear and the optimal range for maximum single-target DPS is about 5 meters where the spiral is still tight enough for all bullets to connect on one enemy, and finally Dahl weapons have the fastest weapon swap speed in the game which most people don't even notice but you can build entire playstyles around weapon swapping where you fire a Dahl burst swap to a Jakobs for the finish swap back to Dahl and the swap animation is almost instant especially with Zane's Cold Bore skill boosting swap speed further and you can cycle through your entire loadout in under a second which feels amazing once you get the rhythm down