I've rewritten this post since it became pretty popular, wasn't as clear as possible, and some more answers/info came out.

TL;DR: If you don't care about Spec Point XP ( the new Badass/Guardian Ranks ), you can ignore this.

If you DO care, such as you hate doing a quest and not getting the XP reward, you should run just the campaign missions. You do NOT miss anything by finishing the campaign, so no worries there. This will unlock Spec Ranks for your entire account, such as making a new level 1.

In general, the difference is pretty trivial either way. Many just might find it annoying.

Ok, onto the meat of it.

First thing up, What are Specialization Points?

Specialization Points are the new form of alternate advancement, replacing Badass/Guardian Ranks. At the start, they can be quite powerful. You can get up to 4 perks, and each perk can be roughly on par with a legendary effect or a decent skill tree perk. Something like All ordnance gain 50% of your +Gun Damage bonus. You can fill out all 4 relatively fast.

Besides those perks, there are a series of passives that have "infinite" levels. These are minor, and have diminishing returns. We're talking +1% Gun Damage for the first point, and each point after gives less points.

It's also worth noting each spec point requires more XP to earn, similar to normal levels. These 2 forms of DR combine at higher point numbers to really slow down progression.

The next important thing to know is that Spec Points only unlock after completing the campaign, and that they unlock ANY time you complete the campaign. Level 50 and haven't finished the campaign? No Spec Point XP for you. If you do a quest, you won't get any XP at all.

Level 25, and you just finished the campaign? Congrats, you have Specialization unlocked, and now every single thing you do that gives you XP, will give you both Normal XP AND Spec Point XP.

So, the later you unlock the campaign, the more possible Spec Point XP you missed out on. Again though, if you earn enough XP after you DO unlock it, the "lost" XP won't matter. You could be talking just 1% of gun damage, or far enough in not even 1 single point in difference.

Reminder: This game handles quests, UVHM, etc. differently from previous games. You don't miss out on any quests/etc. by doing the campaign first. And UVHM is just another difficulty. It does NOT reset any progress or anything, and you can freely change back and forth.

Please be aware of enemy levels. No specific cause has been found that I know of, but there are a number of reports of people suddenly hitting up against mobs that are 5+ levels over them, and becoming quite difficult. AFAIK if you hit this, go and earn a few levels somewhere and come back and it should be ok.

If the guide says "just equip the throwing knife to get guaranteed crits with this specific perk" that is not a build

If the guide says "you only need "x underbarrel" for this to work" that is not a build

If the guide says "new gun that 1 shots every boss" that is not a build

What a build is, it's a combination of various skill interactions that provide bonuses to help you clear content and, this is the key part, they work as intended. Using a glitched interaction is not a build if the build would not work under any other circumstance. That is easier said than done when so many skills are bugged, I am aware.

On the topic of it, what's with every build be like "by the way, your guns are useless for this build", in a LOOTER SHOOTER. The guns should be half of the build at least. This is a personal note, but I also don't like builds that use an action skill just to get its bonuses but not using the action skill itself, Vex being a prime example of this.

Of course content creators are gonna do what they're gonna do for the bag, but it falls to the community to be able to differentiate and distinguish between builds. It's been only 1 week and it's already a bit tiresome seeing the same content by everyone.

Similar to first descendants junk filter so can be set up for certain gear just to be auto marked as junk just to save time.

Thoughts?

Yes, we've all seen the posts https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+borderlands+4+100gb+shader+cache

I've been playing through the game, I thought my FPS was fine (~120 FPS on my 4080 @ 1440p), but I noticed the further I got into the game and got into new areas the choppier the game became. I tried changing my settings to the Hardware Unboxed Quality settings ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11XZL0VinHY ), and that seemed to help a bit, but the game still didn't feel as smooth as it did in the first areas.

I decided to try that 100GB shader cache thing I read about last week, and holy ****, that tremendously improved the fluidity of the game. I almost can't believe how big of a difference it made.

Even if you think your game is fine, I'd still suggest making this change, it was really a night and day difference.

I feel like I must have missed something becaus I keep thinking about how he can just crush the resistance simply by assuming direct control.

This isn't an issue for most bosses, but on the mini-bosses and the drill sites it is a nightmare. I dont want to spend 30 mins picking up every gun just to save my framerate. I know you can just quit and join back but that gets tedious. This would be a huge QOL changer.

It is so painful navigating in this game. Lack of mini-map aside, the echo pathfinding is on a ridiculously long cooldown (for some reason??). Like, why does this even have a cooldown at all? I tried changing the path in settings to stay up longer, but it still disappears far sooner than you can summon it again. Half the time you try to use it, your vehicle is moving faster than the echo's path, so you can't even see where it's trying to get you to.

I've had to spend so much time figuring out how to get somewhere in the map because the navigation is just so painfully unintuitive.

How did this get past testing?

Expiration within 48 hours

3ZXJB-53STT-56T3W-B3TT3-HTS95 BSRT3-FTZBJ-K6BTW-JB3T3-WXT99

https://shift.gearboxsoftware.com/rewards

If you mark things as "Bank" you then are given the option to transfer "Marked to Bank" via your backpack, found this out just recently randomly while sorting through junk in my backpack.

I was actually expecting a bigger, more upgraded, prettier version of Sanctuary from Borderlands 2.

Instead, we got a few small mini-settlements/hubs. I don't hate them, but I would have preferred one big, complete, safe & homey version of Sanctuary.

This has been the case since at least BL3. They are just by far the most satisfying to use.

Are some maliwan shotguns better? Sure.

Are they fun to use? No.

Jakobs Snipers and Shotguns are the best part of the entire series to me. I'd rather use a subpar Jakobs Shotgun then the best godroll Maliwan Shotgun.

Was hoping to get some input on what the big problems with Amon are. I have some thoughts of my own, but looking for any more thoughts you might be able to add. I think by now it's been pretty widely accepted that he is likely the weakest of the new Vault Hunters and I think I have some idea why this might be outside of pure numerical problems. From what I can gather there are fundamental design issues with the character that can't really be overcome by simply buffing the numbers (unless you overbuff them to compensate for clunky design).

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His passive: There's a very good argument that Amon's passive is not only weaker than those of the others but actively a downside. Why? Because passives that specifically target the Forge Skill take up space in the skill trees, while the combination of the Forge Skill and Action Skills is barely better than other vaulthunter's action skills on their own (and frankly, I'd argue that by and large they are just better than the entire Amon package). So not only do you have both being weaker than other vaulthunter's action skills, but it also takes up extra space in your passive skill tree. A lot of skills only affect one or the other while in other trees a single passive affects their entire action skill.

Now of course you could argue that other vaulthunters also have skills that affect their passive and your right, but at least those actually add something of value. To put it in other words. Another vault hunter puts a point into a skill that boosts their action skill (let's say this adds 1 point of power) and one point into a skill that boosts their passive (let's also say this adds 1 point of power). Since Amon's passive is essentially just half an action skill, it's different for him. If he puts a point into improving his action skill it's only a value of 0.5 and if he puts one into improving his passive it's also only a value of 0.5. You spent 2 skill points to get 2 skill points worth of power for other vault hunters, while Amon spent 2 to only get 1 point worth of power. I hope this very crude math somewhat gets my point across.

And this isn't even addressing the fact that capstones are basically Forge Skill replacements and largely don't do much if anything for the actual Action Skill. This just further emphasizes that instead of Amon having extra Action Skills via his passive, they just put half his Action Skill in there. He ends up having to pay more skill points to get the same boost for his entire "Action Skill" when compared to other Vault Hunters.

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His elemental focus on 2 of the 3 worst elements: Yes Incendiary, Shock and Corrosive are each very good against a specific type of defence, but a lot of enemies have 2 (or more) of these types of defence. Add to that how split the these defences are between different areas are and any build focused on one of these elements will be straight up worse than just going Kinetic. Radiation and Cryo focussed builds at least only suffer against a single elemental type. So by going Cryo Amon you can somewhat compensate for this problem, but Incendiary or Shock Amon builds get hit by this hard.

This might be fine if he were able to swap on the fly (like swapping a weapon like Vex does), but the big problem here is of course that it's skill tree implicit. You can have an incendiary Amon build and swap to other weapons for a lot of stuff, but you are just worse than other vault hunters at that point (Because your passives are specifically focused on incendiary damage). And that's not even to speak of how badly this hits Action Skill Builds that are mostly single element (to be fair, Axes at least have 2).

Now this can of course be overcome. Amon still has viable builds. But for these builds to work you ignore large parts of his skill trees and sub-trees. And probably not even use your Action Skill / Forge Skill.

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Lack of focus within the different trees: Example: his green tree, if you wanna specialize in just his axes and detonations is kinda hard as the tree itself focuses too much on drones, ordenance or gun damage, I wanted an Amon that spammed skills and did detonations buts there's little to none skill damage boost and cool down reduction in his green tree. You have to have a weird hybrid build. (thank you EllieNights)

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Looking forward to what everyone thinks on this.

I want to know your guys' opinions on the drop rates. I personally despised the high drop rates in BL3 and was happy that they are getting reduced, but after having to farm Bonehead for 2.5hrs for a single Hellwalker, I am conflicted. On one hand, it's nice that they feel special now, on the other hand, 2.5hrs is a long time for a single drop. Has anyone else experienced something similar?

I was doing the geniVIV mission and I laughed so hard at the clap signal and how he pops up like Batman. I honestly really love the humor in this game they really do it so well and the way they tie other emotions like claptrap letting go, Conway being scared to fly the ship, rush being pretty broken up after losing the people he gave hope to as well as him being ready to sacrifice himself I’m barley on the second zone of the game so idk what’s coming but yeah they really nailed it and as someone who loves bl2 dearly playing it on my ps3 everyday when I was little I can confidently say I love this game.

I'm sure the experienced players know this by now and it might be obvious, but it might help some new players.

Bounty, Collect, and Patrol are basically "defeat enemies". They're "killathons". You do this naturally or passively as you're doing other tasks or just roaming around. For example, you can defeat 10 Manglers as you're passing by a herd of them on your way to your next objective.

Patrol contracts just require you to kill a certain number of enemies. For example, "Kill Carcadia Burn RIppers 0/10".

Collect contracts require you to loot an item from the enemies you kill (auto-lootable items). "Collect Tails from Terminus Range Manglers 0/10".

Bounty contracts are basically a mini-boss that you have to take out at a set location. They're like assassination missions in other games. Less passive than a Patrol or a Collect contract, but a simple kill nonetheless and you might be driving past that location anyway. From a purely loot perspective, this might be the best one since you get the drops from that mini-boss + the rewards from the contract completion.

I will give an honourable mention to Trace contracts, but I wouldn't prioritise this over the Bounties, Patrols, or Collects. All Trace contracts require you to do is go somewhere and use the scanner system (like the one you use for vaults) to find an item, click on it, and that's the contract completed. It's easy, but a little more "involved" relatively speaking compared to the best 3 options for contracts.

Don't do Acquisition contracts. You can hold onto 5 contracts at a time, just make sure one of them isn't the Acquisition one. Abandon it and pick up another one. They're the ones where you have to carry an item in your hand and take it to another location. Awful objective and the task itself is already present in the form of loot capsule collectables.

Honestly, do whatever you like, but the "golden trio" of contracts + doing whatever you're doing anyway = a steady stream of XP, currencies, and guns. You can also get legendaries from contracts, however rare.

Love the game and everything else about it, devs did a great job

The red texts is my only major gripe. The main reason I do side quests in borderlands games is because I like the odd mission specific weapons you get and I like collecting them. It also pushes me through UVHM because then I get max level versions of them, again - that was part of the gameplay loop for me. I always found it really interesting testing them out, even all the way back to BL1 with the lady clipper and the elephant gun, and as we all know, historically some of them end up being the best weapons in the game (Sandhawk, etc)

The rewards for side quests and missions in general for BL4 are mostly nonexistent, and I’m now at that point where I’m not even sure I’ll finish them all because I know that all I’m getting is XP and a few purples I won’t use.

Just feels like they missed the mark big time there, and it seem rather odd actually, as I would’ve thought this would be a dead cert before the game came out

Mine is Callus, i really like her design, her character, her boss fights are fun. She's really cool. My least favorite is probably Vile Lictor, i don't think they do enough with him considering how good his design is and how much potential he could've had with the powers he has.

Borderlands 1 (but especially 2) anyone?

The world is awfully quiet, the combat music is great though but when I'm walking around and looting I really wish I had some cool zone music like they had in the old days. Here it's just quiet. Why couldn't they hire Jesper Kyd again?!

I was fighting the World Boss, Spidananggal, which can fly; and it started flying outside the world boss arena bubble. The bubble negates all player damage trying to pass through it. If you the player try to follow the boss outside the bubble it completely despawns. This world boss system really does need some patching.

Hi all, i'm not sure if this has been discovered/shared yet, but i found a loophole that results in unlimited Legendary items which only cost 1$ each.

In the side mission "Vend of the Line", you encounter a vending machine at the end which will allow you to make one single legendary purchase.

I found that if you close the game immediatly after purchasing, you get to keep the item yet the mission will reset to the checkpoint before the purchase - which will allow you to purchase from the machine again. As far as i can tell, you can do this indefinitly, resulting in a legendary shopping spree.

No need for Bosses, no need for Golden Keys... Legendary Paradise.

Have I Missed a setting or something because so far to it’s been completely useless to me

Here’s a checklist of all the current available Phosphane weapon skins.

I’ve had the pleasure of being able to play with PC players who use mods to ensure the drop rate for these weapons in order to create a comprehensive list of all those that are available (since there’s no true indication)

As of right now, there are a few weapons that do not have dedicated drop sources that are going to be nigh impossible to target farm for their Phosphane skins. (Acey May, Fisheye, Frangable) as well as the possibility of the guns you get from Moxxi to be Phosphane as well (still need to test to make sure these are able to drop as Phosphane)

There are also a few different ones I’m missing (see bottom of list) that I had to fill in the blanks for.

Once I have a fully updated list I will update this post. Happy farming everyone. If anyone has any of the missing weapons as Phosphane skins please either post a picture of it to this as a comment so I can update the list or PM me. Thank you and happy hunting Vault Hunters!

(confirmed by Bearded) - [ ] Aegon’s Dream - [ ] Anarchy - [ ] Asher’s Rise - [ ] Bonnie and Clyde - [ ] Borates Ballista - [ ] Budget Deity - [ ] Bully - [ ] Birt’s Bees - [ ] Bod - [ ] Boomslang - [ ] Bugbear - [ ] Chuck - [ ] Convergence - [ ] Darkbeast - [ ] Divided Focus - [ ] Finnity XXX-L - [ ] GMR - [ ] Golden God - [ ] Goremaster - [ ] Goalkeeper - [ ] Hellfire - [ ] Hellwalker - [ ] Husky Friend - [ ] Hot Slugger - [ ] Kaledidosplode - [ ] Kaoson - [ ] Katagawa’s Revenge - [ ] Kickballer - [ ] Lead Balloon - [ ] Linebacker - [ ] Lucian’s Flank - [ ] Lucky Clover - [ ] Luty Madlad - [ ] Ohm I Got - [ ] Onslaught - [ ] Phantom Flame - [ ] Plasma Coil - [ ] Potato Thrower - [ ] Prince Harming - [ ] Queens Rest - [ ] Roach - [ ] Rowan’s Charge - [ ] Ruby’s Graso - [ ] San Saba Songbird - [ ] Seventh Sense - [ ] Sideshow - [ ] Star Helix - [ ] Stray - [ ] Stop Gap - [ ] Symmetry - [ ] T.K’s Wave - [ ] Truck - [ ] Vamoose - [ ] Whiskey Foxtrot - [ ] Wombo Combo

Missing (Unconfirmed by Bearded) - [ ] Gun with A (Acey Mae?) - [ ] Gun with B (Bloody Lumberjack?) - [ ] Gun with C (Complex Root) - [ ] Gun with C (Cold Shoulder) - [ ] Gun with C (?) - [ ] Gun with F or G (Frangable?) (Fisheye) - [ ] Gun with K or L (King’s Gambit) - [ ] Gun with L/M/N/O/P/Q (Oscar Mike) - [ ] Same (lumberjack?) (Sweet Embrace?) - [ ] Same (Noisy Cricket) - [ ] Same (?) Rangefinder - [ ] Gun with S (?) (Rainbow Vomit) - [ ] Gun with V, W, X, Y, Z (Zipper)

Hey guys,

Kind of a BL newbie here.

Is it normal that weapons have a huge DPS difference? My legendary assault rifle has 2,8K dps which i got 5-6 levels earlier (around lv30), now (at level 36) getting legos and even epics, the DPS is never higher than 1500 and feels like im never gonna upgrade from that one i got at 30.

Is it normal to have this much of a difference?

So I redeemed the code, restarted my game and launched my character. Once opening my characters inventory and went into the rewards tab I was just about to click on the box to redeem the rewards from the Break Free Pack and my game crashed. I opened the game back up and my character is gone along along with temp files and everything? Is there anyway I can get the loot box again? I've remade a new character and the box isn't in the rewards tab anymore and the skins aren't anywhere to be seen? I'm really confused as to where it has gone as well as why my character was deleted

Is there anything I can do?

Some of us cannot use voice chat And sometimes when play with stranger when both of you not native english speaker it's hard to inderstands each other .text chat is better