myreviews2024

Don’t Just Mainline the Campaign

The first thing I did in Borderlands 4 was beeline the main quest. Old habits. New planet, fresh Vault Hunters, shiny cutscenes—of course I wanted to see where Gearbox was taking the story this time. Borderlands 4, overall, in a way, it was more enjoyable than Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (you can check my previous review), and I plan to compare it with Black Ops 7 soon – stay tuned.

That was a mistake.

Borderlands 4’s campaign missions are punchy and well-paced, but they’re tuned around you engaging with the side systems. If you ignore side quests, crew challenges, and early-world activities, you’ll hit a damage wall faster than you expect. Enemy shields start scaling harder, badasses get chunkier health bars, and suddenly your DPS feels anemic.

So my first real recommendation: clear side missions in each new zone before pushing the next story beat. Not all of them—this isn’t busywork simulator—but enough to keep your XP curve healthy and your loot pool fresh. Side quests here aren’t just filler; they’re often tied to unique weapon drops or modifiers that you won’t see in standard vending machines.

And because Borderlands still lives and dies on gear, that matters.

The rhythm I settled into was simple: main mission → two or three side quests → crew challenges → back to main. It kept my build evolving instead of stagnating. If you try to brute-force the campaign under-leveled, you can do it… but it’ll feel like you’re fighting the numbers instead of the enemies.

Lock In Your Build Early (Then Commit)

Borderlands 4 leans harder into build identity than 3 did. Skill trees aren’t just incremental stat bumps—they’re pushing you toward very specific playstyles. Elemental chaos, crit stacking, pet synergy, cooldown cycling. Pick your poison.

What you shouldn’t do is spread points thin across multiple trees “just to see.”

I tried that. It felt safe. It also felt weak.

The early game is tuned around you specializing. If you’re playing an elemental-focused Vault Hunter, you need to lean into status effect chance, elemental damage scaling, and gear that procs off burns or shocks. If you’re running a crit build, you want perks that stack on precision hits and weapons that reward accuracy instead of spray-and-pray.

This is where weapon variety shines. Borderlands 4 offers a set number of core weapon archetypes, but the elemental variants—plasma-style burns, shock analogs, corrosive twists—do a lot of heavy lifting in expanding your options. A shock SMG plays very differently from a fire variant when shields and armor types come into play.

Commit early. Respec later if you have to.

Because once your perks start synergizing—action skill cooldown feeding into elemental procs, which feed into survivability perks—the game opens up. Combat stops feeling like a stat check and starts feeling like a feedback loop you engineered. That’s when Borderlands hits.

Farm Smart, Not Constantly

It’s Borderlands. Of course you’re going to farm.

The trick in 4 is knowing when it’s worth your time.

Early on, I wasted a good hour farming a named mini-boss for a legendary that looked insane on paper. By the time it dropped, I was two levels higher and about to move into a new zone where the base item level would’ve outscaled it anyway. Lesson learned.

Borderlands 4’s loot scaling is aggressive. A god-roll at level 12 won’t carry you to 20 the way it might have in older entries. So instead of hard farming early, target farms around level breakpoints or before major difficulty spikes. Think: right before a new region, before a big story boss, or when your build finally locks into its core identity.

And pay attention to world modifiers and event rotations if they’re active. Certain activities have boosted legendary rates or specific loot pools, and that’s when farming actually makes sense. Otherwise, you’re better off pushing content and letting natural drops carry you.

There’s also something to be said for farming for synergy, not rarity. A purple weapon that perfectly complements your build can outperform a flashy orange that doesn’t proc your perks. I’ve melted bosses with non-legendary gear simply because it fed my cooldown loop properly.

Legendary isn’t automatically best-in-slot. Synergy is.

Bonus: Jump Into Those World Events

One thing Borderlands 4 actually nails is the way world events disrupt the usual combat flow. We aren't just talking about a few random psychos wandering into your sights; these encounters often stack strange modifiers right on top of the action—think sudden elemental traps, beefed-up elites, or annoying temporary debuffs—that basically demand you pivot your strategy mid-fight. It's chaotic.

If you decide to just breeze past them, you're essentially throwing away easy XP and top-tier gear. Don't do that.

But more importantly, you’re missing some of the best chaos the game has to offer. Borderlands has always thrived when the screen is a mess of particles, status effects, and numbers flying everywhere. World events crank that dial up without feeling completely unfair.

They’re also a sneaky way to test your build. If your spec collapses the moment enemies gain a resistance modifier, you know you’ve over-specialized. If you can pivot—swap to a different elemental variant, adjust your positioning, tweak your skill usage—you’re in a healthy spot.

It’s stress testing in real time.

Conclusion

You need a solid plan. Your first few hours in Borderlands 4 shouldn't be a frantic sprint through the main story, but a deliberate crawl where you actually feel the weight of your gear. And you have to pick a specialty before the dust even settles. So you can stop guessing. Because it makes the difference between a survivor and a corpse.

But if you really want to keep your head above water, you need to clear enough side missions to stay ahead of the level curve, grabbing those weirdly specific unique rewards that feel heavy in your hands, rather than just chasing every shiny object that hits the dirt. It is about the synergy. It is about the synergy of a well-planned skill tree. And honestly? Stop hunting every flicker of orange text you see. Just focus.

So you should probably look for gear that actually talks to your abilities during those level breakpoints. And you really ought to throw yourself into those chaotic world events just to see if your build actually holds up when the pressure starts mounting against your chest. But is a bag full of loot worth anything if you haven't figured out how to use it... or if you're just running on empty?

If you’re the kind of player who likes to theorycraft builds, optimize DPS loops, and treat Borderlands like a numbers sandbox, this approach will keep you ahead of the scaling curve. And if you just want to shoot, loot, and see big damage pop-ups without hitting frustrating walls, pacing yourself and committing to a spec will make the early game feel less like a grind and more like the chaotic power fantasy it’s supposed to be.