Borderlands 3 — endgame features revealed!

Borderlands 3 is almost upon us, thanks to a release date of September 13. Like us, we know you're going to buy the game, launch it the same day with friends, and not stop until the end of your weekend!

However, once the main campaign is over, what are you going to do? To begin with, it may be appealing to build several characters and try different types of gameplay. If you have trouble deciding, we're here to help you choose between the four playable classes.

However, that's not all! Here is a guide that covers all components of the Borderlands 3 post-game. Replayability is massive, between additional difficulty levels, arenas, infinite character improvements, and more.

Just keep this in mind: the features listed below complement each other and together make up the Borderlands 3 post-game. Once assembled, it gives massive content for a game when it is released. The most important thing in Borderlands is to create a unique character build that suits you, finding everything you need to complete your equipment. We'd better go collect some of those billion guns!

The return of Arenas

Circle of Slaughter

This game mode, already present in Borderlands 2, will ask you to clean up waves of increasingly powerful enemies. You die, you lose. It is as simple as that. You can clean up to 5 rounds composed of several waves of enemies. The more you survive, the better the loot is. There are even bonus objectives to please this dear Mr. Torgue.

Proving Grounds

You must defeat hordes of enemies, advance through this showdown and reach the final boss in less than 30 minutes. At the end of this challenge awaits you a chest full of precious loot, enough to motivate you as it should be. The training grounds are actually 7 missions spread throughout the galaxy, with objectives constantly renewed by a random generation. These objectives, if you meet them, improve the quality of the loot that awaits you at the end of these training grounds. It's like a kind of raid after all, with optional challenges like defeating the fallen Guardian, not dying, finishing in less than 15 minutes, etc...

To be noted:

• Playable over and over again for both types of arena content!
• Imagine this coupled with Chaos mode, it promises really high challenges and rich in loot.

True Vault Hunter Mode

On this side, nothing very original, it's like in Borderlands 2. Once your first campaign in normal mode is over, you restart the entire game in a higher difficulty. The loot is better and the enemies more recalcitrant. It's the equivalent of a campaign in New Game+ in Borderlands. Let's be honest, this is where the game really starts. It's a shame that the developers still force us to campaign once again before unlocking this mode.

Guardian Rank

By completing the Borderlands 3 campaign, you will unlock the Guardian Rank. If you are already familiar with the Borderlands 2 Badass Rank System, the idea is the same: you will unlock statistical improvements that apply to all your characters.

Your Guardian Rank bar is just above your experience gauge (XP), and it fills up as you gain experience points. Each time the gauge is full, you unlock a new token. You can then spend it to unlock statistics bonuses among three trees (Hitman, Survivor and Precision). When you spend a Guardian Token, you can choose one of six randomly selected statistics, two per tree. Your choices will be important even if chance will prevent you from always increasing the same statistic. However, nothing prevents you from always choosing the same tree structure, which could be interesting given the information that will follow.

Enforcer

• Critical Damage
• Grenade Damage
• Gun Damage
• Gun Fire Rate
• Melee Damage
• Vehicle Damage

Survivor

• FFYL (Fight For Your Life) Duration
• FFYL Movement Speed
• Max Health
• Shield Capacity
• Shield Recharge Delay
• Shield Recharge Rate

Hunter

• Accuracy
• Action Skill Cooldown
• Luck (Rare Drop Rate)
• Recoil Reduction
• Reload Speed

By investing a number of tokens, you will unlock Guardian rewards specific to each category, Enforcer, Survivor and Hunter. There are six levels, all trees combined, and you can unlock them by spending 10, 15, 25, 25, 35, 35, 50 or 75 tokens in their category. Without being very precise, we know that the different levels unlock weapon skins, character skins and especially new really useful liabilities. For example, Level 2 Guardian rewards can cause more damage to your weapons in battle for survival (in the Enforcer for hire tree), allow you to exit the Fight for Survival with all your health and your full shield (in the Survivor tree), etc... It would appear that the higher the level reached in the tree structure, the more interesting the unlocked liability is. Perhaps a rush of a certain tree structure would be a good strategy?

This system makes your L'Arche hunter even stronger or fills one of his gaps. We also see in these guardian levels a way to advance our character one the infinite.

Mayhem Mode

At the end of the campaign, you will bring up a terminal on board Sanctuary-3 with three levels of difficulty: Mayhem 1, 2 or 3. Activate any of these modes, and the risks and rewards will become much greater: enemies will have more health, shields and armor, you will receive more money, erdium and experience points, and you will have a greater chance of finding better loot. Be careful, however, you will only have access to the Mayhem mode terminal in Ultimate Hunter mode after you have completed this new campaign again. We strongly recommend that you finish the game as a normal game, then as the ultimate hunter and only then test the Mayhem mode. To venture into this mode in normal mode would be a complete waste of time.

In Mayhem mode, you will also encounter more brutal and chosen enemies. In general, everything will be more complicated. To counterbalance this difficulty, enemies may sometimes abandon "chosen" equipment, which gives bonuses to your action skills and may be specific to a particular Vault Hunter. In other words, it is the end-of-play optimization of your character. The little detail that will make your build unique and unstoppable.

In addition to offering more resistant enemies, Mayhem mode also applies to any planet you visit, which will require you to adapt your playstyles accordingly. For example, with the "Wild" affix, enemy weapons will do more damage to you, while the "Witchcraft" affix will reduce the damage caused by your normal balls, while increasing the damage caused by your elemental balls. The different modifiers you will encounter are visible on the map screen, and some of them will only come into play in Chaos 2 or 3, making your survival even more complex.

DLC

Gearbox intends to apply exemplary follow-up to its new darling and they showed it during this PAX west. Indeed, the latter have already announced free content updates, as well as the release of the first DLC of the game. Everything in this news will be released before the end of 2019 and we will have more details on September 18th.

This is a very good omen for the continuation of Borderlands 3. More and more consistent content to come? The future will tell us.

Our assumptions for the future

Rumours are already running high on the net, and on our side, we retain the following things as being likely to happen with a high probability rate:

• Mayhem levels higher than 3, giving more and more difficulty to the players of the license.
• An extension of the maximum character level in one of the DLCs, allowing ever more complete builds. Maximum level = 72, as in Borderlands 2?
• Lots of free and event-driven content, which would keep players on the game.
• Finally, a level of Ultimate Fighter 2 seems unlikely and rather counterproductive... Repeating the same campaign twice, on a character, is already a lot in 2019, so 3 times...

To remember

• The vault hunter mode is a formality that Gearbox could have avoided...
• The Guardian Rank is interesting, it's an addition that will please fans who want to improve their character over and over again.
• Mayhem mode is the real asset of the game. It is not only a real challenge in terms of difficulty, but it also adds an insane farming dimension. You will spend some time before finding the "chosen" weapon you need to complete your build of death on Amara...
• The two types of arenas make it possible not to go round in Circle of Slaughter to farm what you need.
• Finally, for us, the endgame of Borderlands 3 will be farming in the Proving Grounds, in the Circle of Slaughter and on the countryside bosses. All this in Vault Hunter with Mayhem mode enabled, until we find what we need to make our character invincible. And you?

Written by Eliot "Pixxel-Mania" Denajar. Translated from French by Millenium.us.org