6 Beginner Tips for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Butt-Stomp

Low gravity might seem like a hindrance but this is far from the case, in fact it’s one of the best tips and tricks in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel that we can suggest. With a healthy helping of height and a generous portion of gluteus maximus, you can enact the buttstomp.

The butt-stomp makes full use of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel‘s physics obsession. The higher you can climb into the sky, the more damage you’ll cause when your bulk crashes into the floor.

Damage is dished out in a surprisingly wide circle around yourself and can be augmented with a variety of aspects but mainly your OZ-Kit.OZ-Kits can improve your butt-stomps ability with anything from a fiery explosion when your ass hits the grass to just generally boosting the damage.

Bear in mind that you aren’t the only one capable of using your backside for this. Many enemy humans, usually of the melee flavor, are able to dish out their own. Both for you and for them, if you are airborne when a butt-stomp lands there will be no damage taken.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Catch Your Breath

As mentioned on the previous page, you’ll be obtaining Oz-kits. Referring to oxygen, this is a new resource to the Borderlands franchise and brings its own je ne sais quoi to proceedings. It brings benefits like the aforementioned butt-stomp and a jumping glide while also proving to be something of a hindrance at times.

Every character has to breathe (except the robotic Claptrap) so you’ll have to keep an eye on  the resource to avoid problems. On the plus side, keeping your oxygen levels up isn’t exactly challenging. When fighting in areas without atmosphere, pretty much every enemy you kill drops an oxygen tank. These replenish the resource enough to keep you going for the next kill.

When in an area with no enemies you can also jump into oxygen geysers which refills the tanks pretty quickly. Just be sure to stay in them until it fully replenishes.

On characters which are not Borderlands staple Claptrap, the resource slowly depletes when just wandering around. Oxygen is also used when gliding through the air so if you’re doing a lot of that, be mindful that you’ll need to get some back before continuing on.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Take their Breath Away

Everybody knows the old meme ‘Attack its weak point for massive damage‘ from E3 2006. Stupid as it sounded at first the game world has never really shied away from this idea. Borderlands is no different and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel even adds a greater onus on this idea. With human enemies at least.

Shooting stuff in the head or the eye or even just the glowing colorful bit results in a shining spear of higher numbers than usual. Sounds fairly simple right? Well it is frankly. You obviously want to do this anyway because the quicker your enemies die, the more you can kill.

What Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel brings though is the option to shoot off an enemies OZ-kit to remove their source of air. This doesn’t stop them attacking – in all honest it seems to piss them off – but it does often cause enemy characters to stumble slightly and then they lose a small amount of health over time until they pass.

It only works in areas without atmosphere, obviously, but the small amount of damage dealt is enough to tip the balance when you’re in trouble.

Tacked onto this as well is the fact that elemental fire attacks only work in oxygen-rich areas. Anyway, onto more stuff!

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Investigate the Talent Trees

For beginners, the talent trees of Borderlands can be a little daunting. If you’re only playing casually with no intention to finish the game or as a rental then these may not seem massively important but trust me here, it’s important. This is one to look at before playing the game and during, and here’s why.

If you choose to play as Athena only to find that none of her talent trees really match up for you, the time you’ve spent playing up until then can be a waste. Luckily, you can save yourself from this in two ways.

The first is to head across to the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel website to view the talent trees before even stepping foot in the game. The second is get yourself a couple of levels and then take a look through everything. This might sound like extra work but you’ll have some spare characters for if you change your mind.

Where this is perhaps the most important is when playing with other people. If you plan to play as a group either all the way through the game or at frequent points in your time, ensuring you’ve got a synergy with your fellow Vault Hunters can help the Borderlands experience go from Epic to Legendary.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Check Back to Old Borderlands Saves

Many people coming to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel will have played the first or second entries in the series. For most games, with a few major exceptions likeMass Effect, having older save files would have precisely zero effect on playing a new entry. This is NOT the case in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

If you are playing on a console or PC with save files from Borderlands orBorderlands 2 you will be able to gain loyalty rewards. These aren’t exactly game changers, but a couple of additional guns and a grab bag of other bonuses are a blessing for getting a quick start.

If you had either of the earlier games you can obtain a bonus 500 badass points at the very start of the game. This generally equates to around 10 badass levels which can be used to tune you abilities in very precise ways like Gun Accuracy bonuses or Shield Recharge Delay reductions.

Owners of Borderlands 2 can gain early access to a powerful hand gun with an even more powerful shotgun on hand for owners of the original Borderlands. The final bonus is a bag of moonstones. You’ll receive 10 if you played Borderlands 2 and 20 if you played the original, making it up to a round 30 for long-time fans.

It may be obvious but it should be noted that this is only the case if you played on the same platform. Owners of Borderlands 2 on PS3 will not be able to get the bonuses when playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on Xbox 360.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tips & Tricks

Explore Everything

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is an open world game. There are crates full of guns and audio logs scattered everywhere just waiting for you to find them. So what are you waiting for, go find them!

Following red wires suspended above can lead to fuse boxes or butt-stomp buttons. Destroying or stomping these opens up fences of electrical beams which hide behind them crates full of shiny guns, grenade mods and other pieces of goodness to gear up your character. Sometimes jumping on that platform in the distance can take you on-wards to new regions which hold even more bundles of guns.

There are also some wondrous sights and sounds to be discovered off the beaten path. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has a gliding and low gravity jumping system so don’t simply ignore it, use this to your advantage to find all the goodness on Elpis that you can.