TOM FRANCIS
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Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About Borderlands

The stuff you can buy at the shop is sometimes too high level for you to use.
There is actually a minimum level bar, and it turns red to warn you of this, but a) it’s tiny and b) the whole weapons shop interface is also red. Any time you’re getting excited about something’s stats, just make sure you check for this before you spend your life savings. Often it’s still worth buying: I bought a level 23 shield at level 21 because it could take 560 points of damage – at level 36, I’d still never seen anything that good again.

The quoted damage for weapons with elemental effects is misleading.
That’s the base, conventional damage – the elemental damage is added to that. Precisely how much it adds varies, but I’ve found a 110 damage revolver with explosive shots significantly more effective than a 150 damage one without.

Repeater Pistols aren’t worth it.
They’re sort of like weaker sub-machineguns with smaller clips, but worse than that, they make the most appallingly puny sounds. Almost every other weapon type sounds and feels good in your virtual hands, repeater pistols really don’t. I suggest avoiding them entirely.

Grenade mods of the same type can do different amounts of damage.
I didn’t notice this for ages – I took ‘explosive sticky’ and never wanted to change types, so never switched for any of the others I found. I’d been selling a bunch of Explosive Stickies that would have quadrupled my damage.

Don’t join a game with a much higher level player than you.
Unless something’s changed since the code I played, you inherit all of their quests automatically, and you can’t get rid fo them. This makes your quest log an unmanagable mess of irrelevant text, and can sometimes cause you to stumble into impossibly difficult enemies.

There are two types of combat rifles.
One fires in three-round bursts, the other puts out a steady stream of bullets. I can’t see an easy way to tell between them on paper, except that three-round burst rifles tend to have small clip sizes that are a multiple of three (some of them actually are three), whereas steady stream ones have larger clips that are multiples of five.

Inventory expansions and elemental artifacts just get dumped in your inventory.
You have to actually click on them there to get the benefit.

It’s really cheap to completely re-spec your character.
At level 25 it cost me about $5,000, which is the kind of chump change you’re making on single trash loot sales by that point. So don’t sweat too much about the path not taken when levelling up. You can get a full refund at any time, try out a different branch, and even switch back for the same price if you don’t like it.

Class mods only boost skills you already have.
If you don’t have any points in Girl Power, +3 Girl Power on a class mod does nothing. If you have 5 points in Girl Power, though, +3 will actually take you past that maximum and up to 8.

Once you kill someone called Flynt, you can pretty much stop playing.
Unless you want to play through the game again with your levelled-up character, which you can do after completion, it’s not worth playing past that point. It becomes a thoughtless corridor shooter leading to a completely irrelevant boss fight with dismal rewards and no plot closure.

This guy. This guy here.