Borderlands 2 / Tropes D to N

Main page | Tropes A to C | Tropes D to N | Tropes O to Z (Shout Out | Unique Items | Wake-Up Call Boss)

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D

• Damage-Increasing Debuff:
  • Slag induces this, with the catch that affected targets only take extra damage from non-Slag sources^note Slag-on-Slag does get a lesser bonus in UVHM, since it's practically mandatory by that point.
  • Zer0 can apply a "Death Mark" to enemies, either by performing a melee attack on them or throwing Death Bl0ss0m kunai at them. Marked enemies take increased damage from all sources; usually you just end up finishing them off yourself with more melee attacks, though.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Psychos will occasionally say "Pluto is not a planet!".
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • For those who have the habit of reloading after every fight, this can result in losing ammo when reloading a Tediore weapon, since reloading has you throw the gun at the enemy like a grenade. Very cool, but it takes all the cartridges left in the magazine with it! It's so bad that even the developers do it during previews. Of course, some players may throw full ones anyway for the damage bonus. Worse yet, the resulting explosion can hurt yourself.
  • With Gaige the Mechromancer, you have the "Anarchy" mechanic - Every magazine you empty or enemy you kill trades accuracy for damage, stacking up to 150 times!^note 400 times with 5 points in the skill "Preshrunk Cyberpunk", up to 600 with the "Hide of Terramorphous" class mod Reload before your mag's empty though, however, and ALL those stacks disappear!^note This is if you don't have Discord, which allows you to reload on a partially empty magazine without risking all your stacks. The first reload causes them to go down in exchange for a fire rate boost, accuracy boost, and health regen. The second stops the loss of stacks but you lose the bonuses
    Gaige: Don't accidentally reload, don't accidentally reload...
  • The new driving controls: guaranteed to kick you out of a vehicle at least once before you remember that you can't lock onto enemies anymore.
  • The PlayStation 3 version moves the aim and shoot buttons from the analog triggers to the shoulder buttons and uses the triggers to throw grenades and use action skills. Those used to the first game's control layout may find themselves inadvertently using their action skills and blowing themselves up with their own grenades. You are, however, able to change the control scheme to "Classic" Borderlands in the options menu.
  • Using Salvador's "Gunzerk" skill on a controller is simple, as right trigger is default fire (right hand) and vice versa. Should you ever have to swap between controller and mouse, however, here's hoping you remember LMB is default (right) and RMB is secondary (left) before you're in the center of a firefight.^note Granted, you can alter options to make the buttons match during Gunzerking, but forgetting it's on and switching to controller just does the inverse.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The main game may be Denser and Wackier, but it gets very dark halfway through, with the attack on Sanctuary, and the events surrounding "Control Core Angel".
  • The "Clan War" sidequest chain. Despite the innate absurdity and hilarity of the trademark Borderlands writing, the questline not only reveals some incredibly, graphically messed up aspects of Moxxi, Scooter and Ellie's backstories, but also involves burning people alive in their own homes and slaughtering tens of people at a wake for a guy you yourself helped get killed to begin with.
  • Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary is this compared to the other full DLC packs, as the stakes are much higher and it serves as a bridge between this game and the sequel after it. It starts with Sanctuary being taken over by a fanatical army and gets From Bad to Worse...
• Darkest Africa: The continent of Aegrus is pretty much this. Dark swamps, savannahs and jungle mountains filled with bloodthirsty savage tribal warriors and ferocious wildlife trying to kill you at every turn.
• Dead Guy on Display: Aside from the all-common instances of Bandit corpses being impaled or hanged, when the player reaches Opportunity, they can see at a certain spot Bloodwing's beheaded body.
• Deadly Doctor:
  • Doc Mercy, a brutal, insane Bandit doctor who loves hurting a lot more than healing. Much to Dr. Zed's chagrin, however, he's actually a licensed surgeon with a real medical degree.
  • Witch Doctors from Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt and Sir Hammerlock vs. the Son of Crawmerax, as they can heal themselves, their fellow savages, and level them up.
  • Maya's "Restoration" skill turns her weapons into Healing Shivs, and her "Res" skill turns her Phaselock into an instant resurrection spell — but only for allies. She also has several Life Drain skills. While the Nurse class mod boasts a passive healing effect as its main feature, it can also boost one or two of her Life Drain skills.
  • Mad Moxxi gets an honorable mention: while she's not actually a medic, all Moxxi-branded weapons feature Life Drain, as they return a fraction of damage done as health.
• Deadly Force Field: Several of the shield types are weaponised in some way. The most obvious examples being the nova shields (which were also in the first game), which unleash blasts of energy when they're depleted and spike shields (which hurt enemies which use melee attacks on them). The third DLC also features "traps" which are basically activate-able bubble shields that explode when they're destroyed.
• Deadpan Snarker: Just about everyone gets snarky sometimes.
  • Some weapons have voices, and will sarcastically comment on what you're doing, whether reloading, or if you get a critical hit.
  Morningstar rifle voice (during reload): Well, at least you stopped shooting for a little while!
  • Claptrap is also the embodiment of this trope.
    Claptrap: Your ability to walk short distances without dying will be Handsome Jack's downfall!
  • Lilith, in spades. Almost everything she says is a snark directed at someone.
  • Even the loading screens get in on it.
    Loading screen tip: Shoot a skag in the mouth when it's roaring. It'll do extra damage and make the skag feel really stupid.
• Death from Above:
  • Buzzards from the base game are bandit flying contraptions who pelt your head with bullets, missiles, gun-toting passengers and trash-talk from above. The buzzard pilots yell it word for word.
  • The Spores from both of Hammerlock DLCs and Commander Lilith.... They hover in the air, dropping kamikaze versions of themselves onto you.
  • The introduction card for the fight against Piston's airship in Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage actually says this. It's accurate too - the thing circles your position raining missiles and bouncing bombs upon you.
  • Gaige has a skill named this. An Ordered Chaos trait which causes her to make explosions while shooting in mid-air.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Just like in the first game, you respawn at a nearby New-U station when you die, losing a decent chunk of money but nothing else. One late-game sidequest even has Handsome Jack paying you some Eridium to kill yourself for his amusement. The only truly meaningful penalty to dying is that, if your entire party goes down, whichever enemies you were fighting instantly return to full health.
  Hyperion Respawn Station: The next time some idiot tells you that life is meaningless without death, Hyperion recommends killing them.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Some enemies, particularly in co-op games, may have such a huge amount of HP that you're almost essentially forced to do this to them. Also played straight if you use an acid or fire weapon on them, and it whittles them down gradually.
  • There's even a couple of Badass Ranks that can be pulled off by getting your second wind from killing an enemy with damage-over-time caused by fire or acid weapons — LIFE and death of a thousand cuts!
  • There is also an area of the game called "Thousand Cuts." Perhaps not coincidentally, the Superboss "Terramorphous the Invincible" (which must be taken down by this method, raid-style) appears just below this area.
  • Implied to be how Mr. Torgue's grandmother killed a guy. She gummed him to death. "IT TOOK SEVERAL HOURS!"
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Invoked in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. While you're using your regular characters, in-game its presented as Brick, Mordecai, and Lilith playing the Bunkers & Badasses game hosted by Tina. They will comment regularly throughout some of the story missions, as well as some sidequests.
• Deface of the Moon: While there's no actual mark, Handsome Jack put a humongous space station halfway between the planet and its geosynchronous moon that casts a big shadow in the shape of an H upon the moon's surface. Wherever you are, it's watching you - if it's not explicitly raining enemy reinforcements.
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • Some of the remnants of the Crimson Lance are now led by Roland as members of the resistance against Handsome Jack. Despite Roland being a Crimson Lance deserter and working with the other vault hunters, they murdered hundreds of them and concretely ended their main employer. Handsome Jack is just that much of a threat. Most of them seem happy to work for Roland.3
  • Loader Mal stops attacking you once you beat him down badly enough at the end of the "Real Boy" side mission in Eridium Blight. He's one of the very few enemies you can absolutely only fight once per playthrough because of this.
  • Brick in a fashion, he just lets his underlings do the fighting before accepting the players into his gang.
• Deflector Shield:
  • Personal Beehive Barrier type shields as part of Regenerating Shield, Static Health. When not taking damage the shields always regenerate after a delay. Some player skills can affect the shields like giving them extra capacity and faster recharge rates. Unless the player has specific skills or picks up items players do not regenerate health. Shields may have other special effects like emitting a burst of elemental energy or cause damage to enemies attacking the player. Some shields even give up energy to boost weapon damage. Enemies also have similar shields.
  • Axton's turret can get a spherical type shield^note If the perk to place the turret on any surface is used or the turret is placed near an edge the turret shield generates a sphere shape that stops at surfaces. The shield is a dome or spherical beehive barrier. It stops incoming enemy shots but permits players to fire from inside or through the shield. The shield is not part of a health and shield regen set up.
  • You help Karima set one of these up and test it in the side-quest "The Overlooked: Shields Up".
• Dem Bones: Skeletons appear as one of the fantasy monsters in +5 to Punching.
• Denser and Wackier: Both in- and out-of-universe, there's notably more silliness in this compared to the original.
  • Compared to the Indecisive Parody in the first installment's core campaign and the arguable shift in its DLCs with their Breaking the Fourth Wall and card carrying villainy, this game is definitely crazier and funnier.
  • In-Universe, the psychos became even more bonkers after Jack took over. When at first their babbles had a constant predatory air to them, now they also spout out things like "Bring me a bucket, and I'll show you a bucket!" or "You can't kill me! I'm already dead tomorrow!", among other hilariously nonsensical and fourth-wall-breaking quotes.
• Destructible Projectiles:
  • Constructors have the ability to fire a nuke-like missile that will send you into Fight for your Life mode (or reduce you to a sliver of health if you were above half, to prevent a One-Hit Kill), and has a gigantic radius. Thus, the best way to avoid this attack is to shoot down the nuke in mid-air.
  • You can shoot at the Bullymong-thrown rocks to destroy them. The "Hurly Burly" Badass Challenge even encourages you to do this a lot.
• Deus ex Machina: A deliberately Invoked Trope in the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dungeon Keep DLC. As the campaign advances, everyone learns that Tina drew up the whole story as a coping mechanism for Roland's death. She didn't want to believe it had happened, and the ultimate fight against the Handsome Sorcerer finds her writing herself into a corner. She can't think of any way to properly end the campaign, since she doesn't want it to end. Lilith and the others remind her that it's ok to make up a happy ending just for the sake of it. Mordecai and the others loved seeing the "miracle" that she thought up, that is, Roland and Bloodwing coming up from nowhere to save the day.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you die with $7 or less cash, the New-U Station's fee will be waived, not charging you for anything. This is because the 7% of $7 is $0.49, and the game rounds down its value to zero.
  • If you die even before getting to Claptrap's place in the first level (Possible in a New Game Plus if you let yourself killed using explosions from your transferred weapons), you will get a free New U Station.
  • If Wilhelm drops his mission item in the cliff, making impossible to reach and catch it, the item will automatically be added to your inventory, saving you from the headache of having to re-fight him.
  • If you take out the old power core in the beginning of the "Rising Action" mission but don't replace it with the new one, all of your pending quests (main or DLC otherwise) will be set as "Blocked" and will only become available again after Lilith teleports you outside the city's entrance. This has some story justification as well, since Sanctuary is exposed once its shield is gone, defending it is your first priority over the optional quests and side stories.
  • When the player is sent to the Marcus Munitions backdoor after the events of "Control Core Angel", if you don't loot a single chest Marcus will only wonder how the hell you ended up there, instead of berating you for robbing him.
  • In True Vault Hunter Mode, the player is automatically given a third fuel cell for Plan B. Normally, one has to buy product from Crazy Earl as a means of introducing the uses for Eridium bullion, but since his upgrades can potentially cap out or at the very least become very expensive come a repeated playthrough, the fuel cell comes as a freebie given that Scooter's provided Eridium isn't changed.
  • The Bane machine gun has an intentionally annoying voice that plays any time you switch to, reload or fire it. To keep the joke going, if you try to circumvent it by setting the sound volume to the lowest possible setting, the Bane will remain unaffected despite every other voiced gun going silent as intended.
  • In multiplayer mode, the other players get to hear the lines of dialogue that your controlled character says in the middle of a fight. But in Krieg's case, nobody else but the Krieg player will clearly hear the sane voice that responds to the outer Krieg's ramblings, given that he is merely Hearing Voices (There are exceptions for certain lines though where the sane personality is actually the one speaking aloud, and the other players can hear them provided that they turn down all the other sources of noise, as the sane voice can get drowned by the background music and other sound effects).
  • In Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty, not turning either "X Marks The Spot" or "Treasure of the Vault" after raiding the Treasure Cave, exiting and re-entering the Leviathan's Lair will have the player get out naturally of the Leviathan (preventing players from re-fighting Roscoe and re-triggering Scarlett leaving the Greed Legendary pistol), play the Leviathan's introductory cutscene, see the Leviathan die saving the player the need to fight it... but the door to the Treasure Cave will be locked, preventing players to continuously raid the chests in the cave.
  • Several related to Commander Lilith...:
    • At the very beginning of the DLC, you're tasked with helping the Crimson Raiders fight the New Pandora Army's onslaught. The level is named "Fight for Sanctuary", distinguishing it from the main game's Sanctuary level. After the fight and the forced mass exodus from Sanctuary, the player enters into The Backburner, and the "Fight for Sanctuary" level disappears.
    • After the "Mt. Scarab Research Center" level, the player enters into "Paradise Sanctum", basically an infected version of Sanctuary where the Final Boss fight happens. After the fight and the ending cutscene, the player can't return to the area, since not only it doesn't feature a Fast Travel point, but Sanctuary is also destroyed in order to eradicate Hector and his plan, so trying to access it from the Research Center level will end with the player facing a deadend in the form of some vines blocking the entrance. At least there's an exit-only Fast Travel station on it.
    • There's no "Cult of the Vault" challenges for "Fight for Sanctuary" and "Paradise Sanctum". This is because there's no way to access these levels after the events that take place in them, so there's no way to backtrack and check places that may be missing in order to complete the challenge. Likewise there's nothing of note to be found in the "Cage of Angels" area in the "Helios Fallen" level, as the area becomes inaccessible after the optional mission "Sirentology" is completed.
    • Trying to enter the "Fight for Sanctuary" level by using the Character Selection screen after completing the DLC's main story^note i.e. completing the story in Normal mode, then switching to TVHM or UVHM and playing, then exiting and going back to Normal will spawn the player on the "Fight for Sanctuary" level, however, the entrance to the Crimson Raiders' HQ will be blocked with vines and a Fast Travel station will spawn behind the player as well.
• Dialog During Gameplay: Talking enemies would react to your character's specific abilities. And depending on the enemies' type or personality, their dialogues differ. For example, Goliaths will call Zer0 a "ghost person" if he comes out of invisibility, while Hyperion soldiers would mock and laugh at Deathtrap everytime Gaige summons him.
• Didn't Need Those Anyway!: Limbs can be blasted off of most Hyperion Loaders by inflicting sufficient damage to their weak points, though the weakpoints on certain tougher models may only be hit from behind. Removing the left arm will disable grenade-throwing, right arm takes away their gun, hitting the legs reduce them to a crawl. Repair Surveyors can digistruct new limbs onto the damaged units in the field (along with restoring the robot's HP), though, and they can still attack with a dangerous shock-element plasma blast from their main optic. Notable is the Super Badass Loader, a nasty enemy whose critical spots are its arm joints and nothing else, not even the optic that's a weak spot in all other Loaders.
• Diegetic Interface: The in-game menus and user interface this time around are produced using the ECHO device that you pick early on. In fact, the map, inventory, skill trees, badass challenges, quest list and so on are rendered into the game world, with your playable character even looking at the menus as if they are projected on big screens. The UI can also sway when you moved, and the menus can be dragged to change perspectives.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Zer0 seems to have been tailored to this - one of his skills gives you a stacking damage bonus when you get a critical hit, but you lose it if you don't get a critical. Also it fades over time, and is exclusive to sniper rifle crits. He also has no early health-restoration abilities, unlike everyone else, forcing you to rely on health vial drops to restore yourself (assuming you don't have a buddy who can heal you or a health-regenerating class mod). Most of the rest of his skills are based around high-risk, high-reward strategies involving in-your-face melee or distant-but-precise sniping.
  • Gaige's Ordered Chaos skill tree caters to this as well. Its primary – and mandatory – skill is "Anarchy", which stacks every time Gaige kills an enemy or reloads from a completely dry mag. The more Anarchy you've got, the more damage you do, but the more inaccurate you become, and this can stack all the way up to +700% Damage (and -700% Accuracy!). Other skills in the tree make use of Anarchy and do awesome things like creating explosions if you shoot at an enemy while jumping through the air or forming health-stealing claws in melee.
  • Hyperion weapons in general. The whole schtick of Hyperion weaponry - that they become more accurate as they fire - is so counterintuitive to every FPS out there that many players just don't use them. However, Hyperion weaponry also has consistently superior stats to just about everything else, so once you manage to get accustomed to the weirdness of using such a counterintuitive weapon family, they become devastatingly effective.
  • Torgue weaponry has the slowest bullet speed of any weapon in the game, and in some cases the bullet speed and firing rate are variable. This makes leading the target difficult. However, Torgue weapons deal explosive damage, which damages everything pretty well, even shields (which it has a 20% damage penalty). And on top of that, the damage listed in their description card is actually the splash damage from when the shot detonates close to the target instead of on it. The actual damage dealt by a direct hit is about twice as high. Now, couple Torgue weapons with Axton, who has skills that buff both gun and grenade damage, and remember that Torgue bullets count as both bullets and grenades. Yeah.
  • A Mania-centered Krieg build focused mostly on taking damage and meleeing, can be difficult to play (especially early on until you can get "Release The Beast" at the very bottom of the skill tree). But utilizing it properly, he can chew through waves of both regular Mooks and even some badass ones with little trouble, and a particularly skilled player can chain cast his Buzz Axe Rampage skill, showing bandits, dangerous creatures, and Hyperion just how dangerous a psychos can get when he's on the Vault Hunters' side.
  • Certain orange items with very bizarre/non-traditional weapon behavior but great stats can also fit this. One example is the Fastball, a legendary Tediore grenade. It is thrown (so it has travel time, unlike a longbow grenades), but it has much higher velocity and nearly no arc. It has incredibly high damage, but practically no splash damage, making it tricky to use at long distance but incredibly powerful if you can hit with it. Many other orange weapons have similarly strange abilities but great potential, such as a Tediore shotgun that homes in on nearby enemies when thrown, firing off any remaining cartridges in the magazine on the way, before exploding on impact.
  • Tediore Guns are frustrating to use if you're a compulsive reloader, but can be utterly devastating if you know about the heightened damage and instead use them as effectively extra grenades. They make farming certain bosses hilariously easy; simply toss an almost-full gun at them once or twice and the boss is guaranteed to drop. Their fast loading also makes them excellent in a firefight, where you absolutely cannot waste time reloading.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: The percentage boosts provided by your Badass Ranks decrease in value the more you spend on a statistic. For example, the initial percentage boost for upgrading a stat for the first time is 1%, yet these Badass Rank upgrades will slowly decrease until they reach 0.3% per upgrade.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The mission where you assault Control Core Angel has vibes indicating it might be the game's final mission - Assaulting a base of the big-bad, support from a lot of your allies, said base is filled with mooks, several Elite Mooks patrolling, and a large enemy as the area's boss fight. Nope, it ain't the final one.
• Disc-One Nuke: Almost every boss enemy has a heightened chance to drop one particular Legendary (orange-rarity) weapon, including those fought at the very beginning of the game. Although it's certainly a Luck-Based Mission to get one, the right spawn can give you a very powerful weapon quite early on that'll carry you for quite some levels^note Keep in mind, of course, that since these weapons spawn at low levels, they will eventually be outclassed by even white-level common weapons; it just takes a fair bit longer:
  • The very first actual boss in the game, Boom and his brother Bewm, have a chance to drop the grenade mod Bonus Package. This lets you throw a grenade, which explodes into more grenades, which, in turn, explodes into a few more grenades! One grenade equals 15-21 explosions that will rip clusters of enemies (or one big, slow-moving enemy) to shreds. The damage potential for this grenade mod is so high, it can outclass regular MIRV mods ten levels above it. Making this even better is the fact that both Boom and Bewm can drop it, effectively doubling the chance of it dropping (and potentially - but extremely rarely - giving you two copies).
  • Doc Mercy, the boss of one of the first sidequests you get in Sanctuary, has an increased chance to drop the Infinity pistol, which has great stats in addition to its unlimited ammo gimmick and is absolutely devastating in the hands of Salvador. As long as the user can make good use of the signature spread pattern, it's a mainstay until its damage is rendered ineffective.
  • Once you get to "Three Horns - Divide" (the area right after beating Captain Flynt) you can find the unique Psycho Savage Lee, who has a chance to drop the legendary pistol Unkempt Harold. It's a Torgue pistol (meaning explosive damage) that shoots three horizontal projectiles, which each split into up to seven projectiles. And if any projectile hits, it will deal damage as though all of them hit. On larger enemies this will put out about a thousand damage per shot if all seven hit. If it comes with the 'Double Penetrating' prefix, it'll fire two groups of projectiles at the cost of 6, making it a quite sought-after weapon. And since it's a Torgue weapon, it only comes with the Explosive elemental effect, which makes it quite strong against a lot of elemental and non-elemental enemies. This pistol can carry you from when you arrive at Three Horns all the way through the Wildlife Exploitation Facility, and perhaps even up to and including the BNK-3R.
  • Subverted with the Hornet pistol. Compared to other pistols of the same level, the Hornet really does live up to its Legendary rarity, but it has a boosted chance to drop from Knuckle Dragger, the tutorial boss. This means it will always spawn as a Level 1 variant and will become outclassed very, very quickly. Furthermore, its always-corrosive nature hinders it at a point in the game when every enemy that isn't Boom or Bewm has health instead of armor.
  • After Sanctuary lifts off, you get access to the "Clan War" sidequest chain. Completing it before any other mission grants you access to two powerful Slag weapons, provided you side with the Zafords: the Chulainn (a dual-element weapon -Slag and Shock- that has the unfortunate side effect of slagging you as well) and the Slagga (a Bandit SMG with the highest chance of slagging an enemy).
• Disney Death: Most players won't notice this unless they're watching it (and not running towards the next area shooting stuff), but during the final story mission, when Mordecai and Brick are helping the Vault Hunters to reach Jack before he activates the Warrior, the cargo ship Mordecai is on starts taking a lot of damage about halfway through the level. Brick then jumps onboard to try and help, but the ship crashes into the lava below, complete with Brick screaming. Then when you finish the story mission, both men show up at the end, a little bit battered, but no worse for the wear.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A few examples.
  • Handsome Jack tends to do these on you during story missions. It never works out, since you destroy everything he sends your way.
  • Three from Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage:
    • Mr. Torgue's side quest "Matter of Taste" wants you to kill a game review critic simply because he gave a 6 out of 10 for a game the former liked. As you leave the area after killing him, the surviving reviewers then comment on you and how you reminded them of yet another game (or rather, a feature in the game) they hated, causing Mr. Torgue to have you kill them as well.
    • In Tiny Tina's side quest "Number One Fan," she wants you to get an autograph from her third favorite murderer. The guy says no, so she has you kill him and collect his head instead. Then after you turn the quest in she mentions her number one favorite person is you.
    • During "Eat Cookies and Crap Thunder," Tina freaks out when she learns that the food vendors in the Torgue Arena are dispensing oatmeal-raisin cookies instead of the chocolate chip she thought they were. She demands you destroy the machines. The game seems to agree with her, saying "Oatmeal cookies should be considered a war crime" when turning in the mission.
      Mr Torgue: Somebody's destroying our food dispensers! In a few months, all the workers will probably starve to death! THAT IS AWESOME!
  • In the fourth DLC, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, after clearing out some guys from Moxxi's bar, one calls her a bitch before leaving, so Mr. Torgue orders you to 'punch him so hard he explodes'. You do. It is glorious.
  • Basically all of Jack's policies in towns he control. One of the announcements notes that littering is a crime punishable by death. It then goes on to specify that speaking badly of Hyperion is considered "Verbal Littering".
  • The Sheriff of Lynchwood has many, many laws. Breaking any of them is punishable by death.
• Dirty Coward:
  • The primary antagonist of Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage is afraid of losing his position, so he uses every underhanded move in the book to try to take you out without putting himself in danger.
  • Angel occasionally tells you that Jack is too much of a coward to face you directly and relies on others to do his dirty work. After she dies, Jack is pissed off enough that he wants to kill the players himself, though he still relies heavily on backup.
• Dodge the Bullet: A few humanoid enemies^note (Marauders, Psychos, Rats, Engineers) will sometimes be smart enough to perform side rolls or side steps if they are aware of you shooting at them from a long distance. This makes it difficult when you are aiming at their faces under a sniper scope, or when a Torgue projectile is too slow during a gunfight.
• Door Stopper: In Hammerlock's radio commercial for his "Beasts of Pandora" book, he says that if you were faced up against a stalker, you would know to attack it on the underside of its skull (its weakpoint), or otherwise you could just throw the massive book at it and run away while it's stunned.
• Don't Explain the Joke:
  • When discussing Moxxie leaving Jack:
    Jack: Once you've eaten prime rib for free, it's hard to go back to suckin' down hamburgers for cash. If you know what I'm talking about. Do you know what I'm talking about? (Beat) Dicks! I'm talkin' about dicks.
  • There's also the mission where Claptrap wants you to destroy a bandit encampment's furnace so the bandits will "chill out." He explains not only the joke, but the entire concept of humor!
    Claptrap: Since I still don't hear you laughing about "chill out", you must not understand humor in general. See, humor is based on subverting expectations, often through play on words. According to this formula of humor, my "chill out" comment was literally the funniest thing ever said by anyone.
• Double-Edged Buff: All of Captain Blade's Cursed weapons from Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty have a buff and a nerf taking place at the same time:
  • The "Orphan Maker" Shotgun has increased damage, but deals 5% of all damage caused with the weapon to the player.
  • The "Manly Man" Shield gives bonus damage to explosive attacks, but makes its user vulnerable to all elemental-based attacks.
  • The "Rapier" Assault Rifle deals +200% melee damage, but makes the user more vulnerable to melee attacks.
  • The "Otto Idol" Relic restores health for every enemy killed, but reduces the total 'Fight For Your Life' time.
  • The "Midnight Star" Grenade Mod has increased child grenade damage, but all child grenades fly towards the user.
• Dragon Ascendant: Loyal Handsome Jack follower and Hyperion employee Professor Nakayama isn't too pleased at what the vault hunters did to his boss.
• The Dreaded: Maya was apparently highly feared by the people of her planet, as the monks used the threat of her powers to scare the populace into paying taxes for the Church. She discovers this after she is ordered to execute a citizen for the crime of not paying a tithe.
• Dreadful Musician:
  • The A.I. core that you put into Moxxi's entertainment system overrides the music with a performance by one of these, hoping you'll commit suicide.
  • Jack also invokes this trope in one quest, after he kills Bloodwing. He at first mentions playing a violin, but then doesn't have one, and the dialogue stops. After you reach Sanctuary a few moments later, he comes back on, and then plays some really awful notes on said violin, then berates you and says that it would've been really funny if he had played it right after Bloodwing died. Can be viewed here.
• Dressing as the Enemy: With Ellie's help, you get to fool Flanksteak in opening the Bloodshot Camp's gate by imitating their Bandit Technicals.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • This game's cover features a psycho that's looking doubly suicidal.
  • Daisy after you deliver to her the love poem written by Scooter.
  • Face McShooty, a bandit that gives you the quest of shooting him in the face. Doing so even nets you an achievement.
  • You, in a sidequest. In Eridium Blight, there's a sidequest where Handsome Jack pays you to jump off a really tall cliff. You can comply and get a lot of Eridium (and get called his bitch), or call the Hyperion Suicide Prevention Hotline to get more EXP instead (and get called a loser.)
  • The A.I. core who you "rescue" plays bad music hoping that Moxxi's bar patrons would do this.
  • Angel is driven to do this after being pushed too far. Unfortunately she cannot kill herself, so she has you do it.
• Dumb Muscle: Goliaths, complete with a Simpleton Voice and Hulk Speak. Weirdly, their intelligence seems to go up a few notches when they become enraged.
• Dying Moment of Awesome
  Angel: Dad, I have to tell you something... you're an asshole.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: Hyperion Loaders and Engineers are first seen in the opening cutscene getting thoroughly stomped by the team. Loaders aren't fought in the game proper until several story missions in, and Engineers don't show up until even a bit later after that.
• Early Game Hell: Your first hours before you even reach Sanctuary can be a hard slog due to a number of reasons, but these became subverted in New Game Plus playthroughs or with accumulated Badass Ranks:
  • You have little money and they can come in slowly, which can limit your ability to purchase gear from Vending Shops, and force you to farm and scrounge for loot and ammo.
  • You slowly get shield and grenade gear after completing some sidequests from Hammerlock and defeating Boom Bewm respectively. This means that your first encounters would limit your offensive and crowd-control capabilities. Relics and Class Mods are also introduced half-way into the game, much more so with Rocket Launchers.
  • You only get your Action Skill once you reach level 5, and you'll need to grind or complete some side quests to reach it. Likewise, you won't be possibly experiencing the best of your character class in your first playthrough due to how Skill Points are tied to your player level.
  • You'll have to rely on white or green-rarity non-elemental equipment early on, since high-rarity elemental gear especially Maliwan weapons, can be hard to find and farm at first. But once you have decent weapons for the five elements, then the game will became easier afterwards.
  • Lastly, the Black Market and your third weapon slot are only available once you reach Sanctuary, while the fourth weapon slot is rewarded half-way through the main story. Your Inventory slots and maximum ammo are also relatively few until you can purchase more upgrades from Crazy Earl.
• Easter Egg:
  • Random Psychos have a very low chance of reciting the "Too Solid Flesh" soliloquy from Hamlet when they're aggroed. The whole, several minutes-long thing, as seen here.
  • Reaching a certain part of the Highlands will make a double rainbow visible, and either Handsome Jack or Claptrap will ECHO the player and repeat lines from the original viral video when it's spotted. This also unlocks an achievement.
• Egopolis:
  • Fyrestone, the first town in the first game is now Jackville.
  • The city of Opportunity, a ridiculously shiny city with statues and cardboard cutouts of Handsome Jack everywhere. True to his actual character, the people building it are overworked to death, there are more security robots around than humans, and it's not very well-planned out because the road to the city just stops without room for a parking lot. The actual builders are even told they won't be able to live there when the city is finished, since they aren't civilized or rich enough. The fact that he's actively paying people to live in a city in the middle of a bandit-infested planet makes the place an example of Fascist, but Inefficient.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Fire is good against flesh, acid is good against armor, and shock is good on shields, but they tend to do less damage against things they're not strong against compared to non-elemental guns. Explosive is average-middling on everything and has Painfully Slow Projectiles, but does splash damage. Slag is Non-Elemental, and coated enemies take more damage from non-slag attacks.
  • That said, it's usually a good idea to carry at least one of every type of elemental weapon on you. It may seem extremely inconvenient at first, particularly if you're a Kleptomaniac Hero who has to grab everything they see. But an otherwise tough battle against a badass loader can be made much, much easier if you have a good corrosive weapon on you, or a fire weapon against the goliath whose helmet you just accidentally shot off, particularly in True Vault Hunter Mode.
  • Lampshaded in the quests that explain this mechanic, which are actually called "Rock, Paper, Genocide".
• Elite Mook:
  • Besides the usual "Badass" variants of enemies, some enemy types are, in general, more powerful than their companions. Nomads, for example, are slow-moving but tougher than most other bandits, often armed with riot shields or heavy machine guns, and some even function as Mook Commanders by ordering the rest of the enemies after you.
  • Played for Laughs in Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt. Shortly before you reach Professor Nakayama's ship, he tells you that he's sending his best men to stop you. They're just a group of normal (slightly harder) tribesmen like all the rest. Nakayama panics when you deal with them.
    Nakayama: Those were LITERALLY MY BEST GUYS! Oh, I am so screwed!
• Emotionless Girl: Aubrey Callahan III from Captain Scarlett's DLC is a perpetually bored and sarcastic-sounding young woman who has some sidequests posted to the Oasis Bounty Board for you. She also returns in Tiny Tina's DLC as a Treant, again with a sidequest for you. Technically this is the only time you get to meet her in person.
• Empty Room Psych: Parodied in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep where a friggin' VAULT can be seen in the distance from Flamerock Refuge.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
  • Salvador and his grandmother.
  • Handsome Jack invokes this trope in one quest by sending you to check on his grandmother. He sounds rather concerned for her and doesn't seem like the usual jackass that he normally is. Then he subverts it by revealing that he hired some bandits to kill his own grandmother, and just wanted you to check and see if they did the job. Even better: since you killed them, he doesn't have to pay them anymore! Given that said grandmother has a buzz-axe in her house which is said to be used as a "disciplinary" weapon, Jack may have a Freudian Excuse for wanting her dead.
  • One quest line follows Taggart, an ex-boyfriend of Sir Hammerlock, where you find several of Taggart's ECHO recordings to his mother, ending with you looting what was supposed to be a Mother's Day gift.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped:
  • Everything Papa Hodunk says is "Unintelligible Old Coot Gibberish." Tector understands him just fine though.
  • The Bane makes "Annoying noises" whenever you shoot it.
• Everyone Is Bi:
  • Or at least, most people are, and those who aren't don't make a big deal about them. Various characters in the game will make passes at you or comment on how attractive you are regardless of what gender your character is, and in a game with a lot of characters who have almost no redeeming features, not a single one of them ever throws out a homophobic slur.
  • There are several same-sex marriages mentioned in passing as well. Then again, the game takes place in 5357.
• Everything Makes a Mushroom:
  • Badass grade robots create a skull-shaped mushroom cloud.
  • Also played straight with Axton's turret gun if you get a certain skill. It will create a mushroom-cloud explosion wherever it lands at.
  • The "Nukem" rocket launcher creates a mini mushroom cloud.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • As in the first game, the wildlife is angry and numerous. Newly added are the plants, like Firemelons, which explode when shot or Stinging Cacti which electrocute anything that gets close when they are shot, struck, or otherwise disturbed.
  • The Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary DLC has flora infected with Hector's Paradise Gas. Tendrils will come out from walls to lash at you, Infected Flowers spew gas at your direction, and other infected plants will spawn enemies in your area.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Jack seems to be under the impression that whether you're good or evil is entirely down to aesthetics: if you look great, have a lot of money, and live in a shiny, shiny city, you're the good guy, and good guys always win. He doesn't really seem to understand the difference between order and chaos, either, because while he mentions he's trying to clean everything up, that's in between fits of mad laughter over how hilarious it is to blow people's brains out and speeches about how mining-induced volcanoes are "the definition of awesome!"
  • Jack seems to genuinely believe he's the hero, and berates the vault hunters for being bandits and unable to recognise that the hero is going to defeat them and make the world a better place. He gives you an example where he talks about that one time he burnt down an orphanage, and a bystander tried to kill him with a spoon. Jack takes the spoon and blinds the guy with it. And then forgets where he was going with the example.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • In full effect. Handsome Jack can't resist constantly calling you to tell you how he Poked The Poodle recently. On several occasions he's audibly eating something. He is also visibly offended by any and all of your attempts to resist him to the point that your continued existence alone causes him to be in a state of constant Villainous Breakdown.
  • One sidequest has Handsome Jack give you a mission to kill yourself, knowing full well you'll respawn; he just wants to humiliate you.
  • Another mission has the Hyperion Corporation hiring you to kill a bunch of bandits, knowing full well who you are and promising a "Hyperion firearm made especially for you" if you do it. The sniper rifle in question has decent stats and an onboard A.I. that does everything it can to make you feel bad (which is an explicit Shout-Out to this XKCD comic).
• Evil Weapon: The Bane. Anyone who encounters it will admit it's a fine weapon, but it bears a horrible curse that either kills its users or drives them insane. Specifically, having it out slows your movement to a crawl, and it's a talking weapon which makes a lot of extremely annoying noise when fired, or zoomed, or anything.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • The "Loaders" are repurposed enemy mining robots and come in many deadly varieties. HOT Loaders are armed with flamethrowers. JNK Loaders are assembled from junkyard scraps. EXP Loaders... explode.
  • The mission called "Shoot This Guy in the Face". A guy named "Face McShooty" wants you to shoot him in the face. Guess what you do.
    "You shot him in the face." (Message that appears when turning the mission in)
  • There's a unique bruiser named Muscles and a unique midget named Shorty.
  • In Captain Scarlett's Pirate Booty, there is also an ARR Loader, which is a pirate robot complete with pegleg and sword.
  • Jack taunts the Vault Hunters early on by talking about the diamond pony he bought. It's not a statue, by the way: it's an actual living breathing pony with a diamond body.
• Experience Booster:
  • The Moxxi's Endowment Relic.
  • Krieg's "Pull the Pin" skill causes him to drop a free grenade upon death. If he gets a kill with it, he gets double the XP.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: At the beginning of the game, Claptrap's eye suddenly turns back on after it was torn out of him. He tells the player that he sees the two of them... and immediately realizes that it means the bullymong that ripped his eye out must be very close.
• Exploding Barrels: All over the place. Random incendiary, corrosive, explosive, slag, and oddly, barrels of electricity are everywhere. Larger tanks of fuel or explosive gas are around as well; apparently Jakobs was a major fuel provider.
• Exploited Immunity: One of Krieg's skills allows him to become an Action Bomb if his HP is depleted. If he manages to kill an enemy in the explosion, he'll come back to life thanks to the second wind mechanic.
• Expospeak Gag: Near the beginning of the game, Hammerlock utters "Ah, fecal matter!" to express his displeasure at the bounty board not working.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge:
  • Bandit "Maylay" shields encourage this as a tactic, granting bonus melee damage when depleted. This is especially the case with the unique Love Thumper shield, which takes a very long time to recharge and gives a huge melee bonus - while also causing explosions with every connecting melee attack.
  • Goliaths drop their weapons when their helmets are knocked off, attacking with their bare hands until killed. Provoking this is the best way to deal with Goliath Blasters, because their rocket launchers are much more dangerous than they could ever be while enraged.
  • A Mania-build Krieg can invoke this, as he has several skills which boosts his melee when his shields are down and delays the shield recharge. However, should you find yourself in fight for your life mode, this isn't as effective if the enemies move out of your hitting range.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • According to Scooter, Crazy Earl once ate one of his cars. The whole thing. With a fork and all...
  • Skags will eat EVERYTHING. One quest flavor text theorizes that guns must taste like filet mignon to them seeing how often they drop them when killed.
  • There is a citizen in Sanctuary that will make claims that his various family members have all eaten various forms of Pandora wildlife... and another who claims all his family members were eaten by nearly all forms of Pandora wildlife.
• Eye Beams:
  • Loaders can zap you with their Cyber Cyclops eyes, an attack that's usually reserved for when their primary weapon is useless (like when you're out of range or when you shoot their arms off). It charges slowly and is pretty easy to avoid. Angelic Guard loaders have substantially more effective eye beams.
  • Constructors have much more powerful lasers that can cut you down in seconds, though again it's not an attack they use very often.
  • Lab Rats, bandits who were experimented on by Hyperion and escaped, fire very powerful beams from their eyes if they manage to get right in your face.
  • Deathtrap also has an electrical eye beam he'll use against distant flying targets (like Rakk) and can get a more powerful fire-damage beam as an upgrade from Gaige's middle skill tree.
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: One of the heads available for Gaige the Mechromancer is a newsboy cap (appropriately titled "Read All About It"), the peak of which hides her eyes (when viewing the character model on the title screen, either variant can occur depending on the angle her head is positioned).
• Eye Scream: Multiple:
  • One of your first missions is a result of a bullymong named Knuckle Dragger tearing out Claptrap's eye.
  • Jack gloats about blinding a man with a spoon in front of his children (one of whom lives in Sanctuary and still has the spoon). While trying to tell you how he differs from the "bad guys" he claims you are.

F

• Falling Damage: While the game eschews the trope unlike 1, it's played straight in the "The Vaughnguard" quest of Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary. You get to demonstrate to Vaughn's new recruits that you won't die from jumping on a tower, however, when the new recruits jump, they get squashed when they hit the ground.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Played straight with the Nomads. Their hatred of Midgets seems apparent given their tendency to strap them to their shields, and consider "Midget-lover" an insult that they often hurl at you.
  • Subverted in the Tiny Tina DLC. At one point while fighting the dwarves, Lilith comments that all of them look like Salvador. Tina tries to dismiss it, but the others wonder if she's being a little racist. Tina then yells and asks Salvador downstairs if it's okay that all the dwarves look like him. He yells back and says that it's awesome.
• Feuding Families: There's a quest chain where you facilitate the feud between the Hodunks and the Zafords. Which clan comes out on top is ultimately up to the player.
• Fiction 500:
  • Handsome Jack. Hyperion is the largest corporation on Pandora, and he owns it.
    Jack: I wanted to let you know that I just bought a pony. Made of diamonds. Because I'm rich.
  • Jack later clarifies: not a statue, a living pony made of diamonds. Given that there are species on Pandora composed of precious gems, this is a little less far-fetched, but still.
  • His promised bounty reward to several assassins? Enough money for each of them to buy a mansion composed of smaller mansions.
• Fission Mailed:
  • There is a very straight-forward at this in one very specific moment. Kill Yourself. No, seriously, it is a mission given by Handsome Jack. He has chosen a spot for you to commit suicide and gives you the choice of doing or not. It's hilarious, regardless of the outcome.
  • Also, there's Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. Last mission involves you finding the "marked spot" that should lead to a vault full of loot. Instead, you get EATEN by Leviathan. The best part? He is taking you and her straight to the Vault, but the BEST part is... Do you remember her pet Roscoe? She found him!
• Flare Gun: Flynt's Tinderbox behaves exactly like one, firing low-arcing projectiles that deal laughable impact damage, but near-always sets targets on fire for massive Incendiary damage. Curiously enough, it's also one of the most persistently "rare" weapons in the game, being guaranteed to show up no less than three times over the course of the main story:
  • The first time the player encounters it, it's dropped by its owner, Captain Flynt.
  • The second time is during the mission A Train to Catch; when you arrive in the Tundra Express, you can blow the head off a nearby snowman to reveal the Tinderbox. It's because you'll need a fire weapon to set Varkids on fire.
  • The third time is during Clan War: Trailer Trashing, in which it's given to you as a mission item (meaning you can't keep it) so you can set the Hodunk Clan's trailer park on fire.
• Flat "What":
  • Lilith's reaction to Roland's discovery that the Vault is not a cache of weapons or similar, but a living thing. Twice in a row.
    Lilith: I'm just gonna go ahead and repeat myself. What?
  • Also Jack's reaction to Angel telling him that she's discovered another Siren (Maya, specifically).
• Flipping the Bird:
  • With the skill Come At Me Bro!, Salvador does this with both hands before reaching for his guns.
  • Claptrap does this to Sir Hammerlock after his optic surgery. Claptrap doesn't have a middle finger, so he has to do a bras d'honneur instead.
• Flunky Boss: Some fights are much more about fighting off waves of enemies than attacking one single foe; in other cases there's a giant foe (usually a Constructor) that's actually making new enemies for you to fight. There's a boss fight against a Thresher that has swallowed a supply beacon and it is inadvertently causing robots to be launched from the moon down to its location, making it one of those rare "inadvertent" flunky boss fights. In a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, this actually works in the player's favour, as it provides the only way to successfully revive yourself out of a Second Wind outside of Co-Op (or if everyone is downed) when the boss still has a reasonable amount of health.
• Foreshadowing: Multiple:
  • During the side mission "Assassinate the Assassins," each target drops an ECHO device containing a message from Handsome Jack as instructions for people on trying to get one of his bounties, specifically for the Siren Lilith. To dissuade bounty hunters from just painting a woman's arm blue and turning in her corpse as "evidence" he says there's only six Sirens in the universe. More importantly, he also says he knows who three of them are. At this point in the game the player only knows two of them, Lilith and Maya. Plot Point! Actually you know all three, you just don't realize it. It is later revealed that Angel is a Siren... and Jack's daughter. It is especially well done because there were lots of hints in Borderlands 1 that Steele was also a Siren, so returning players would assume she's one of the three, and might not think there's anything else behind the comment.
  • Even earlier, when Angel hacks a door for you, she uses an ability called "Phaseshift." That is awfully similar to Phaselock and Phasewalk, Maya and Lilith's respective Siren abilities.
  • Very small and easy to miss but Angel frequently apologizes for swearing or cuts herself off before she can. It's repeated at several points that Jack considers profanity a punishable offense. One might think that she's apologizing because Jack programmed her with the same aversion, however the pattern is much closer to a repeatedly-disciplined child than the hard programming one would expect from an A.I.
  • A minor version in Tina's house. Look at the cards on the table. They're the names of each of the invitees to her tea party, who you will be asked to fetch for a side mission. One of them says "Evil bastard that killed my parents".
  • When you first meet Roland in the flesh, he's on a bed with a giant, red graffiti on the wall that reads "You Die!" Roland is the only one of the original Vault Hunters to die in the story.
  • Roland also has a prominent black skull tattooed on his left arm. This one could be argued as not foreshadowing, since Roland had the same tattoo in Borderlands 1. But Borderlands 2 keeps positioning Roland so that his left arm is facing the player each time they speak to him in Sanctuary.
  • Before beginning the raid on Angel's location, Roland even mutters "Time to think of some memorable last words."
  • When you get back to Sanctuary after killing Wilhelm, Scooter is working on one of the fuel cell receptacles, right before Sanctuary has to take off.
  • In the mission "Wildlife Preservation," Mordecai tells the Vault Hunters that he's not going to lose his cool over Bloodwing's capture. When Jack kills her, Mordecai goes ballistic.
  • As you journey through the Wildlife Preserve, Mordecai repeatedly assures you that Bloodwing is tough enough to withstand whatever torment Hyperion was putting her through. Remember when Lilith said roughly the same thing about Roland earlier in the game?
  • In Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, the first story mission is called "Denial, Anger, Initiative". This is a hint that Tina is already aware of Roland's death but is in denial, which is revealed to be the case at the end.
  • During "My First Gun" and "Best Minion Ever," Claptrap is confounded by stubborn Hyperion tech and stairs, respectively. Both of them come into play at the beginning of "Talon of God," the final story mission.
  • Plenty to the third game in Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary:
    • Vaughn mentions that the last time he saw Rhys, the latter was headed to Promethea to remake the Atlas corporation. Promethea is one of the new planets in 3, with the conflict between the reborn Atlas and Maliwan forming the impetus of the plotline there. Another of his quotes has him state that he changed his gang's name from "Children of Helios" because it sounded like a cult. Funny thing about that...
    • After Mordecai is cured of the gas, he says that he's considering going with Tina and Brick off Pandora. By 3, the trio have formed a bounty hunting team called "the B-Team".
    • Moxxi muses that she should choose something more "mobile" for her next establishment after Lilith destroys Sanctuary. Well, a spaceship like Sanctuary III is pretty mobile...
    • Hammerlock talks about his dream of going hunting across the galaxy, mentioning another new planet, Eden-6.
    • Marcus ponders on how he feels like he's getting old, and that he should change things up a bit, joking about growing a ponytail. Come 3, and he does indeed sport a ponytail.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Vaughn doesn't seem to recognize Zer0 in Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary despite them meeting in the first episode of Tales of the Borderlands.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Zer0 is portrayed with only four digits on each hand. This may be just another reference to his Japan-esque haiku-spouting cyber-ninja character, or, given that his body is completely concealed and he seems extremely lanky for someone his strength, it might be a hint that he is not exactly human.
• Four-Point Scale: In-Universe; In the Campaign of Carnage DLC, an ECHO sim reviewer gives a bad review to a game Mr. Torgue enjoys... with a numbered score of 6/10. Mr. Torgue calls the reviewer out on his hypocrisy, saying that by any logical standard 6/10 is above average.
• Freudian Slip: Moxxi gives one when you're going to face off with Motor Momma in the Torgue DLC. She immediately apologizes for it afterward, saying that she went too far that time.
  Moxxi: No one eats my girlfriends but me.
  • A non-sexual example also happens in the Tiny Tina DLC, where Tina as dungeon master gives you a quest where you have to collect missing crumpets to feed the townspeople. Lillith becomes a little suspicious as to why the food of choice had to be crumpets; after some interrogation, it turns out that yes, Tina has been literally eating nothing but crumpets for years, and so Lillith, Mordecai and Brick proceed to force-feed her salad.
• Friendly Fire Proof: In co-op games, shooting other players outside of a duel doesn't hurt them. The Siren even has a skill that heals others by shooting them. Some special shield effects can hurt your teammates, namely the IED Boosters dropped by the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and the explosive nova caused by melee attacks when the Love Thumper is depleted.
  • Krieg has a special skill that specifically allows allies to damage him. Given that he often goes on massive rampages whenever he's at low health, this is still beneficial.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Oh, so there's a tyrannical government/megacorp in charge that tried to kill you when you landed? That sucks! Now, watch a character from the first game is killed, in a recording while the Big Bad laughs, your supposed ally (Guardian) Angel turn on you because she's working for said Big Bad, your city is endangered, a friend's pet is mutated then killed, you are forced to Mercy Kill a girl you find out is the Corrupt Corporate Executive's daughter held in perpetual slavery to stop said baddie, another friend is shot (right after the whole kill-the-slave-girl thing), a third friend is kidnapped and the Big Bad got away with everything! Well, until the final boss battle anyway.
  • In one side quest for Tiny Tina's DLC, players are asked to help Claptrap get a beard and charge up his wand. After fulfilling those quests, he then decides to cast some spells to test out his new toys, by summoning and defeating a demon. Said demon turns out to be sentient brooms not unlike those seen in Fantasia. To make matters hilariously worse, every time he tries to dismiss or weaken them, he ends up making them even stronger, forcing you to deal with ever more powerful minions.
• Full Health Bonus: This game introduced Amp Shields to the series. They provide a large boost to damage when your shield energy is full, but also deplete a significant amount of that energy when the boost activates, meaning you only get one shot and have to wait for your shields to recharge before using it again. In this game specifically, The Bee is a legendary variant that provides the amp damage at no energy cost, allowing for multiple consecutive shots of boosted damage for as long as you can avoid actually getting hit. It proved to be so powerful that not only was The Bee itself nerfed, but several of the weapons people would use with it also got nerfed, and shotguns as a whole got a major nerf when used with Amp Shields.
• Funny Background Event: In Krieg's intro video, he does his toss-buzzaxe-in-the-air-and-catch-it thing. When he's about to pounce the guard in the red armor, he drops it.

G

• Game-Breaking Bug: Most are not completely game breaking, but they can be prevalent.
  • The biggest one was resetting Badass Ranks and deleting all skin unlocks/stash items, while still leaving the challenges for them completed. It happened randomly from the first day of release, though it was eventually patched (and the patch re-credited all ranks and unlocks, mostly accurately).
  • After killing Doc Mercy, he drops a quest item. For some reason, this can clip through the floor, forcing you to quit the game so it spawns where Mercy spawned.
  • If an enemy is in front of the New-U station when you respawn, you can get stuck inside of the station. Enemies almost never appear in front of New-U stations, so as to prevent spawn killing, but Loaders can move in front of the station during or after the fight with the Gluttonous Thresher. During the fight it's not a problem, as the Thresher will just kill you, you respawn, and you may move freely again, but after the fight, Loaders won't spawn anymore, meaning that if you die while the last Loader was standing in front of the station, and you kill him upon respawn, you're stuck and have no choice but to quit the game to fix it.
  • The BNK3R boss can get stuck in the geometry. If you kill it, nothing happens, forcing you to reload your game. Bloodwing can suffer the same issue, forcing the player to have to redo the entire level in order to get back to the fight.
  • During the final leg of the "Get to Know Jack" sidequest, if you turn the valve to summon the rakk holding the final ECHO log before pressing a nearby button, you will have one, one chance to kill the rakk before it vanishes; otherwise its ECHO log, and subsequently the sidequest, is gone for good.
  • Gaige was a source of bugs upon release:
    • If someone is using Anarchy on a multiplayer game and isn't hosting it, they'll lose their stacks every reload without question.
    • Having points invested in Gaige's "Smaller, Lighter, Faster" skill (which are required to advance in the Anarchy tree) reduces the magazine size of any gun she uses. If that gun has a magazine size of one (rare, such as some Jakobs shotguns and the Infinity pistol), it's reduced to less than one and subsequently rounded down to zero, making the gun completely useless to her.
  • For Maya players who spec in Cataclysm, critical kills are not registered as such if they trigger Cloudkill, which can be a pain if you're aiming for the bonus objectives for the Circle of Slaughter sidequests.
  • Landing at a certain spot in The Highlands, near Overlook, will end with the player getting stuck in a pit from which players cannot escape. The only way to escape it is to exit and re-enter the game.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: None of the original characters can be harmed when they're out fighting in the field with you during story missions. Most blatantly with Brick, whose preferred method of fighting is punching things to death.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Just after Sanctuary takes off, Lilith sends you back at the entrance of the road leading to Sanctuary with the bridge to the city now broken, and you will be required to exit via the Three Horns Valley. If you turn around and re-enter, the entire location will be replaced with the Sanctuary Hole map, the layout being different, and the bandits are now occupying the place as if the story forgot the fact that the city has just taken off a few seconds ago.
  • Even if Handsome Jack is dead, incomplete side missions where he does the talking will still have him ECHO you because his voice is required.
  • Roland's death. From being able to tank high caliber bullets, rockets, lightning, fire and globs of superacid in Borderlands 1, to dying from a single shot from a pistol into the back in this game.
  • The extent of the explanation behind Maya's Siren powers is that Angel points out that she's not affected by Eridium.
  • From Commander Lilith..., being able to Fast Travel to the main game's Sanctuary at any point, even though the city has been overtaken by the New Pandora Army and is now half vines, half concrete. And by the end of the DLC, it explodes.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Hyperion is a stark, faceless megacorporation that wants your money, and Marcus is a cut-throat trader who likes playing dirty. This is why dying costs you 7% of your money, and also why Marcus's ammo costs a percentage of your money instead of a fixed amount.
  • The slag mechanic is exclusive to Borderlands 2. This is because Slag is a by-product of Eridium processing, which is an activity that only takes place in this game as Handsome Jack is pouring all of Hyperion's resources into tapping the newly formed Eridium; refining all that Eridium produces a lot of Slag, enough to pollute the entire planet with it, and you can use it because in this game it's everywhere. It doesn't show up in Borderlands 1 because Eridium only started forming once the first Vault was opened, it only shows up in a few select occasions in The Pre-Sequel because Eridium had been only recently discovered (a few bosses use Slag, but you can't), and it doesn't show up in Borderlands 3 because the major factions are too busy fighting each other to refine Eridium and because the main corporation that used Slag (Hyperion) underwent a sanitization overhaul in order to distance themselves from their past president.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Most bandits, going from Marauders to Psychos. The guy on the cover is a Psycho, for instance. Especially Rats, though.
• Gatling Good:
  • The Vladof spinigun barrel features a gatling style form of operation, that spins up to maximum rate of fire and eats through ammo quickly, with variations depending on manufacturer:
    • Vladof and Bandit work as described. The legendary Vladof Shredifier reaches top speed almost immediately.
    • Dahl "Miniguns" don't need to spool up in hip fire, and shoot a burst from each barrel when aimed.
    • Torgue "Spitters" have a randomized rate of fire that sounds similar to a car engine sputtering and spitting.
    • Jakobs "Gatling Guns" fire all three spinigun barrels at the same time, effectively turning it into an accurate shotgun.
  • Non-Jakobs Pistols can also come with a Vladof double rotary barrel, which gives them ridiculously fast fire rates.
  • Badass Goliaths heft massive miniguns, literally roughly the same size as themselves, into combat — though, like all Goliaths, they drop their weapon when enraged.
  • The Badassasaurus has rocket-firing miniguns mounted as its "arms".
• Gem Tissue: The Caustic Caverns are the habitat of creatures known as Crystalisks, huge tripedal animals with valuable crystals growing in their flesh.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • Taggart named an especially big and nasty Stalker after his mother, Henry.
  • Butt Stallion, even though the horse in question is female.
• Gender-Inverted Trope: In Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, the side-quest "Fake Geek Guy" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a gender-reversed example of the 'Fake Geek Girl' stereotype, with Lilith playing the role of the 'true' geek, and Mr. Torgue as the 'suspect' geek. Turns out Mr. Torgue isn't as hardcore a geek as either Lilith or Tina would like, and breaks down in tears because he just wants to be included.
  Mr. Torgue: [Inelegant Blubbering]
  Lilith: Wow... now I kinda feel like a dick.
  Tina: Yeeeeeahmetoo.
• Gentleman Adventurer: Sir Hammerlock (according to his introduction slide, no less). Subverted as he is also Sophisticated as Hell and just as prone to crude humor as everyone else on the planet.
  Sir Hammerlock: I just - y'know what, sod it all - Bonerfarts; they're Bonerfarts from now on!
• Giant Flyer: Badass and Chubby Rakk. Also Bloodwing after Jack does his slag experiments on her.
• Giant Mook:
  • Bruisers return, but are largely replaced by Goliaths as the Bandit giant mook. WAR Loaders fill this role in Hyperion forces.
  • One of the first thresher-type monsters you face is the fifty-foot-tall one.
• Gilligan Cut: An audio version is used frequently in TK Baha's old ECHO recordings.
  TK: Well, it's the first day on Pandora. Wife wasn't too happy about the move, but she'll come around. This is the beginning of our new life together!
  [next ECHO]
  TK: Welp, my wife's dead.
• Giver of Lame Names:
  • One quest Hammerlock gives you involves changing the name of the Bullymongs for his almanac. After a while he gives up and just calls them "Bonerfarts" (also naming the children as "Bonertoots"), which the game will hilariously update them to for the duration of that quest.
  • In the very beginning of the game, Handsome Jack talks about how he's recently bought a horse made of diamonds that he wants to call "Piss-for-brains" in honor of the Vault Hunters. Later on, he settles on "Butt Stallion". According to the Sheriff, Jack just sucks at naming things since his original name for Lynchwood was "New New Haven."
  • Jack's attempt at giving "cool" and "cutting-edge" names to Hyperion's line of gun products doesn't amount to anything more than putting business-related buzzwords on the items, even if they make no sense, like "Synergy!" and "Longitudinal!" His executive board is dumbfounded by this, but of course, Jack assumes that this means they're the stupid ones.
• Gladiator Subquest:
  • The main game has three different arena side quests.
  • The Mr. Torgue DLC features several whose first level must be completed in order to advance the story. The second and subsequent tiers of these matches are optional.
• Glass Cannon: The idea behind the Bee shield, which provides a massive gun damage boost with no capacity drain, unlike normal Amplify shields, as long as it's fully charged. Gun damage is very powerful while full, but take one hit and extra damage disappears — not to mention it has low capacity and long recharge delay, so a user has to be extra careful and take cover frequently.
  • Subverted if you're wearing a Bee Shield when you climb into a vehicle. Any bullet^note but ONLY bullets you fire from the turrets has amp damage added, but the vehicle takes damage as normal and the effect works regardless of the vehicle's health or the state of your shield when you climbed in.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • One of Zed's quests involves getting Rakk and Skag parts for him. Later they turn into Skrakk, or flying skags. The final part of the quest has you kill a Spycho, or a psycho combined with a spiderant.
  Zed: Y'know, if you think about it, this is really all your fault.
  • A similar quest from Sir Hammerlock involves injecting evolving Varkid cocoons with a mutagenic serum. Varkids are insect-like critters that, when in combat and in the presence of at least another Varkid, will enter a cocoon stage and morph into a flying Adult Varkid. Hammerlock's serum causes them to turn into Mutant Varkids that spit an extremely powerful corrossive acid and take lots of damage before dying. This quest is very hard, and it's actually a good idea to spend some time leveling up before undertaking it.
  • 'Mad Moxxi's Wedding Day Massacre starts with Moxxi trying to get the Zafords and Hodunks to put aside their feud and unite over a wedding between a Hodunk woman and a Zaford man. The clans do end up uniting after the titular massacre to declare war together on Moxxi and the Vault Hunters.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns:
  • On the Bad end we have Hyperion and Bandit guns. Hyperion guns are sleek, futuristic space age guns with excellent statistics and sleek gimmicks, are made by the resident Big Bad, and their names are stark, faceless corporate babble such as "Customer Focused Innovation". Bandit guns, meanwhile, look like random junk cobbled together with two straps of duct tape and the will of the Almighty, are made by the local Ax-Crazy people who want your head, and have garbage statistics except for their gigantic magazines.
  • On the Good end we have Jakobs, guns made by Honest Corporate Executives with firm values and fair business practices. Unlike Hyperion, their guns are 19th century-like and with no frills whatsoever, and their names are traditional, cultured Chinook words; and unlike Bandit guns, their guns have exquisite top notch craftsmanship and have excellent stats but small magazines.
  • On the morally ambiguous middle ground we have Dahl, which is a corporation that holds a corporate image of being an invincible badass army while actually being run by cowards who bail out of danger at the first chance and usually leaving their ground forces behind, and whose guns look military, utilitarian and like present day guns; Vladof, which is the defense industry version of those fashion companies that make Che Guevara T-shirts and are equally hypocritical in their employee relationships; Tediore, which is focused on making cheap, disposable, easy-to-use guns with poor stats but a neat gimmick where instead of reloading you toss away the entire gun and a new one spawns on your hand; Maliwan, which is run by pretentious hipsters who view non-elemental damage as boorish and unrefined, and whose alliance with the Children of the Vault cult in Borderlands 3, despite being mostly for political reasons, is highly evocative of how rampant are New Age beliefs in the Silicon Valley; and Torgue, which is run by a bumbling Ax-Crazy Large Ham who just wants Stuff Blowing Up and makes guns that are all about badass explosions.
• Good Is Boring: Whereas Handsome Jack is bombastic, larger-than-life and can't spend more than 30 seconds on ECHO transmissions without cracking a joke, the Big Good Roland is the most dead serious and composed member of the entire cast.
  • Also happens at a city-wide level in Hyperion-controlled Opportunity and rebel-controlled Sanctuary. The former is a sleek, shiny mini-megalopolis with buildings made out of perfectly polished glass and metal and holographic ads all over the place, yet absolutely nobody but Hyperion robots and military forces is ever seen in the streets, and it's all just an empty Crapsaccharine World façade hiding a deeply dysfunctional Fascist, but Inefficient corporate government. Sanctuary, meanwhile, is nothing but drab brown, dilapidated structures with some of them even destroyed with the rubble still lingering there, yet it's always bustling, life there is comfortable, and it's one of the few places in Pandora that has any such thing as quality of life and a functional government.
• Gorn:
  • Sometimes enemies turn into chunks if you kill them with a high powered weapon, or they may also vaporize/burn/melt away if you kill them with an elemental weapon.
  • It is possible to blow off limbs
  • The only thing keeping a Golaith's skull from erupting out of his head and flopping around on his distended spinal cord is that helmet he's wearing...
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!:
  • The Guardian Angel occasionally gets frustrated and utters a minor swear word, then acts mortified and changes it to "darn" or "heck" or so on.
  • This may have something to do with the fact that Jack, Angel's father, who is keeping her a prisoner to use her as a living battery, admonishes both her and other characters for "language" later in the game (having presumably done so for Angel's entire life) and has no compunction about inflicting serious pain to reinforce this.
  • The censorship-obsessed robot in Washburn Refinery sends you on a mission to kill a profanity-spewing radio DJ. When you actually meet the DJ, his "profanity" is just a lot of infantile, imaginative made-up words that are not, technically speaking, obscene. "Suck my willywack!"
• Gradual Regeneration: There are very few shields that restore your health over time compared to the first game, but there are other ways to gain regeneration, like abilities that grant it through action skill use or killing an enemy, or certain class mods.
• Grail in the Garbage: Like in the first game, sometimes you may find a really good gun from a random garbage can. Usually, that happens after you just spent most of your money buying something ever so slightly less good from a vending machine only five minutes ago.
• Gratuitous Spanish:
  • From Mordecai, he says stuff like "adios" or "Gotcha, Pendejo" when he's helping you out by sniping enemies.
  • Salvador's speech is also peppered with Spanish, especially in ECHO recordings. "They tried to kill mi abuela!" Becomes hilarious when he has Jack's voice.
• Gratuitous English: In the Japanese version of the game, the subtitles always spell out the names of people and places in English.
• Gratuitous Foreign Languages in general:
  • Claptrap likes to say "Let's go!" in several languages, such as French ("Allons-y!"), Spanish ("¡Vámonos!") or Italian ("Andiamo!").
• Gratuitous Ninja
  • Probably the entirety of what Zer0's deal is.
  • In Captain Scarlett's Pirate Booty, you also have Ninja Pirates who can use a kind of deception.
• Grave Robbing:
  • Claptrap is doing this when you meet him.
    Claptrap: [rummaging in a pile of snow with limbs sticking out] Here! Take this ECHO communicator which I totally didn't loot from one of these corpses.
  • Marcus's vending machines periodically mention that a lot of his stock was lifted from dead bodies.
  • YOU do it in a quest or two.
• Great White Hunter: Sir Hammerlock is a Gentleman Adventurer who is equal parts hunter, scholar, and gentleman. Most of the reward items he gives you are sniper rifles. Somewhat subverted in that he's not actually white. He doesn't go out in the field much anymore, mostly because he literally lost an arm and a leg to some of Pandora's native fauna. An ex-boyfriend of his is quite Manly Gay, definitely not part of the traditional stereotype.
• Green Rocks:
  • Eridium, a rare element with ties to the Eridians, and the cornerstone of Eridian technology from the first game. The opening of the Vault is revealed to have spread it all over the planet, which in turn triggered a gold rush and a subsequent takeover by Hyperion. It is used as a currency for a unique vendor and to access raid bosses. In addition, it seems to have an empowering effect on Sirens like Lilith, who gained the ability to teleport among other things.
  • Slag is an Eridium byproduct and it's all over the place in some parts of this game. It tends to cause crazy mutations in people, so it's the most likely cause of all those weird-as-hell Goliaths and other mutants.
  • Constant overexposure leads to total physical dependence, as is the case with Angel.
• Grenade Launcher: Unlike the first game, this game has them, though not as a distinct weapon type. Dahl's Grenadier assault rifles, E-Tech shotguns, and the legendary Torgue Kerblaster are the various kinds you can get your hands on.
• Grenade Spam: Many flavours. Each more entertaining than the last; least of which is spamming the grenade button.
  • Tediore weapons are thrown at enemies when reloaded, whereupon they explode. The more bullets in the magazine, the more powerful the explosion. The explosion also has whatever elemental effects the weapon carries, if any. This leads to such hilarity as firing a single shot and then beaning an enemy with a thrown pistol, which then blows him into ragu sauce. And then doing it to his friends.
  • M.I.R.V. (Multiple, Independant Re-entry Vehicle) grenades fire a bunch of little grenades at enemies.
  • Assault rifles can spawn with a Torgue-licensed "torpedo" barrel that turns them into full-auto (or semi-auto if it's a Jakobs) grenade launchers, usually using the gyrojet rounds manufactured by Torgue as well, although Dahl and Jakobs use a heavier grenade that arcs. The downside is that they usually cost 2-4 bullets per trigger pull, so you're in for some long division to determine their real mag size if you want to use them (unless you're lucky enough to get your paws on a gun from Torgue's "Root", "Lance", or "Rifle" lines of assault rifles, which have a 1:1 shot/ammo cost ratio, the former doing less damage in exchange for reduced recoil, and the latter having a small mag to balance its raw power). But still, miniature autocannon.
  • The Unkempt Harold is a legendary Torgue pistol that fires 7 exploding projectiles in an accelerating horizontal spread at the cost of 3 ammo per shot. The Double Penetrating variant doubles those figures. If you add the Grog Nozzle effect you'll be shooting a wall of exploding bullets.^note Try dual-wielding the Grog Nozzle and a Double Penetrating Unkempt Harold as Salvador; it is glorious.
  • Kreig has two skills that facilitate this: "Light the Fuse!" lets him run around throwing TNT at everyone when in "Fight for your Life!"status, and "Buzz Axe Bombardier" tapes TNT to his throwing axes.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Leave your character standing long enough and s/he will make snarky comments.
  Maya: 27 years of training to stare at nothing!
  Salvador: As fun as watching Skags hump.
  Gaige: If I don't shoot, repair, or screw something in the next few minutes, we're gonna have a problem.
  Axton: I left the military to get away from pointless waiting, dammit. And because I got dishonorably discharged... But mostly the first thing.
  Zer0: The peaceful silence / Penetrates my whole being / It's so very dull.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Figuring out the correct murderer in "Won't Get Fooled Again," since two of the three witnesses you can interview won't provide obviously useful information. Moxxi mentions shooting one of them and his shield absorbing the bullets, but the brother with the visible shield on his body is innocent. In fact, the only reliable information as to which brother is the murderer comes from the sheriff, who mentions the victim died to a single bullet to the throat. The only gun that usually kills with a single headshot is a sniper rifle, pointing to the brother with the rifle as the killer. Zed does note that he patched up the murderer, and the murderer has full health while the others don't. In addition, if you look closely, the murderer also has a shield bar.
  • While guns can spawn with accessories like scopes, elemental capacitors, and bayonets with obvious effects, other gun parts like barrels, grips, and stocks also provide subtle changes to a weapon's performance and are associated with various manufacturers, with the manufacturer of the part determining the bonuses granted. Perhaps more egregiously are the bits stuck to the sides of shields, which also are associated with manufacturers and affect the shield's functionality, meaning that two shields with the same level, rarity, and prefix can have different values depending on the accessories attached to it. Nowhere in the game is this mentioned, and as such, min-maxing requires a lot more than just finding a legendary drop; you also have to find a legendary drop with the right parts.
• Gun Porn:
  • Obviously. New to the sequel is the ability to examine your item models, and every load screen has a rotating gun model (or shield or grenade mod) in the corner.
  • A number of weapons have authentic looking methods of firing or operating. Like some revolvers when being rapidly fired the character fans the hammer to various break action weapons like shotguns opening up realistically. Other details like realistic function actions of the hammers, bolts on some automatic weapons moving like real life weapons, to certain magazines like drums or pans moving like the weapon would believably fire.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • Salvador's specialty. And this isn't just limited to pistols or submachine guns, either; how about rocket launchers akimbo? One of his skills also doubles all grenades he throws while gunzerking.
  • Goliaths, Bandit Giant Mooks, dual wield machine gun-type assault rifles (or rocket launchers in the case of Goliath Blasters), until you make them angry.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: Despite using the wide variety of fantastic and unique guns in the game, the designs of many weapons lean towards being unrealistic and even physically impossible, including:
  • The Jakobs "drum" magazine, which appears to be five conventional magazines arranged in a star pattern that rotate like a wheel when the trigger is pulled, each magazine chambering one round. In real life, this mechanism would be very difficult to time correctly to prevent improper feeding and be much less efficient than a conventional magazine.
  • What takes the cake are Vladof's gatling barrels. The barrels are mounted after and below the receiver. This means that then the trigger is pulled, the fired bullets exit the receiver, then have to make a series of sharp turns and then fly through a rotating set of barrels. This also defeats the purpose of a gatling gun, which is to have multiple barrels with individual firing mechanisms to allow for faster operation and better cooling.

H

• Hand Cannon: A specialty of Jakobs and Torgue, especially their revolvers. Provided you acquire them at their highest levels, both Maggie (AKA the Masher) and Rex (effectively a small rifle) are capable of 119982/shot^note 6 bullets doing 19997 each and 115633/shot respectively.
• HA HA HA—No: When the player is delivering invitations to Claptrap's birthday party, this is Marcus's reaction to actually coming there.
• Hailfire Peaks: Frostburn Caverns; icy but full of nutty fire-worshippers who use flamethrowers.
• Hair-Trigger Sound Effect: Many of the speaking items in the game fall under this trope, making the guns that talk when fired something of a literal example. But bonus points go to the weapon The Bane, playing the psycho midget squeal at top volume when fired. Fully automatic fire = CONSTANT EXCRUCIATING NOISE! It's referred to in game as a cursed weapon for a reason...
• Hammy Villain, Serious Hero: The Big Bad Handsome Jack is this compared to the rest of the Crimson Raiders and the Vault Hunters from 2. Jack is the wealthy CEO of the most powerful corporation in the world of the game, Hyperion. He loves to flaunt how much of a big deal he is, he's sadistic, narcissistic, hams like there's no tomorrow, and whenever the Crimson Raiders get hit he enjoys the hell out of it. He even has his own town shaped to his image, "Opportunity". The Crimson Raiders and the Vault Hunters from 2, on the other hand, have no big wishes or desires outside of taking down the megalomaniacal Jack and making money as mercenaries. This especially counts for Commander Roland, one of the Vault Hunters from 1, who's the most heroic, no-nonsense and stoic of all the Raiders.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • All but literally; One-Armed Bandits are one of the bigger and tougher versions of Goliaths, and provoke Badass callouts when they appear. Their name comes not only from the fact that they carry slot machines on their backs, but also because they're missing an arm themselves.
  • Badass and Super Badass Psychos are 10' tall, grotesquely muscular and wielding gigantic axes, but their left arm is comparatively tiny and also useless.
• Hand Wave: Maya's first ECHO log notes that she isn't affected by Eridium the same way Lilith is, avoiding the potential effect that Siren powers would have had on the plot.
• Hanging Judge: The Sheriff of Lynchwood is a version where the judge is also the local legislature, jury, chief of police, and town executioner. Let's put it this way: the town being named "Lynchwood"? That was her idea. Her deputy mentions that there are more than 200 offenses that are punishable by death. This being Borderlands, the recommended way to bring about judicial reform is with a revolver.
• Harder Than Hard: Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode. Enemies now have quadrupled health compared to Normal Mode, and the most significant changes of all are that they also scale to the highest player's level and have Regenerating Health if they aren't damaged for a specific amount of time. However, there are also some Hard Mode Perks exclusive to UVHM to compensate for the increased difficulty.
• Hard Mode Mooks: Psychos become Armored Maniacs (trading Fire element weakness for Corrosive) in True Vault Hunter Mode and Ironclad Lunatics in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode; Marauders become Outlaw Marauders (trading their handgun for a Shotgun) become Outlaws; etc.
• Hard Mode Perks: There are quite a number of Anti-Frustration Features available only in UVHM:
  • Enemies are more likely to drop more ammo and have higher drop rates for rarer items.
  • Weapon swap speed increased to better facilitate slag use.
  • Slag mechanics are increased (Duration increased to 8 seconds, Slagged enemies now take triple damage from other sources, and Slag-on-slag damage modifiers have been increased as well). However, these buffs are also applied to things and enemies that can slag you.
• Have a Nice Death: The New-U stations will taunt you on occasion.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Gay?: See Straight Gay below.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Deputy Winger, if you spare him during the showdown with the Sheriff.
  • Subverted in the Tiny Tina DLC with Greedtooth. When you destroy the magical sphere that The Handsome Sorcerer was using to control him, he thanks you and wants to help you. Then he learns that you're the one who killed the dwarven king earlier and resumes trying to kill you.
• Heroic Second Wind:
  • If you lose all your health, you can get a "second wind" either by killing an enemy, or in a co-op player game, another player helping you back on your feet.
  • Some badass ranks can be achieved by purposely doing this, such as killing a badass while dying, or killing enemies with a certain gun-type.
• Helpful Mook:
  • Pixies in the Tiny Tina DLC become this if you manage to catch them, after which they'll give you random buffs and heals. If you shoot at them however, they turn hostile instead.
  • Enraging Goliaths by scoring a headshot on them can be very useful to clear out areas that are crowded with enemies as Raging Goliaths are powerful, hostile to everyone (even their former allies) and can level up and gaining Badass ranks, fully healing in the process. While the GOD-liaths can be extremely dangerous to the player, they also give much better loot than usual, as well as a massive amount of experience. This can be exploited with one of the (initially) friendly Goliaths in "Defend Slab Tower" - a Raging Goliath can rampage through all the invading Loaders on his own provided they hit him in the head (although they would also try to attack the Cargo you are protecting).
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Torgue holds this opinion about the ECHOcast game reviewers in the Badass Crater of Badassitude, In-Universe. In fact, having an opinion about a game that he disagrees with is such a Berserk Button for Torgue that he sends you off to kill them!
• Hero Killer: Handsome Jack murders Helena Pierce, one of your main allies in the original game. Near the end of the game he also personally kills Roland by shooting him in the back.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • As you finish story quests, there is a data pod in Sanctuary where you can hear the latest news. No matter what you did, the newscaster always paints you or your allies in a bad light.
  • Fortunately, you can pick up a sidequest late in the game that allows you to "take care of that problem", aka go kill the guy making all those negative announcements about you and Sanctuary.
• High-Five Left Hanging: Initiating a melee attack on Claptrap will prompt him to hold his hand out so you can high-five it with a melee attack. You can leave him hanging if you want.
• Hindenburg Incendiary Principle: In the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep expansion, the first quest Mr. Torgue gives you is to blow up the airships protecting the town (for no reason other than Rule of Cool). You suffer no consequences, he's banished to the stocks.
• Hint System: Of the "Hint on Loading" type. The game will occasionally drop hints on general gameplay tips, specialties of the different manufacturers, ways of defeating certain enemies, skill explanations and many more on the loading screens.
• Hipster: Lilith grills Mister Torgue for wanting to join in and enjoy their game of Bunkers & Badasses, ridiculing him of being a jock who loves to take care of his body and accusing him of wanting to appropriate geek culture because it's trendy. After grilling him on geek pop culture, Mister Torgue breaks down and cries because he got a super-specific question wrong. Lilith and Tina realize they're acting like dicks and apologize.
• Hired by the Oppressor: Hyperion boss and Jerkass extraordinaire Handsome Jack despises the Vault Hunters as much as he despises bandits, and they despise him too. That said, he knows how to use their monetary needs to fulfill his own ends. Three side missions are based on them doing the dirty work for him, and all of them have at least one caveat meant to make the Vault Hunters' live more miserable:
  • The side mission "Hyperion Contract #873" requires you to kill 100 bandits. It has four side missions that require you to kill 25 with each elementary weapon type sans Slagged (Corrosive, Incendiary, Shock and Explosive), forcing you to keep track of the amount of bandits you kill with a weapon, lest you fail one of them. And the reward is the Morningstar, a Sniper Rifle with an annoying voice module chastising you at every action.
  • The side mission "To Grandmother's House We Go" has the Vault Hunters checking out Jack's grandmother, as he hasn't heard of her in quite some time. When you reach the house, you find that five bandits killed her. When you reach Jack's grandmother, she's dead. Turns out the bandits were hired assassins sent to take her down, as she had quite the abusive history with Jack, and then sent the Vault Hunters to kill these bandits as he didn't want to pay them.
  • The third side mission is "Kill Yourself", where the trope is Played for Laughs, and it's quite self-explanatory: you need to go to a certain area and fall to your doom. Doing the deed rewards you with Eridium while Jack laughs at the extent you were going to do solely to get money, not doing so (by pressing the "Hyperion Suicide Prevention Hotline" button) only grants you XP and Jack making fun of you for being a sissy.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • You use Hyperion's Lunar Deployment system against Jack on more than a few occasions. Culminating in you using it to finish off the Warrior.
  • In the more literal sense, several enemies like Engineers and Orcs in Dragonkeep DLC attack by tossing or suicide bombing with barrels. You can shoot them to make them explode in their hands.
  • Grenade-related suicide is one thing, but the Midnight Star grenade mod from Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty takes this up to a whole new level by ejecting child grenades that home in on the thrower. While all of the cursed weapons from the DLC can screw you over with their negative effects, the Midnight Star was pretty much designed for it.
• Hold the Line:
  • All the Circle of Slaughter mission chains^note Three in the main game -one of them DLC-, one in Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage, and another on Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep involve the Vault Hunters surviving wave after wave of enemies until all waves are cleared.
  • The climax of the "You Are Cordially Invited" mission chain involves the Vault Hunters holding off waves of bandits from destroying an electric generator while Tiny Tina hosts a "tea party" for Flesh-Stick.
  • The "Bright Lights, Flying City" mission in Overlook ends with the player(s) having to defend a beacon in order to establish a fast-travel link to Sanctuary. You're doing this while Handsome Jack does everything he can to stop you, throwing endless Hyperion robots your way. It's one of the hardest missions in the game whether you're playing solo or in a group; the enemies are as relentless as they are numerous.
  • One mission in Thousand Cuts has you defending an Hyperion supply drop that landed in Slab bandit territory, with the help of some Slabs. In this case, there's a set number of enemies that Hyperion throws at you, but unlike in the above example (where you can repair the beacon if it's damaged and continue the mission), this mission is over if the supply drop takes just a few hits, and the last, most powerful enemies spawn just a few steps away from being able to hit it.
  • Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep has the Son of Murderlin's Tower challenge, modelled after the Tower Defense genre, but with the Vault Hunters being the only defense the tower has. Hordes of Orcs carrying explosive barrels attack the tower, and it's up to them to prevent it from taking enough damage for it to go down.
• Honest John's Dealership:
  • Marcus is normally a sociopath and a very unscrupulous businessman, but one quest late in the game is all about how he conned an idiot into buying an (admittedly quite good) gun at an outrageous price, and you retrieving the 9$ change he gave too much.
  • His vending machines also occasionally remind you that "if you shop anywhere else, I'll have you killed" and that most of his wares were looted from dead bodies.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Happens at the beginning of Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. With Tina as DM for a game called Bunkers & Badasses, she sends down a dragon just as the Vault Hunters approach Flamerock Refuge. Weapons are ineffective and its attack results in a One-Hit KO.^note It's technically possible to survive the attack if Axton's Grit skill kicks in, or if you run through the area fast enough to dodge it completely. However, it has no effect on what follows. When called out for this severe imbalance, Tina revives everyone and substitutes the dragon for a different boss.
• Hope Spot:
  • Near the end of the story quest in Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, Jack has experimented and mutated Bloodwing. With your help, Mordecai plans to calm her down so that Zed could possibly turn her back to normal in Sanctuary. Mordecai does tranquilize and calm Bloodwing down. But at the next moment, Jack makes Bloodwing's collar explode, killing her.
  • Towards the end of the game, Roland starts talking to you again, after having been killed by Jack, about how you should go kick Jack's butt and then go out for some drinks. Then Jack comes on and says that it was just him, and that Roland still really is dead. It's played for laughs, because it isn't Roland's voice.
• Horse of a Different Color:
  • Like in the Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC from the first game, some enemies have skag mounts. In this case, they're average-sized bandits riding huge armored skags, rather than the Knoxx DLC's midget bandits riding average-sized, sometimes-armored skags. Also in this case, they're very specifically meant to stand in for horsemen, since they only show up in the Western movie themed Lynchwood area.
  • One early boss is a psycho midget riding a bullymong (a four-armed alien ape thing), and the commentary makes a clear reference to Master Blaster.
  • Handsome Jack claims to have a living pony made of diamonds, which he named Butt Stallion in honor of the Vault Hunters.
  • Midget bandits will occasionally hop onto a Goliath's shoulders. Particularly hilarious when it's a midget goliath...
• Hostile Show Takeover: In one quest for the Torgue DLC campaign, Moxxi has you grab a bunch of ECHOs which has interviews with Mr. Torgue and herself. In the last recording, Tina takes over the show briefly, with very hilarious results (starts at 1:37 in the video).
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Atlas. After losing hundreds of men and tech and millions of dollars trying and failing to kill the original Vault Hunters in the original game's endgame and Secret Armory, they've gone from the dictators of Pandora in all but name to a virtually nonexistent figurehead company. Their former role has been taken over by Hyperion, with a new and even more outrageously evil (and/or petty) CEO. They make a triumphant return in 3, however, after the death of Handsome Jack.
• Hub Under Attack:
  • Sanctuary, the players' stronghold and shopping centre, comes under heavy mortar fire after Angel phaseshifts through the fake fusion core and deactivates the shield, forcing the Crimson Raiders to relocate the entire city.
  • Later on in Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary, Sanctuary is taken over by the New Pandora Army, and the Vault Hunters spend the entire DLC trying to take it back.
• Hulk Speak: Goliaths aren't big on grammar, syntax, or intelligence in general. It's pretty funny to hear them try to describe the things around them — if Zer0 leaves Decepti0n near them, they might cry "Ghost person!" Strangely, when angered their speech becomes much more grammatically correct.
• Human Resources: Overlook, the Hyperion Company Town in the Highlands has all crimes (including curfew violations, swearing, and littering) punished by being thrown into an industrial-sized meat grinder in the center of town. Hyperion also sends out raffle tickets, with the "winner" ending up in it, a la' The Lottery. They also expect mothers of twins to choose one NOT to get ground into spam.
• Humans Are Bastards: Parodied in the quest where you help a robot become a human - his ideas of what it means to be a person are rather... off. Although this being Pandora, it's quite understandable how he came to those conclusions. Some of the stuff he says is still pretty surreal, given that Pandora is a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with brain damaged psychopaths...
  Mal: Hi! I'm human! I eat food, and desire things! I'm in credit card debt and have a wife for whom I feel nothing!
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The reason the crystal monsters found in the Caustic Caverns and the Fridge became violent is because Dahl wanted the valuable crystals they are comprised of. The foreman even maimed the security chief and anyone with her, who was trying to defend them.
  Sir Hammerlock: Have you heard my speech about how humans are the real monsters? Seems appropriate.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • Hidden away in a corner of Scaylion Grove is an Aegrian native tied up and dangling above the ground. Just press the switch and... A GIGANTIC CLAPTRAP appears from the cave, eats him up, and then disappears just as quickly as he came out.
  • At the Shrine of the Gunbringer, if playing multiplayer, one or more players can jump into the shrine and another can pull the lever... which closes the shrine, slowly incinerates the sacrifices, and rewards some guns. The more bodies in the hole, the higher quality the guns.
  • Part of the Firehawk quest chain has you take a midget to a mechanical fire-spewing dragon to be burned alive. The midget in question is more than willing.
  • Also part of that quest was Incinerator Clayton's plan to sacrifice innocent people to the Firehawk. The Vault Hunters foil that plan, though.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • Super Badass Loaders stand several times taller than a person, and have enormous cannon arms. Then there is Saturn, which is the size of a building, and one of the toughest bosses in the game, since its weak spot is impossible to hit if you play solo using Maya or Salvador.
  • Badassasaurus is a gigantic, mechanical dinosaur. It's bristling with armaments, featuring gatling rocket launchers as its "arms", a "hornet's nest" style rocket barrage on its back, and nuclear missiles in its knees.
  • Uranus is the successor to Saturn. It is absolutely gigantic and loaded to the teeth with dozens of guns and missile launchers. It's like something out of the MechWarrior franchise.
• 100% Completion: Oh God! There are zillions of Challenges in the game and one of the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 Achievements/Trophies requires you to get at least the first level in all of them (at least, the ones not located in a specific area). The trickier, area-specific ones usually have only one level but that means you need to do everything you can to find them all, usually in the form of boss challenges or finding all hidden audio logs or Vault Symbols. Also, that achievement: You have to reach level 5 in a very specific Shotgun challenge before you even open up the challenge that in all likelihood will be the last one you need for the achievement.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: In the credits, Brick is seen with Tiny Tina (riding piggyback on his shoulders) killing bandits.
• Hybrid Monster: The "Monster Mash" questline ends with you hunting down skag/rakk hybrids, or "skrakk", and later a spiderant/psycho hybrid ("Spycho"), created by Dr. Zed for God knows what reason. You also helped him make the monsters in the first place by bringing him body parts.
  Zed: If you think about it...this is really all your fault.
• Hyperspace Arsenal:
  • It's back, and it functions similarly to the first game.
  • Also, while Storage Decks are visible once again, not all playable characters show those on their character models.^note Gaige, Maya, and Zer0 aren't seen to have one, while Axton (on the right side of his thigh, though it's not glowing), Krieg (right side on his belt), and Salvador (he has two: one on left and one on right just below his armpits) have Storage Decks on their character models.
• Hypocrite:
  • The Sheriff of Lynchwood calls you saying "Pistols at high noon. Come alone." Of course, even though she considers YOU a Worthy Opponent and is a borderline Friendly Enemy, she doesn't tell you that she'll be surrounded by mooks armed with assault rifles, her right-hand man with a shotgun, and hiding behind cover on the roof of her office with her incendiary Maliwan pistol drawn...^note And there's a bonus for not shooting the deputy.
  • Her boyfriend is even worse. He's actually got so many instances of this that reading his entry on the character page should give you a good idea of what a douche he is.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Vladof promotes its weapons as a tool of revolution against the MegaCorp evil - despite being clearly just as corporate and ruthless, and having shiny, high-quality finishes, even though they're supposed to be made by angry factory workers.
  • The Censorbot in the first DLC asks you to kill a DJ for swearing on-air. After you do that and return, what does the bot say? "That DJ was a real asshole!"
  • When entering the area where Motor Mamma resides in the Torgue DLC for the first time, Moxxi tells you this:
    Moxxi: I don't want to get too graphic, but let's just say she eats her own children.

I

• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Cassius in Fight for Sanctuary wants you to kill him, and will encourage you to keep hitting him during the boss fight.
• I Die Free: Angel, whose life has consisted of being used to charge the Vault Key because she's a Siren. The player(s) destroy the machinery keeping her alive both at her request and to stop Jack.
• I Lied: During the "No Hard Feelings" quest, the Tundra patrol will outright say this if you open the chest which he says was not booby-trapped.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • As in the previous game, Psychos make no bones about the fact that they want to eat you. Rats appear to be cannibals as a rule — when starting combat they might shout "Allez cuisine!" They also rant about licking their chops and how delicious you look.
  • When the Rats are killed by a fire weapon, their death cry is sometimes "I smell delicious!"
  • Frequently when dying, Rats exhort their brother Rats to eat their remains.
  • One of Salvador's crimes on his wanted poster alongside manslaughter and arson is cannibalism.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: Some of the midget deaths: "SO COLD! Sooo cooold..."
• Immune to Bullets:
  • Crystalisks are bulletproof — except for the crystals on their legs. Explosive weapons are capable of punching through their thick hides, but in this case, it's much more efficient to just go for the weak points.
  • Boroks have plating on their heads that makes bullets bounce off, but are vulnerable everywhere else.
  • Prof. Nakayama's experiments. Shots are likely to ricochet and might hit you. Like Crystalisks, however, they have weak spots — Woundspike becomes vulnerable to regular bullets after you destroy the turret on its back (though being a giant Borok it still reflects some bullets), and Jackenstein can only be hurt by attacking the electrodes on its back and chest.
  • The Ravenous Wattle Gobbler is actually invincible, until it is poisoned.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The most accurate attacks in the game aren't lasers or sniper rifles but thrown projectiles. Psychos can throw their buzz-axes with pinpoint accuracy from further away than you can reliably hit them with a sniper rifle. Bandits and Loaders also aim their grenades a lot better than they aim their guns; if you don't move they will consistently put them directly under your feet regardless of distance. Bandits can even achieve this level of accuracy with grenades while being shot in the face mid-throw.
  • Fortunately, Krieg can take advantage of this. His thrown buzz-axe is the single most accurate ranged weapon in the game!
  • Zig-zagged with Hyperion guns. At first, they're wildly inaccurate, but once you're fired a few shots, the internal stabilizer kicks in, and becomes ridiculously accurate.
• Improbable Infant Survival:
  • In the Tiny Tina DLC, after you "defeat" Prince Jeffrey, Roland tells you that you can't kill him since he's just a kid. You are however encouraged to slap the hell out of him, at least until Tina runs out of dialog for him..
  • Tiny Tina herself, as she is one of the few NPCs to live outside of Sanctuary, is not part of the local bandit clan, and lives within spitting distance of no less than 3 bandit camps. Then again it's implied that she can and has killed anyone who tried to enter her workshop unannounced.
• In a Single Bound:
  • Rampaging Goliaths are bad news, and this trope is why. They can leap through the air to find you and pound you no matter how high up you climb. In some cases their jump arcs are totally ridiculous.
  • Bullymongs are large apelike creatures that can propel themselves through the air on their large arms.
  • Hyperion Troops are outfitted with Exoskeleton style Power Armor permitting them to make large leaps or for some of the troops glide.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy:
  • Goliaths with become Raging Goliaths if their helmets are shot off, becoming faster and stronger while also attacking other enemies for you. If they're allowed to kill enough enemies, though, they will level up into the more threatening Badass, Super Badass, Ultimate Badass, and finally the supremely deadly GOD-liath.
  • Varkids start out in a larval form that's fairly harmless, but will eventually cocoon themselves to transform into their larger and stronger adult form. They can repeat this process even further if left unchecked, progressively transitioning into more and more powerful forms and eventually becoming a Superboss known as Vermivorous the Invincible.
  • The "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep" DLC has Orks, which grow even more quickly (and instantly), meaning the player is likely to end up fighting (or running from) a Grand Duke of Ork.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Zer0, who Gearbox has admitted they created to be a parody of a Sociopathic Hero with a Mysterious Past. There is absolutely no information given on who he is, what is his goal and why is he spouting philosophical haiku alongside gaming jargon. Even Handsome Jack admits that he has no idea what his deal is.
• Infallible Babble: The citizens of Sanctuary may randomly speak lines when you approach them. One NPC talks about a rumor that Handsome Jack is not handsome and Jack is not his real name.These two details turn out to be true - The Pre-Sequel reveals that he wears a mask to cover his damaged face. During the last chapters of the game, there is an optional mission where you collect ECHO recordings about Jack, one of which reveals his real name as spoken by his boss when Jack was still an employee of Hyperion.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Most legendary (orange) items are like this in that they tend to be better than any other weapon of their type in the game, but two items in particular stand out: The Bee (an amp shield without the Cast from Hit Points factor, allowing its massive damage boost to apply until the player takes damage) and the Conference Call (a shotgun that spawns additional bullets when it hits something or travels a certain distance). The Bee drops from an optional late game mini-boss; the Conference Call from the final boss (though both can drop elsewhere, just those two have the highest chance of dropping each item).
  • If the player has The Bee equipped while in a vehicle, any bullets they fire from that vehicle will include amp damage. However — unlike how it works in normal operation — taking damage does not cancel the effect, giving you limitless amp damage as long as you're in the vehicle. This only works for bullet damage, so the vehicle that takes the best advantage of this is the Machine Gun variation of the Runner.
  • Another contender is Infinity, which is a legendary rapid fire pistol that has only one cartridge per magazine, but does not use ammo at all, effectively having a Bottomless Magazine. Combined with some other items (the aforementioned Bee, and a unique relic that increases pistol fire rate by 50% and damage by 20%), it is one of the strongest and most reliable weapons in the game. It also has one of the lowest drop rates in the game (listed on the Borderlands wiki as 0.007%), and the boss it drops from is incredibly annoying and powerful.
    • The "drawback" to Infinity is that it fires in an infinity symbol pattern, but against Loader enemies this is perfect. Put your crosshair in the middle of their chest and you can hit both of their shoulder weak points with a minimum of effort.
  • A third contender is the Norfleet, a Legendary E-tech rocket launcher that fires three projectiles per shot in erratic patterns. Like all other E-tech launchers, its projectiles have a cataclysmically huge blast radius, capable of blowing up enemies hiding behind walls, and its explosions also inflict huge damage over time on enemies that haven't simply been disintegrated by its monstrous damage output (the Norfleet outdoes every other weapon in the game in terms of damage per shot if all three projectiles hit the same target, which isn't difficult considering its blast radius). It's also incredibly hard to get, as the only way to get one is to fight one of two raid bosses and hope it randomly drops from the boss.
  • With the addition of Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, Pearlescent weapons from the first game have returned, essentially making them an Infinity Plus Two weapon. Depending on what gun one gets, it may or may not be better than an orange weapon, but it will be powerful in its own right.
• Informed Flaw: To hear the Catch-A-Ride machines say it, Scooter's cars are four-wheeled deathtraps that blow up spectacularly if you so much as look at them funny. In-game, they're not the prettiest vehicles, but handle with no real problems, and only explode when they're destroyed - which takes a lot of gunfire.
• Interface Screw: Certain enemies - skags and spiderants, specifically - have subclasses with special attacks that can and will obstruct the player's vision for a couple seconds if they connect. Aside from the inherent Squick factor of getting puked in the face by an angry alien dog, being unable to see a thing can spell quick death on higher difficulties when surrounded by an entire pack of critters—or a badass or two.
• Interface Spoiler: In the "Matter of Taste" sideqest from the Campaign of Carnage DLC, Torgue calls you back after killing the first target, implying the mission to be completed. However, the mission objective doesn't change to "Turn In", which is the usual message that appears when the sidequest is finished. Instead, Torgue changes his mind and commands you to go back and kill the other reviewers after one of them broadcasts a message that he doesn't agree with.
• Ironic Echo: Lilith is fond of teleporting around, surprising enemies, and killing them. She most commonly says "'Sup." while doing this. Handsome Jack later teleports in behind Roland and shoots him in the back, greeting a surprised Lilith with "'Sup."
• Item Amplifier: The original game gives us Class Mods which offer boosts to specific armaments. This game adds Artifacts which can do similar things to just about all aspects of your character.
• It's All About Me: Handsome Jack is amazingly evil and amazingly self-centered. The most amazing thing is that he's somehow managed to convince himself he's the good guy of the story. Yes, he's the hero, standing up to the "bandit hordes" from the safety of his orbiting spaceship, behind an army of robots, while laughing about how he once gouged a man's eyes out in front of his kids. If he does it, it's a good deed, 'cause he's the hero. If you do it, it's horrible, 'cause you're the bad guy.
• It's Personal: Invoked on both sides. After Handsome Jack kills Mordecai's Bloodwing, kills Roland, and kidnaps Lilith, Mordecai and Brick are hit hard by the events and they swear they will make Jack pay for what he did. After the player kills Angel, Jack gets extremely angry and promises he will kill them himself.
• It's Raining Men: The giant H-Station in the sky isn't just for show. It can launch supply crates and robots straight to any location, all the way from the MOON.

J-K

• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: During the events of the Tiny Tina DLC, the actual Vault Hunters are busy beating info out of a Hyperion employee. They finish just after the campaign is finished, with Maya saying that they now have the codes to go to the moon base.
• Jack of All Stats: Tediore gun parts are this compared to other guns. While each gun brand has its own unique qualities about them which give their own strengths and weaknesses, the guns themselves can be made up of multiple parts from different companies. Grip, Scope, Barrel, Body, accessories. While a Torgue barrel on a rocket launcher will greatly increase the damage of the weapon, it'll also decrease all the other stats such as reload, recoil, and accuracy. Besides the body giving a faster reload, Tediore parts gives neither any positive benefits or negative drawbacks to weapon stats.
• Japandering: Animated Actor Claptrap did this at some point, as seen here.
• Javelin Thrower: Hunters in Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt. Naturally they have an endless supply.
• Jive Turkey: Roland in the Tiny Tina DLC talks this way, in stark contrast to his usual proper, collected self. This is because Tina is roleplaying him.
• Jump Scare: The Mimic monster in the Tiny Tina DLC will quickly teach you to open up certain types of chests from as far away as possible.
  • The main game also features powerful enemies that jump out when you open some chests.
• Just Think of the Potential!: It's suggested that, when the Vault Hunters get their hands on the Vault Key, they should just destroy it. Roland suggests the idea of turning the Vault's contents on Handsome Jack and driving Hyperion off Pandora for good.
• Kaizo Trap: Chests with Skag dens around? Certainly will have an Adult or Badass Skag around, most likely 3 or 4 of those. Just defeated a Crystalisk? Don't stay too close. And then there's Wilhelm flipping a TRAIN on you.
• Kangaroo Court: Salvador was subjected to one in his backstory. The judge refuses to believe that the bandits who attacked Salvador's grandmother were, well, bandits, and insists that they were innocent men whom Salvador murdered.
• Karmic Death: Some audio logs in the Caustic Caverns reveal this happened to at least one of the heartless Dahl executives. There were strange, elephant-sized creatures made of crystals down there and the security chief lady noted they were peaceful. The executive goes, "Made of crystals, huh? Chop 'em up, I want my money!" The security chief declines, especially since she's befriended the big blue one, but she gets shot by the executive. The final audio log is of the executive panicking as the peaceful creatures are not so peaceful anymore now that they've been attacked, and she gets squashed by the big blue one. Sir Hammerlock's amused reaction is "Well, that was dark."
• Karmic Jackpot: The sidequest Uncle Teddy has two outcomes. Either you give TK Baha's weapon blueprints to his neice who wishes to sue Hyperion for infringement, or you mail them to Hyperion and stab her in the back. Picking the former nets the Lady Fist, a pistol with a very high crit damage boost bonus (and a call back to the "Lady Finger" pistol he gives the player as part of an early story missing in the first game). Picking the latter nets the Tital Wave, based on TK's Wave, a notoriously poor weapon (also a quest reward from the first game).
• Kick the Dog: As if his attempt to kill you would not be enough to convince the player that Jack is evil, one of your first missions involves finding ECHOs of Handsome Jack gratuitously and mercilessly executing a major character of the first game.
  • In fact, he really makes it a point to constantly rub this trope in your face throughout the game. Which makes his inevitable death at your hands at the end of the game all the more rewarding after putting up with all of his shenanigans.
  • Even the tie-in merchandise has him do it: if you buy the real-life Diamond-Plated Loot Chest, it contains a Hyperion shipping crate from Jack to the Vault Hunters with the heads of Roland and Helena Pierce in it. And a bag with what was left of Bloodwing's.
• Kill It with Fire: Fire weapons are generally pretty useful, but especially so against Bullymongs.
• Kill the Poor: Handsome Jack's plan for Pandora, in a nutshell: All stinky poor people must die! Naturally, you get to introduce him to the fact that Pandora eats the rich.
• Kilroy Was Here:
  • The game has an ongoing challenge called "Cult of the Vault" where the player tries to discover as many hidden vault symbols as possible, collecting badass points as a reward. Some of them show up in some very odd or difficult-to-reach places.
  • In the mission "Where Angels Fear to Tread", you can see Claptrap drawing a grafitti of himself with "Claptrap was here" on a metal plate just near the entrance of the Hyperion base.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better:
  • Jakobs guns eschew any such thing as modern technology and elemental damage in exchange for pure, hard statistics. They are harder to learn, but each shot of them hits like a truck.
  • Also played straight with some E-tech guns, which can be tricky to hit enemies with, especially over long distances.
• King Mook:
  • For the enemies, Smash-Head is basically the ultimate Goliath, several times normal Goliath size and wielding a huge shield and rocket launcher. The Big Sleep is the "king" version of pirate Anchormen. There's also Saturn, who is essentially a giant Loader, Dukino's Mom, a massive skag, and King Mong, who is just a really huge Bullymong.
  • Krieg is a PLAYABLE variant, essentially being a Psycho on serious steroids. He looks much like one, but is much larger in stature and build. He also wears a unique mask, which you can change.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Just like the first game, you'll probably search every nook and cranny for item containers, and may pick up every gun you find, if nothing else to sell. You also get badass ranks by picking up colored items too, so don't be surprised if, in a co-op game, you see someone grabbing everything that the other players leave/drop behind.
• Klingon Promotion: Subverted with Hyperion personnel. If you kill one with another nearby:
  Nearby personnel: Woohoo! Looks like someone is in line for a promotion!
• Kneel Before Zod: Shooting the helmet off a Goliath can result in this.
  GET ON YOUR GODDAMN KNEES!
• Knight of Cerebus: Surprisingly, Handsome Jack. In a game filled with Comedic Sociopathy and black humor, Jack sets the tone very early on by an ECHO recording of him laughing as he describes the noise Helena Pierce's head made when he blew it off. It was merely a foreshadowing for something much, much worse later on.
• Known Only by Their Nickname: The player characters are never referred to by name, with most NPCs simply calling them "Vault Hunter". The old Vault Hunters, on the hand, each of their own nickname for them. Lilith calls them "killer", Roland calls them "soldier", Mordecai calls them "amigo" and Brick calls them "slab".
• Knights and Knaves: One of Marshal Friedman's missions has you trying to figure out which one of four robbers (Sam, Lindy, O'Cantler, and Lee) took all the money for him-or-herself. Friedman explicitly tells you that only one of them is truthful and the others are all lying. The culprit is Lee, the only one who didn't try to accuse anyone else; the truth-teller is probably O'Cantler, who accused Sam of lying but not of stealing the money.
• Knight Templar: Appropriately, the Knight-class enemies you fight in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep. Their battle dialogue indicates that they believe they are champions of justice and righteousness, but they serve the Handsome Sorcerer and are all too eager to try to kill the Vault Hunters.
• Konami Code: Enter it at the title screen, and you unlock the "Extra Wubs" option in the menu. It literally does nothing. Sorry to disappoint.

L

• Lame Pun Reaction: Multiple:
  • "Since arriving on Pandora you have been mauled, shot, stabbed, and frozen... and yet, that pun hurts worst of all." The mission in question is called "Arms Dealing". You get a bunch of actual human arms for Doctor Zed. Get it? Arms dealing?
  • During the mission "The Ice Man Cometh" (in which the player is sent by Claptrap to rig some bandits' furnaces to make them too cold to fight), Claptrap loves making puns.
    Claptrap: Hey bandits - FREEZE! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
  • Claptrap also cracks a weak pun about fingers and hands in a "Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt" story mission. When he realizes you aren't laughing he says "Fine, last time I try to make a "flip the switch" objective interesting."
  • Sometimes, when deploying his Sabre Turret, Axton will shout "Sorry, boys, I've got turret syndrome! Get it? 'Cuz of the turret...? Sorry." There's even an achievement for killing enemies called "Turret Syndrome", though it involves vehicle turrets.
  • During the Tiny Tina DLC, when you use the password ("fart") to unlock the exit from the Dwarven Mines:
    Claptrap: Hey, guys! Did someone just say "fart"!? What a stinky thing to say! Ahahahaha!
    Tiny Tina: You ruin everything.
• Lampshade Hanging: A few missions specifically lampshade elements of the game:
  • The "No Vacancy" mission, wherein you turn the power at the Happy Pig motel back on. Scooter guides you through the motions, and at one point asks if it's weird that he knows what you're doing over the ECHO communicator.
  • The "Uncle Teddy" mission has you collecting T.K. Baha's old ECHO logs for evidence of Hyperion stealing a gun design of his. T.K.'s niece, Una, notes that he "kept all his ECHO correspondence — like a lot of people on Pandora, evidently", lampshading the fact that you find these things everywhere and they seem to be recording near-constantly. One mission even has someone saying (literally) "Here I am taking a walk, talking into my ECHO recorder and enjoying not being torn apart and having my gun broken into four pieces — (skag roars) OH GOD THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW!"
• La Résistance: Multiple:
  • Sanctuary is an entire town opposing Handsome Jack's oppressive dictatorship led by the former Vault Hunters called the Crimson Raiders. When you enter it for the first time, Roland outright tells you they're losing the fight since Hyperion has access to a lot more resources than they do, not to mention all the robot troops at their disposal.
  • The Slab also counts by extension, since their leader Slab King held a grudge against Hyperion for killing his dog. Then we later know that "King" is no other than Brick, a fellow Vault Hunter of Roland, Lilith, and Mordecai. The climax has you team up with Slab Buzzards in order to get to the Control Core Angel. Said buzzards also "force open" the bridge that lets you go to the Badlands. Lastly a side quest involves having the Slab Psychos, Marauders, and Goliaths as allies against a group of Hyperion Loaders.
• Large Ham: Multiple:
  • Goliaths, once they become enraged.
    GET READY TO FEEL MY FINGERS IN YOUR EYEBALLS
    GET ON YOUR GODDAMN KNEES
    I'M GONNA GOUGE YOUR EYES OUT
  • Mr. Torgue's tone of voice is always set on "yell at the top of your lungs".
  • Murderlin the Wizard is very enthusiastic about running the magic Circle of Slaughter, and speaks with a lot of dramatic gravitas and emphasis.
• Laser-Guided Broadcast: Invoked. Handsome Jack hears Axton moping about how bounty hunting is too easy, and arranges to have a Vault Hunter recruitment advertisement played on the radio so Axton will hear it.
• Last Ditch Move: The Suicide Psychos. If you have encountered their Hyperion Counterparts (the EXP Loaders) who instantly explode upon death , these Psychos will instead throw their grenades at your direction just after you killed them.
• Last of His Kind: The Claptrap you meet at the beginning of the game is the last CL4P-TP robot in existence, as the others were all destroyed on Handsome Jack's orders. He keeps the corpses of the rest in his home. One sidequest in the Sir Hammerlock DLC has him find the signal for another Claptrap. It's dead.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • Every character has a customization skin locked away behind level 5 of the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Assault Rifle" challenge that ultimately requires you to kill 3200 enemies with an assault rifle while crouching. This actually takes a lot longer than you might think. No other challenge with any other weapon type requires anywhere close to this number of kills.
  • The one Challenge that takes everyone the longest to complete: Finding and killing Jimmy Jenkins, a rare-spawn robot that pops out of a Hyperion loot container. Sometimes. Once the Random Number God decides to bless you. Getting this challenge is usually the last step in getting the "Challenge Accepted!" trophy/achievement too.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • Guardian Angel straight up says she's an A.I. about 10 minutes into the game; in the first game her nature was kept deliberately vague until The Stinger after the end credits. It later turns out she's actually not an A.I. after all.
  • As it takes place some time after the main game, a major subplot of the Tiny Tina DLC is Tina dealing with Roland's death.
  • Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt's intro offhandedly mentions that Jack is dead.
  • Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary takes place after every other piece of Borderlands media released at the time, including post-launch games such as Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! and Tales from the Borderlands, and as such, the first time you enter to the DLC area, it shows you a dialog outright telling you to not to play the DLC unless you want to get spoiled, and giving you the choice to go back to Sanctuary. For example, in one of the sidequests of the DLC, Moxxi tasks the Vault Hunter with honoring Scooter's last will and testament, which spoils his death in the latter game.
• Laughably Evil: Handsome Jack to a tee. He's clearly having a blast being evil.
  Jack: Ohoho man did - did you see her head?! It was all like PBBBPTH! Ahahaha...hoohoo...
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Courtesy of Sir Hammerlock.
    Hammerlock: Oh dear, I'm spouting exposition again, aren't I? Apologies.
  • Nomads also spout enough dialogue about "gear" and "loot" to qualify for this.
  • Gaige in the item screen:
    Gaige: Show me some green arrows!
  • Krieg does the same, ranging from a line similar to Gaige's above to a conversation with the Psycho on the cover of the game's box.
    Krieg: Too. Many. Icons ...
  • One quest involves finding a steam valve and a gearbox. During the quest, Scooter says the steam pumps used to work on a different power source, but people complained so they switched over. Borderlands used Gamespy's multiplayer matchmaking system, which nobody liked, but Borderlands 2 has switched over to Steam's.
• Legacy Boss Battle: Rosco in the Captain Scarlett DLC, who is a domesticated Rakk Hive. The Rakk Hive was one of the first bosses announced for the original Borderlands.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The Fibber gun. First off, this gun lies to you. Hard. It'll claim it has ludicrous damage, firing speed, and mag size (sometimes more than you can actually carry ammo for pistols), but also immense reload times. The special effects also note it has +3000% damage and +50% love. However, depending on what version of the gun you get, it can either remain the lethal joke item, or it can go well into the Difficult, but Awesome category. On the joke effects side: the more you shoot with it the slower the bullets go or a parabolic and heavy drop off with bouncing bullets which makes it very hard to aim. The very powerful effects include a version which shoots 5 to 7 bullets that go slightly slower than normal, but penetrate your enemies, a version that has incredibly high critical hit damage, and a version which makes its bullets ricochet once and let it spawn an additional 8 projectiles when it does, effectively multiplying its damage by 9.
    • The Practical variant. Shooting enemies directly with it does virtually no damage, but if the bullets bounce off a wall/floor first, it can kill some raid bosses in under a minute.
  • Some of the randomly generated loot is this, especially since all guns are generated with a mix of benefits and drawbacks. Both can get ridiculous pretty rapidly.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: A villainous example with Handsome Jack. After the Vault Hunters kill Angel, he goes from a petty, insulting jackass to killing Roland and dedicating his life to making the Vault Hunters' lives as miserable as possible.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Lilith plays along with being the "goddess Firehawk" of a certain bandit group. She states doing it so that she could keep the bandits in check while Roland focuses on taking down Jack. Sure enough, once you enter the Frostburn Canyon for the first time, the Bloodshots are seen attacking the Cultists, implying that Lilith was at least successful in making the bandits take down each other.
• Letters 2 Numbers:
  • Every "o" in the name of Zer0 and his skills has been replaced with the numeral "0". The names of some of his alternate heads follow suit, this time including E/3, I/1, and A/4 as well.
  • Some Hyperion bots are named CL4P-TP (Claptrap), W4R-D3N (Warden), BNK3R (Bunker), P3RV-E (Pervy), C3n50r807 (Censorbot) and more...
• Level Scaling: Beating the game in True Vault Hunter Mode causes enemies and quests to scale to level 50. In Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, everything scales to your level, period. On Digistruct Peak, however, enemies scale to your "overpower levels", which you gain by completing challenges — this means bad guys can go up to level 80, whereas the player can only achieve level 72. It's the same for loot, though you gain the ability to use overleveled gear as you gain overpower levels. The DLC for the game sets the level of an area to what you are when you first get there, but also has a minimum.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Levelling-up fully restores both your health and shield to their new maximum values, aside from the added benefit of resetting the cooldown of your Action Skill.
• Life Drain: All Moxxi weapons heal the player for a percentage of the damage deal when wielding them. The weapon with the biggest bonus currently is the Grog Nozzle of the Tiny Tina DLC, which deals minimal amounts of damage but heals you for 65% of damage dealt.
• Lighter and Softer: Any of the DLC quests and areas, which are chronologically set after Knight of Cerebus Jack's death.
• Lightning Gun: Mentioned in the quest completion text for "My First Gun":

  You just moved five feet and opened a locker. Later, when you're killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you'll look back on this moment and be like, "heh."

• Look Both Ways: Just like in the first game, a Skag meets its end because it walks into a road. Soon after, the vehicle that hit the skag even more abruptly gets hit by a train. One bandit somehow survives this stands up on top of the train only to immediately get clotheslined when the train goes under a sign. Life on Pandora ain't pretty, folks.
• Lottery of Doom: Hyperion runs one (for no reason) in the town of Overlook, throwing "winners" into the "Grinder" which is exactly what it sounds like.
• Luck-Based Mission: Hyperion Circle of Slaughter: Round 4. Wave 5 starts off with nearly a dozen EXP Loaders, which aren't so bad if you just run from them - they'll catch up, stand still, then explode. But as they die, they're replaced with RPG Loaders, which can spam high-damage missiles at you. If two or more do this in a row, no matter WHAT your health is, it's going down fast. Plus, it keeps other player from reviving you if you play co-op.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: In Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, some chests have 20-sided dices on top. They roll and return a value of 1-20, which determines the quality of the stuff inside said chests. By investing 5 Eridium units, a second dice is rolled, highly improving the chance for better loot.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Several enemies employ this in combat, such as BUL Loaders, Nomad Torturers, and Badass Nomads.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • Any high enough damage done to organic, non-armored enemies will instantly gib them, much more so with critical hits, explosions or both.
  • In the Captain Scarlett DLC, running over Sand Worms with your Sandskiff can instantly gib the worms with a green splash of blood, as it essentially kills them in one hit.
  • In the Vita port, enemies will always be gibbed on death regardless of how they're killed, since having bodies stick around after death would tax the Vita's hardware.

M

• MacGyvering/Homemade Inventions: The resourceful, but technically-inept Bandit cults also make guns◊ equipped with huge mags◊ that are so ramshackle that they make the guns of the Resistance of Brink! look professionally manufactured by comparison.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • Torgue shotguns substitute clouds of gyrojets for pellets, especially when you find a Torgue shotgun with the rare (but appropriately Torgue-manufactured) Quad barrel.
  • The Vladof Mongol, a unique rocket launcher that fires a rocket that also releases several mini-rockets from their parent projectile in random directions in its flight path until it hits something.
  • As the commando, getting the Scorched Earth skill midway through the Guerrilla tree adds a pair of rapid-fire rocket pods to your turret. While it's already an impressive light show on its own, you can also get the Gemini skill at the bottom of the Survival tree for two turrets, with the twin getting its own rocket pods as well. Hijinks ensue.
• Made of Explodium:
  • The various barrels you can shoot throughout the game is made from this trope. The vehicle you're riding in can also seem to be this if an enemy destroys it quickly, usually via rockets.
  • ANY bullet fired from a Torgue gun is explosive. Shotguns, pistols, rifles, ANYTHING. With Tediore guns, however, the entire gun explodes when it runs out of ammo. Hilariously enough, you don't reload a Tediore gun; you just hurl it at the enemy like a grenade and a new copy materializes in your hands.
• Made of Plasticine: If your damage is high enough, almost anything killable becomes this (even if you just melee them). It's incredibly fun to watch bandits explode into a shower of gore from Gaige's little hammer swing.
  • The PS Vita port has enemies explode into meat chunks when you kill them regardless of how much damage you do, in order to avoid overloading the game engine with bodies.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: Pops up every now and then, almost always for comedy. Some notable moments include the pre-recorded dialogue from Hyperion to the residents of Overlook and an ad Marcus gives to the Crimson Raiders, encouraging them to buy guns to fight the bandits... and the same ad to the bandits, except with every instance of Crimson Raiders and bandits swapped.
• Magic Floppy Disk: C3n50r807 asks you to stop a bunch of pirates who are illegally downloading the latest games on the ECHOnet. The games are all stored on 1.44MB magnetic floppy disks, and the description says to keep away from sand.
  • Tiny Tina's bomb circuits are actually standard PC motherboards.
• Magikarp Power: Larval varkids are mostly annoying. But if you don't contain them, and fast, you'll be fighting an armored Badass variant. They evolve far beyond the normal Badass though... Wait long enough and they become burrowing artillery platforms as the Super Badass varkid, and one stage further is the aerial gunship Ultimate Badass varkid. Of course, each version has several times more health than the previous. It goes even further on the second playthrough, where if you are lucky (or unlucky, if you weren't actively trying to get him to spawn) the second Raid boss from the main game could potentially evolve from an Ultimate Badass. Vermivorous the Invincible has at least twice as much health as the other raid boss Terramorphous the Invincible, and a wide array of attacks to (insta)kill you with.
• Male Gaze: In A Meat Bicycle Built For Two, the close-up of Maya starts at the curves of her rear and lower back and slowly pans up. Then again, considering Krieg's reaction to her, this makes sense.
• Manipulative Bastard: Handsome Jack, to a tee. It turns out very nearly everything that occurred in the story of the first game was a result of his manipulations.
• The Man Is Sticking It to the Man: The Vladof Corporation highly encourages you to buy glorious Vladof proletariat firearms to overthrow the capitalist pigs in a glorious revolution.
• Man on Fire:
  • Burning Psychos, whose combat strategy consists solely of running around, being on fire, and breathing fire at you. Elementally-charged wildlife also exhibits this trope: skags, spiderants, et cetera.
  • With the right skills, setting Krieg on fire only makes him stronger!
• Mauve Shirt: Private Jessup of the Crimson Raiders is unceremoniously gibbed during Hector's assault on Sanctuary. Never saw it coming.
• Meaningless Meaningful Words: Jakobs has an unique sniper rifle whose flavor text is "Bison bison had had had had had bison bison bison shi shi shi". It looks like a word salad, but in reality, it's a mashup of three language grammar puzzles: one where repeating eight times "buffalo" results in a gramatically correct English sentence, one where inserting the right punctuation on a sentence that repeats "had" 11 times makes it meaningful, and a Chinese poem that, when read out loud, is pronounced "shi shi shi shi shi shi...".
• Meaningful Name:
  • Hyperion translates as "Watcher from above". Their Kill Sat is visible with the naked eye from every outdoor location in the game and tracks your progress.
  • Zer0; it refers to both his mysterious nature, and the emoticon that flashes on his visor whenever he gets a kill.
  • Gaige is rather close to "gauge" (a mechanical measurement device or assessment of a situation); this relates to both her cyborg nature, and the predictive ability required to play her most complex skill tree. She also loves to "gauge" the inventory items and see how they stack up.
  • Salvador translates from Spanish as "Savior".
  • Krieg is German for war. His name was originally going to be Blitz (German for lightning).
• Meatgrinder Surgery: The "Do No Harm" quest. Your goal is to melee Zed's patient, but just shooting the man works too. Especially hilarious on higher difficulties where you can perform the "operation" with a high level rocket launcher.
  Zed: Alright: make a small incision just below his sternum, but be careful - we don't want to nick the coronary artery.
  (player "performs surgery" with a melee attack, killing the patient)
  Zed: Close enough.
• Medium Awareness: See Meaningful Name directly above. Gaige in the inventory screen. "Show me those green arrows!" referring to the green arrows that show how an item is superior to what you're comparing it to.
  Gaige I love comparing loot!
• Medium Blending: As with the first game, there is live action footage not only of the Guardian Angel, but also Lilith.
• MegaCorp: All weapons manufacturers except the Bandits (who jerry-rig their guns out of scrap). Even Vladof. They also seem to liscence parts from each other, as Vladof always makes the "spinigun" barrels seen on gatling assault rifles, whereas Torgue always makes the Gyrojet barrels seen on microgrenade weapons.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Amongst the generic rank and file, there are no female enemies in the main game and only very few amongst the named ones. The enemies are all either robots, animals or male. This has been explained by Randy Pitchford as being because Dahl used prison slave labour but is contradicted by the game's audio logs in which Tannis explains that the bandits the player fights used to be scientists, as well as a series of logs between a Dahl's mining chief and a security officer, both of whom are female.
• Menu Time Lockout: Bringing up the multi-tiered menu screen effectively freezes the action around your character, allowing you to calmly scrutinize a dizzying array of sprawling weapon stats in order to determine precisely how best to effectively murder the face of whatever cold-blooded homicidal thing happens to be bearing down on you at the time.
• Mercy Kill: Played completely straight.Angel, held prisoner by Jack, her own father, asks to die to both end the torment and stop Jack's plot to use her as a power source—disconnecting her ends her life but also prevents the Vault Key from charging.
• Metal Slime: The chubby version of enemies, who rarely show up but drop more loot than usual when killed. The Loot Midgets become this in True/Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, where they can drop Legendary/Pearlescent items alongside simple ammo and money.
• Mexican Standoff: Referred to as a Truxican standoff in this game, there are two instances of this.
  • The first is near the end of the mission "The Good, the Bad, and the Mordecai", where you stand off against two other people in a fight for a treasure chest.
  • The other is in the mission "BFFs", which has a group of four people in this state because they can't figure out who stole their cash.
• Mini Mook: Midgets are back, and there's a couple of new types. Some regular enemies may also be micro-sized, such as mini-goliaths, or tiny nomad raiders.
• Mob War:
  • The entire "Clan War" sidequest arc is one, with the Vault Hunters doing more increasingly brutal acts for both sides until it explodes into a massive firefight at the Lynchwood train station.
  • The Slabs versus the Sawteeth (who had their own emblems and flags despite having the generic appearance of the "bandit mooks" you've faced several times). Their feud is told by Brick while you are on your mission of stealing some heavier firepower.
  • More subtle than the Sawteeth, but the Slabs also had a fight with the bandits of Lynchwood according to the announcements of the town's deputy.
• Momma's Boy: Taggart was one of Hammerlock's exes and was very close to his mother. Prior to his death, he was looking for his lost Mother's Day gift (which was hand-made) and it does initially look innocent since Henry earned Taggart's admiration by teaching him how to survive. However, as the mission progresses, Taggart's behavior sounds more and more oedipal, whether it was intentional or not on Taggart's part is uncertain. At the end of the mission, the shield can be found under the name of "Love Thumper" and it has the inscription "If thumping you is wrong, I don't want to be right". Aside from the shield name, Taggart has a knuckle tattoo of the word "Mama", he named a stalker after his mother, and he dies yelling for his mother to save him. The quest completion notice is mockingly blunt about it:
  Oedipus complex Shmoedipus complex.
• Money Multiplier: The Vault Hunter's Relic increases the chance of finding rare loot.
• Money Spider:
  • Shooting the crystals off of Crystalisks can allow you to pick them up as an equivalent to cash. And since they spawn with a degree of regularity, they can be farmed to pad one's bank account.
  • Barf Skags are a lesser degree of this. Explained In-Universe by the fact that Skags eat damn near everything, and vomit up whatever they can't digest.
• Moment Killer: Non-romantic variation: Pyro Pete is your typical pyromaniac nutter who loves ranting and raving and laughing manically. Then Mr. Torgue hangs a lampshade on everything Pete does, including his inevitable betrayal of you. Pete's volume goes down by half and he loses a lot of his enthusiasm.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • This game is both a bigger parody than the first, as well as much darker, leading to tons of this. Tiny Tina's tea party is a funny bit of Comedic Sociopathy... until it becomes clear she's torturing the bandit who got her parents killed right in front of her.
  • In the Hyperion Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, there are funny announcements about not getting near the animals unless you're in the "human bait" test group and similar, cut with finding ECHO recordings of a scientist being forced to conduct horrific human experiments because Jack has her wife.
  • Then during the storyline mission set there, you're tricked into killing a mutated Bloodwing while Mordecai watches, distraught. Then as you're heading back, Handsome Jack scrambles to find a violin before playing you a mocking requiem. Terribly.
    Handsome Jack: Alright, screw you, it would have been hilarious if I found it earlier! Shut up!
  • During the hilarity that is the Hodunk/Zaford quest chain, Ellie offhandedly mentions the reason Moxxi took her away from the Hodunk clan was because they were planning to raise her as the clan wife. Pretty much everything in the game has at least a little Fridge Horror attached to it.
  • After the part where Handsome Jack kills Roland and takes Lilith hostage is a part where you're teleported into some closet with a ton of chests. Upon exiting, you see that it's Marcus' storage area, and he sees you coming out and admonishes you for being in there. Ahahaha... might have been more amusing if it hadn't been for the previous scene.
  • For that matter, the entire Bearer of Bad News quest. If you ever want to see how the people of Sanctuary would act when you take the pep out of them, this quest has your answer.
  • The final quest of the Tina Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC is chock full of this. Most of it is hysterical, but it also deals with Tina finally coming to terms with Roland's death.
• Mook Maker:
  • Constructors are what Jack sends after you when he gets really serious about killing people. They're big, heavily-armored floating replicators that can digistruct a small army of loaders and turrets, and making mooks isn't their only attack, either. They are also armed with huge cutting lasers, missile volleys, a ground-pound if you try to get too close to them, and the Badass ones launch tactical mini-nukes at you. Their one weakness is shooting their eye, which disrupts how they construct new loaders, but you still have to dump 1/3 of your rocket ammo into them.
  • Scylion Broodmothers can spawn Scylion Minions in unlimited supply.
  • Blue, the giant Crystalisk, can spawn mini-versions of himself that he catapults to you. They also explode on impact, with you. If they do not impact you they will do so by chasing you down.
• Monty Haul: The Commander Lilith DLC features various farmable bosses who are guaranteed to drop at least one Legendary, some easy-to-farm Loot Midgets and Legendaries as quest items.
• Mook Medic:
  • Hyperion uses small flying robots called Surveyors to either repair Loaders or give them shields. Thankfully, you can still kill a Loader getting healed pretty easily unless multiple surveyors are healing it.
    • Surveyors can be annoying to destroy, as they zip around and shoot lasers at you. Easy way to take them down is to damage a Loader to the point that the Surveyors flock to it to heal it, and take them out while they hover in place.
  • Witch Doctors in Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt. Frustratingly, not only do they heal themselves, they also have many other tricks at their disposal, like leveling up other enemies (for instance, making a Savage Warrior into a Skilled Warrior) or turning into tornadoes. Vampire Witch Doctors also usually require between 3 and 6 rockets to die.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: "Dr." Zed, is a subversion, as he constantly reminds you of his lack of a medical license despite being genuinely interested in healing people. Doc Mercy is Zed's foil and a straight example: he's a bandit doctor who is far more interested in causing wounds than patching them up, but he at least has a medical license.
• Mordor: The Eridium Blight is pretty much one big Expy of Sauron's realm itself, complete with a blackened wasteland, volcanoes and lots of lava.
• More Dakka:
  • Vladof weapons, to the point where some of their sniper rifles (especially the Droog and Lyuda lines) are functionally long-range assault rifles, which are often considered even better primaries than actual assault rifles, if you've got the ammo for it. Assault rifles with spinigun barrels. And especially Vladof and Torgue manufactured spiniguns.
  • Bandit Weapons look like they were designed by Orks, with a massive magazine to boot. Two of their bandit legendary weapons, the Slagga and Madhaus!, have mind-boggling high magazine counts and rates of fire, allowing you to literally cloud your field of vision with bullets.
  • The Gunzerker playstyle is all about this, with twice the gun putting out four times the bullets with the right skills. One of his ultimate skills grants you faster firing speed and faster reload the longer you hold down the trigger. Another skill gives him the ability to prolong gunzerking duration as he kills. And another skill gives him ammo regeneration while gunzerking.
• The Morlocks: Rats, Bandits who live in especially isolated areas and are even more detached from society than regular bandits. They're first encountered in the sewers of the Bloodshot Stronghold and are most plentiful in the cavernous Fridge. For some reason there are a few of them in Lynchwood, though.
• Multiplayer Difficulty Spike: The game states quite often in the loading screen messages that playing with other people increases the game's difficulty but also increases the loot quality that drops.
• Mundane Utility: As recorded in an ECHO Log, one of the Bloodshot Bandits used a fire gun Marcus sold him just to roast some food.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: On Pandora it would seem to be the only solution to life's problems, judging by many of the game's sidequests. One example, from the DLC "Torgue's Campaign of Carnage" involves the player being asked to hunt down and murder a video game critic, for the crime of giving a bad review to a game Torgue liked.
• My Beloved Smother: There are two distinct Psycho voices, each with its own personality. Both of them are seemingly fearful of their mothers; Psycho 2 has lines that indicate she dominated his life before he killed her. The challenge for killing Psychos is even called "Mama's Boys".
  • At the entrance to Southpaw Steam & Power, you come across three psychos who are arguing with each other over which one actually killed their mother, and by doing so, proved which one she loved the most... and caused the most pain.
• My Grandma Can Do Better Than You: During the quest to return to Sanctuary and planting a fast travel station in Overlook, Jack sends robots to try and stop you. Most players won't experience this (unless you're soloing on True Vault Hunter Mode with sub-par weapons, or have an extremely bad group), but if the robots repeatedly interrupt/destroy the beacon, Jack will chime in, commenting on how bad you are and wonder how you can defeat him if you can't even protect a little beacon.
  • He sends a similar taunt if you take too long to rescue Roland (either due to dying repeatedly, and/or taking too long to destroy the robots). It then takes him to the Hyperion prison in The Dust, where you now have to travel to and fight more enemies to rescue him.
  • Played for Laughs at the start of the Campaign of Carnage. Torgue says that you start off right below his own grandmother on the rankings. She gummed a guy to death. IT TOOK SEVERAL HOURS!!!
  • You later meet said grandmother in another DLC. She looks like Torgue in a grey wig and lipstick, meaning that said gumming of death was probably not a hyperbole in the slightest...
• Mysterious Protector: In the "Victims of Vault Hunters" sidequest of the Son of Crawmerax DLC, the various assassins gathered by Sparky Flynt are all dead by the time you get to them, to the frustration of Flynt. At the end of the sidequest, Hammerlock tells the Vault Hunters that each of them received a message from six different individuals who were the ones responsible for killing the assassins (though he states that they weren't working together).
  • Axton's assassin (a sergeant he knew and hated) was killed by his ex-wife Sarah, which he takes as meaning that she still wants him.
  • Gaige's assassin (Marcie Halloway's uncle) was killed by her father.
  • Salvador's assassin (the survivor of a bandit clan he wiped out) was dealt with by his abuela, who hired the resort staff to deal with him.
  • Maya's assassin (Sophis' brother and a Siren Hunter) was killed by possibly Patricia Tannis, judging by how the letter was written.
  • Krieg's assassin (a Hyperion scientist involved in the experiments that created him) was killed by Dr. Samuels, the Reluctant Mad Scientist mentioned in the Doctor's Orders sidequest.
  • Zer0's assassin, who Sparky knows nothing of, is killed in a way that only he understands. His letter is simply "To Zer0: One", which even he considers infuriatingly cryptic.

N

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The names Goliaths get as they level up. Ultimate Badass Goliath, Fatal GOD-liath, Hulking Mass of Destruction, Giant Midget of Death....
• Nested Ownership: Handsome Jack once offers to pay the Vault Hunters "enough money to build a mansion, made of other, smaller mansions."
• Never Trust a Trailer: The launch day trailer suggests a massive battle The Lord of the Rings-style with the four new heroes teaming up with the old. This does not happen. Furthermore, this quite amusing scene never occurred.
• New Game Plus: Just like the old game, the player may run through the entire game again after finishing the story, facing tougher enemies while getting better loot.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Lilith qualifies for one when she ignores Angel's warning to stay away from Angel's core and gets kidnapped by Jack to charge the vault key.
  • Your own character ends up doing this during a story quest, where putting a new power core in Sanctuary ends up disabling the town's shields. To be fair however, none of the protagonists were aware of this, as it was yet another of Jack's many Xanatos Gambits.
  • In one quest during Tiny Tina's DLC, Mr. Torgue shows up, and has you destroy two of the blimps watching over the town in that campaign because EXPLOSIONS!. However, it turns out that said blimps were watching for enemies approaching the town, and destroying them causes enemies to show up near the outskirts. In a rare aversion of Karma Houdini, Mr. Torgue doesn't get away with it, and when you return to town later, he's locked in a pillory as punishment.
  • Later in the same DLC, when greeting the king of the dwarves in a mine, Brick wins the roll, and says he wants to punch the king. Despite Lilith and Mordecai's objections, he wins out, and when you "punch" him, you end up killing him, causing the dwarves to be hostile to you.
  • And this comes into play again later when you reach a trapped girl in the dungeon. Brick once again wants to hit her, but this time Mordecai and Lilith win out, and you end up freeing her. She thanks you by plotting her revenge against the world, and turns into a giant spider forcing you into a boss fight. Brick wishes then he did punch her while she was locked up.
  • During a sidequest in Flame Rock Refuge, Sir Reginald Von Bartlesby asks you a riddle. However, Brick accidentally breaks the figure on the board when he slams the die down a little too hard, and in-game its represented by Reginald getting squished by the die. Nonetheless, Tina decides to consider the sidequest completed.
  • In the Wattle Gobbler DLC, Torgue helps you poison Wattle Gobbler (who has been made invulnerable) so that you can kill it and he can eat it, to the frustration of President Smith. When you finally make your way to Wattle Gobbler, Smith reveals why they rigged the fight: They wanted Torgue to be the one to kill the beast as a publicity stunt. Torgue doesn't care and still goes through with it and ends up fired from his own corporation.
• Noble Savage: One of the Savages who captures Sir Hammerlock in the Son of Crawmerax DLC takes offense to Hammerlock calling them savages.
  Hey! Who are you calling a savage!? I graduated from Eden-4 Megatech with honors! Check your privilege, dick.
• No Flow in CGI:
  • Everyone's hair is pointy and immobile. Mordecai's ponytail or Lilith's bangs could put an eye out, and some alternate heads make it even worse.
  • Gaige's skirt and the padlock on her right wrist don't move at all.
• No Hero Discount: Largely because of Adam Smith Hates Your Guts, the most you can expect for helping people out on a quest is whatever reward they give you. Marcus and Dr. Zed still expect you to pay full price for their wares, no matter how many quests you've done for them and how many times you've saved them from Hyperion.
• No Indoor Voice:
  • Salvador yells almost all the time.
  • Torgue in the DLC yells in every single voice clip he has. His captions are likewise (mostly) done in ALL CAPS.
• No Name Given: The Sheriff of Lynchwood has no name and the deputy even points it out during a broadcast. He doesn't know who she is, just that she showed up one day, deputized him, and scares the shit out of him. This may be a stealth Shout-Out to "The Man With No Name." It wasn't until Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! that her name was revealed to be Nisha.
• Non-Indicative Name: Even though the raid bosses Terramorphous, Hyperius and Haderax have "the Invincible" tucked after their names, there's nothing stopping you or your friends from killing them! In fact, the Badass Challenge for killing the former is named "Terramorphous the Not-So-Invincible", mocking its name.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Killing Psycho Midgets sometimes results in them screaming "BICYCLES!"
• Noodle Incident:
  • Gaige's father apparently aided her escape with the aid of a golf cart and explosives.
  • A particularly amusing radio advert for Tediore weapons has a man named John claiming that he lost both of his thumbs in a "horrific foreplay accident".
  • Tina says she has to pay Roland back for "that buttcrap with General Rancid." (Whoever that is.)
• No OSHA Compliance: We've lost count of the broken or missing safety rails. There's also the various Eridium mines with exposed moving drill bits that players might accidentally blunder into and be killed by. Never mind the per-usual explosive, shocking, fuel, slag, and acid-filled barrels that just happen to be...oh, everywhere.
  • One sidequest has you fight a miniboss that you reach by walking up a conveyor belt. Sounds easy? Well, it is, even while dodging the giant pistons, but that's still a really odd way to get up to what seems to be the guy's living space.
• Nostalgia Level: Arid Nexus - Badlands is basically the starting zone of the first game after Hyperion got their hands on it.
• Not Even Bothering with an Excuse: In the side mission Claptrap's Birthday Bash!, all the invitees (except the players) turn him down. None bothers explaining why.
  Scooter: Hah, Clappy's havin' a shindig? You know, I'd go, but... I ain't gonna.
  Moxxi: Ooooh, sorry, I can't make it. Give Claptrap my love, though. My purely platonic love. Don't want him getting any ideas.
  Marcus: Hahahahahahahahahaha! No.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Unlike the first game, there's no fall damage at all. This allows you to take shortcuts out of dungeons, or to do something so badass that the Slab King is amazed at you. Exceptions are usually to prevent you leaping over the edge of the level map.
• Not What I Signed on For: The Hyperion Engineers will say some of these lines when fighting you.
  I did not sign up to fight bandits!
• Notice This: Anything that can be opened or looted has glowing green lights on it somewhere. In the event it's not a chest, locker, lockbox, crate, junk pile, mailbox, washing machine or cardboard box, it will still have something green and glowing about it. Piles of animal refuse also have a greenish glow or green mist about them (Pandoran life forms eat anything they can get their mouth on, and just throw up the undigestible guns and ammunition for you to loot). This may simply be your ECHO device highlighting lootable objects, as upon closer inspection the glowing parts lose their glow upon opening, which includes paper stickers on the side of cardboard boxes.

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