Looking for an optional challenge in Borderlands 3? Are you some sort of bullet fetishist who wants lead inserted into intimate areas that’ll make your doctor shake his head in disappointment when he examines your X-rays while your digistructed self sheepishly grins? Then you’ve got two options! True Vault Hunter Mode allows you to replay your way through Borderlands 3 with bullet-spongier enemies, fearsome foes made out of sturdier meat-cubes that’ll take a few extra rounds to make them pop like a watermelon left inside of a microwave for too long.
If that’s not enough you deliciously mad person you, then you can always apply the Mayhem Mode modifiers to your game, a collection of challenging elements that essentially function as cheat codes for the AI at their maximum level. It’s risk versus reward, with some of the loot available being chuffing good. Back in November, Gearbox detailed how Mayhem Mode would be overhauled, promising details on how these changes would apply.
Several months later, and you won’t have long to wait on those promised details or the actual tweaking of Mayhem Mode. It’s coming tomorrow, April 23.
According to Gearbox, you’ll be able to use 25 new modifiers within Mayhem Mode 2.0 and its ten levels of increasing difficulty. The higher up the masochism ladder you go, the more experience you’ll gain and the better your loot will be. “Mayhem Mode will benefit from a number of improvements designed to offer a more varied, lasting, and rewarding challenge,” Gearbox wrote in an update.
For starters, you’ll no longer need to visit the pedestal on Sanctuary III to activate Mayhem Mode or adjust your Mayhem level; the option will be accessible via a new tab on your ECHO Device menu so that you can access it at any time. Note that in multiplayer games the Mayhem level will be determined by the host, and when you matchmake for multiplayer, you’ll automatically be matched with players who are at a similar Mayhem level as you whenever possible.
There will be more than 25 all-new modifiers that can be applied to your game, each rated as Easy, Medium, Hard, or Very Hard. Easy modifiers are largely helpful, and include things like Big Kick Energy, which actually increases your weapons’ damage but also increases their recoil and spread. There’s also Galaxy Brain, which dramatically increases the size of enemies’ heads so that crit shots are easier to land.
Venture into Medium modifier territory and beyond, though, and things start to get more challenging. For example, the Medium modifier Floor is Lava “encourages” you to keep moving at all times by forming a pool of damage-dealing lava beneath your feet when you stand still, and the Hard modifier Drone Ranger spawns Healing Drones to accompany and assist enemies. We’ll let you discover the rest of the modifiers—including all of the Very Hard ones—for yourselves.
Modifiers are selected at random, but the number of modifiers and difficulty ratings of those modifiers are always the same for each Mayhem level, as shown in the table below.
To further sweeten the pot, Gearbox wil drop eight new legendary weapons into the mode, although I’m not sure if anything can replace my beloved Dahl assault rifle that shoots pyro bullets and homing death-skulls straight into bandit faces. Beyond that, this week will also see a new seasonal event called Revenge of the Cartels, which has you doing awful murder stuff for Maurice in his war with the Eridium Cartel. There’s a problem that needs to be solved, and much like the dilemmas with space-gods that can tear the fabric of reality open, the only way to do so is with bullets.
A LOT of bullets.
Last Updated: April 22, 2020
