Bosses

Something odd happens when you lay out every boss we have written a dedicated page for. Not one of them is from the base campaign. Shiv, Mouthpiece, Gigamind, Captain Traunt, the Rampager, the Warden and the rest live together in a single bosses overview, while every fight that earned a page of its own came from a DLC, a free event, or the Director's Cut.

That is not an accident of coverage. Campaign bosses are gates you pass through once. The bosses in this bucket are things you are expected to come back to, and the number of times you are expected to come back is the most useful thing to know about any of them. So that is the order they are in below, starting with the one you never fight at all.

Zero times: the boss you are not allowed to shoot

The Quick and the Quickerer is filed as a boss and contains no boss fight. Josie wants trouble started at the gambling hall because she makes coffins for a living. Slim gets thrown out of that hall, you revive him, you take him to a range where he fails to hit bottles, you scavenge metal plates to armour him, and then you goad a drunk called William into a duel with him.

Then you ring a bell and stand still. Slim wins with a headshot, takes one himself, and you revive him a second time. It is the Bounty of Blood tutorial dressed as a shootout, and it is the only page in this bucket where the correct number of shots you fire is zero.

Once, and then never again

Five fights close a piece of story and have no reason to be repeated. They are the ones to do at your own pace.

• Quartermaster is the shortest real fight in the bucket, and it is short because of a rule rather than a weakness. He appears with the Oaken Wolf, a giant robot that regenerates as long as the small man beside it is alive. Empty a magazine into the Quartermaster and the Wolf simply stops moving. Attacking the robot first is the only way to make this fight difficult.
• Dr Benedict guards the mask you need to continue through Psycho Krieg. His attacks are slow projectiles with predictable arcs, so strafing sideways dodges most of them without thinking. The fight ends at a terminal rather than on his corpse.
• The Dandy and Damsel ends in a conversation, not a kill. Boss Keem turns out to be Carolina, the wife you were sent to rescue, and you either take the ring or talk her into going home. Either way it pays $215,423, which makes it one of the best paid single missions we cover.
• Joey Ultraviolet closes the Revenge of the Cartels campaign. He watches from above while his dogs come at you and will not drop into the arena until the room is clear, and his shield stays up until the two mini-bosses beside him are dead.
• Locus of Rage is the final Psycho Krieg mission rather than a boss in its own right, ending with the Psychoreaver and then a timed loot run before the place collapses.

There is a trap in the Joey Ultraviolet fight worth flagging here rather than there. Two of the six Cartel Underbosses only spawn during his fight, and the underboss challenge requires all six to fall in a single run. Kill Joey efficiently on a run where you were collecting underbosses and you have thrown the run away.

Once, but the fight repeats inside itself

Four bosses are single encounters that loop internally. Knowing the loop is the whole fight, because each one has a window that only opens on a cycle.

The Psychoreaver is the clearest example of a cycle you should welcome. When it floods the floor with lightning, the instinct is to run, but the arena has jump pads to a safe platform and the boss is stationary while it channels. The attack that looks like the punish is the opening.

Eleanor and the Heart rewards attacking before the fight properly starts, since Eleanor barely moves and every point of damage landed early is damage you do not have to land while dodging tentacles. Our page recommends being level 43 or above, which is the only explicit level recommendation on any boss page in this bucket.

Built to be farmed

This is where the bucket changes character. Our best bosses to farm page exists because certain fights have a named weapon attached to them, and the honest advice on that page is that a guaranteed drop is not a drop on the first attempt. Mouthpiece for the Mind-Killer, Gigamind for the Smart Gun XXL, Katagawa Ball for the Tsunami, the Rampager for the Quadomizer, Billy for the Lead Sprinkler, the Graveward for the Lyuda, and Tyreen for the Queen's Call.

Spongeboss Bulletpants takes that idea and folds it into a single fight. He starts in a pineapple house before the third catapult in Psycho Krieg, and he has five forms. Shooting his helmet promotes him the first time. After that he levels by kills, and not his own: you have to lead him to the spider ants and let him earn them. One kill for the second form, two for the third, three for the fourth and four for the fifth, which is ten kills fed to him before Godly Spongeboss NoChance exists and the best loot table opens.

You can stop early and kill him at any form, and the fight gets easier the sooner you do. The reason not to is that P.A.T. Mk III sits at the top, and the page is candid that even then you may need several runs.

Run until the table pays

Hemovorous the Invincible is the game's first raid boss and the only fight in this bucket that charges admission. You start it at Claptrap's safe on Sanctuary, walk to the Darkthirst Dominion in Ascension Bluff, and then pay 500 Eridium at a gate to enter the Gorging Gorge, every single time.

Like Spongeboss, it comes in five stages, though these arrive as a sequence rather than as promotions: attack the egg to free the Larva, then the Adult, the Badass and the Superbadass, and only then does Hemovorous itself appear. There is an ammo dump, a Quick-Change station and Zed's Meds in the room before the gate, and using all three is not optional preparation.

The loot is four legendaries, the Atlas Replay, the Ionic Disruptor, the Ringer grenade and the Vladof Company Man artifact, at roughly 25 to 35 percent each per run. Multiply that by 500 Eridium a run and the fight becomes an argument for reading our Eridium farming guide first.

The campaign bosses, and one caveat

The ten campaign fights are covered together in our bosses overview, written for solo play, and the useful thread through it is that most of them are shield problems rather than damage problems. Gigamind recharges his shield by hurting you. Captain Traunt hides a generator on his back. Katagawa Jr. spawns clones you have to strip before they matter. Mouthpiece becomes immune while the floor is lit and the only safe ground is next to him.

The caveat is that the page ends by promising three more bosses it never adds, so treat its ten as a strong start rather than a complete roster. Between it, the farming page and the DLC pages above, the fights it leaves out are mostly covered elsewhere in this folder anyway.

Frequently asked questions

Which Vault Hunter is best against bosses?

Moze, for solo play, because Iron Bear can be summoned on demand and its minigun reaches weak spots while she takes no damage inside it. The exception is Takedown at Maliwan, where Wotan is hard to critically hit and FL4K is the pick.

Why do I keep not getting the guaranteed drop?

Because guaranteed means the boss can drop it, not that this kill will. Every farming page in this folder says the same thing in different words: go back and do it again. Hemovorous is the only fight that puts a number on it, at roughly 25 to 35 percent.

Do I need the DLCs for any of this?

For eleven of the twelve pages here, yes. Joey Ultraviolet is the exception, since Revenge of the Cartels was a free event, and Hemovorous needs the Director's Cut on top of 500 Eridium a run.

What is the easiest boss in the bucket?

The Quartermaster, provided you shoot the man rather than the robot. Our page calls it a walk in the park with a legendary equipped, and the Oaken Wolf beside him is only a threat while its operator is breathing.

Should I level Spongeboss all the way up?

Only if you want P.A.T. Mk III. Reaching the top form costs ten fed kills and makes him considerably harder, and the loot at the lower forms still includes the Faulty Star variants and the Unlimited Deadshot.