SegmentNext
Elpis is a moon with no air on it, and the game keeps reminding you: side missions send you to kick an Air Dome Generator into life before the shooting can start, two of the eight Luneshine bonuses a Moonstone grind can add exist to keep your oxygen meter topped up, and the final boss has attacks you dodge by Oz boosting into a sky with nothing in it to breathe. What ties our Pre-Sequel guides together, though, is not the air. It is a number. Nearly every page we have written about this game states a level, and read in order they turn into a single ladder that runs from a level 2 boss to a cap costing 3,429,728 experience to reach.
What the climb actually costs
Our levelling guide prices all fifty rungs of that ladder, and the shape of the table is worth knowing before you start. Standing on level 10 costs 37,798 experience in total, while getting from level 40 to the cap costs nearly 1.6 million on its own. Fighting things above your own level is the honest fix, and the guide's two shortcuts are not fights at all. Both the Redbelly loop and the turret theft during Let's Build a Robot Army work by saving and quitting at the right second, which resets what the mission has counted while leaving your experience, cash, Moonstones and loot exactly where they were.
The same trick anchors our farming guide, which adds the endgame version: once the campaign and its second run are behind you, the last two levels come off the creatures and the raid boss in the very first area you ever visited. Everything below is arranged by where you are on that ladder.
Choose a Vault Hunter before you spend a point
Three of the crew have a full skill tree breakdown here, and the Gladiator page for Athena is the one most people arrive on. Rather than repeat the trees, our Vault Hunter builds guide lines all nine of them up against a single question, which is whether the tree pays off with company or without it. The short version: Athena's Phalanx and Claptrap's I Love You Guys are the only two lines aimed at anybody else, Nisha is pure damage in all three of hers, and a third of the trees are quietly written for a second playthrough rather than a first.
Twelve worked builds sit under those three characters, from a Claptrap that spends 39 points on his friends to a Nisha loadout aimed squarely at a raid boss. Read the tree summaries first and the builds second, because several of them ask for gear that only turns up much later.
Levels 2 to 12: finding your feet
The campaign's first three bosses arrive at levels 2, 4 and 8, and none of them needs a build to beat. Flameknuckle burns, so keep away unless your shield resists fire; Deadlift fills his arena with jump pads and shock damage, which makes a sniper rifle and a hasty hop the answer; Redbelly can be walked in circles because he refuses to leave his own patch. All nine bosses that guide counts, their critical spots and what they shrug off are gathered in our boss guide, and reading it early saves you burning cryo rounds on the six of them that ignore cryo entirely.
Optional work starts almost immediately. Of the 57 jobs in our side missions guide, ten are available at level 10 or below, and the first handful come from Lost Legion Invasion and Marooned. The two campaign missions that hand out the most work are A New Direction and Science and Violence, which unlock six side missions each. Sixteen of the 57 are locked behind another side mission rather than behind the story, so skipping one job quietly removes others from your log later on.
This is also the point where exploring starts paying. Our named locations guide lists the discovery points region by region for the Cosmic Completionist trophy, and a fair few of them are the same jump pad routes the early missions push you along anyway.
Levels 13 to 26: the gear years
The Bosun at 14 and Felicity Rampant at 16 are the first fights that punish a bad loadout, and by Colonel Zarpedon at 26 the game expects you to be swapping elements on purpose. Our items guide covers what to swap to, sorted by what each piece asks of you before it is yours, and its headline finding is that most of the orange guns in this game are bought or built rather than hunted. The full stat and red text listing lives in the legendary weapons guide, which tables 32 of them by weapon class.
Lasers deserve their own detour, since they are the class this game invented and the only one where the barrel rather than the body decides how the gun behaves. Four manufacturers make them, four barrel shapes cover the whole range, and the Maliwan ones reward holding the trigger far longer than feels sensible.
The machine that turns three unwanted guns into one wanted one is in our mechanics guide, alongside the cosmetics economy. Both run on the same idea: a Moonstone buys certainty at the Grinder, a named mission buys a specific skin, and everything else is a roll. That guide also explains why nine named jobs are worth doing purely for the wardrobe.
Collectors have two lists to work through in this stretch. Twenty eight Lost ECHO logs are mapped across seven areas in our items guide, worth Badass Points rather than a trophy, and the eleven secrets in our Easter eggs guide range from a Mario pipe inside a yellow building in Tycho's Ribs to a 2001 monolith in Higgin's Gully that walks you through the film. The buff drinks lined up in Moxxi's bar are the practical one: ten Moonstones each, and best spent immediately before a boss.
Levels 27 to 50: the top of the ladder
RK5 at 29 and the Sentinel at 28 close the campaign, the latter across four phases that each end when its shield breaks, with the recharge stopping after the second. The Empyrean Sentinel is the version that turns up afterwards to take your endgame gear apart, in three phases built around black holes and a corrosive pool that lingers for half a minute.
Two more bosses never appear on the critical path at all. Iwajira sits in a lava cavern past Springs' base in the first area, level 30 on a first run and 52 on a second, and drops purple and blue gear along with a rocket launcher. Nel has to be goaded into fighting by scaling a Regolith Range building for two billboard letters and planting them at its foot. Both routes are in our secret bosses guide, and the raid boss the farming guide points you back at around level 48 lives in that same opening area.
The last quest worth naming here is Guardian Hunter, which opens at level 29 near Vorago Solitude and asks you to capture a living Guardian. Ignore the request, kill them as they respawn, and you have a five hundred experience tap that runs until your ammunition does.
The second lap
True Vault Hunter Mode is where several of our pages change their advice. Athena's elemental line and Claptrap's two extreme trees are all written with it in mind, our legendary listings quote both level 25 and level 50 versions of the same guns, and Iwajira's level jumps by 22 the moment you start again. Treat the first run as the one where you learn the fights and the second as the one where the gear finally matters.
If the moon stutters
The PC version drops frames in places, and our tweaks guide works through the options that cost the most performance for the least visual gain, then goes into WillowEngine.ini for the shadow, light shaft and detail settings the menu never exposes. The field of view slider runs from 70 to 110 with a default of 90, and capping the frame rate by hand is usually kinder than leaving VSync on.
Everything above assumes a first playthrough on foot. If you would rather start at the top, read the builds guide and the farming routes together, since the fastest way onto that ladder is still somebody else's turret doing the counting for you.