Items

Loot on Elpis reaches you in three ways: you walk to a spot and pick it up, you kill something specific, or you stand at a counter and pay for it. Sorting our gear pages that way is more useful than sorting them by manufacturer, because it turns out that the third route covers most of the orange guns in the game.

Most legendaries are bought or built, not hunted

Our legendary weapons guide tables 32 orange guns across seven weapon classes, and the drop location column is the interesting one. Eighteen of those entries name a vendor, the Grinder, or both. Six name nothing except a kill or a place. The remaining eight name no source at all, which is honest enough on a page its writers still label a work in progress.

That reshapes the shopping trip. If a Torrent, a Hellfire, a Mongol or a Fatale is what you are after, a vendor and three spare guns will get there faster than any farming route, and the pistol shelf is the deepest of the lot at six entries. Save the boss runs for the handful that genuinely require them.

Six of those rows hang on something you have to kill. Four are unavoidable, since the Bosun, Flameknuckle, Colonel Zarpedon and the Sentinel all stand between you and the credits, and their strategies are in our boss guide. The other two never appear on the critical path and are covered in our secret boss guide. Nel is the odd one out of every entry here, because he has to be insulted with a pair of scavenged billboard letters before he will show up and part with the Skullmasher.

Lasers are assembled rather than found

The weapon class the Pre-Sequel added for itself does not behave like the others, and our laser weapons guide explains why: the barrel, not the body, decides how the gun acts, right down to how much ammunition a trigger pull costs. Only Dahl, Hyperion, Maliwan and Tediore build them, and because a barrel from one can sit on a body from another, no two lasers you pick up behave quite alike.

Four barrels cover the class. Blasters throw plasma bolts and stand in for assault rifles, beams pour a continuous stream, railguns are the slow long range option, and splitters spray several bolts at once like a shotgun. Manufacturer habits then layer on top. Dahl adds penetration and burst fire down the sights, at the price of railguns that swallow four rounds of ammunition per shot. Hyperion reverses recoil the longer you hold the trigger and takes melee attachments worth half again as much melee damage. Tediore lasers shock the room and detonate when reloaded, and its splitters fire six projectiles where a rival fires three.

Maliwan is the one worth planning around. Its lasers gain damage the longer you keep firing, but the warm up is not the same for every barrel, and the barrel that reaches its ceiling soonest is not the one that pays the most for getting there.

Thirteen named lasers get their own write ups on that page, and the pick of them is the Thorny Ol' Rosie, which stacks a further 300 percent on top of a Maliwan beam for 518 percent in total. The Excalibastard is the strangest: it always arrives in cryo, spawns with every part already decided, and freezes what it shatters. Toby's Bright Spadroon has no range at all beyond a swing and a magazine of 237, and Lazlo's Freezeasy exists purely to freeze things, since it does almost no damage of its own.

The 28 items that never move

At the opposite end from the vending machine sit the Lost ECHOs, which are simply lying where the developers left them. Our ECHO locations guide maps 28 of them across seven areas, filed by the voice on the recording rather than by the map, so Athena, FR4G-TP, Wilhelm, Nisha, Lazlo, Zarpedon, Dahl staff and the story itself each get their own run of logs.

No achievement or trophy is attached to any of them, which is the reason most players walk past the lot. They are still worth the detour, because each one pays out Badass Points and drops a piece of advice about the game on the way through. Several also sit on top of things you were going to visit anyway, including the bunker wall west of Nel and the building with the oxygen bubble outside it in the Lost Legion base.

Turning spare guns into better guns

The counter that supplies half this article is covered in its own right in our mechanics guide, recipe by recipe, along with what a Moonstone changes about the outcome. Gear that a specific character wants, such as the electric laser rifle and adaptive shield in the raid setup on our Vault Hunter builds guide, is often a Grinder job rather than a farming route. Everything else Elpis has to offer is indexed on the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel hub.