Let’s Look at Who’s Going to that Vault!

I was just starting work on a review of the two expansion characters for Borderlands 2, Gaige the Mechromancer and Krieg the Psycho, as I’m doing reviews of all the expansion content at this point, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually done a deep dive on the characters from any of the games. It’s one thing to discuss expansions stories and content, as a basic review of the main games allows us enough knowledge to discuss the story and gameplay expansions added in. But characters are different.

How do we discuss a bonus character included later on if we don’t have a basis to understand how they stack up to the main roster. And if we’re going to discuss the characters from Borderlands 2 then we first have to go back and look at the roster from Borderlands since we can’t establish if newer characters are upgrades over previous ones without first looking at those previous characters.

So here we are, digging back once again to talk about each of the main characters from the first game just so we have a baseline for discussion moving forwards. And we’re going to go in order from most powerful to least powerful because, frankly, that’s an easy way to organize it and, considering the characters in question, an obvious one as well:

Lilith the Siren

Of all the characters in the first game (and, frankly, maybe even all the later entries as well) there is no character more fundamentally broken, in an intended way, than Lilith. While the other characters in the series were pretty grounded – a soldier, a hunter with his bird, and a boxer – Lilith was the character included to give players access to a “mage type” character. She had special abilities unlike anyone else, and she effectively set the tone for just how weird, wild, and strange the world of Pandora could get.

Lilith’s main power is her Phasewalk. She pops herself into an alternate dimensional phase and is able to run around at faster speed while in this dimension. Not only is she invisible to all enemies while in this form (although other players are able to see her), but she’s also able to deal a whole ton of damage in the process. That’s because Lilith has a number of abilities that can augment her Phasewalk, taking it from pretty useful to absolute god-tier in power level.

For starters, Lilith can gain elemental bonuses to her Phasewalk, bursting into, and out of, the alternate dimension and spraying elemental damage all over the place. Then, she can learn Radiance, which applies constant Shock damage to any enemy she moves near while in her walk. This does damage over time, and can stack and compound with other damage. And then she can also gain Venom, which adds Corrosive damage to her melee attacks, and she can gain, as one of her capstone skills, Phase Strike, dealing bonus damage to any enemy she punches while in Phasewalk. So, if you engineered it right you could burst into Phasewalk near an enemy for elemental damage, stand near them while they ignore you for constant shock damage, and then punch them right near the end of your Phasewalk time, adding corrosive damage plus a melee bonus. Lilith, functionally, could liquefy enemies.

And it gets worse. Her Hit & Run skill adds time to her Phasewalk and more melee damage on top. Hard to Get them decreases her Phasewalk cooldown, allowing her to get into her alternate state faster. And then when you add on Blackout, which decreases the cooldown of Phasewalk, there were ways you could functionally never leave Phasewalk at all. I’ve had sections of the game where I burst into Phasewalk, run around every enemy I can, watch them all die due to the constant burn of Shock, only to see my Phasewalk meter refill before I’ve even exited, meaning I could go back in again, and again, and again. Strings of four or five Phasewalks at a time aren’t unheard of with the right packs of enemies. It’s ridiculous.

And then once you add in the fact that Inner Glow regenerates your health while you’re in Phasewalk and Girl Power regenerates your shields for every enemy you kill, well… Lilith is impossible to put down. That’s not to say the other characters in the game are bad, but Lilith is on a different level from them… and just maybe from any other character we’ll see in the series. She’s busted in the best possible way.

Roland the Soldier

In comparison to Lilith, Roland is a step down. As I said above, he’s not a bad character by any means, but in comparison to the godly power that Lilith brings to the table, Roland is just… fine. Probably the best of all the characters left, but he just can’t compare. He does have his uses though, especially because he’s the only character that brought a second gun to the party: his Scorpio Turret.

When in combat, Roland can throw out his turret, a gun that will stick in a single location for twenty seconds, firing off at everything else around them. It’s a handy secondary source of damage even before you start thinking of use cases for it. Like, for instance, hiding behind cover and throwing your turret out beside you, letting it not only grab the attention of enemies, but also kill many of them off, making it easier for you to progress further into an area. Yes, it’s a cowardly way to play, but we’re here to see the story, not care if people think we’re weak.

Of course, many of his skills are built around increasing the power and effectiveness of the turret. Sentry increases the turret’s damage, Barrage increases the number of shots it fires, and Refire and Deploy both increase the cooldown speed of the turret, allowing you to bring it out faster and faster as the game goes on. Plus, if you throw on the capstone skill of Guided Missile you get, yes, a missile fires at regular intervals from the turret. You can make it a pretty strong force on the battlefield.

And then there are the support skills Roland gets. Roland can heal allies by shooting them with the Cauterize skill. His turret can recharge health via Aid Station. It can recharge ammo via Stockpile. The capstone of Supply Drop can set the turret up to spill supply pickups for the team. And with Revive, the turret has a fourteen percent chance to bring back downed allies when it’s deployed. Put it all together and while Roland might not be as strong as Lilith, but that doesn’t make him bad. He’s a very useful support character who can hold his own during those times where Lilith is off, destroying everything else.

Mordecai the Hunter

Roland was a pretty large step down from Lilith in terms of power, and while Mordecai isn’t quite as big a step down in comparison, he is still not as useful as Roland. He has his uses, especially for a solo playthrough where the player doesn’t want to just liquefy everyone with Lilith, but he is only good in limited situations… and even then you really have to like his play style to care about Mordy at all.

Mordecai’s main power is his bird, Bloodwing. When charged up, Mordy can throw out his bird, who will then fly around the area, damaging all enemies in their flight path before swinging back over to Mordy for pickup. This is a decent way to do damage to a bunch of enemies all at once, but it does lack the constant fire of Rolan’s turret or the unimaginable damage that Lilith can do simply by existing. Mordy really has to work for it even when using his bird.

Bloodwing can be charged up in a few different ways, usually by working your way down the Rogue skill tree. Swift Strike increases Bloodwing’s damage. Out for Blood gives you health back for every target Bloodwing hits. Aerial Impact gives Bloodwing a chance to daze any enemies it hits. And then Bird of Prey increases the number of targets Bloodwing can hit. So as you charge up, Bloodwing becomes more and more powerful, making it quite a helpful little buddy. Maybe not as useful as Roland’s turret, but not a complete waste, either.

Mordy’s other big skill set is his ability to use Snipers. Each character has a weapon type they get bonuses with (for Roland it was Combat Rifles, and for Lilith it was her melee), but Mordecai’s bonus really pushes you towards wanting to use snipers more than anything else. Focus increases accuracy with all weapons and decreases sniper sway specifically. Caliber increases damage with sniper rifles. Smirk increases experience gained when you get critical kills (which is what you should always get with snipers). And Carrion Call reduces the cooldown of Bloodwing when you shoot an enemy with a sniper rifle. Functionally if you’re not using snipers with Mordy you’re pretty well playing the character wrong.

And that’s great. Mordecai is a fantastic sniper character. The unfortunate thing, though, is that Borderlands very often puts you into tight corners or small arenas where long range “you can’t see me but I can hit you” kills aren’t really possible. And when that happens Mordy starts to run out of power. And sure, Mordy has a couple of skills that boost pistols, letting you sometimes deal double shots (Gun Crazy) or increase the fire rate and magazine size (Hair Trigger), but these are nowhere near as powerful as the sniper bonuses. It feels like Mordy is made for a specific use case when when the game forces you into situations outside that, Mordy becomes pretty awful.

Brick the Brawler

And yet even Mordy isn’t as bad as Brick. When you look at the classes of the other characters – a mage type, a soldier with a secondary gun, and a hunter with a bird – a dude coming into the battle field with his fists feels woefully underpowered by comparison. He brought his fists to a gunfight and, well, you can figure how that often goes. Mordy was limited in his usefulness often enough, but Brick is just a bottom tier character that really needed a massive reinvention to even come close to being useful.

Brick’s big power is that he can go berserk. When in this mode, Brick drops all pretense with guns and his aim and fire buttons because his left and right fists. As a berserker you run around, punching everything in front of you. Berserking gives you increased damage resistance and some health regeneration, but you better be sure you can kill things before they kill you because, otherwise, you’ll be on your knees, bleeding out, before the enemies even care about you at all.

Brick’s Brawler tree is fully geared towards improving your fisticuffs. Iron Fist increases your melee damage, Endless Rage increases your Berserk time, and Heavy Handed gives you bonus melee damage after killing an enemy. Sting Like a Bee grants you a forward dash every time you punch, letting you move towards enemies faster. Short Fuse then further decreases the cooldown of your Berserk. And, finally, Blood Sport gives you health regen for a short time when you kill an enemy while in berserk. All together this can make your berserk pretty powerful… but it’s still limited. You came to a shooting game and the whole thing you have is, “let’s punch a bunch of dudes.” It can be effective at times but it feels like Brick showed up for the wrong game.

The other main tree that’s useful for Brick is the Blaster tree. Here Brick gains bonuses for explosive damage and rockets. Increase explosive damage with Endowed, get more rockets in the gun with Wide Load, and get bonus cooldown when dealing explosive damage. Plus you can get Cast Iron which decreases your own resistance to explosive damage (which is useful if you accidentally blow up a rocket right in your own face). And finally, with Master Blaster, you can regenerate rockets when you kill enemies.

If you like punching people, and using rockets, Brick is for you. And I have known people that have really gotten into the rhythm of Brick. They main him all day and have fun, and I’m not here to say they’re wrong. If that’s a style of play you like than Brick will, obviously, rank higher for you. But general sentiment is that Brick is way too limited to be of true use, forcing him to the bottom of the ranking. In general, unless the idea of melee sound like your thing, Brick is the guy you play last after you’ve already played through the game at least three times and completed everything else you could in Borderlands. And even then you might not bother finishing the game with Brick. He’s just not the useful.