There are two ways to approach Borderlands 4. One is as a colorful sci-fi comic book sandbox where people say entertaining stuff as you shoot things in the face. The other is as a claw-game lottery to be mathematically solved, with players optimizing strategies to earn prizes as efficiently as possible. Both of those things can be fun! The magic of a great loot shooter is in making those two approaches feel like one and the same.

One player decided to go full tilt in the numbers direction and Excel the shit out of Borderlands 4‘s loot RNG. The result after 3,000 boss kills, published on the subreddit in a color-coded spreadsheet for all to see, was a legendary drop rate that felt surprisingly stingy at just 5 percent. They want Gearbox to increase it.

“I think 10 percent is the sweet spot for dedicated items for two reasons,”  the player, who goes by Siphonicfir, told IGN.  “One reason is precedent, as that was the drop rate in Borderlands 2. I think that game is widely regarded as the best game in the franchise, and I am almost certain the community thinks it was the best game for farming. Ten percent created a perfect balance where a drop always feels special, but you never go too long without one.”

That might feel purely like vibes talking, but Siphonicfir points out that while a 5-percent drop rate means you’re averaging one Legendary drop every 20 boss kills, the far end of the range means there are players out there going a lot longer without getting anything meaningful, especially if they’re trying to farm specific pieces of equipment.

They explained further:

For example in my data the longest cold streak was when I farmed Fractis. It took 96 runs to get a single UAV grenade to drop. The odds of not getting the item 96 consecutive times at a 5 percent drop rate are about 1 in 137. In stark contrast, at a 10 percent drop chance, the odds of going cold for 96 trials in a row are just 1 in 24,703. Going from 5 percent to 10 percent isn’t just doubling the chance, it’s reducing the worst possible outlier outcomes by a factor of 180. Those outcomes make people give up or quit due to frustration and should be limited as much as possible. An increase to 10% would make a world of difference in limiting the most egregious outlier scenarios.

Time will tell if the developers at Gearbox end up agreeing with Siphonicfir’s logic. It’s easier to make a game more generous than it is to turn off the reward spigot, so studios have an incentive to wait and see before course correcting too far in favor of showering players with extra loot.

Nerfs and mod warnings

In the meantime, Gearbox is trying to get some weapon balancing issues sorted ahead of future content updates. Some players have been running around one-shotting bosses for a few weeks now, and that little festival of unintended build consequences is coming to an end. The October 9 patch notes detailed a litany of changes, including a big buff to Hellwalker base damage and pistol reworks. Assault rifles are supposed to get some love a little later on, too. But clock is ticking on those broken builds too, with some big nerfs slated for the mid-October patch.

We have future content like the upcoming Invincible that we want players to find challenge/accomplishment in. If we balanced that content around bad gear, it would remove build diversity, forcing players into specific builds using said gear.

— Graeme Timmins (@ProdigyXL) October 10, 2025

“Small update this week before a larger one next week,” creative director Graeme Timmins posted on X. “There will be some changes next week to specific gear and those unintended interactions.” He explained the team’s reasoning in response to criticism from some fans of nerfs in a non-competitive, mostly single-player game. “We have future content like the upcoming Invincible that we want players to find challenge/accomplishment in. If we balanced that content around bad gear, it would remove build diversity, forcing players into specific builds using said gear,” Timmins wrote back.

Also, beware of some of those popular mods floating around for Borderlands 4 on PC. One of them lets players skip all of the dialogue in the game, a feature fans are requesting be added in an official update at some point to make it easier to keep grinding through the campaign. Easier said than done, according to the development team. “I’d be cautious using this mod; skipping dialog could lead to broken mission states that might not be recoverable,” Timmins posted on X. Skip the writing and performance teams’ hard work at your own peril!