Borderlands 3 is a looter-shooter. While you certainly do a lot of shooting, it’s all a means towards an end of getting sweet, sweet loot. Once you’re done with the campaign, or even before the campaign is over, you might want to try your hand at farming legendary weapons in Borderlands 3. Here’s our suggestions and tips as to how you can go about doing that.
How to Farm Legendary Weapons in Borderlands 3
Before the Campaign is Over – Boss Farming
Essentially, what you need to do to farm legendary weapons and other loot in Borderlands 3 is kill the mini-boss and boss class enemies as they have the highest chance of dropping a legendary weapon, and may have their own signature legendary equipment that you can find.
You can technically do this anywhere you want, but places that have tightly packed side mission mini-bosses or regular bosses are the way to go. When you kill one they will respawn once you leave the planet and come back they will respawn and you can try again.
One area that has emerged within the community early on (thanks to WiLLisGaming) is Athena, which is a good spot once you’ve progressed far enough in the story to have beaten Traunt, received the Hammerlock hunts, and completed Ava’s journal side-mission on Athena.
That gives you three boss spawns that are not far from each other. Then you can run around, kill all three, and then respawn and run it again. Check out the linked video above if you’d like to see it in action for yourself.
But again, basically any area that has multiple bosses unlocked is a good area to farm, Athena just happens to be very easy to navigate and an area that has a good amount of them close together.
Loot Tink Farm
Loot Tinks are very similar to the Treasure Goblins from Diablo 3. They will run around and drop items, and then when you kill them you have access to even more stuff. They have an extremely high chance of dropping legendary weapons.
Any area that has a chance of having a Loot Tink appear is a good place to farm legendary weapons. PC Gamer actually discovered a location that appears to have a 100% chance of having a Loot Tink appear in the Jakobs Estate area near the Servant’s Lift once you unlock it in the main quest.
Until Gearbox realizes this is broken, this may be the best place to farm legendary weapons as you can just kill the Loot Tink, loot his bag, then leave and return to respawn it, and rinse and repeat.
If/when Gearbox patches this, mixing in checking an area where a Loot Tink can spawn into a boss rotation farm is something you should do.
After Beating Borderlands 3: Mayhem Mode, TVHM Legendary Weapon Farming
All of the above still applies but is amplified to be even more effective once you unlock Mayhem Mode. Mayhem Mode increases the difficulty but also ups the quality of the loot.
To use another Diablo 3 example, it works similarly to the torment difficulty modes. As the heading above implies, it isn’t available until after you’ve beaten Borderlands 3 at least once.
Once you have the terminal unlocked at Sanctuary though, crank the difficulty to as high as you can handle and then just do all of the above pre-campaign stuff and you’ll have even better drop rates.
Finally, you can also up the difficulty some more in True Vault Hunter Mode as you’ll get better loot from playing through this version of the campaign.
You actually will probably get better loot in the short-term sticking to everything we suggested above, but if you can grind through True Vault Hunter Mode, beat it, and then do everything above with True Vault Hunter and Mayhem Mode turned on, that will likely get you the most powerful gear in the game as of launch.
That’s our tips for how to farm legendary weapons in Borderlands 3 as easily as possible. For more tips, tricks and FAQs answered, be sure to check out our Borderlands 3 wiki guide.
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