How To Make The Gunzerker A Rapid-Firing Maniac

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a guide on how to turn Zero into a sword-focused badass. Today, I want to focus on Salvador, our cover boy from the Borderlands 2 issue last year. I’m hovering around level 30 with him right now, and I’m finding him to be even more deadly than Zero if you level him right. Here are some tips on how to make him a force to be reckoned with.

Ignore Free Ammo Perks

While gunzerking, Salvador will constantly regenerate health and ammo. Because of this, I ignored perks that focus on earning free ammo or conserving existing ammo (Inconveivable, 5 Shots Or 6). Increasing your magazine size will help (via the Filled To The Brim perk or SDU upgrades from Crazy Earl), but you shouldn’t have to worry about ammunition if you follow the rest of these tips.

Gunzerk All The Time

Above, you’ll see my favorite skill tree setup for a level 30-ish gunzerker. One of the most important tips I can give you is to make sure Salvador is gunzerking for as long as possible and as often as possible. Because of this, you’ll want to funnel a bunch of skill points into Last Longer, I’m Ready Already, Get Some, and Yippee Ki Yay. These perks will cause your ability to cool down faster and last longer, which will help quite a bit as you progress.

Use A Heavy Trigger Finger

Since you’ll be gunzerking nearly all the time if you follow the tip above, you’ll always be regenerating ammo. It’s no use having a nearly-endless supply of bullets if you don’t use them, so you’ll want to aim for the final skill in the Rampage tree. The Keep Firing perk causes your guns to fire faster the longer you hold down the trigger. You’ll be regenerating ammo as you gunzerk, and you’ll be able to fire for a very long time if you’ve upgraded your ammo capacity via the Filled To The Brim perk. With a large magazine, regenerating ammo, and the Keep Firing perk, you can fire dual assault rifles at downright stupid speeds as long as you keep your finger on the trigger.

Organize Your Loadout

Once you have four weapon slots available, you’ll be able to gunzerk either the top two slots or the bottom two slots at the same time. Keep this in mind, as you’ll want to strategically place your weapons to maximize their deadliness. Maybe you have one slag pistol and one corrosive pistol. Put them together and you’ll deal crazy damage to anything in your path. For most of the later missions in Borderlands 2, I went with two high-powered pistols in my top two slots, and two assault rifles in the bottom two. The huge flying bunker boss took me forever to kill as Zero, but I took him down in no time at all by using this method with a similarly-leveled gunzerker. If you’re going into a fight with a particularly large enemy, you might even consider packing dual rocket launchers to really bring the pain.

Dabble With Regenerating Health

These tips mostly revolve around pure firepower, but it’s nice to have a little help in the health department. You won’t want to spend much time in the Brawn tree if you’re following these tips, but a couple points in the Hard To Kill perk wouldn’t hurt. With this bonus, you’re regenerating health all the time, not just when you’re gunzerking.

Grenade While Gunzerking

One of my favorite perks in the Rampage tree is Double Your Fun, which makes Salvador toss two grenades instead of one while gunzerking. This doesn’t cost you an extra grenade, meaning you can have eight grenades in your inventory but throw 16. Once you have this perk, make sure you’re only tossing grenades while you’re gunzerking. If you have a grenade that creates singularities or splits off into multiple cluster grenades, you can basically clear entire battlefields with a few tosses.

Gunzerk Even When You Don’t Need To

Gunzerking offers a constant flow of health and ammo, so it can be useful even if there aren’t any enemies around. Let’s say you just got done taking out half the town of Lynchwood, and you’re low on health and assault rifle ammo. Activate your gunzerker ability, and you’ll be instantly rewarded with half of your health bar on top of the regeneration that happens after. The only things you should be buying from ammo vending machines are launcher ammo (this doesn’t regenerate) and grenades.

Spend Your Badass Tokens Wisely

Badass Tokens are a nice little bonus in Borderlands 2, and they reward you with stat bonuses for completing challenges. While playing as Salvador, you’ll want to spend them on a few key categories if you want to maximize the carnage you can cause. If they are available, I always go with the following bonuses: gun damage, gun accuracy, fire rate, recoil reduction, and reload speed. If none of those are available, my fallbacks are grenade damage, elemental effect damage, and elemental effect chance. Your gunzerker ability should keep your health up, so don’t waste tokens on health and shield bonuses if you can help it.

Follow these tips, and you’ll have quite the badass on your hands by the time you reach level 30. If you’re gunzerking with two high-capacity, high fire rate assault rifles and you have all the perks I described, you’ll be spitting bullets faster than anything else on Pandora.