Warning some spoilers about bosses in this post

I am up to Fyrestone in borderlands 2 and have just finished killing the monster robot Saturn by hiding behind a wall and firing my guns non stop for about 5 minutes while it stood there launching missiles and lasers. It just dawned on me that this and some previous boss fights like the sheriff (easily sniped from ultra long range) and Bunker (easy to hide behind something as well) are too easy or easily exploited. Has anyone else found this to be the case?

Isn't that exactly how bosses in Borderlands 1 worked?

Kind of. Although I had some serious trouble with Dukino's mom, mostly because I flipped out instead of staying behind cover. Also, call me when you get to True Vault Hunter mode. I'm actually starting to hate Borderlands now.

Sounds like a sequel to Borderlands.

If its going to be patched it will...if not...then its just Borderlands 2.

Yeah I did the same to that saturn robot, only problem i had was running out of ammo and trying to find some more.

The last boss can also be cheesed pretty easily.... unfortunate because i was hoping for a challenge.

Okay I am at the last fight. I died and spawned outside the place where to warrior is and there is a barrier between the us. I climbed high to shoot above the barrier. I could killed the boss this way, but it will probably take 10 minutes non stop shooting.

@TheDudeOfGaming said:

Kind of. Although I had some serious trouble with Dukino's mom, mostly because I flipped out instead of staying behind cover. Also, call me when you get to True Vault Hunter mode. I'm actually starting to hate Borderlands now.

I can't beat that boss for the life of me.

I had a lot of trouble with wilhelm but mostly because I wasn't leveled enough to take him on. I was 18 and I think he was 20 or 21.

Willhelm was easy since he didn't reset when I died, but the boss that was holding Roland was a fucking bitch!. I was soloing with an Assassin and had no corrosives yet, so was relying on Deception>RPG, but his shields kept regenerating, and all those robits ._.'

Y@Mcfart said:

Willhelm was easy since he didn't reset when I died, but the boss that was holding Roland was a fucking bitch!. I was soloing with an Assassin and had no corrosives yet, so was relying on Deception>RPG, but his shields kept regenerating, and all those robits ._.'

Yeah I got to say corrosive is the best elemental type for the main quest. So many robots..

i had to retreat and re-equip for warden, but otherwise it's been smooth, and thank god, i hate boss fights that just put a wall up in front of you. i want the challenge to be present in regular play, not just at the end of a chapter, and i want the techniques i learned during regular play to be effective during those fights, not redundant the way many games make em.

Kind of. Although I had some serious trouble with Dukino's mom, mostly because I flipped out instead of staying behind cover. Also, call me when you get to True Vault Hunter mode. I'm actually starting to hate Borderlands now.

Strangely enough, I had a lot of trouble with Doctor Mercy in the early game, but I think I was under leveled. I was the exact same level as Willhelm and I beat him in like 15 seconds. I'm not so sure that he wasn't purposefully easy because of the events that follow. Every other boss encounter has felt reasonable for my level.

Long range sniping of the sherif and seeking cover from bunker seems like totally legit tactics to me. Too bad about Saturn, me and him had a straight up fight. A lot of bosses seem to rely on AoE damage to get players behind cover, not sure why Saturn didn't do that, he has rockets..

Dukino's mom is a bitch

Me and my friend took down saturn, it took us forever. Literally he has no crit points on his body anywhere. We didn't use cover either, but just kinda went in circles around him.

I noticed alot of people are having trouble with Dukinos mom. You can use the cover on the elevator and pop out to shoot her here and there. I don't think she can hit you if you are crouched behind the cover. Borderlands boss fights suck.

@laserbolts said:

I noticed alot of people are having trouble with Dukinos mom. You can use the cover on the elevator and pop out to shoot her here and there. I don't think she can hit you if you are crouched behind the cover. Borderlands boss fights suck.

I want to clarify this advice a bit.

If you go down with the elevator and hide behind the sheet metal the switch is attached to, Dukino's Mom can't hit you with her energy beam but can near insta-drop you with her jump-stomp and her energy lobs.

Solo, my strategy was to send the elevator down but not go down with it. At some point you see Dukino's Mom through the truss beams on either the left or right side, spaces wide enough to shoot through. From here you can draw her to the mouth of the elevator. It's a bit time-consuming, and she'll occasionally walk away to deal with the bandits, but she can only hit you at this position with a lucky energy lob.

@HistoryInRust said:

If you go down with the elevator and hide behind the sheet metal the switch is attached to, Dukino's Mom can't hit you with her energy beam but can near insta-drop you with her jump-stomp and her energy lobs.

Really? I just crouched behind that thing the whole time and it was fine. I just waited until the bandits came and then shot the shit out of her. I guess I just got lucky.

With the gunzerker, most boss fights are fairly easy even without cheesing, but I did find myself in a stupidly tough position when I got stuck between a constructor and the thresher that eats the beacon for Sanctuary. I somehow triggered the autosave/spawn behind the constructor and managed to spawn the thresher as well. I had a serious lack of ammo, was underlevelled, and completely clueless as to how to go about things, so I eventually just did a mad spring for the other side of the constructor base and finally managed to hit that earlier save point.

My problem is really just mobs. I can't aim for shit while gunzerking (not because of my character, but because of my eyes), so I usually charge in completely balls to the wall, get up close with a shotgun/launcher or shotgun/machine gun combination. It works surprisingly well, so long as I don't have to deal with snipers. Or constructors. Or fifty eight billion robots teaming up on me. Gah.

@Zaccheus said:

@HistoryInRust said:

If you go down with the elevator and hide behind the sheet metal the switch is attached to, Dukino's Mom can't hit you with her energy beam but can near insta-drop you with her jump-stomp and her energy lobs.

Really? I just crouched behind that thing the whole time and it was fine. I just waited until the bandits came and then shot the shit out of her. I guess I just got lucky.

I've definitely heard conflicting anecdotes. So anything's fair game. But whenever I tried what you did I got lambasted. And believe me, I tried it a lot.

Saturn actually completely ignored me for the most part. He was kicking my ass until I ran behind the metal fence, then he just stood there and stared off into the distance and I had a full view of his main head/body. It was ridiculous but I wasn't gonna complain.

Even tho this is basically true, the bosses have more variety and do move around quite a bit more than the infamous BL1 final boss. Its designed so that you only die if you are lazy. Going solo, I have died a few times on almost every boss, many times on some. But you know when you finally kill these things it is just going to be a cheesefest. I don't think there is anything to say about it. It's just a fact of the game. The only way you can take down something with so many hit points is to shoot it a LOT. So it will always feel repetitive. Especially on a solo run. Overall the regular enemy variety makes up for this & it's fun to take down a big boss every once and a while, so I'm okay with it.

@Mcfart said:

Willhelm was easy since he didn't reset when I died, but the boss that was holding Roland was a fucking bitch!. I was soloing with an Assassin and had no corrosives yet, so was relying on Deception>RPG, but his shields kept regenerating, and all those robits ._.'

He was easy as hell as a Gunzerker. Just had to start gunzerking and keep blasting away. If anything, the fuckton of robots let me get a second wind every time he downed me.

I don't think any of the bosses so far are just flat out too easy. In fact, some of the bosses seem like the programmers actually screwed up when determining the amount of damage done and the amount of health and shields they have. There are some huge difficulty spikes in this game that come out of nowhere. I'm looking at you, W4R D3N.

@zombiebigfoot said:

@Mcfart said:

Willhelm was easy since he didn't reset when I died, but the boss that was holding Roland was a fucking bitch!. I was soloing with an Assassin and had no corrosives yet, so was relying on Deception>RPG, but his shields kept regenerating, and all those robits ._.'

He was easy as hell as a Gunzerker. Just had to start gunzerking and keep blasting away. If anything, the fuckton of robots let me get a second wind every time he downed me.

I didn't have anything great against armor (was using mostly fire weapons), so was probably a bit behind the curve. Is the Gunzerker fun? His ability has a much longer cooldown, so does he still feel unique?

Yeah they're all pretty easy, never had to exploit my way through any of the main story bosses (anything with the health bar going across the top of the screen). Saturn was the only big enemy I had to kill with an exploit, mainly because that thing would annihilate me in one AOE bombardment and I got real tired of hearing the respawn ladies commentary.

That being said I dont hold a very high bar for bosses in first person shooters... or for any bosses in games i've played this generation, and at least the rain of loot that you get at the end of the game is super satisfying.

So... You wanna attempt taking out the bosses w/o cheating the system?

You can. The thing is that some of the bosses are too hard to be taken on mano-a-mano that you HAVE to use cheap tactics like hiding behind a bullet/rocket-proof box.

@Starfishhunter9: wait until you get either the "the Bee" or "the Sham". They make the game super easy

It might be because I've been overlevelled for most of the game, but I've found that most bosses are easily dealt with if you just save your rockets for them.

@Mcfart: Definitely. I may be a bit partial because I played Brick, but he's definitely different enough from Brick. Very fun character.