Playing Mordecai in Borderlands

Popular opinion in the games press seems to say the Mordecai, Borderlands' hunter character, is not well-suited to the design of the game. While it may be true that his abilities are not as complementary to the game as the soldier, Mordecai is still a fun, capable, and rewarding character to play. His great ability at range can often enable him to eliminate key mobs before the horde arrives making the imminent close-range battle much less hectic. With a little skill, he has plenty of tools at his disposal to dispatch threats even at close range.
 
This guide will focus on tips, strategies, and information specific to the hunter class. More general information is best left for a separate guide. I have learned a great deal about playing Mordecai in my time with the game, but I do not claim to be an expert nor have I finished the campaign. As such, this guide is open to everyone for editing and publishing. I hope you will contribute the fruits of your own experience to benefit everyone interested in succeeding as a hunter in Borderlands. Please do some self-editing and proofing before submitting edits so that we may maintain the integrity and readability of this guide.

As with the other classes, little distinguishes the first five levels of Mordecai's advancement from that of the other characters. The only real difference is his initial loadout. Your hunter comes factory-equipped with a sniper rifle and a repeater. The rifle will serve you well when you have some distance on your opponent. This is very useful with mercenary opponents as they typically do not rush you to attack. They will instead take up a position and fire at you from a distance. Luckily, they are firing weapons that are not as accurate as your rifle giving you a distinct advantage. Against the less sophisticated enemies (think Skaggs), you may rely more heavily on the repeater when they get in close, but you may still be able to take out one or two members of the group before they are on you.
 
Run a few of the opening missions and, before long at all, you will have hit level five. At this point, you gain your first skill point which will give you access to your action skill. You have embarked on the journey of customizing your character. You will now begin to learn and exploit the proclivities of the class.

Mordecai's skill tree is divided into three branches: Sniper, Rogue, and Gunslinger. Over the course of the game, you will gain 46 skill points to place as you like into the various available skills. The first tier of each branch is open from the start, but subsequent tiers open up for each five points the player has invested five in the tree (regardless of the tier in which those are invested). As a result, it is a good idea to decide early on what your focus will be to insure you will have available points to reach the more potent skills in that branch of the skill tree. Don't get too bogged down, though, as you may buy a reset later on and regain all your previously spent points for reallocation. The official Borderlands web site has provided a skill calculator which will allow you to play around with different builds outside the game. This is helpful in planning out a build in advance.
 
The skill descriptions below are used under Creative Commons license from the Borderlands Wiki on Wikia.

The Sniper skill tree focuses on increasing your damage and effectiveness when using sniper rifles and otherwise attacking from afar.

 

Smirk	All players on your team (including you) gain additional experience when you kill an enemy with a Critical Hit. Starts with +3% Experience Bonus.
Killer	Killing an enemy increases your Damage and Reload Speed with all guns for a few seconds. Starts with +8% Damage and +6% Reload Speed.

The Rogue skill tree lets you kill without getting your hands dirty. In Mordecai's case, this means powering up his pet, Bloodwing.

The Gunslinger tree enables Mordecai to do massive damage with guns (primarily repeaters and revolvers).

The skill trees in Borderlands, as with other games, are designed such that players will gain enough points to complete a single branch and a little more but not the entire tree. This forces players to specialize with their characters rather than merely persevering long enough to max out everything. If you take two high-level hunters, they may be very different characters because of the way they have allocated their skill points. For instance, my character is heavily focused on the Rogue skills with a minor focus in Sniping. There is no perfect build for a character although there are skills that complement one another and that complement specific play styles.
 
If you are interested in posting your build and need help taking a screenshot or with some other aspect of the process, head over to my profile and PM me. I'll be glad to give you a hand. Also, don't forget to post a link to the calculator once you have finalized your build in it! Just copy and paste from the address bar after you have made your build. That URL points to the calculator with your custom build already in place.

The build focuses heavily on powering up Bloodwing to allow Mordecai to keep his fragile bones outside of shattering range. In keeping with that theme, sniping is also enhanced. I have maxed out Swift Strike to allow Bloodwing to do maximum damage when he attacks. I also maxed Out for Blood to give Mordecai a way to heal in battle making him more self-sufficient. Aerial Impact will give a chance to daze enemies who feel Bloodwing's wrath. This is particularly useful when coupled with Birds of Prey to allow Bloodwing to attack six enemies in each swoop. In improving my sniping skills, I was able to pick up the Carrion Call skill to decrease the Bloodwing cooldown with each successful sniper rifle hit. Since that is my primary weapon, this should allow for more use of Bloodwing in most combat situations. Between Fast Hands and Killer, I have a couple of ways to increase my reload speed which can be a bit of a buzzkill on the sniper rifles. I threw in Ransack simply because I love loot!
 
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I'm not level 50 yet so I haven't been able to actually try this build yet, but with all the health regeneration, daze effect, item dropping, and multiple hits with bloodwing, it seems to be good for soloing (hence the Clint Eastwood name).

The Clint Eastwood focuses on self-sufficiency by selecting skills from the Rogue and Gunslinger trees to reach the final tier of each. Mordecai will deal heavy damage with guns or Bloodwing bringing him out of the shadows as a supporting character and into the foreground. There are also ample opportunities for health regeneration.

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Submitted in the forums by mordecaix7

I think I'm gonna call this the Bullet Boy build, obviously it's based around getting your character to do as much damage as possible with your guns, and not bothering to upgrade Bloodwing at all. 
 
40% Damage, 30% Reload Speed, 40% Fire Rate, 25% Chance for Double Damage and 15% Health over 7 Seconds all awarded for a kill, so that once you get started killing you won't be stopping till you run out of ammo :D. 
 
Topping all of this off is Trespass, so you don't even need to bother wearing down your enemies shields. Pure Bullety Death :D

Bullet Boy forgoes Bloodwing altogether in favor of creating opportunities for massive damage with weapons. Weapon specialization is divided evenly between sniper rifles and pistols, but many of the skills are not weapon specific.
 
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Submitted in the forums by Galbrezu

Mordecai is brittle which means it is often most effective to engage your enemies from range at first if possible.
 
Human enemies generally try to stay at range. Those who do advance do so slowly. Use cover wherever possible unless you are far enough from the human enemy that the accuracy of his weapon makes him ineffective. Fire at the heads of humans to score a critical hit.
 
Non-human enemies are more apt to charge as they often cannot attack you from range. Luckily, you will often spot them before they spot you and begin to charge. If you spot a group of enemies, try to eliminate as many as possible in the time it takes them to charge even if this means leaving the most powerful enemies unscathed. Here's an example of this strategy in practice. You come upon a group of skaggs huddled around a single badass skagg. Start by shooting for the weakest enemy. If you can take him out before the group is on you, move to the next weakest before beginning to chip away at the badass. You are much better off fighting two elder skaggs and a badass than you are fighting a spitter, two elders, and the same badass at 2/3 health.
 
Although your sniper rifle is not the best weapon at close range, it can certainly get the job done. Rather than aiming down the scope, fire from the hip as aiming down the scope is far too slow for close-range combat. If you can find a rifle with a generous fire rate, you may find that the high damage coupled with your proficiency bonuses might make the sniper rifle the only weapon you use whether or not you are up close.
 
It is important to have diverse weapons equipped because you will find yourself running out of ammo if you haven't come across good ammo pickups or haven't been to a shop in a while. This is especially true if your weapons have a high fire rate. Having weapons that use different types of ammo will insure you have another weapon you can switch to when your others run out. If each of your weapons uses different ammo, you will have to run out of four different types of ammo before you are reduced to only Bloodwing and your melee attack.
 
As you gain additional slots to equip weapons, consider filling them with close-range weapons. Your sniper rifle is doing heavy damage at long-range. Even though it has far less ammo than anything else, a decent rifle will be able to efficiently dispatch a large number of enemies with the limited ammo. Close range weapons generally take more shots to do the same damage meaning having a diverse collection of close-range equipment will serve you better than a variety of ranged weapons.