If you’re looking for some early legendary gear in Borderlands 4, I’ve got the perfect set of items that will get you through most of the campaign and into the later levels much faster. You can start farming these immediately after you complete the prologue and do a couple of errands for Claptrap.
Let’s go over everything you need to know!
Farming Splashzone
Long story short, what you’re gonna want to do is farm Splashzone. He’s the first real “boss” that you’re going to encounter in the game, and you have to kill him as a part of the very first actual main story quest “Recruitment Drive”.
To re-fight him, you have to take advantage of the new Moxxi’s Big Encore mechanic introduced in this sequel. Outside the boss area, you’ll find one of these encore machines right beside a conveniently-placed ammo vending machine (this will be important in a bit).
By interacting with this machine, you’ll pay a fine that scales with your current level, and this will respawn the boss in its arena. From here, you just run in, kill Splashzone, get out, and pay for another encore!
Here’s a map image to show you where he’s at, in case you’ve forgotten:
What Does Splashzone Drop?
This named badass psycho has a chance to drop a whole bunch of legendary items tailored around explosions. To be more specific, you can get the following items from him:
- Lead Balloon (Shotgun) – This is a Torgue shotgun that shoots rockets that will float upwards, like a bunch of balloons. Upon exploding, each rocket will create a “child” rocket that falls downwards. Because of its special effect, it essentially deals splash damage twice.
- EDIT (9/15/25): I’m not kidding when I say this: This damn thing can carry you through everything up until the final boss of the story, even if a bit underleveled. Can confirm, as I’ve just rolled credits.
- Atomic Jelly (Grenade Ordnance) – This powerful grenade has the Self-Replicating perk, which causes it to clone itself after exploding, and this effect repeats in rapid succession. With the Nuke perk, it deals so much more damage, has a wider radius, and replenishes faster.
- Firewerks (Shield) – Finally, Splashzone can drop this legendary shield, which has the special Bundled perk. Whenever you kill an enemy, missiles will shoot out of their body and home in on nearby enemies, dealing a ton of damage.
Why They’re So Good
With all three of these items, or even just the Firewerks shield (with any prefix) and/or a Lead Balloon, you can breeze through most of the content in the campaign, even while playing in hard difficulty. It doesn’t matter what you’re facing, the sheer amount of damage you’ll do against everything at this point in the game is hilarious.
I can’t exactly tell you how this will perform in the post-50 stuff, but seeing as how only a small percentage of the playerbase on Steam has killed a certain boss as of writing this, y’all are many hours away from this becoming irrelevant. Even then, higher level versions of the set can be acquired quite easily.
Splashzone is incredibly easy to farm. Depending on your current gear, you can clear him three to four times per minute. In my case, with all three of these items, it’s as simple as dashing in, blowing him up, and then running back to the encore machine before my action skill even expires.
Here’s what his arena looks like after barely 5 minutes worth of kills. The version of Lead Balloon that I’m using in the picture came from one of these kills btw:
Now, if you’re wondering how the hell you’re supposed to fund these boss respawns, that’s where the ammo vending machine comes in handy.
Pick up all of the loot he drops that isn’t a legendary or a good epic as junk, and then quick sell them at the vending machine before paying for an encore (it’s literally one button press to sell all junk).
Nine times out of ten, you’ll actually make money with this method, especially as you level up and get more expensive “junk” items. You can come back to Splashzone later on if you want another one of these with higher level stats, and the farm will get quicker the further along you are in the story.
And that’s all there is to it, really. You can farm other bosses in a similar manner if you want, but with these three items, you pretty much trivialize most of the fights in the story. I’ve breezed through major bosses through plain brute force with this set, and the only thing you really need to watch out for is the splash damage, because you can hurt yourself with the child rockets and grenades.
Find any other powerful legendaries from other sources? Let me know in the comments below!
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