Borderlands 3 Legendary Farming Guide

Borderlands 3 legendary farming keeps the game fun. Like any looter shooter, the point is to farm weapons, shields, and armor. Of course, legendaries are the most sought after. 

You know, because it’s the best gear in the game for each class…

There are a few surefire ways to load up on these shiny golden guns. The best and most broken of them — such as those outlined at the bottom of this guide from PC Gamer and Heavy — are likely to be patched or adjusted. Update: the PC gamer trick is patched.

Since the pipe bomb trick and loot tink won’t be around for long, we’ll be discussing five different methods unlikely to be patched or removed. They are:

• Boss farming
• Chest Farming
• Quest Hoarding
• The Circle of Slaughter
• Proving Grounds

Please note: All of these methods require True Vault Hunter Mode and Mayhem to be active. Also, this article does not discuss specific farming locations, focusing instead on the means of acquiring legendary items, the ultimate upgrade for your guns and gear.

Borderlands 3 Legendary Farming Guide

Farming Bosses and Red Chests

As in Borderlands 2, every boss in Borderlands 3 will respawn after a set period passes, provided you’ve completed the main story on their planet.

For instance, you can endlessly kill and loot the Gigamind and/or Killavolt boss fights on Promethea. That is, provided you’ve completed all story missions there and killed the bosses in question.

Typically, there’s about a 45-minute to a one-hour delay between each boss spawn. As of writing, though, you can expedite the process by tricking the game into respawning bosses early.

How to Spawn Bosses Faster in Borderlands 3

All you need to do for this quicker method is:

1. Kill the boss
2. Exit their arena (completely)
3. Reload the game
   • Quit to the main menu and reload

You’ll spawn at the checkpoint nearest your previous location, and the boss should be similarly back in action. 

This farm works endlessly, and you can continue to fight as long as it takes for the boss to drop the weapon you want. 

Get Red Boss Chests for Better Loot

Bosses usually come with red chests as well, and these chests have a much higher probability of spawning legendaries than other weapon caches throughout the world.

Red chests respawn after about 45 minutes. If you find a good spot to grind for a few hours, you can supplement boss murder with additional chances at the best loot.

Quest Hoarding

There are a lot of quests in Borderlands 3. However, unless you’ve completed the main story, they won’t scale in level or value with your character. Once you do beat the final boss, they start scaling just fine. 

You’re likely to hit the max level cap (50) by the time you complete True Vault Hunter Mode’s second playthrough. That means every quest you picked up along the way is not at the level cap, bosses and loot included.

Bear in mind, most completed quests are not repeatable, so hoarding them until endgame is the best way to secure everything at the proper endgame levels.

The Circle of Slaughter

Another endgame, the Circle of Slaughter is a classic Horde mode. You’ll fight through five rounds of three waves each with additional challenges thrown in.

Difficulty increases with each round, meaning more and tougher enemies, with the fifth round being the hardest of all. In the end, you’ll meet a small horde of quality loot as a reward for conquering the Circle.

“Farming” this activity is less about the act and more about the theory. You want to maximize four things to get the most out of your time. 

1. Damage: If you can’t kill enemies, you aren’t spawning loot. Prioritize damage wherever possible. Efficiency is key.
2. Survivability: Tailor your build so you can stay in the fight as long as possible. Whether that’s damage reduction, regeneration, misdirection, or any other method of keeping yourself alive, do it.
3. Luck: If you can find the gear to increase your luck by any significant margin, equip it. Don’t sacrifice either damage or survivability, but a little extra luck increases your chances of a legendary weapon by more than you might think.
4. Maximum Mayhem: In most scenarios, Mayhem Level 2 is more than enough for increasing your loot chance. Curate your builds around modifiers and play the best Borderlands you’ve ever played.

Proving Grounds

Another endgame unlock, Proving Grounds is Borderlands 3‘s take on a classic dungeon instance. Think Diablo Rifts, but without quite so much randomness in map layouts. 

Proving Grounds are round-based affairs culminating in a final boss and a loot chest. As with the Circle of Slaughter, you want to ensure your builds are up to snuff. Strategize as above.

The farm here isn’t quite as time-consuming as Circle, but it isn’t boss-farm efficient either. Instead, you want to kill and kill and kill, melt the boss, repeat ad infinitum. With good luck and Maximum Mayhem, legendaries should be plentiful enough.

Be sure to check out our other Borderlands 3 guides below:

• How to Redeem SHiFT Codes 
• How to Complete Skag Dog Days
• “Connection to PlayStation Network Has Been Lost” Fix
• How to Skip Cutscenes

As noted at the beginning of this guide, you can also try these farming methods, though they’re likely to be patched sooner rather than later: 

• Loot Tink at Jacobs estate – Patched
• The Pipe Bomb strat