Gearbox "avoiding nerfs at the moment" for Borderlands 4, dodging previous balance backlash: "I wholeheartedly want to avoid ruining someone's countless hours of farming"

Gearbox is preparing a larger update for Borderlands 4 on the heels of a small weekly refresh, and associate creative director Grant Kao says players can rest easy: there are no nerfs on the way right now.

"Avoiding nerfs at the moment," Kao told an X/Twitter user who asked about "seeing a mix of buffs and nerfs" in the future. "We're expanding the pool of new gear pretty dramatically going into the next couple content drops and I wholeheartedly want to avoid ruining someone's countless hours of farming. The Bod is an example where we can 'fix' the bonus but won't."

The Bod is a legendary shotgun that also counts as an assault rifle, sniper rifle, pistol, and submachine gun, letting it benefit from a wide range of weapon bonuses and skill triggers. It's a little too juiced up right now due to unintended scaling interactions, but Gearbox is letting it ride in the name of fun. In fact, it's making the gun easier to find: "It's being moved from the low % tier to the primary drop tier to help players farming for the unique gun," Kao explains.

The Borderlands series, and especially Borderlands 3, has had some sticky run-ins with game balance in the past, or at least that's what many players would tell you. I remember nerf complaints defining stretches of Borderlands 3's launch, and Borderlands 4 faced similar chatter just recently after toning down drop rates following an event. Loot goblins cannot go backwards, it turns out, and nerfs in a PvE game can be hard to swallow even when they might be essential to game integrity.

Kao's explanation – let players run wild with the loot they've been grinding for, and step in further down the line if something is still well and truly folding the game like a lawn chair – seems like a reasonable one. Borderlands games are made to be broken, and it can be frustrating for balance patches to step in right as you finally overcome RNG and bag your dream gun. But there comes a point where balance is just plain out of whack, with a small pool of options boxing out other potentially interesting builds and even making the game less fun.

In a separate post, Kao specified that, "One change I can speak to is an increase of multiple percentage points for dedicated loot drops scaling with [Ultimate Vault Hunter] levels." So it sounds like targeted loot will only be easier to come by in the future, provided you're on the UVH train, which you probably are if you're farming targeted loot. This will be part of "some large adjustments" coming at the end of January, it seems.