The Borderlands 4 Endgame Continues to Expand With a Second (And Third?) Raid Boss

Borderlands 4 received its second raid boss update the other week: Subjugator and Thol the Invincible. After fighting them a few times, and getting the platinum score, I definitely have some thoughts.

First and foremost, I still absolutely despise the timer reward system. I’ve come to the conclusion that generally speaking, timers are one of the worst ways to artificially inflate difficulty, especially because forcing completion of an activity to be fast makes the cracks more apparent. If there was no timer, I think that Subjugator and Thol would be a great fight. They are fun, have cool and intimidating designs, and definitely require you to think a little when it comes to fighting them. However, needing to beat them in 3.5 minutes when there’s a 20ish second phase transition and potentially unforgiving mechanics is just stupid. On the bright side, there isn’t any loot tied to a platinum clear, unlike Bloomreaper. As a result, I do think that Subjugator and Thol is a better fight because you aren’t required to get the best time to get all the loot. The platinum chest just gives you a guaranteed drop, which is nice. However, I play on UVH7, the newest difficulty added in the with the bosses (and hopefully the last because Boses are getting annoyingly spongey now), so gear drops very consistently from them anyway.

While I may hate the timer, I don’t hate the fight. Or at least most of the fight. The fight has four to five phases depending on what you do. Phase one is against Subjugator. He flies around with a shield and attacks. He has these eye turret things that can recharge his shield. Phase one isn’t too bad. Once Subjugator’s shield health bar is destroyed, Thol subs in. Thol is a little bit more annoying, but he’s so large and has such a big hitbox that it’s at least easy to hit him. He does have lifesteal on his attacks, so that could prolong the fight. His most annoying mechanic isn’t even him, it’s the obscenely tanky enemies that appear in the arena and create bubble shields around him. Once Thol’s first health bar is removed, Subjugator comes back for a duo fight. Phase three is where the fight can start to slow down. The strategy here is to kill Subjugator first because whoever you kill first immediately ends the phase and the next phase is against the powered up survivor. The difference between phase four fights is night and day. But as for phase three, there are really only two abilities that are annoying that the bosses can do. Thinking about it, Thol doesn’t really do that much. Granted I do usually ignore him. His most annoying attack is a laser that he fires at you that Subjugator helps him channel. The laser will melt you. My Vex build has pretty obscene sustain capabilities, but it will get deleted by the laser. The inverse attack is when Thol shields Subjugator and makes him immune to damage, which would be fine if it didn’t literally stop the fight because timer. Subjugator’s other attacks of note include spamming explosive drones at you, but you can avoid them in a few different ways. Now for phase four. I always fight phase four Thol because he’s just really tanky. My one complaint here is that his health bar will occasionally gray out and he becomes immune to damage towards the halfway part of the fight, and I can’t tell if this is a glitch or just a poorly implemented mechanic. I know that he does have some sort of healing mechanic, and I assumed that this was it, but also it is really annoying when you end up losing a collective thirty seconds of damage time because the boss is capable of taking damage, but chooses not to. He has a bunch of sweeping attacks in this phase, but none are that bad. Except maybe when he belly flops on you. Subjugator, on the other hand, is literally impossible. Phase four Subjugator actually isn’t too bad. He gets really big and throws skulls at you, but you can still defeat him kinda quickly. He is floating a little ways off the platform, which definitely complicates things sometimes (I play co-op with my buddy who is using a Rafa melee build because Rafa’s other builds have all been gutted so he has a tough time on this phase). Phase five Subjugator is actually impossible. He reappears nearby and just obliterates you. Like he is genuinely one shotting me and I have no idea what I could do differently. It’s not helped by his obnoxious skulls floating around and lasering me the whole time. I’ve also heard that once he hits half-health or so, he heals when taking damage of a given type. That’s a really, really stupid mechanic, especially for players like me who made a kinetic Vex bleed build because he’ll just heal from the kinetic, and the bleed. I don’t fight phase four and onward Subjugator. You shouldn’t either. He’s not fun or well designed or balanced correctly.

Now, it wouldn’t be a fight if there wasn’t new loot to chase. Every character gets a new legendary class mod, and this is by far the easiest thing to get from the boss. While platinum time here isn’t remotely as consistent as Bloomreaper for my friend and me, gold and silver are, so we’ve amassed quite a few class mods over a few runs. Subjugator and Thol each have their own loot pools. There is overlap with the class mods, and the pearlescent: the Jail-Broken Gatling. It actually has a pretty respectable 17% drop chance on UVH7. On the one hand, that feels kind of weird to me when other pearls are still sitting at 0.95% drop chances on UVH7 (at least dedicated ones), but I’m not going to complain because I think a pearl locked behind a raid boss should be easier to get since the raid boss is inherently harder than a basic boss. The Gatling is solid. I think it comes with a pretty static roll, so the only thing to really chase is element and override. It can put out some pretty solid damage, though it can also chew through ammo. Thol’s other drops include the Lockjaw assault rifle and the Flak Cannon ordnance. Lockjaw is solid for mobbing because it’s an explosive assault rifle that ricochets bullets between targets. I haven’t actually used the Flak Cannon yet, so I’m unsure how good it really is, but I think it’s at least decent. Subjugator drops the Shammy Kablammy pistol and Collector shield. I have gotten a copy of the Shammy (thank you platinum chest), but I have yet to get a Collector. Collector is apparently worthwhile because it can be a very high capacity shield that has built-in healing. I haven’t gotten around to using the Shammy yet, but it looks pretty silly when just reading what it does. Overall, I think the raid boss is solid. On the one hand, I like that you’re incentivized to kill each boss for their respective loot, but there’s also the platinum chest to potentially help offset it. On the other hand, Subjugator is such a crappy final fight that there’s little incentive to actually fight him, at least at higher difficulties.

It is also worth mentioning that this update added in eight more world drop pearlescents. These guns don’t have dedicated drops, but can just drop from any source. I’ve actually found them surprisingly easy to acquire. I’ve gotten most of them in a relatively short amount of playtime after the update. I am still missing two of them, and both snipers at that. They all vary in viability. Of the six I have, here is how I feel about them all: Gomie is very strong; Herald is situational and can either melt a boss or do next to nothing; Constable, Juliet’s Sparkle, and Parasite are allfun and have some uses, though I wish Parasite’s Locust Rockets could bypass the armor on bio-bosses; Screwstonian sucks. Overall, I appreciate there being more pearls in the game, and more desirable ones at that.

I think that the Subjugator and Thol the Invincible content update was a pretty good one. The new bosses aren’t perfect, but they’re fun. I still hate the timer, but at the end of the day, I do like the bosses. I think they have good designs. I think the fight offers some nice variety and challenge. I do think that they might have a little too much health, especially Thol in phase four, and the extra enemies in the arena definitely do; the extra enemies are so tanky that it’s almost impossible to get a second wind if you go down, and yeah that doesn’t feel great. I like that there’s more loot to chase now, and especially higher rarity endgame stuff. I’ll never say no to new gear that can mix up buildcrafting. And it leaves me excited for the upcoming Takedown mission we should be getting this summer.