DLC #162 - Borderlands 2 - Mr Torque's Campaign of Carnage

Fingers firmly crossed still, but I think we're almost there. The burnout is real and I'm at the stage now where, as much as I've enjoyed the Borderlands 2 experience, I'm glad it's almost over.

We've had to do certain things the long way round, and this DLC pack was a big testament to this, as this is where we've had to farm the previously aforementioned Torque tokens to originally upgrade our equipment, and help us beat some of the side quest bosses within other DLC packs that were causing us issues.

Mr Torque's Campaign of Carnage takes you to the Badass Crater of Badassitude, where an open invitation awaits. Mr Torque is running an open deathmatch tournament to "find Pandora's Number 1 Badass", where the winner will be granted access to a new vault full of loot.

The tournament is structured like a leaderboard, where you'll start in 5th place, and have to progressively climb to the top in order to emerge victorious. This will involve completing quests in order to earn the right to call out and fight your next opponent directly above you, repeating this process until you reach the top, where you'll eventually fight the current Number 1 Badass - revealed very early on to be a protagonist called Piston.

The typical formula remains. A brand new main story questline, loads of extra side content, new environments to explore and unique enemies to face off against - Some of the characters you fight on the tournament leaderboard are especially stand-out. There are also 3 additional trophies that follow the exact same trend as the Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty pack.

Completing all 15 main story quests, and reaching the top of the leaderboard, will award 1 of these trophies, and is still fairly easy to progress through, as per the standard level of enemies still being around the 30 mark. There are also an additional 25 side quests, which will grant another trophy, but by this point, nothing had given me any trouble thanks to some proper forecasting on the back of the experience with the previous DLC packs.

The final tier of Bar Brawl side quests, where you have to clean out Pyro Pete's bar within a set time limit, does set the enemy level to 50, for whatever reason, and whilst this meant I did have to come back to this and tackle it later, I knew this would just be simply a case of reaching a much higher level and returning once I had matched this. I don't categorise this into the same grouping as boss fights which felt insurmountable and may need to have been revisited much further down the line from the point at which you first encounter them.

This DLC mostly served great purpose for the following things;

• Grinding out to Level 50, via the ability to replay the Death Race side quest, which in turn allowed me to obtain the "Capped Out... For Now" trophy from the main list - As well as finally equip some of the more powerful weapons I'd stored in my inventory.
• Earning Torque Tokens through various means, which are introduced via this DLC pack, in order to purchase stronger weapons that allowed me to tackle certain side quest bosses I was previously struggling to defeat.
• Accumulating much more money by selling Torque weapons, which have excellent re-sale value. I had previously struggled to fund boss fights by replenishing ammunition, and this alleviated this nicely.

As a consequence, I didn't struggle with any challenge contained within this pack. Every boss fight on the Badass leaderboard was easy enough to take down, including Piston, the final boss, and the big side quest boss, Pyro Pete the Invincible, was also plain sailing, despite being a bit of a bullet-sponge.

This could have been just as difficult as what I've experienced had I gone down a different route, but the Torque weapons and those I'd also farmed from Terramorphous the Invincible, helped make light work of these. Even the Level 50 enemies in the Tier 3 Bar Brawl were simple enough to deal with when I eventually came back round after hitting level 50 to give myself a reasonable chance. Incredible what learning and a bit of forward planning can do.

The final trophy is awarded for collecting 10 pictures of Moxxi, which are purely random drops from downed enemies, and will naturally come as you go. Shock, horror to see some classic RNG find it's way into this list somehow.

A larger total quest volume than both previously completed DLC packs, but much harder to nail an estimated completion time to, purely because I spent alot of extra time replaying certain quests to grind out for level 50, as well as Torque Tokens, which is where I probably spent the majority of my time here. Would it be fair to consider this as a factor? It was a purely strategic move, but also a necessary evil to progression for me, albeit mostly for the benefit of elsewhere with other DLC packs.

One last pack remaining before digging into the remainder of the main list for the final time.