'Borderlands 2' and how to exploit your Mechromancer

Gearbox teachers you how to exploit the Mechromancer character.

Borderlands 2's Mechromancer class is looking like it's going to arrive earlier than initially expected, Gearbox's Randy Varnell stated to a room of journalists during this week's Gamescom presentation of the upcoming sequel. What was originally believed to be a 60 day wait for the playable downloadable class before it would be made available has now shrunk as progress on the characters has made significant strides since the class concept was first announced at PAX, along with a few pieces of original concept art.

The Mechromancer shown during the presentation is a work in progress still, however. Both art and skill trees are in continued development for the half-human/half-robot female character.

"One of our design intentions was to be sure that when we have a character that's come on after the four main characters, we would give you a lot of different types of variety of play style," said Varnell. "So we designed the mechromancer to cater not only to advanced and skilled players - there's some really advanced tactics in here - but also new players."

The Mechromancer's primary action skill, called Summon Deathtrap, summons a robot whose name will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the original game's Claptrap robot. But Deathtrap differs by being a much deadlier companion. When unleashed onto the battlefield, he will claw enemies, dealing massive amounts of damage, Varnell explained.

The Mechromancer can use abilities that compliment Deathtrap. "Close Enough" allows for bullets that failed to hit an enemy to have a chance to ricochet back toward nearby enemies, at a lower damage.

"It's really cool for a new player who might be getting used to console controls or is not great at aiming to get into co-op play and feel like they're really, really accomplishing something and damaging an enemy," he said.

Varnell added that this ability is highly exploitable.

"There's a really good tactic that we've seen come up where you can take the Close Enough ability: put five points into it, and if an enemy dodges behind cover or around a corner you can shoot the edge of the building and shots ricochet and hit an enemy that normally you would have to get into a difficult position to hit.

"Also it makes you think of gear a different way, with Close Enough a shotgun that has a really wide spread that might not be optimal to use now gets really good because that shotgun will spread the pellets wide across the field and will ricochet into a wide group of enemies. Less accurate guns get very, very valuable with this."

Borderlands 2 is said to feature a 58 hour-long campaign and will include character customization following its launch on September 18th.