Borderlands 2

Why You Need To Play The Slots

Eridium can be found throughout the game, but not very often and normally only 1-4 bars in any one place. At one time, after getting to Sanctuary I would look for eridium in the lockers in Roland's headquarters and in Scooter's, then Save-Quit-Continue and do it again. And again. I would average about 1 bar of eridium per trip to Roland's per visit and maybe average 1 bar for every 2 trips to Scooter's.

You may go several trips to either place and get nothing, but then get 4-6 bars of eridium in one trip. It all averages out as said.

However, the slots award eridium at a much higher rate and overall, with a lot less trouble, although I still check Roland's and Scooter's if I have to go into or even pass nearby either place. Even the little carton near the Fast Travel Station in Sanctuary will give eridium two or three times in a hundred and isn't much trouble to check.

Most YouTube videos about playing the slots focus on what kinds of weapons you get for various symbol combinations, but like vending machines, the weapons you get from playing slots very rarely are better than what you already have, especially if you have an armory.

In fact, if you level up by killing bosses or by completing a lot of side missions, so that you are a couple of levels above your current missions, the slots will only award weapons of your mission levels, not your current level, in which case you are virtually never going to get a better weapon than you already have.

An exception is that if you hit the triple vault symbol jackpot, you win a legendary weapon. The problem is that you may play the slots for hours straight without ever winning one. I've played BL2 more than 20 times, spending a lot of time on slots in each playthrough, and have never won a legendary weapon until very recently

You have a better chance (for time invested) of getting a legendary from random drops in the normal course of playing the game.

UPDATE: Finally, after countless more times playing the slots, I won a legendary weapon - a level 9 Redundant Logan's Gun. (I was level 10 at the time.) This is probably my least favorite legendary ever, so the wait was definitely not worth it. In contrast, if you followed this walkthrough, you should have already gotten at least 3 legendaries before even reaching Sanctuary - the Hornet, the KerBlaster, the Bonus Package, and possibly even the Thunderball Fists. All of these are much, much better weapons than Logan's Gun. See the Legendary Weapons page more info.

A few weeks after this vault symbol jackpot, I got a second one, a Potent Flakker shotgun. I already have several Flakkers which I never use, so this was also a letdown. I was making a video at the time, so I even got it recorded.

Then unbelievably, a few hours later, I got a third jackpot and won an Original Deliverance shotgun. Again, it would not have been in my Top Ten list, but at least it's one I didn't already have.

So the benefit of playing slots is almost entirely in getting eridium, although a side benefit which takes no additional effort is the completion of a number of challenges related to acquiring loot. These challenges help upgrade your character's abilities and carry over to your characters in future playthroughs.

By playing the Slots, you can win on average about 12-20 bars in a session where cash divided by cost of a try is about 60-70. Example: On level 9, a try is $133. If you have $8000, divide that by $133 to get 60. On level 15, a try is $263. Multiply that by 60 and you need about $16000.

I've won over 40 bars of eridium in a typical session several times and one time over 60 bars. During a recent playthrough, I accumulated about $130k while at level 23. I won over 100 bars just playing down from $130k to $100k, which is pretty high and included two eridium jackpots. Going from $100k to $25k, results were more average but I still won another 100 bars. (Keep in mind that includes selling weapons that I won and playing with the proceeds.)

On the other hand, in a recent game I won only 4 bars while playing $20,000 at $133 per try and later again won only 4 bars with $40k at $264 per try. Those sessions are discouraging, but other times you will get a lot more eridium than expected.

It takes 210 bars of eridium to max out the ammo capacity for just one weapon. I usually like to max out ammo capacity for sniper rifles, launchers, and grenades for a total of 630 bars, plus 50 more for backpack capacity and another 50+ for other weapons. for a total of at least 700 bars before level 31. Finding 1-4 bars every now and then is not going to get there, so using the slots is almost essential.

Three sets of three eridium bars in a row is a jackpot. You win 12 bars and complete a challenge.

Newer Play Slots Again

The time it takes to get the backpack capacity I like to get during my first trip to Sanctuary is long and, quite frankly, boring.

If you started playing BL2 on an XBox 360 and later got an XBox One, you can put in those hours once and never have to do it again.

First you have to get BL2 for the One. BL2 looks and plays almost identically on the One as on the 360, so why would you want to buy it again, even at a reasonable price? (I paid $24 on Live.) 

1. The 360 BL2 came on disc and on the One, you can get the downloadable version and not have to mess with a disc. 
2. If you use an armory as described on this web site, you have to change characters quite a bit to pass gear back and forth. Changing characters on the 360 involves an annoying delay, but it is instantaneous on the One. 
3. BL2 on the One lets you copy characters over from the 360 (but not from the One to the 360).

The last point is the most critical. I would not have bought BL2-One if I couldn't have copied my armory characters over to it, and this ability also has some other benefits:

One benefit is that if you copy all your characters to the One and play there, then if you somehow lose a great weapon from the past (which I have done), you can go back to the 360 and copy the character with that weapon over again.

If BL2 would let you keep old saves around, you could max out your backpack once by playing the slots, save, and keep that save forever, then the next time you get to that point in the game, switch to the saved character and play it from that point on. But BL2 doesn't let you keep and load old saves over and over.

But with BL2 on the 360 and on the One, you can do this using the ability to copy the same character over as often as you wish.

First start a new character on the 360, get to Sanctuary, get a couple of hundred thousand bucks from your armory characters as explained elsewhere in this document, and play slots until you have all the backpack upgrades you want.

I don't do any missions or challenges in Sanctuary other than getting Claptrap's Secret Vault which is needed to get the gear from armory characters to sell for cash to play the slots. But you could go ahead and do any which you don't want to ever have to do again.

Give that character a name like "Max Backpack" and don't play it again.

Save-Quit and at the menu, do a Cloud Save of this character. The menu option is used on the 360 only for uploading a character and on the One only for downloading a character.

After downloading a character on the One, click Continue and it will put you back in Sanctuary where you quit on the 360. Change the name to whatever unique name you wish.

Now you have a choice when you want to play BL2 on the One. 

• You can start a new game, play until you get to Sanctuary, then delete that character and load the downloaded character to play from that point forward -OR- 
• If you don't want to play the parts leading up to Sanctuary, you can just skip starting a new game and load the downloaded character and start from there.

Either way, after using the downloaded character, the next time you play BL2 on the One, you will have to go back to the 360 and save Max Backpack to the cloud again and repeat the steps above.

The main drawback to this procedure is that if Max Backpack is, say, a Mechromancer and you start a new game as a Siren, you will be changing to a Mechromancer at Sanctuary, which is probably not what you want. If you usually prefer one character type, this is not a problem.

A final note - this procedure is based on the assumption that you have at least one past level 50 character. You do not have to have turned these past characters into "Armory Characters." You just need one level 50 character to play the slots, win some level 50 gear, and pass it to your current character to sell to get cash for playing the slots.

Strategy

One strategy often suggested for slots is to Save-Quit-Continue before playing and if you don't hit a big jackpot before you run out of money, abort the game without saving (on the Xbox, go back to the Xbox menu) and restart the game. This is known as dashboarding. Using this strategy, people usually empty their backpacks onto the floor of the bar when they get full to make room for more weapons so they can continue playing the slots. Then if they hit a jackpot, they have to pick them up again to sell them.

This is all a lot of extra trouble and a waste of time (unless you are willing to spend many hours trying to win a legendary, dashboarding every 10 minutes or so). You can win all the eridium you need by playing normally. The following assumes that you do not have an extensive armory and thus will have limited funds.

• Usually every time you return to Sanctuary after completing a mission you will have $8k-$20k (up to about level 20). On level 9, a pull at the slots cost $133. It was said above that $8k divided by $133 is about 60 pulls, but when you keep selling weapons as you go and playing with the proceeds, you typically total about another 75-80% of what you started with for a total of about 100 tries. (Example: if you play $10,000 then sell what you've won, you'll get back about $3300 on average, but then you'll get back 33% when you play that $3.3k, getting back $1.1k and then get back 33% of that, etc.)

  Each time you have cash divided by cost per try of at least 60, you should play immediately for several reasons:

  1. By doing it each time, you can spend relatively shorter times at the slots at each session. Playing two machines, you can average about 10 tries per minute, so 100 tries would take only 10 minutes.
  2. The cost of the slots goes up when you level up. If you had $9000, on levels 9 and 10 you could get over 100 tries, including using money from selling weapons you win. If you hang onto that $9k until you got to levels in the high 20s, you would only get about 15 tries total for the same $9k.
  3. If you die, the more money you have, the more you are charged for being revived, so by keeping your cash level low, you are charged very little for dying.
  4. Since on average you will win 12-20 bars of eridium each 100-try session, you can immediately use that to upgrade your ammo and/or backpack capacity instead of postponing those upgrades for later (unless you are saving up to get 50 or 100 bars for a big sniper or rocket upgrade).

• I spend the 4 bars Scooter gives me to get more backpack capacity. When I win more bars at slots, I use them to upgrade capacity two more times (for 8 bars and then 12 bars). Not only does this minimize the frequency with which you have to empty your backpack when playing slots, but later in the game you will want the space so that you can carry a variety of weapons and upgrades. My next two upgrades are on rifle ammo capacity which makes the Medical Mystery mission much easier.

• Before starting play, empty your backpack as much as possible. Sell stuff you don't want and move as much as you can into the safe and even into Claptrap's Secret Stash. The more you unload, the fewer times you will have to run to a vending machine when your backpack gets full at the slots.

• Play both slots at once in Moxxi's. Stand just to the left of the left machine and turn just enough that you can see about half of the first symbol on the right machinne as seen belown. This position also allows you to simply step into the doorway if a grenade comes out. You cannot be damaged while in the doorway, even though you can see a grenade from the left machine explode a few feet from you.
  
  

• Start the right slot first, then rotate (using the right joystick on the Xbox) enough to start the left one then rotate back so you can watch both machines.

• Watch the symbols on the right machine. Three gas masks in a row will cause a grenade to come out. You will have to move away until it explodes, then come back and get into position again. So...

  • As soon as you see that you are not getting 3 gas masks in a row on the right, shift your attention to the symbols on the left machine. You are not moving your character in the game - you are just looking, on your TV/monitor, first at the right machine then at the left one.

  • As soon as you see that you are not getting gas masks on the left, shift your attention back to the right.

  • If the first two symbols match, you are going to win something, so rotate to the right to pick up your winnings; otherwise, rotate to the left to pick up your left machine winnings, if any.

  • If you rotated to the right to get right machine winnings, you can tell from the sounds if you got left machine winnings, in which case rotate to get them; otherwise, start the right machine and rotate left to start the left one.

  • Other than when a grenade comes out or when your backpack gets full, your character should never have to actually move.

• Usually your backpack will fill up before you run out of cash. The closest vending machine is outside of Marcus's shop: exit Moxxi's, run down the road ahead and up the stairs and turn right.

  The one disadvantage of emptying your backpack before starting the slots is that you may not be able to remember if a weapon you've won is better than those you already have which rarely happens, especially if you have an armory, but it is possible, so you may want to jot down the specs for the weapons you stored before starting to play the slots unless you have printed out your armory listing as suggested on the Armory page.

  If you have leveled up above the level of your current missions, the slots will only give you the weapons at the level of those missions. For example, I played slots while at level 23 but still hadn't done a level 18 mission. All I got was level 18 gear. In that situation, even if you still had your current gear in your backpack, you wouldn't know if the gear you were getting is any better than what was in your armory without having a printout.

  If you are carrying a legendary weapon of a particular type, such as a pistol, it's a virtual certainty that you are not going to get a better pistol from the slots, so you can safely and quickly sell all pistols. Likewise, if you are on a level where most of your weapons are green or better, it's highly unlikely that a white weapon will be better, so those can be sold quickly as well.

The Armory Way:

If you have previously played the game to level 50 or higher and still have that character available, have him/her go to Sanctuary and play the slots. He will probably have millions of dollars to play with and will very quickly accumulate a lot of level 50 weapons which can be passed to your current player through Claptrap's Secret Stash locker. Don't bother with weapons worth less than $7k. You may get some worth as much as $100k.

Even if your highest level previous character as less than 50 (but more than, say, 30), follow the same strategy. They may have to pass you more weapons to get all the cash you need, but it is still doable. Either way, you may as well start with $150k-$200k and it won't hurt to have $30k or so left over when you have reached your eridium goal.

It should be noted that having a level 50 character playing slots (in TVH mode) just long enough to get enough weapons to pass to a level 9 player cost over $1 million the one time I tried it. While level 50 players generally have a lot of money, they can't keep this up indefinitely.

However, if you use a level 50 character to hold weapons for you to use in doing missions (i.e.: not just to raise cash), every time he goes to the Stash locker in Claptrap's place to pass you gear or pick up gear you are done with, he can check the lockers there and find level 50 weapons in them often enough to pass those to you to sell for cash for slots, which is why I never have to have my armory characters play the slots. (See the Armory page.)

Rather than spread out your slots playing throughout the game, it is better to get it done right away. For one thing, the cost of playing slots goes up a lot as you level up. At level 9 or 10, you are getting the most bang for your buck.

Also, by doing all your slot playing early, you immediately get the benefits of your winnings - greater ammo carrying capacity, more room in your backpack, and the knowledge that you are done with playing slots for the rest of the game. You will still be finding lots of eridium in the ordinary course of playing the game (including farming) and that can be used to upgrade things even further.

I still start by using Scooter's 4 eridium bars and any others that I find or win to buy additional backpack space, which costs 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 caps for a total of 60 caps. Since I'll be getting all new weapons from my armory before I leave Sanctuary, I have no problem selling everything in my backpack other than my grenade mod and shield, neither of which are given as prizes by the slot machines, so they aren't in the way.

When my backpack gets full, if I have won enough to upgrade capacity again, I do it on the way to the vending machine to sell loot, thus providing more room for loot as I continue playing.

With 27 backpack slots plus 3 empty slots provided for equipped weapons, I can win 30 weapons before having to run to the vending machine. While I upgrade my backpack capacity as soon as I get the caps to do so, there is no rush to upgrade ammo capacity until I'm done playing. I put that off until I'm done so that I can see how much I am winning.

I try to have at least 200 bars of eridium before I quit playing, not counting the 60 bars I spend on the backpack capacity. Here's how I spend it on ammo capacity:

Weapon	Rounds	Erid.
Rifle	840	40
Launcher	27	60
Sniper	108	60
Grenade	7	40

If you just can't stand playing slots any more, I would skimp on the Launcher ammo and get it later. Also, the above is a minimum. I would completely max out Sniper (100 bars of eridium) and get Grenades up to 9 (50 bars).

The only downside to this strategy is that playing slots for an hour or more straight is kind of boring, in which case I will stop when I get bored and do something else - you know, eat lunch, watch a football game, etc., then come back and play slots some more.

Sometimes I get jackpot after jackpot while other times I may play off $200k at level 9 and never get a single eridium jackpot and very little eridium overall. That's just the random number generator at work. You are in different ends of the bell curve, statistically speaking. It is not as much fun on the low end, but you have to work through it. Eventually, you'll reach the goal.

Other Slot Machines

Here is a list of all slot machines in BL2.

In addition, you may sometimes come across a goliath carrying a slot machine. The drawbacks to playing goliath machines are --

• There are usually no vending machines around, so when your backpack fills up,
    you have to just dump what you've won on the ground.
• The machines are laying down, which isn't the most convenient way to play them.
• After some period of time, the machines will disappear.

The machines in the Dust and the Holy Spirits bar are more convenient than those in Sanctuary because they each have a vending machine nearby.

The only drawback to these is that playing only one machine takes longer than playing two machines at once at Moxxi's.

The advantages are --

• You can get in a position about 45 degrees to the right of the machine and never have to move except when a grenade comes out. (You can still get gear from the left side even if you can't see the actual gear.)
• You only have to move half as often to avoid grenades as you do when playing two machines.
• And the biggie - when your backpack fills up, you can sell off gear quickly and use that money to play more.

Moxxi's bar in Badassitude (DLC) has two machines, but they are not arranged such that you can play them without moving around like the ones in Sanctuary. However, they do have vending machines nearby.

This same bar also has two machines which take (and pay off in) Torgue Tokens. In the long run, you will lose all your hard-earned tokens to them and get only crappy guns in return. The main point in playing the slots is to win eridium, even though you lose cash while doing so. Since you have to bet Torgue Tokens to try to win Torgue Tokens in these machines, you are just going to lose them in the long run.

The Jackpot Challenge:

A Challenge in Sanctuary is to get a jackpot at the slots. This can be either a Vault Symbol jackpot (you'll grow old trying) or an Eridium Symbol jackpot. If you've already won 250 bars of eridium and never gotten a jackpot (which rarely happens), you may be playing the machine in The Dust, get a jackpot, and find out that you completed Sanctuary's jackpot challenge. Strange, but true.

Bad Slot Machine Info

A lot of bad info circulates on the web about how one BL2 slot machine costs or plays or pays differently than the others:

[Fill-in-the-blank] machine......

... yields more jackpots. - If you know what a Bell Curve is, you know that for purely random events there are extremes at either end of the curve. On one extreme (as it applies to slots), you may win very little (or no) eridium. On the other extreme, you may hit multiple jackpots in one relatively short session. In one video, a guy hit multiple jackpots in his first try at the machine in the Dust and proclaimed it to be the luckiest in the game. It isn't. He got lucky one time.

...gives higher level weapons. - The level of the gear given appears to depend on the level of the missions completed - possibly on just the main mission. If you have built up a good armory, you will virtually never win gear at slots which is better than what you already have.

...is cheaper to play. - The cost of playing a slot machine depends entirely on the level of the gear being given. In the chart below you can see that the costs at levels 33, 40, and 50 (normal mode) are all the same while level 50 in the Vault Hunter Mode is much, much more expensive.

While the machines in Sanctuary, Holy Spirits, and in Badassitude all cost the same and give the same level weapons if you just go from one to the other, the machine in the Dust has its own criteria for determining the level of weapons given which, in turn, determines the cost of playing it.

Here is a comparison (Holy Spirits and Badassitude not shown because they are the same as Sanctuary).

Player Level	Sanctuary Cost - Lvl Given	The Dust Cost - Lvl Given
18	$263 - 15	$209 - 13
33	$1438 - 30	$1611 - 31
40	$1438 - 30	$1611 - 31
50 Normal	$1438 - 30	$1284 - 29
50 VHM	$13872 - 50	-

On player level 18, the only Dust mission done was getting the bandit vehicle, which was a level 13 mission.

Levels 33 and 40 were from two different games, both in Normal mode after killing Jack, which is a level 30 mission. In the Normal mode, any missions done after killing Jack would have been older missions with lower level ratings. The same is true for level 50 in the Normal mode.

Level 50 in the Vault Hunter Mode has the player taking on higher level missions which are reflected in the higher cost and higher level weapons given.

Notice that while a lot of people on the web claim that the Dust's machine is cheaper than the others, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It all depends on the level calculated for you since the cost is based on the level of weapons given.

You can verify this by playing slots on different machines while on the same level and not playing any missions between going to different locations.

The Jackpot page on Wikia says:

While there are slot machines in multiple locations, the challenge can only be completed by using the slot machines in Moxxi's bar in Sanctuary.

I recently won 260+ bars of eridium in Sanctuary, which is the point at which I quit playing the slots at that time, and never got a jackpot. Later, I was playing in the Dust and hit a jackpot and the screen said that I completed the Sanctuary JackPot Challenge.

Other Sources of Eridium

In addition to the slots, every time you Save-Quit-Continue a game, the loot containers in Sanctuary (and everywhere else) will reset. You can go check the lockers at Roland's again. You may find none 2 or 3 times, which is discouraging, but the next time you may find 4 bars, but you will find about 1 bar on average.

The lockers on the second floor of Scooter's only average about 1 bar every 2 trips, which makes sense because there are about twice as many lockers and washing machines at Roland's.

And after you open the lockers in Roland's stash, don't forget to keep checking those:

Critter piles sometimes have eridium, so I check all of them. If I'm in a vehicle, I'll just shoot them. Usually cash comes out which you can get by running over it. If I see eridium or a non-white weapon, I'll get out to pick it up.

Fuel tanks sometimes spit out eridium when they explode, so I always shoot them. This does not apply to elemental barrels such as fire, corrosive, and slag.

Repeatedly killing Bad Maw at the Bloodshot Stronghold (usually levels 13 through 15) and the Constructor at the start of the Statuesque side mission in Opportunity (levels 18-23) reliably gets you eridium. For example, my last time through, I killed Bad Maw 30+ times going from level 13 through 15 and ended up with over 70 bars of eridium. Once you reach level 16 killing Bad Maw and level 24 killing the Constructor, the points and eridium given drop off to make it not worth the time.

In fact, most of the characters which you farm for Legendary Weapons will drop eridium (to varying degrees) when killed. One exception is Doc Mercy who very rarely drops eridium, but his bandits and loot containers yield some every few farming trips.

Leave comments at the video on Youtube.