When you first jump into Borderlands 4 the screen just fills with guns and half of them look like upgrades at a glance, especially once you start messing with Borderlands 4 Cash and buying random drops from vendors. Pretty fast you realise the little green arrows on the stats do not tell the whole story. The brand logo on the side of the gun does. A shiny purple rifle can still feel awful if the manufacturer gimmick fights the way you like to play, and a lower level pistol can carry you for ages just because the handling lines up with your habits.

High Risk Jakobs

Jakobs is usually where people fall in love with the game. These guns hit like a truck and reward you for actually aiming instead of just holding the trigger. If you are landing crits, the ricochet feels broken in the best way, bouncing into the back line and clearing trash mobs you never even looked at. The flip side is brutal though. Miss a burst of shots when a psycho sprints in your face and you feel every wasted bullet, because the fire rate is basically tied to how fast you can click. If you are more of a “spray the centre of mass and hope” player, Jakobs can feel like the game is laughing at you.

Element Focused Maliwan

Then there is Maliwan, which used to be the brand everyone avoided because of that slow charge up. In Borderlands 4 it feels better, still not instant, but quick enough that you do not hate it. Being able to flip between elements on the same weapon is huge when the game throws mixed waves at you. Blue shields, yellow armor, flesh all stacked together, and you just swap modes instead of swapping guns. The cost is ammo. Maliwan guns chew through your reserves, so if you lean on one as your main gun you will be staring at empty magazines a lot, even when you manage your shots fairly well.

Vladof And Dahl Styles

Vladof is pure chaos. You hold the trigger, the barrel spins up and suddenly you are deleting your entire ammo pool in a few seconds. On paper the accuracy is not great, but when you are hip firing into a crowd or using a drum mag with a grenade launcher under the barrel, you do not really care. It is the gun you pull out when things go wrong and you just need the room clear. Dahl sits on the other end. Calm, tighter bursts, clean recoil when you aim down sights. The DPS numbers rarely look crazy but you win fights because every burst actually lands. If you like sitting mid range and tagging weak points, Dahl feels safe and reliable without any weird trick to remember.

Tediore Tricks And Loadout Ideas

People still sleep on Tediore because “throw the gun to reload” sounds like a joke, but in this game it is more like carrying a stack of mini rockets. You reload, the old gun flies out, explodes, maybe even splits into more projectiles depending on the roll. It changes how you think about magazines; you start reloading on purpose when an enemy runs behind cover just to tag them with the throw. The best setups mix these brands instead of forcing one logo in every slot. A typical loadout might be a Jakobs pistol for tidy headshots, a Maliwan SMG for stripping shields, a Vladof or Tediore shotgun when enemies push too close, and maybe a flex slot where you swap in whatever weird drop you get from farming or trading Borderlands 4 Items buy so you are never stuck dry in a boss phase.