For those willing to cheat in Underdome...

[Varkster]

I've spent many hours in Borderlands, but Underdome certainly is one of the most painful, boring and time consuming grinds for achievements I've ever seen in any game. Not even the covenant grind in Dark Souls comes close.

So for those that want to solo it but don't mind cheating (which I don't, because it's honestly a garbage waste of time if you attempt it fairly), I suggest downloading a trainer for the game which lets you one-hit kill. I'm not going to advertise, but there's a very legit one which you can find with a quick 5-second search on Google.

Now this is the trick, once you get the hang of running around the map and quickly 1-hit killing everything, there's a very good technique to save yourself a lot of time. This works MOST of the time, but don't expect it to work 100% on every round.

At the end of each round there is one final boss fight. The curtains open and the boss spawns first before the goons. Now as I said this only works around 90% of the time, some rounds you won't be able to execute this trick. What you have to do is point a rapid-fire weapon directly at the centre of the stage and start shooting before the boss spawns. Once he spawns and you 1HKO him, the curtains should start closing instantly, in which case you must now stop shooting and let the goons spawn behind the curtains. They are very much alive and will chase you down and shoot/hit you, but keep them alive until the 10-second timer goes down. Once the 10-second timer finishes and you press [Enter] at the score screen, quickly kill the remaining enemies and it should skip your current round and go straight into the next one.

So for example, at the end of Round 1 I aimed at the centre of the curtains, quickly shot the boss once he spawned, curtains closed, 2 bruisers spawned behind the curtains. I left them alive, waited for Round 2 to start after the 10-second timer and player score evaluation, and shot them. Another glitched timer started and brought up another player score screen, after which I ended up in Round 3.

Potentially using this method you can skip 1/2 of the arena and shorten the time you spend grinding it out. Using this method, I managed to clear the arena (solo) in approximately 1 hour. I would imagine if multiple people decide to use this exploit, it becomes even quicker.

Good luck to any poor soul that cares about this poorly designed DLC and its trophies...

[Boboscus]

This will definitely help, thanks. Even doing them by having a host be low level is time consuming as hell.

[Varkster]

Originally posted by Boboscus:

This will definitely help, thanks. Even doing them by having a host be low level is time consuming as hell.

Yeah, man. I don't know what they were thinking when developing this DLC. It's already a grindy enough game and they decided it'd be a good idea to add an artificially lengthy arena with no real unique challenge full of standard NPCs you've already killed in the normal game. They also thought it would be smart to outright remove any EXP gain in the Arena (I'm assuming because it's so long, they would risk players over-levelling themselves while in the Arena and breezing through it at low levels) and that makes killing anything in the Arena just boring.

This is one of the worst game designs I've seen to be honest, and when the design is terrible - cheating isn't a problem for me.

Note: What I said before about it not working 100%, it depends on the actual boss you're fighting - there are only a couple bosses that spawn straight away with the mobs which don't let you use the exploit.

There's also the Hanz and Franz boss fight where Hanz spawns first a little to the right of the stage and you'll have to kill him just as you would kill any other boss and then treat Franz as a spawned mob, finishing him off after the round ends. It's a really odd exploit but so far it's saved me a bunch of time.

[Bad Company]

I'd also suggest using Willow Tree to get yourself a shield that makes you invulnerable. I didn't use a trainer, and the grind was almost unbearable, but at least I didn't die. I used guns that replenished their own ammo and that helped a lot.

[BLiSS]

I agree on the "wth they were thinking when doing this DLC?" part, and this will help people that just want the achievements.
But if someone wants it "legit", albeit at this point and being a PVE-coop game it doesn't matter, bring some friends and just chat while completing this tedious DLC (plus the achievements)...3 hours per round and 10 hours in total, I met new people and had a good time (although the low level host is a must I'd say).

[lionheart_89]

Thank you so much Varkster, you deserve a statue! This trick is working, as you say, most of the times, even in the enhanced version. It definitely saved me a lot of time in Moxxi's awful DLC, that I'm playing just for the achievements with no fun at all.

[Boromir <-------<<<]

Yeah the Underdome is horrendous, just doing it once on one character in one difficulty is bad enough besides doing it at least twice per character. Great post for the achievement hunters though, otherwise just use Willow Tree to give yourself 2 skill points and never touch that DLC.

[Numzy]

too be honest, there is no point in doing the 20 round matches, except for the achievos, so you just need to do it once ...period, since it provides no rewards for winning


that being said the 5 rounds are a great test of strength for your characters to see how they are doing over all, u can cheese these with the above tactic, but i recommend actually doing these legit

[Numzy]

Originally posted by Boromir <-------<<<:

Yeah the Underdome is horrendous, just doing it once on one character in one difficulty is bad enough besides doing it at least twice per character. Great post for the achievement hunters though, otherwise just use Willow Tree to give yourself 2 skill points and never touch that DLC.

why not just use willow tree to complete the quest for you, under the quests section, you can flag for ready to turn in...then just turn in the quest