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Here’s What’s Going On With Borderlands 3’s Farming Frenzy Drop Rates

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Borderlands 3 is in the middle of a big “Farming Frenzy” event right now which has made a lot of loot easier to farm in different ways. I previously said that all the changes made for this event needed to become permanent, but today I’m starting to hear players complain that even this event isn’t as rewarding as it seemed like it was going to be.

The common refrain I’m hearing is that players don’t seem to be getting more legendaries or the legendaries they’re specifically after any more than usual. And I think that’s because a lot of people have misread what’s actually happening during this event, so I thought I would try to clear that up.

Here are the changes made for this event:

Rare spawns now always spawn in their dedicated places.

Bosses and spawns with specific drops in their loot pool will now be more likely to drop that loot.

Anointed rates on loot drops have gone up.

This is slightly confusing, but the core issue here is what is not said. Namely, there fundamentally is no base increase in legendary drop rates with this event. You can see a rare spawn every time, but he still has the same change to drop a legendary as he always does. You can kill bosses, but the chance that has been increased is just that they will drop a specific weapon, not any weapon. For example:

Let’s say for the sake of argument that in 100 boss kills, they drop 50 legendary weapons. Of that 50, normally, 10 are their “dedicated drops” where Gearbox has given them a bonus chance to drop. This event does not change the fact that they drop 50 weapons in 100 runs, but it may mean that instead of 10 of those 50 being dedicated farm drops, it’s now 15 or 20. So the rate doesn’t go up, but chance for a dedicated drop within the existing rates go up. The same is true for anointed drops. If out of 50 legendaries before there were 10 anointed drops, now maybe there are 25 with this event.

So fundamentally, if you add up rare spawns appearing all the time, a higher chance at a dedicated drop, and a higher chance at an anointed drop, you do have better odds of getting that one anointed legendary that you’re looking for. But in general, you should not expect to see any more overall legendary drops than you are now, as those base rates have not changed across any Mayhem mode. In short, it’s the quality of drops that have increased, not the total number. So farming is easier, but still not easy. This is part of the reason that I think these changes should be permanent, as this is not a “loot pours from the sky” event, it’s just something to make farming specific drops more realistically possible.

I still believe we could see this event made permanent when it ends, but we have 11 more days to go before we figure that out. For now, just know what you should expect from the current changes.

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