Discover how Guardian Ranks work in Borderlands 3, along with the many bonuses they provide, such as weapon damage and shield capacity. These features will enable you to tackle high-level content with greater ease.
As the game interface teases you, alongside your class skills, you’ve likely noticed: upon completing the main storyline of Borderlands 3, you will finally unlock Guardian Ranks (along with the Chaos mode, among other features).
Before diving into the details, an important note about Guardian Ranks is that, once again, you only begin accumulating them once the main story is completed. This means it may be wiser to focus solely on the main storyline while ignoring side activities, to unlock these ranks as swiftly as possible. This isn’t the most entertaining option, but if you are looking for high-level optimization while saving time, it’s certainly the way to go.
Borderlands 3: How Guardian Ranks Work
The concept is similar to the Badass Tokens from Borderlands 2, allowing you to continue leveling up your characters with various passive statistic bonuses that apply to all your characters.
Your Guardian Token gauge is displayed in purple, just above the experience gauge, and it fills up as you earn experience points. Each time the gauge fills up, you unlock a new token. You can then spend this token to obtain statistical bonuses from three skill trees: Assassin, Survivor, and Hunter. When you spend a Guardian token, you can choose one option from six randomly selected statistics, two from each tree. Your choices will be crucial, even though luck may prevent you from always boosting the same statistic. However, nothing stops you from consistently choosing the same tree. It is also worth noting that there are diminishing returns; each additional point invested in the same statistic seems less and less efficient than the previous one, so don’t expect to reach +100% in any one area. While it’s normal to prioritize certain statistics, it will be more effective to diversify your points across the most useful statistics.
Possible Statistics for Each Skill Tree
Assassin
- Critical damage
- Grenade damage
- Weapon damage
- Rate of fire
- Melee damage
- Vehicle damage
Survivor
- Survivability duration
- Combat movement speed
- Maximum health
- Shield capacity
- Shield recharge delay
- Shield recharge speed
Hunter
- Action skill cooldown
- Rare loot chance
- Recoil reduction
- Reload speed
By investing a certain number of tokens, you will unlock specific Guardian rewards within each category: Assassin, Survivor, and Hunter. There are six tiers across all skill trees, and you will unlock them by spending 10, 15, 25, 35, 50, or 75 tokens within their category. Each tier you reach will grant you weapon skins, character skins, and especially new truly useful passives. For instance, level 2 Guardian rewards can increase your weapon damage while in survivability mode (within the Assassin tree), allow you to exit survivability mode with full health and shields (within the Survivor tree), etc. The higher the level attained in the tree, the more interesting the unlocked passive becomes. It’s up to you whether you prefer to quickly obtain all early tree passives at 15 points or grab one at 75 faster.
