Borderlands 2 player spends over 800 hours beating it without taking a single hit, but another player swiped the achievement 10 hours earlier

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Both players pulled off something people thought was impossible.

Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 wears a cocky grin.
(Image credit: Gearbox)

Twitch streamer and challenge runner HeyBlasty practiced for nine months and over 800 hours to beat Borderlands 2 without taking a single hit. But another player, Darksmoke11, managed to pull it off around 10 hours before HeyBlasty's successful run.

There's no rivalry between them, though. HeyBlasty inspired Darksmoke11 to attempt it in the first place, and he gave credit to him over on the Borderlands 2 Reddit. Who did it first seems moot when they both managed to do something people thought was impossible using slightly different methods.

HeyBlasty got it on his 112th attempt, after spending most of his time developing a safe route through the game, and Darksmoke11—working off of HeyBlasty's route—got it on his 13th. And each run took over 20 hours to complete.

Speaking as someone who only played a few hours of Borderlands 2 and definitely took more than one hit, it looks like their strategies largely involved hiding behind rocks with a scoped weapon and letting Axton's turret do the rest of the work. HeyBlasty was more specific on Reddit, but I couldn't tell you what any of this means: "I used a combination of Axton's turret, Fastball, homing grenades, snipers, and a combination of Lady Fist and The Bee shield to melt some enemies and bosses." Presumably, the ideal build is one that lets you clean up weak enemies with the turret and delete bosses as fast as possible so they can't even try to attack you.

If you want to see how they did it, Darksmoke11's full run is split up into a couple stream archives on Twitch. HeyBlasty's are too, but the videos are stuttery, so you might want to wait for them to show up on YouTube.

Tyler Colp

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.