The Destroyer

The Destroyer is a massive, godlike being from another dimension, and the final boss in Borderlands. It appears as a gargantuan, one-eyed beast with a massive mouth and several tentacles. The Eridians imprisoned The Destroyer within the Vault thousands of years prior to now, at the cost of their entire civilization, in order to prevent the monstrosity from consuming the universe.

Background
The Guardian Angel knows of The Destroyer, and that it is actually what awaits those who open the Vault. However, she chooses not to share this information, perhaps because adventurers would choose not to pursue the Vault if they had knowledge of its contents. The Angel appears to want to use the Vault hunters as a means to defeat The Destroyer.

Combat
The Destroyer does not move throughout the battle. It has multiple critical spots: its eye, the glowing spots on the tentacles, and its mouth/tongue. Its anchoring tentacles are also vulnerable to damage, and can be reached with melee attacks. The Destroyer has a truly prodigious amount of health. It is immune to corrosive splash damage, as inflicted by corrosive rockets or grenades. It is unshielded, and so takes increased damage from all incendiary attacks. Like most bosses, it is immune to damage-over-time.

Throughout the battle, The Destroyer will sprout a set of purple tentacles with glowing orbs near the base of each. These tentacles throw explosive purple spikes that can arc over cover, making it imperative to target them when they appear. The spikes can be destroyed by shooting the glowing orbs on the tentacles. The tentacles also count as separate enemies; severing one of them will activate "On Kill" buffs, trigger a second wind, and can also drop ammunition upon "death".

The Destroyer will also lash out with its two reddish tentacles. These are impervious, but their attacks are fairly obvious, easily avoided, and only happen occasionally. More often, it will lift these tentacles into the air and slam them on the ground, creating a shockwave that knocks nearby characters back. This can be avoided by hiding behind any of the stone pillars around the battlefield or by jumping before the tentacles hit the ground. After taking a decent amount of damage, The Destroyer will sprout two more red tentacles.

As the battle progresses, The Destroyer will unleash a concentrated blast of pure energy from its eye. The beam's charge can be heard before it is unleashed. This is a very damaging attack and can be difficult to dodge, but it can be avoided by hiding or crouching behind the rocky pillars. This attack frequently follows its tentacle slam and characters caught by it may be knocked away from cover (or the cliff of the battle site) and unable to reach safety by the time The Destroyer unleashes the beam. Sometimes the beam can be seen piercing a pillar, although the damage is blocked, regardless.

Glitches
A glitch exists where characters can sometimes end up inside the body of The Destroyer. This is not a significant advantage, however, seeing as all of The Destroyer's attacks are still capable of harming the character inside. Critical hits can still be scored by aiming at the eye or the maw while in this position.

The Destroyer has two giant tentacles that grapple two pillars of stone. Next to this pillar gripped by the left tentacle is another small piece of stone. Characters hidden behind this are impervious to The Destroyer's attacks, but may harm The Destroyer in return.

Climbing one of the tentacles gripping the pillars can allow a character to put themselves inside the Destroyer or directly infront of its eye. The area in front of the eye damages the character slightly as the eye forms its laser but the damage is minimal when compared to the potential of damage given. This glitch is particularly advantageous to Berserker class characters.

Bugs
1. Some players have experienced a bug that caused The Destroyer to vanish from play when one player exited during the fight. Upon a restart of the game The Destroyer is absent, the mission checked as complete and the Vault Key unobtainable. This could have been caused by a game crash during the fight in some cases.

Workarounds found so far:

 * Connect to friend's game and kill The Destroyer in co-op.
 * Use WillowTree to edit the mission to either completed in order to skip it as a whole, or to mark it as undone to go through it again.

On some occasions, the game may crash on kill for a character scoped in on The Destroyer, and the kill will not be counted.

2. The player may jump off the mountain in single player without being killed by, it's health will not reset. Instead it will remain the same and the vault hunter may continue fighting the boss without worry other than monetary loss.

Trivia

 * The Destroyer is very similar to the final boss of Gearbox Software's first game, the Half-Life expansion Opposing Force.
 * In a title card that was cut from the final release of the game, its name was stated to be "Phil". Given the often humorous nature of these image captions, however, the veracity of this claim is open to dispute.