Sledge: To The Safe House

Objectives

 * Obtain the Mine Gate Key and take it to Headstone Mine.
 * Mine Gate Key:0/1


 * "The note you found suggests that the Mine Gate Key can be found at Sledge's Safe House to the north."

Description
Once you obtain this quest you will need to travel back towards Shep Sanders and take the transition into the Arid Hills. After fighting your way north you will arrive at the transition for Sledge's Safe House.

Sledge's Safe house is a large sprawling building ending in a big round room where a boss battle takes place.

When you first enter the safe house, vending machines will be on your right. Down the first hallway are several enemies and your first of many tough battles. Fortunately, you can easily keep coming back to the vending machines to restock ammo and health after the first couple of battles. Once you get further along, you will have to rely on finding ammo.

As you go through the building, you will come across a disabled Claptrap which will give you the quest Claptrap Rescue: Safe House, which will be the first in a series of rescue quests throughout the game. You can either keep the Mine Gate Key as the current objective and put off fixing the Claptrap until your way out, or you can backtrack a few rooms to pick up the repair kit (which is on top of some pipes near the ceiling). It is worth doing this immediately as you will be awarded a Backpack SDU, which will give you an additional 3 backpack slots.

To enter the big round room for the boss battle, you have to drop down into a small area then jump up into the room, at which point the boss will aggro you, accompanied by a bunch of midget warriors. Once you drop down, the only way back out is to die or to kill the boss. Although a chain-link fence is all that separates the entry area from the arena, you cannot fire through it as you usually can most such fences in the safe house (though you can try to fire through the gaps at its sides).

The boss is one of the few non-named bosses you will fight during the game. He is simply called a Roid Rage Psycho.

Strategy

 * 1. The conventional strategy for the boss battle is to keep running, killing the midgets first and taking shots at the boss when you can. He will charge you and will also throw grenades at you, thus the need to stay mobile. If you are killed, you will spawn in an area away from the arena. When you get back there, the best case scenario is if the boss has come up where you can fire at him without having to drop into the entry area again. (Again, you cannot fire through the fence, so he will need to be to the side of it.) It is also possible that he will go through the entry area himself and into the next room. If neither of these happen, then you have to go back in.


 * 2. Another way to beat the boss easily is to kill all of the midget warriors and then jump back into the small pit at the entrance. When the Roid Rage Pyscho comes in after you, he will be unable to get out. Simply jump out and fire away. (The boss can get out of the pit, though it is possible to run into a scenario where he stays in it. A bigger danger is that you get down into the pit and he stays out and lobs grenades into the pit with you, which has been known to happen.)


 * 3. Yet another way to defeat the boss is to stay in the pit and kill the boss from there. By not stepping into the arena-like boss area, you cause the boss to stay where he is and not engage you.  In one side of the pit are a stack of boxes that you jump up on to enter the arena.  By standing on one of the boxes, you can position yourself to get clear line-of-sight to the boss through a vertical gap on one side of the chain-link fence.  You can snipe at the Roid Rage Psycho's large head safely from this vantage point.  The boss will remain stationary even while taking fire as long as you stay in the pit; he will move a step or so from taking hits.  It is even possible to enter the pit and cause him to move, then to step back into the pit and cause him to become stationary again.  Some of his aides may attack you, but this is something that can be easily handled.  In the event that you aggro the boss and you die, you can still take this approach as your death will cause him to become stationary again. (As noted under #2, this strategy does not always work.)


 * 4. It is also possible to get the Roid Rage Psycho's head stuck in the fence. If you die, you can shoot at the mesh fence to get his attention when you respawn. He may run up to the fence and possibly get his head stuck in it for a bit (he will glitch so half his body is on your side of the fence), which will allow you to shoot him and get critical hits. He can still frag you occasionally somehow so be ready to avoid them. If he moves out of the net he MAY go back but if he doesn't, you may have to go into the arena after him.


 * 5. Another, less exploitative strategy is to take advantage of the Roid Rage Psycho's fleshy nature by utilizing incindiary weapons and skills. Once he's alight, you can begin dealing with the Midget Psychos, stopping periodically to re-ignite him. Alternatively, you can ignore the Midget Psychos and focus entirely on the big guy; since the midgets have a fairly limited effective range, you can avoid most damage from them by staying mobile. Also, due to his relatively high health, you can take full advantage of corrosive weapons' increased damage DoT.

After killing him, you will find a button hanging down near the center of the room. Press it and the key rises up in the center.

A platform extends across the entry drop-down point and you can walk out of the arena. You will have to fight your way back out of the Safe house, which will not be any easier than when you fought your way in. You can go back the way you came in, but some new doors will be open letting you take a different, but probably no easier, way out. The advantage of the new route is that it will have more loot to pick up.

Notable Loot
Once you defeat the mini-boss and retrieve the key there is no specific loot which drops off of the boss nor any special weapon chest available.

Video Walkthrough
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