The Destroyer



The Destroyer is a massive, godlike being from another dimension, and the final boss in Borderlands. It is a mass of flesh with a huge, glowing eye, a massive mouth, and several tentacles. The Eridians imprisoned the Destroyer within the Vault thousands of years previously at the cost of their entire civilization, in order to prevent the monstrosity from consuming the universe.

The Guardian Angel knows of The Destroyer and that it is what awaits those who open the Vault, but it chooses not to share this information with the player, possibly because it fears the player will chicken out of trying to open the Vault if the player knew there was a hideous, godlike, extra-dimensional monster waiting instead of fame, power, riches, and/or women. The Guardian Angel appears to want to use the player to defeat the Destroyer once and for all.

Combat


The Destroyer does not move throughout the battle. It has multiple weak spots: Its eye, the glowing spots on the tentacles and its mouth/tongue. The Destroyer has a truly prodigious amount of health, as befits an extra-dimensional, godlike being of destruction. Luckily, the destroyer is only level 33, and by then you should be over 34 or just there.

At the beginning of the fight, and throughout the battle, The Destroyer will sprout a set of purple tentacles with glowing orbs near their bases. These tentacles throw purple, explosive spikes that can arc over cover, thus it is imperative to destroy these tentacles when they appear. When the spikes explode, they drop ammo which can be useful if you are running low. They can be destroyed by shooting the glowing orbs near the bases of the tentacles. These tentacles also count as separate enemies; severing one of them will activate 'On Kill' buffs and can trigger a second wind.

The Destroyer will also lash out with its reddish tentacles. These can't be destroyed, unlike the purple ones, but these attacks are fairly obvious and easy to avoid, and only happens occasionally in any case. More often it will lift its red tentacles into the air and slam them into the ground, releasing a shockwave that launches the player back. This can be avoided by hiding behind any of the stone pillars that litter the battlefield.

As the battle progresses, The Destroyer will also unleash a concentrated blast of pure energy from its glowing eye. You can hear The Destroyer charging this beam before it uses it. This is a very damaging attack and is difficult to dodge, but it can be avoided by hiding behind most of the rocky pillars. This attack is used very often as a follow up to its tentacle slam (see above), so be sure to avoid both, or you may be knocked away from cover by the tentacle slam and unable to reach it again when it unleashes the beam. The beam attack also has a large amount of knock-back, so if you attempt to stay in the back of the area, out of range of some of its tentacles, there is a good chance that the beam will knock you off the cliff behind you if you do not find cover quickly. If you are behind cover and still see the beam, don't worry, it is not piercing the stone (unless you see yourself taking damage). For some reason the beam appears to pierce the stone even when the damage is stopped. This is likely a bug.

If you're down for the count, look above and to the left of The Destroyer. Rakk sometimes spawn in the sky here and are good targets for a Second Wind. Second Wind can also be activated by destroying one of the vulnerable tentacles.

If you'd like to save some time, find where the tentacles wrap around the pillars of stone, and melee away (or use a shotgun). It'll take a while, but it's a lot faster than playing hide and seek with The Destroyer.

You can also move to the right side of the area and simply jump over the tentacle, follow it up to the middle of the creature (preferable duck) and shoot/melee away. This way The Destroyer will miss pretty much all attacks (besides the slams but they barely do any damage). An hp regenerating shield is advised.

After a substantial amount of damage, The Destroyer will finally be defeated. Enjoy the ending and go on to Playthrough 2!

Strategies
These strategies will work with any player, but high accuracy or bullet regen is recommended for the second:

if at this point in the game you have any eridian weapons, equip them and use either them or an assault rifle to take down three of the four purple tentacles (leave one to stop the rest respawning.) Now just fire away while hiding behind the stone pillars for the duration of the eye attack; this should allow you to kill The Destroyer with ease and without you having to worry about ammo. An extremely effective weapon is the Eridian Thunderstorm, about 15 shots is all that is needed to kill The Destroyer. While it recharges, just use another weapon to take the purple tentacles down.

Make certain you destroy the purple tentacles when ever they show up. Stand behind one of the large rocks that has a half circle removed from one side. Through this, if you are careful, you can have shooting access to the eye. You will only have to worry about the slam, as the beam will not be able to penetrate the rock, and the destroyer is unable to aim for anything but the center of your body; which is behind a rock. You will be safe, and have an easy avenue to the destroyer. Just make sure to shoot the purple tentacles when they show up. This was most eaisly done with hunter, for obvious reasons, but the only charater that should have any difficulty is the siren, and an unusually accurate SMG could probably be found somewhere for this purpose. Even berserker has explosives at easy disposal.

Another strategy is to move to the left side of The Destroyer itself, this will prevent it from attacking you, making it very easy to kill if you have a ammo regen class mod, or weapon.

Hunter

 * If you wish to be a sniper, get yourself a sniper rifle, get a sniper rifle ammo regen mod (for when you run out and there is an extremely high chance you will).
 * Once the battle starts head to either left or right (it doesn't matter just get in the general area of one of the 4 main pillars near the boss).
 * Take out three of the purple tentacles that throw the explosive spines.
 * Leave the 4th one, if you somehow after destroying three of them manage to get taken down you can use the 4th one for your second wind. Don't destroy that 4th one throughout the battle (as long as the last one doesn't die the rest won't respawn.)
 * Once you've destroyed the three of the purple tentacles you can spend the rest of the fight concentrating on the eye. With 5 points in CALIBER, DEADLY, and mod that either increases critical damage, or sniper rifle damage (like a +caliber sniper mod/+deadly gunslinger mod).
 * This battle will progress REALLY quickly (in the area of about 2 minutes) if you have a Skullmasher sniper rifle, they do in excess (with applicable mods/skills) of 15,000 per critical hit.
 * Also, if you stand back near the New-U station, you can unload a assault rifle (or anything else that has a decent accuracy) into The Destroyer's mouth. I did this using an assault rifle with a damage of 100, and it took about 300 or 400 bullets, but it works.
 * If you wish to do it as a gunslinger, an ammo regen mod is again recommended.
 * If you have a large clipped repeater and a high rate of fire, you don't need to worry about getting criticals, just fire away from behind the pillar until he is dead.
 * As most high fire rate and large clip repeaters are not particularly accurate anyways, focusing on the critical locations can leave you vulnerable. Instead, just aim in the general direction.
 * It can be killed with about 800 pre-modified shots from a ~60 damage repeater. It will take many more if you don't have Gun Crazy and Hair Trigger. Criticals happen regularly enough from scattered shots.

Soldier

 * For an assault rifle gunner, get a ammo regen of any kind, be it your gun, your class mod whatever. Take cover behind a pillar and gun the hell out of him, throwing a sentry every now and again. For a Shotgunner, get right up and personal if you have a soldier medic on your team. Otherwise just shoot from afar, its not like you will miss much.Or go to the back of him and use sledges shotgun and just fire.
 * A weapon i find to work well is the Boom Stick, due to large damage and goes all over him
 * A good skill to have here is Overload.
 * Use combat rifles with high damage and a big magazine clip and accurately fire into the eye of the Destroyer and stack up on critical hits.

Glitches
Pertaining to the battle

A glitch exists where players are sometimes able to walk onto the platform that The Destroyer sits on, passing through its model-texture, and thus are able to walk inside its body. This is not a very significant advantage, however, since the projectiles it fires can still reach and harm you, as do any internal movements made by its tentacles. Also, all damage dealt to The Destroyer is still done on the surface of its model-texture, so you would still have to aim at particular areas, such as its eye, if you wanted to deal a critical hit. The only real advantage this glitch has is if you have a highly inaccurate gun, or explosive weapon, and want to deal flat damage to it without the chance of its tentacles getting in the way.

It is unconfirmed whether or not its eye beam attack can still hit you in this glitch.

Pertaining to Death

If you are knocked over the cliff in the back of the area, or simply jump over it of your own accord, (both of which will result in death), The Destroyer will have the same amount of health as it did before you died. This is contrary to a normal, bleed-out death, where The Destroyer will have full health once you respawn. The same situation has been reported to happen when both players die from normal, bleed-out deaths on co-op mode.

Bugs
Some players have experienced a bug that caused the Destroyer to vanish from play when the game was exited during the fight with the Destroyer. 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 destroyer in co-op.
 * Hex edit the save file. How to do so is described here:Borderlands discussion on Steampowered games

Trivia

 * The Destroyer design could be inspired by the monster at the end of Alan Moore's comic, The Watchmen.
 * Nine Inch Nails song "The Great Destroyer" talks about a person, or thing, being watched by satellites and having potential to destroy everything, called The Great Destroyer. This could be potentially be the inspiration for the destroyers name.