Buzzard

Buzzard
Title	Combat aircraft
Crew	1 Pilot + 2 Airborne Marauders
Faction	Bandit (faction)
Game(s)	Borderlands 2
Appearances	Borderlands 2

A buzzard is a Bandit aircraft featured in Borderlands 2. They are prominently featured in The Dust, Tundra Express and Sawtooth Cauldron.

Buzzards are also used by the Slabs gang, and their buzzards are featured in several storyline missions.

Badass Buzzards can also be fought less commonly. They are more armoured than their regular counterparts and can launch even more volleys of rockets. They may be found around the Buzzard Academy in Tundra Express, should a player use the alarm switch; outside of this, they may be encountered anywhere waves of Buzzards spawn if multiple players are present. They can also be found in True Vault Hunter Mode.

Strategy

The buzzard can directly attack using machine guns or missiles. It can also drop two Airborne Marauders to the ground. The weak points of the buzzard are its pilot and its engines. Shooting these areas with a Corrosive weapon can deal massive damage (despite the pilots being ordinary-looking Marauders, they count as armored and are vulnerable to corrosive damage, not fire). While the buzzard is very mobile, it quite often stops and exposes the cockpit to the player's firing line, usually in an attempt to line up a shot during an attack run.

Aside from the rocket barrage (which is relatively easy to seek cover from) Buzzards are not particularly deadly, but their mobility can make it harder to find cover from them than from land-bound enemies, resulting in a harder time recharging shields and a gradual whittling away of the player's health, as well as the extra Marauders entering the fray. They are much less durable than other armored vehicles, and their weak points are relatively large; even a Badass Buzzard can take fewer body hits than a Bandit Technical, and critical hits will bring them down even faster.

If a Buzzard has not yet dropped its Airborne Marauders, they can be killed separately from the main craft, commonly by explosive weapons. The pilots are not independent entities - shooting them applies (critical) damage to the Buzzard.

Quotes

Normal

• Tora! Tora! Tora! (reference to the code phrase used by the Japanese during their attack on Pearl Harbor, and the movie)
• Air superiority!
• [singing Ride of the Valkyries]
• Death from above!
• Fear the skies!
• You can't escape the eye of the sky

Notes

• Buzzards never have shields.
• It was revealed on February 21, 2012, in the Borderlands 2 Launch Date Trailer.
• The Slabs gang has a version that deploys ammo and health on the field. It has a white beacon on the bottom of the aircraft.

Media

2012-10-28 00001.jpg

A Slab Buzzard Picking up Cargo