Most game wiki sites avoid telling you what they don’t know. We think that is the wrong move — for trust, and for the kind of long-term project we want BL4 Tools to be. So this post is a list of things our site deliberately does not do in V1, why we made each call, and when we expect to revisit.
We are an unofficial fan site, and this list is current as of Patch 1.4 (2026-04-22).
We do not publish precise DPS numbers
You will not find a “this gun does 142,883 DPS at level 50 on a flesh enemy under Mayhem 3” table on BL4 Tools. There are several reasons.
The biggest one is that BL4 has not published its damage formula, and no decompile or memory inspection has produced a clean formula either. The community has best-fit numbers — usually within 8-15 percent of observed behavior, but with known edge cases. Anything more precise than that is fiction dressed up as math.
What we do publish, where it is useful:
- Relative damage rankings (“higher than X, lower than Y”) with the sample size we used
- Weapon archetype guidance (“crit-focused snipers outperform body-damage snipers in this fight, by a wide margin”)
- Community-fitted approximations, marked clearly as community-fitted, with a link to the methodology post
If you want a six-decimal-place DPS number, BL4 Tools is not the site for you in V1. We would rather say “we don’t know” than make one up.
We do not scrape logged-in content
Some BL4 data lives behind a 2K account login — leaderboards, certain seasonal challenge data, a few of the social systems. We do not scrape any of it. We do not use cached cookies, account-share scripts, or any of the other gray-area moves that are common in this niche.
This costs us coverage. Some sites have dynamic leaderboard pages because they are scraping logged-in data. We do not. If 2K opens an official endpoint, we will use that. Until then, we are content sitting that one out.
Weapon data is community-sourced and we say so
Every weapon page on BL4 Tools that has a drop rate, drop location, or rarity number cites where the number came from. Usually that is one or more of:
- A pinned Reddit thread (we link to the thread, not just the subreddit)
- A Steam community discussion (we link to the discussion, not just the game’s hub)
- A YouTube creator’s video where we can verify the timestamp
When the sample size is small (under 100 confirmed kills/drops), we mark the page needs verification and we leave the badge up until we can re-confirm. We never silently round up “8 confirmed drops” to “around 15 percent” — the page will say “8 confirmed drops” and let you do the math.
This is not because we don’t want clean numbers. It is because we have read too many guides that confidently cite “12.3 percent drop rate” and trace the citation to nothing. We would rather be honest about the data we have.
We do not auto-generate combo permutation pages
Some BL4 sites have pages like “best [weapon] for [boss] on [Vault Hunter]” generated for every combination of every variable. There are tens of thousands of these per site. Most of them are template-filled and not actually useful.
We have considered building this kind of matrix and decided against it for V1. We would rather have 200 manually-tested pages than 10,000 templated ones. If you want to compare a specific build against a specific encounter, our Build Planner lets you do that interactively. If we ever do build matrix pages, we will say in the post why and how.
We do not write builds we have not personally tested
Every build on BL4 Tools has been played by at least one person on our team to at least mid-game. If a build is theoretically strong but we have not tested it, we leave it out. We know this is slow. It is also why our build pages have screenshots from real saves and not stock art.
We are not a leaks site
We do not publish unconfirmed datamines, unreleased weapons, unannounced characters, or anything similar. Even if we have access to the data, we sit on it until Gearbox confirms or releases it. This is partly principle (it ruins the game for people who don’t want to be spoiled) and partly practical (datamines are wrong constantly).
What we will revisit
This list is V1. Each item below has a trigger condition that would change our position:
- Precise DPS formulas: if Gearbox publishes a damage spec, or the community converges on a formula that is within 2 percent of observed across 10+ conditions, we will publish them.
- Logged-in data: if 2K opens an API or partner program, we will integrate it.
- Combo matrix pages: if we hit traffic / scale where it makes sense and we have a template that is genuinely useful (not template-spam), we will build it.
We will write a follow-up post called “Honest limits V2” the next time anything in this list changes. That post will include before-and-after on what we changed, why, and what we learned.
That is V1. Thanks for reading.