You’d think it’d take a while for the community of a game with 87 bazillion guns to determine the best one. But players of the loot-shooter Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (fact check: out for less than two weeks) have already crowned a reigning champ: a legendary-tiered pistol called Liquid Cooling.
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Update: 4/15/22: 10:55 a.m. ET: All good things must come to an end. After the latest Wonderlands hotfix, the popular Liquid Cooling legendary pistol has been nerfed. Gearbox explained in the patch notes for the latest hotfix that it had “Addressed an issue with how Liquid Cooling Damage Scaling was being calculated.” Since then, players have reported massive decreases to the popular weapon’s damage output. While the gun is still useful for certain character builds, it’s no longer the OP boss killer it once was. RIP.
Original story continues below.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands—developed by Gearbox and released, again, not even two weeks ago for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC—is a lot like the mainline series from which it spun. That series, Borderlands, is perhaps best known for being a first-person shooter with a near bottomless variety of loot, as immortalized in an infamously dubstep-heavy trailer for Borderlands 2 proclaiming an array of “870 gajillion guns.” For all intents and purposes, the sheer number of weapons in a Borderlands game is far lower than a sum so large you can’t register it on a calculator, but the series makes use of a procedural generation system to make it seem like it is. Two assault rifles that are fundamentally identical save for one that reloads 0.0001 seconds faster? Count ‘em as two different assault rifles!
Still, even accounting for and ignoring the imperceptible differences between nearly identical weapons, the inventories in these games are galactically vast. Wonderlands is no different, which means everyone is doing the dance that happens every time a new Borderlands comes out: clamoring over the current best gun in the game.
It’s been an easy debate, at least according to some fans. “So, as we all know, Liquid Cooling is the best gun in the game,” one player summed up in the headline of a semi-viral Reddit post. As Joltzdude139, the preeminent Borderlands YouTuber, put it, “Gun go BRRRRRRRR!!”
Like many legendary-tiered automatic weapons, Liquid Cooling has a phenomenal damage output and a blistering fire rate. It fires frost ammo, which slows enemies down and, if applied enough, turns them into an ice sculpture, tripling their weakness to melee damage. (Liquid Cooling pairs with the melee-focused Brr-zerker class, since you can allot skill points to increase your frost damage.) And since it’s Skuldugger-branded weapon, it deals extra melee damage and doesn’t require a reload; you can fire until it overheats, at which point you simply have to wait a few seconds for it to recharge. Or—and this is the perk that makes Liquid Cooling so ridiculously overpowered—if you land a critical hit, it’ll cooldown. So, if your aim is steady enough, you could conceivably fire Liquid Cooling forever.
You can get Liquid Cooling by heading to the Salty Saunter fast-travel point of Crackmast Cove. A bit to the east, there’s an ancient obelisk—an interactable structure that spawns a mini-boss—in a cave. That obelisk’s particular boss, Lissa, can drop Liquid Cooling when defeated.
A rarer, but still technically, possible method is to just…play. Some players claim they’ve additionally stumbled upon Liquid Cooling as a “world drop,” which means it stands a vanishingly small chance of appearing from any traditional loot sources (chests, lucky dice, defeated enemies, and such). You obviously can’t count on that, though.
Of course, there’s a catch. Some players say they’ve experienced an issue where, if you let Liquid Cooling overheat, it won’t cool down, effectively making it unusable. They say it’s a bug. (One potential workaround: Drop the weapon on the ground, have a co-op partner pick it up, then have them drop it.) It could also have something to do with Liquid Cooling’s red flavor text, “Works great until it doesn’t,” though that’s likely a reference to the weapon’s ridiculously good cooldown perk. It’s unclear if there’s an immediate fix in the works, or if Gearbox has any other planned changes—a nerf, perhaps—for the arguably overpowered gun. Representatives for the studio did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
