How can I beat Terramorphous the Invincible?

The intent of Terramorphous is to be a raid boss, something you bring 4 players along to fight at once. It's possible to beat him with a coordinated team, good equipment, proper skills and tactics (or a reasonable combination of the above), but there's a super cheap slightly helpful way to beat him even solo, too.

The Cheap Way

With The Bee shield and the Conference Call shotgun, Terra is trivial. The Bee adds 40k-50k extra damage per bullet, meaning any good shotgun can do over 500k damage to Terra in one shot. The Conference Call shotgun is optional, but shotguns are best for this method, and the Conference Call is ideal.

The Bee has been significantly nerfed in a recent patch (actually all Amp Shields were) so the amp damage no longer applies to each bullet from multiple bullet weapons (shotguns); instead the damage is split across all projectiles. This means shotguns went from insanely broken with The Bee to being only minorly boosted. Instead try a high Rate of Fire weapon that shoots single bullets per shot (or that fires pellets so close all of them will hit).

You can get The Bee from Hunter Hellquist.

Rapid Fire guns like SMGs work very well. If you can boost shield recharge rate at all, do it; you'll want your shield charged as often as possible, the Bee only kicks in at max shield.

Killing Terra is much harder than it used to be with The Bee but it's still a relatively quick way to do it. The more the merrier though; a team is now almost required so see the tips below rather than hoping on soloing him.

Tips for doing it the right way

Like the mission description says, You Will Die. Even if you take the cheap route, this boss can kill you with a flick of his wrist (tentacle).

Be level 50/max level

This should go without saying, but it's vital. Terra will always spawn at level 50-52. You deal decreased damage to targets higher level than you, so even if you have The Bee and amazing weapons, your damage will be drastically reduced if you're level 45 and Terra is level 52. Save this fight for after your second playthrough to save yourself a lot of grief.

Communicate

Everyone should use headsets if possible. You don't have time to type (don't try, you'll get killed and piss everyone off), use headsets or just play in silence. Coordination is key for doing things live reviving allies

Respec your skills

Lots of skills are useless in this fight. Kill skills aren't great (but you will have tentacles to kill), anything that requires multiple kills isn't great. Elemental damage isn't helpful. Abilities that benefit your team over yourself are often helpful, like the ability that turns Phaselock into an instant revive. Note that no part of Terra can be phaselocked, so keep Phaselock for Revives. Use Decepti0n to trick Terra while reviving allies.

Hug the wall

There's a cliff face on one side of the arena; all players should gun this wall unless running from an attack or grabbing ammo/health (tentacles drop a lot). Spread out a bit so he can't kill you all at the same time. Standing high on the outcropping near the wall will avoid Terra's direct attacks. There's also a little niche where one player can hide from some tentacle attacks. If you don't hug the cliff, Terra's knockback can often knock you off the edge of the arena for an instant kill.

Manage your respawning

Like Crawmerax before him, Terra has a slow elevator leading up to him. After being used it takes a minute or two (seriously, not "a few seconds" or "a little bit") to shoot all the way up. If two players die, make sure you both get on the elevator at once or one of you will be waiting a long time to get back in.

Get back in the fight as soon as possible though, as soon as no single player is alive (or in Fight For Your Life) in Terra's arena, his health resets to max. Be quick but be reasonable; if another player is about to die, wait a couple seconds for them to spawn and use the elevator together. Buy ammo if absolutely necessary, but remember his tentacles drop lots of ammo anyway.

Elements

Terramorphous is occasionally elementally charged and will resist the element he shows up as; I've seen him as Shock and Fire, not Corrosive yet but I'm not sure. It's best to not bother with elemental guns, he doesn't appear to take Damage Over Time damage and doesn't seem especially weak to anything. Sirens should spec away from elemental damage.

Terramorphous can occasionally be slagged but he usually resists it. When he's slagged it lasts for about one second instead of 8, so don't bother unless your best gun is already slag.

Guns

Obviously use your best guns. Don't use elemental guns hoping they'll do DOT, but he does seem to take elemental damage normally. There's no particularly fancy strategy here, put a lot of very big bullets into him. Bring different kinds of guns or you'll run out of ammo. Bring at least one long range gun for the tentacles.

Being a Thresher Terra moves a lot and has many relatively small crit spots, so sniping can be trickier, but due to his bulk his crit spots aren't too small.

Wound tentacles, don't kill them unless you need to

The tentacles he spawns can be annoying, but they're great for Second Winds. Generally it's best to just wound them or ignore them, depending on type, and use them for a Second Wind if someone is knocked out. Hurting tentacles hurts Terra, too, but unless you're sniping you're likely to miss the tentacle a lot more than Terra itself.

Note tentacles drop lots of health and ammo though, so kill some just to keep everyone full of ammo.

Loot

Terra drops a lot of whites and greens, a few blues, a couple purples and always drops one orange class mod (it's not as good as you might hope), and apparently has a chance to drop other orange weapons.

Unlike Warrior, Terra drops all his loot in a tight circle around where he dies. There's pretty much zero chance his loot will fall off the map or be stuck in his body, making the looting much less frustrating than Warrior or BNK3R. You can also see all of the items at once, so there's less risk of ninja-looting ("oranges? There's no orange guns over here....")

Comparison to Crawmerax

I'd say Terra is easier than Crawmerax, even ignoring The Bee trick, and certainly less frustrating to fight. His tentacles will rarely kill you unless you fail to evade, as opposed to Craw Maggots which would zip in, kill you, and flee out of range. Getting second winds is easier, and you don't have to worry as much about elemental matches with the minions. The lack of specific weakpoints you have to kill, one by one means it's much easier to hurt Terra; just shoot in his general direction. He soaks up a lot more damage, but it's much easier to hit him.

If player respawns are spread out, getting back into the fight isn't quite as long or annoying as the infamous Crawmerax elevator. And he doesn't drop 50 %$^&ing equalizers every time he does. Generally he's still extremely hard like Crawmerax, but not frustrating. The only annoying "Crawmerax" thing Terra retains is the instant-kill attacks and knocking players off the map (instant kill without a chance to revive!).

My wife (Commando) and I (Siren) managed to take Terramorphous down today, so I'll share our strategy.

First of all, it appears that despite the level cap increase, Terramorphous has not had his maximum level increased. We were both level 53, and on playthrough 1 Terra spawned at level 52. This likely made things much easier for us.

We both brought Kittens from the Campaign of Carnage DLC, and they proved essential. The life-on-hit kept us alive a lot longer than we would have been otherwise. Mine had a fire elemental, and hers had Shock. They were both level 53, and the damage per shot was astronomical. It fires a pattern of 3 rounds, but only costs a single bullet.

Other than that, I stacked shield boosting abilities, and she stacked fight for your life time and health. She also had maxed out Grit and 2 turrets with shields. We opened the golden key box a few times and came away with an adaptive shield with 50% elemental resist for her. Other than that, we had mostly purples and no farmed orange/legendary items.

Our overall strategy was:

• I crouched behind the rock that is in one corner of the arena, outside of the grassy area and near the rock wall. From here, I shot tentacles and Terra whenever the opportunity presented itself. Keeping pressed up against this rock kept me safe for the occasional revive, and tended to keep me from being knocked back.
• She tanked on the ramp that leads to the exit door (the one that is closed until Terra dies), throwing her sentries as far out as she could. This kept Terra from getting in too close, and absorbed at least some percentage of the damage that he was dishing out.

We killed tentacles with impunity, and ran out to grab ammo between waves.

Terra can take on the abilities of other threshers, but the most problematic ones were:

• Black hole. The commando turret shield seemed to block the effect of this on anyone sitting on the other side of it, which was essential. There was no way to survive this if you got caught in it, that we could tell. We dealt damage as fast as we could, hid behind the only rock available, etc. If everyone goes down at this point, it's unlikely that you'll be able to get a tentacle kill before fight for your life runs out.
• Fire. My Kitten couldn't do damage to him while he was on fire, which also meant that I wasn't regenerating health. Without the high damage output of the Kitten, I also had a tough time dealing damage to the tentacles, so reviving myself was tricky. Fire is an unfortunate element to have on your most powerful weapon in this fight, sadly.

It took us a few tries (mainly because of the black hole and from getting knocked completely off) but we managed to kill him.

One thing I'll note is that the "elevator" to get back into the arena is optional - it just cuts the time it takes you to get back in. You can run back to the entrance to the lair and back to the grate without using it, if you so wish.

The best way after the stupid Bee Shield nerf is to carry a corrosive infinity pistol (Dr. Mercy at true vault hunter mode), and a fire infinity pistol, and the Bee Shield with the most amp damage, and hipfire (unless you're Zero wih the skill that grants +20% critical damage for zooming in your scope) Terramorphous in his eyes until he dies. The different infinity pistols are for when Terramorphous elementaly charges. I recommend heavily the Gunzerker with 2 infinity pistols, and the Bee Shield, and 4 people all doing the same thing. Also most important, kill his tenticals first because it takes little to kill you, and you against four is not an easy task. I've done this many times, and never died after the Bee Shield nerf.