BDO Beginner Gear Progression Guide with Build Template
This BDO Beginner Guide gives you a starting gear template and path to follow as a new player, and that will help segway you towards farming your top end gear! Knowing what gear to get and what to prioritize as a new player in Black Desert Online can be confusing, but hopefully this guide gives you some good direction and explains what gear you should be aiming to get as a new player in BDO! Just a quick disclaimer before we get into the guide though, this is all just my opinion! Everyone has a different opinion on how to gear in BDO and what order upgrades should be obtained in. Just recently going through this process myself, this is the order that I found worked best!
The first step is to do the beginner quest at least through Altinova to get your Naru gear and the beginner blackstones from questing. You’ll use those to upgrade your Naru pieces to Pen rating. After that, go to Fughar (who can be located at any town’s stables), and grab the quests from him which allow you to exchange the Pen Naru gear for Narchillian gear (note this gear is once per family!), which is essentially like Tri.5 gear! Also do note that the Awakening Naru weapon doesnt need to be upgraded to Pen and can just be exchanged to Fughar at its base form. You only want to get the Narchillian for Weapons & Armor; accessories will be discussed next!
In terms of accessories, these will be obtained through the level up rewards from 58-61, which will reward the Capotia Ring, Capotia Earring, Capotia Belt and Capotia Necklace!
This will leave you with 1 open ring slot, and 1 open earring. For these, there are free accessories you can get from certain questlines later in the game. The Red Sand Crysal Ring comes from the Valencia main quest line, and the Forest’s Eye Earring comes from the Kamasylvia Main quest line. If you click “O” and navigate to the main tab, you’ll be able to do the Light of Kamasylve questline which requires you to be level 58+, and once you are level 56+ you’ll be able to do the Eastern Sands Kingdom (Valencia) story quest line. As long as you did the main quest line from the black spirit to actually get the Narchillian gear, you should have any prerequisities to do these quest lines. While doing the Kamasylvia and Valencia quest lines, you’ll earn Free Magical Black Stones and Freed Magical Black Shards. These will be used to upgrade this ring and earring to Tri rank via the enhancement system. Thankfully, enhancement level doesnt drop when this upgrade failes and the accessories don’t get destroyed. So once they’re successfully upgraded to Tri using the Freed Magical Blackstones, simply take them to a blacksmith and use the Shards in order to repair any durability lost was lost on failed enhancements.
In terms of what crystals you should put in this gear, I highly recommend putting Black Magic Crystal – Precision’s in your weapons, as these grant 8 accuracy and and 10% ignore all resistance each, and put Magic Crystal of Infinity – Critical Hit in your off hand for bonus critical hit damage. Past these crystals, what you put in your gear is totally up to you but I can make some recommendations. If you’re going for a setup that is capable of PvPing, I recommend the following:
- Helmet: Black Magic Crystal – Intimidation
- Armor: Magic Crystal of Infinity – Special Evasion
- Boots: Ancient Magic Crystal of Nature – Adamantine
- Gloves: Black Magic Crystal – Valor
For a pure PvE setup
- Helmet: Ancient Magic Crystal – Harphia
- Armor: Ancient Magic Crystal – Cobelinus
- Boots: Ancient Magic Crystal – Hystria
- Gloves: Black Magic Crystal – Precision
At this point, your gear will look something like this.
At this point, your account will be in a pretty solid spot to start tackling the mid parts of the game! After this though, I’m sure many of you will have the question of “what should I get next?”. Now this answer will vary heavily based on who you talk to, but, I do have a couple of recommendations to get you started after you get this initial gear setup.
One thing to also note though before I discuss these upgrades, because I’m going to start with the weapons, is that 30% of your opposite’s weapon AP transfers over to your skills. For example as succession, even though you don’t use your awakening weapon, 30% of it’s AP effects your succession skills. Now to actually discuss the upgrades, first I highly recommend if you’re an awakening class upgrading your Narchillian Awakening weapon to a TET Dande weapon for your class, followed by upgrading your main & sub weapon to a TET Kzarka and TET Kutum respectively. Your weapons are some of your most impactful pieces of gear in terms of stats at this point, so it’s important to upgrade these! If you’re succession, you’ll instead just want to do your Main and Sub weapon to TET first, grabbing Kzarka for the mainhand and Kutum for the sub weapon; I wouldnt worry about upgrading your awakening weapon at the moment for succ, you can easily get away using the awakening Narchillian weapon for a long time since we are just using it for the % AP. The reason I personally recommend TET Kzarka and TET Kutum as the main and sub weapon because I think they’re great for general play and will suit most people’s needs!
Once you have those weapons upgraded, I HIGHLY recommend grabbing yourself a pair of TET urugon’s boots. The reason being is that these boots give a ton of damage reduction, while the narchillian boots lean more towards evasion. Evasion needs to hit certain threshholds to actually be useful, and that doesnt come til the way way later stages of the game when your gear is basically full PEN. So you’ll get a lot more mileage out of the TET urugon’s boots in terms of defense than the Narchillian pieces.
At this point, your gear will look something like this.
After that, where you go from there is up to you. Again, people have varying opinions on the order in which things should be progressed. My personal recommendation is to upgrade on of your quest accessories, either the Forest’s Eye Earring or the Red Sand Crystal Ring to something else that gives you at least a 2 AP gain, as you’ll be really close to an AP bracket on your main weapon, and you should be able to grab a 2 AP gain pretty cheaply. You could also potentially use Caphras stones to upgrade your Kzarka weapon to C2, which will give you those 2 bonus AP to hit that bracket.
Speaking of Caphras, something to keep in mind: If throughout this entire gearing process, you notice you’re only 1 or 2 DP/AP away from a DP/AP bracket, I highly recommend putting some caphras into your gear, but only with TET or PEN gear. With TET gear specifically, I’d go no higher than C3 or C4, as anything past that is way overkill in terms of silver cost for a TET piece.
At this point, I’d personally recommend upgrading the rest of your Narchillian pieces to TET boss armor pieces, focusing on Griffon’s/Dim Tree/Bheg’s for the damage reduction. You can then upgrade your accessories to TET accessories, such as the Basilisk’s Belt, 2x Ring of the Crescent Guardian, Ogre Ring necklace, and either 2 Distortion Earrings or 1 distortion earring and 1 Narc Ear Accessory (if you don’t want to lose any DP). I would also upgrade the accessories in the order that they’re listed in the previous sentence.
With your full TET gear now achieved, you’ll be looking like this.
At that point, you’ll be able to add caphras to your tet gear up to c3 or c4 like I mentioned earlier, and then you can start moving up to PEN enhanced equipment and better crystals, and that’s where the build paths start to diverge a ton. But, once you’re at the point that you’re ready for PEN equipment, you’ll most likely have a better handle on BDO and already know what you’re looking to do!
