Month: February 2018

As I’ve said before I’m not a big fan of chance-based crafting or gear upgrading in MMOs in general. I don’t get a rush by pressing that button and hoping for the desired outcome, at least not a positive one. It agitates me more than anything.

Many players argue that “it’s just mathematics, man” and that I only need to calculate how much upgrading all my gear will cost on average. That’s not quite accurate though, is it? After all I won’t upgrade hundreds or thousands of items, so chances of it all evening out over time are pretty slim. I’d rather have higher but fixed costs for each step, so I’d always know that investing X will get me Y.

That being said, BDO’s system (called ‘enchanting’) isn’t nearly as punishing as for example ArcheAge’s, at least in terms of upgrading weapons and armor. These items can’t be destroyed by failing an upgrade, and falling back a tier can only occur from trying to hit enchantment level 18 (of 20) onward.

The game is also very generous with login-rewards, limited time events and such. Even if I hadn’t done anything other than logging in once per day and maybe doing a quick quest or two for the last couple of months I’d have quite a stash of silver and upgrade materials by now.

This all combined with the fact that I really want to experience everything this wonderful game has to offer meant that I couldn’t (and didn’t need to) ignore this part of it for too long.

To prevent making costly mistakes I tried to learn as much as I could beforehand. This video is the most sensible and comprehensible guide I’ve found, it helped me a ton. The author has made some more guides about other aspects of BDO which are equally good. Thanks man!

Since I weren’t keen on having to start over a couple of times I wanted to pick the ‘best’ items to enchant right away. Based on Morrolan’s and some other guides I decided that I’d go for a Liverto Gauntlet, a Leather Vambrace and three pieces of the Heve armor set plus the gloves I was already wearing. I would enchant and wear all of these until I got pieces of boss gear (which are all Best in Slot, but rare and expensive).

I didn’t actually have to wait until I got lucky and looted the pieces I wanted off mobs. Not only is most gear in BDO tradable, it’s auction house works with a fixed-price system. Every item has a minimum and a maximum price. They fluctuate a bit, but not by orders of magnitude. So even if an item is sought after and the supply can’t meet the demand sellers can’t charge ridiculous amounts of silver for it. Hence I could just buy the items I didn’t have yet off the market, and it didn’t cost me a fortune. Not the most satisfying way to get one’s gear, but at least I know someone else pried them from the cold dead hands of some monster.

Then I was finally ready to start enchanting. Here’s the datamined and considered-to-be-accurate chart of success chances:

A failstack is generated when an attempt to enchant an item fails. As you can see, those stacks are an immensely important part of the process if you don’t want to fail too often. The chances for success go up again from +15 to +16 (called PRI ingame) because from then on you need more expensive upgrade materials, the item loses more maximum durability with each failure (which has to be repaired by either consuming copies of the same item or using a considerable amount of a relatively expensive special item), and above DUO you fall back one tier when you fail.

What this means is that you have to do a delicate dance of building failstacks on cheaper items and only working on expensive ones when you are relatively close to the maximum number of effective stacks for the level you’re trying to reach. A successful attempt consumes all failstacks of course.

Getting items to about +11 is easy enough, after that you start to feel the chance of success dropping off considerably. I kept at it though, and before long I had reached +14 on my gauntlet, the most important but also most expensive piece of my ensemble.

I decided to build 20 failstacks before trying to hit +15. This would give me a measly 12,5% chance of success to begin with, but it’s generally not recommended to start at the effective maximum because the additional failstacks from failing a couple of times would be kind of wasted. The first five failures would give me another failstack (and thus 0,5% more success chance) each, then I’d give it another 3-5 tries at max effective stacks (while still building more total stacks). Barring success I’d then save that high amount of stacks for a later try at higher levels and switch to another character.

This was the plan. On the very first attempt though…

This, of course, is why many people seem to like these chance-based systems. It sure feels nice to hit the jackpot once in a while. I know that by hitting +15 right away my gauntlet’s value has increased by much more than it has cost me to get there.

Thusly motivated I continued to enchant my other pieces as well and even dared going for PRI and DUO on gauntlet and vambrace after a while. I had mixed results, but got there. Some levels needed numbers of attempts above average, some below. Overall I believe I’ve been neither especially lucky nor unlucky.

Then some unforseen things happened. A couple patches ago the set bonuses for the also very popular Grunil armor set were changed, making using two of those instead of Heve the superior choice for me. I didn’t fancy having to start over enchanting though, so I bought Grunil helmet and gloves already at +15, and sold my corresponding Heve pieces at +14. Because of the fixed prices it wasn’t much of a loss in terms of silver, if at all. I also got a pretty good chest piece by questing, so I also sold my +15 Heve chest, having lost the set bonus anyway.

The accessories I’m wearing are a different story. Those are looted off mobs (except for the belt, which is quested like the chest) and neither tradable nor enchantable. For where I’m at in the game right now they’re pretty solid, I’ll use those for a while I guess. Farming them was actually quite fun, killing mobs until they dropped just like in the old days.

At the moment I’m quite content with the whole system. I’ll continue upgrading by getting the other armor pieces to DUO next. When (or if) I can muster the courage to do an attempt for TRI though…we’ll see.

I’m still playing the heck out of Black Desert Online. I’m very happy to have found a game that lets me play it just the way I want – even when I want to play it completely differently from one day to the next. It really feels more like a virtual world to me than any other game I’ve played, which makes it so much more than the sum of its parts (of which there are many to boot).

Some play sessions I dedicated to following the main quest lines with the Striker. At first I had to do some backtracking because the quests led me to areas I had already visited while leveling. This wasn’t bad though, since there was still much to discover.

A village called Trent, which I had visited before, all but drowned due to the most pouring and realistic looking rain I have ever seen in a game.

Of course I had to kill hundreds of mobs for the various quests, so I snatched quite a bit of loot. I replaced all my accessories during the last couple of weeks and even got some pretty good armor pieces. The Striker doesn’t need the latter anymore, but any future alts I might play will start pretty well equipped (no level requirements for any kind of gear in this game and no bind-on-pickup or bind-on-equip either).

I even looted some boss scrolls. I guess I was quite lucky since I got three in the course of just two days. From what I’ve heard they are pretty rare. Two were for the goblin boss Giath, whom I hadn’t fought before.

The helmet he’s wearing is actually the piece of boss loot he can drop, imaginatively called Giath’s Helmet. No luck with that though.

I also got to explore a completely new region, Mediah. I think it’s supposed to look and feel mediterranean, and it kind of does I guess.

In any case, I quite like it.

The largest town of the area is Altinova.

It’s nice, I won’t set up shop there though. I feel more at home in the medieval ambience of Heidel or Calpheon.

A couple days ago I hit level 56, which means that I gained access to the ‘awakening’ of the character. I did the requisite quest chain and now have a second mainhand-weapon, a monstrosity called ‘Gardbrace’.

A whole bunch of new skills are also available to me now, though I haven’t taken a closer look at them yet.

Of course I also wanted to continue with crafting, gathering and farming, so I didn’t only play the Striker. I’d estimate the Witch got about a third of my total playtime.

In addition to the mainstays beer brewing, carrot farming and meat acquisition I explored some new ventures here too. I had read that Olvia is a great place for Alchemy, so I went back there after quite a while of absence. Indeed there are a lot of Alchemy quests on offer, but there’s more. I also found some quick and easy cooking dailies, and most importantly lots and lots of gathering quests. Those are really great because not only do they give a good chunk of extra gathering XP, when finished I get to keep everything that I had to gather for them, incidentally supplying some of the materials for the cooking and Alchemy quests.

Oh, and I learned how to milk cows. I kid you not.

I also researched a bit more about workers. I had already noticed that they come in different tiers of quality. What I didn’t know was that lower tier workers can take a promotion test every ten levels (level 30 is the maximum, so no more than three tries per tier). If he passes the test he gets promoted by one tier and resets to level one. Since levels 20 to 30 take considerably longer it is recommended to level workers to 20, then have them try the promotion test twice, and fire them if they fail both. Only one worker can take the test at a time, and it takes 24 real time hours whether logged in or not.

I’m really happy about how progression is handled in this game. There are countless ways to progress, so many XP bars to fill and stuff to level and/or tier up. What’s great about it: the ceiling for most things is so high that even hardcore players won’t reach it anytime soon, yet nothing is useless or worthless even at the lowest levels. There are so many MMOs where, once a couple of weeks have passed after the game’s release, you have to grind your way to the top before you can do anything substantial, anything of value. It’s so much more satisfying to be able to do useful stuff from the beginning while knowing that you will get continually better and better for a very long time.

Lastly I finally managed to tame a tier 5 female horse, which means that I now have horses of both genders at the highest tier to be found in the wild. I will train them to at least level 25 each and then do a breeding attempt. A breeding calculator I found claims that there will be a chance, albeit small, for a tier 8 horse, which is the maximum tier as of now. Fingers crossed!

It’s already a big upgrade as it is though, because the female has learned the skill Sprint while leveling, which my other horses didn’t. As the name implies it makes a horse run faster. A LOT faster. It’s level 10 now and runs much faster than my level 23 male without Sprint. Imagining a tier 8 horse with this skill…hell yeah!

I’m sure I forgot some odds and ends, but these were my last couple of weeks in BDO in a nutshell. I’m lovin’ it!