Hello, and welcome to the Black Desert Online beginner guide. Here you will learn how to pick your class, best way to level, how to make money, how to upgrade gear, the best gear to get when you start including how to obtain boss gear and how to use the central market. BDO can be very intimidating to get into but don't fret, with this guide you will be a BDO expert on the basics of the game in no time.
What Class Should I Choose?
Choosing a class in BDO can be difficult and a little overwhelming at first. The best way to go about picking a class is by watching class videos on YouTube to get a feel for each one; for the ones you like, take it a step further by creating a trial character to gauge player compatibility - doesn't have to be perfect, but you'll never truly know what you want until you're in it. By doing this you are giving yourself the opportunity to see how each class functions and plays. Based on what you see and how you feel about a class, should determine the outcome in your decision.
With that being said, make sure when you find the class that suits your playstyle, you stick with it. In BDO you can share armor between characters but not weapons. With weapons taking a long time to upgrade, continually switching classes will stunt your growth; selling weapons due to frequent character-swapping will also delay your progress, since selling anything on the marketplace requires a 15% tax. Once you do find what you like, you are not solely confined to one type of playstyle - if you find yourself eager to dip your toes into another class, you can do what is called tagging your character. The tag system allows you to copy your primary character's gear to any secondary character of your choosing for a fee. This way, you can play two classes instead of confining yourself to one.
Tag System
To tag your character, you will need to buy Marni's Unstable Fuel. This can be purchased from an Old Moon Manager in any major town. To find an Old Moon Manager (or any NPC), you can click on the magnifying glass at the top of your screen, located on the right side. Once the nearby NPC finder pops up you can use it to find any NPC you need. The NPC Finder is shown below.
Magnifying Glass NPC Locator
Old Moon Manager Shop
Best Way to Level?
Figuring out how to level in BDO can be difficult and at times overwhelming. Fortunately, this guide contains everything a new player could possibly need to know about leveling and progression. First things first: do the main story questline. At the start of the game, you will gain access to what is called your Black Spirit. This little shape-shifting demon will be your primary quest guide throughout your BDO journey. To open the black spirit on PC, you will need to hit the "<" key. Doing so will launch your Black Spirit menu.
Black Spirit
Once you open your Black Spirit, you will need to click on "Main Quest(R)" to see what main quests you have available to you.
Main quests will be displayed on the right. You can choose to have side quests shown using the Edit UI function shown below. Main quests will be highlighted at the top of the quest log in yellow. To access Edit UI, you need to open up your main menu by clicking escape. Edit UI also allows you to move your quest menu anywhere on the screen.
The best way to level nowadays is by completing main story quests until your character reaches level 56. Questing gives you good beginner gear and also good recourses to adequately prepare you for your BDO journey. The best way to level up - if available - is by creating a season character. Season characters can access season servers, aka servers designed to specifically focus on character growth. Season servers offer a variety of quality rewards for new and returning players, along with specific season character gear called tuvala gear. Tuvala gear is easier to upgrade than regular gear. Once you get tuvala gear to max level (which is pen) it becomes equivalent to real Tet boss gear. Gear in BDO has level brackets which go from base to +15. Then once your gear is +15, the levels are then pri, duo, tri, tet and pen. Once you have completed the main storyline and reached level 56, you can start grinding at places that compliment your gear score. You can find the right grind spot for you by clicking here. Season server offers a season pass for 20$ that gives you extra rewards for completing certain main story quests. It is highly recommended for new players.
Season Pass
How Can I Make Money?
Making money in BDO can be hard at first when just getting into the game but in time making money becomes nice and easy. The easiest way to make money off the bat is to do main story quests. Although main story quest's aren't great for money they get you up and running to build a foundation with. After you get to level 56 go to the Grinding Guide here to find your best options of obtaining wealth. You can also make a lot of money life skilling. Life skilling is super complex and I have never done life skilling myself. I highly recommend if you want to learn about life skilling you look up a guy named Blade Boques on YouTube. He has every life skill guide you could ever need. You can find his channel by clicking here.
BDO can be very intimidating at first when you realize upgrading gear is based on RNG. The good thing is if you don't want to gamble your upgrades in BDO you don't have to. The best option to safely make gains in BDO is saving up silver and buying gear from the central market. Buying gear seems like it would take long right? Recently BDO made some great updates that made grinding super efficient for making silver. The newly added zones have made it possible to make 10's to 100's of millions of silver per hour. You can always upgrade and take risks. When you do however make sure you are ok with potentially loosing or degrading the item. It always helps when upgrading gear if you have backup gear to fill the slots you potentially loose. This way if you do loose the item your current gear will stay the same.
How Can Enhance My BDO Experience
How Do I Upgrade Gear?
Upgrading gear in BDO is super confusing at first and without a guide it's almost impossible to figure it out on your own. The most basic way of explaining how to upgrade gear is by explaining fail stacking. Fail stacking is a way to build up enhancement chance to increase your chances of upgrading gear. The best way to build fail stacks is to use reblath gear. Reblath can be purchased from the black smith in Velia. You want to get one piece of reblath to +14. The reason for this is when you build fail stacks the higher the level the gear is the less chance of it succeeding it has. +14 to +15 has the lowest chance of success providing you with the best chance of boosting your fail stack higher. If your reblath hits +15 you will need to take it to the priest of the town to cleanse it for only 100k silver, this will take the reblath back to +14 so you can continue building stacks. You can only hold one fail stack per character. You will want to create multiple characters for fail stacking you will only need to get them to level 7.
Each piece of gear weather that is boss gear or accessories has a percent chance of success based on how large the fail stack is. The higher level the piece of gear is you have the less percent chance of success it will have based on the stack. For example a base ogre ring to hit pri with a 25 stack has a 75% chance of success. But a pri ogre ring with a 40 stack only has a 50% chance of success. Make sure you are comfortable with the stack and the percent chance of success rate it has.
Last but not least armor and weapons if failed when enhancing will downgrade a level if the gear has reached pri. Armor and weapons from base to +15 cannot degrade. Be warned if you enhance jewelry and if fails it will not downgrade it will blow up and you will loose it forever. Be careful when enhancing never go for an accessory upgrade without having a backup you never want to make negative gains in BDO.
Below you can watch a short video on how building fail stacks is done with reblath.
How To Build Failstacks
What is the Best Gear for Me?
The best gear to get at the start is quest gear. Once you reach level 56 you can get what is called oasis gear. Oasis gear is basically free tri boss gear that cannot be upgraded. This gear will help you a ton for when you hit level 56 providing you with a huge boost of progress that will allow you go go and grind Polly's which is the best grind spot for new players. How to obtain Oasis gear can be found in the video below.
The Polly guide can be found here. For jewelry you want to start with your neck as it gives you the most Ap out of any accessory. I recommend getting all of your jewelry to tri and all of your armor and weapons to tet first. Once this is accomplished you can work on tet accessories. Try to focus on a tet necklace as your first tet accessorie as it gives you the most power. If you are making a seasonal gear still get the oasis gear once you are levle 56 but after that focus on levelling up Tuvala gear as it is much easier to upgrade than boss armor.
How Can I Obtain Boss Gear?
Boss gear can be obtained from world bosses that spawn all throughout the world of BDO. World boss timers can be found here. You can also purchase boss gear for 100 mill a piece from the central market but I advice going to world bosses first and getting full pen tuvala gear before you start spending money on boss gear. The world boss guide can be found here.
How to Use the Marketplace
The central market aka marketplace is where you will post everything you would like to sell. The marketplace will also be where you buy the things you need. The marketplace is crucial for making money. Make sure before you sell anything you purchace a value pack. There is a 45% marketplace tax so everything you sell will be taxed heavily. Having a value pack reduces the tax penelty by 30% so the tax rate then becomes 15%. A video down below shows you how you can find the marketplace. You can either purchase a value pack in three ways one being buying one with real money from the pearl shop. Two being pre ordering one from the central market which will take a while for you to get. Or finally you can purchase it with loyalites. You get 100 loyalties everyday. If you save up 1500 loyalties you can purchase a 1 day value pack. So if you are tight on money and you need to sell stuff save up loyalites for 15 days and on the 15th day buy the 1 day value pack and sell what you need that day.
How To Use The Marketplace
Oasis Gear