Category: Gaming

One of the most confusing things to me when I started playing BDO was gear. It’s still pretty confusing, so let’s look at just season+ characters and simplify things. First of all, if you’re a season character you can’t wear regular gear, so you’ll be looting gear that you can’t wear sometimes. When you’re questing, you’ll be given blue gear – Naru gear (I know technically you get white and green gear first but let’s start with Naru). You’ll see tons of people talking about ‘PEN’ – and this is a tier of enchanting. As you quest, or log in daily, or just exist, you’ll earn beginner black stone armour/weapon. You summon your black spirit dude, click enchant – and with the stones and the armour in your inventory, you use the UI to enchant the gear.

The game fools you because the first few times you do this, you’ll have 100% chance at success. Then things get hard. Now, Naru is special gear and they’ve made it even easier than regular servers, so you SHOULD be able to get all of your gear to PEN without too much difficulty. I believe that means 1-15 and then 5 levels above that to reach PEN. Needless to say it uses a ton of materials.

So once you’ve gotten your gear (ignore accessories!) to full blue naru PEN, you’ll remove it, and go talk to Fughar – type his name into search if you’re not sure where he’s at and you’ll get an auto path to him. Talking to him gives you some quests to turn in that Naru PEN gear for Tuvala gear. It’s yellow/orange, and it’s enchanted a bit to be better than the Naru you were wearing.

Your next goal is to take that Tuvala gear and enchant THAT using the supplies you’ll be collecting – ideally to PEN level before season+ ends sometime in December.

This is where the grind of the game comes into play. You’ll fail. A lot. Your items will go down in durability. You can repair this durability by exchanging tuvala ore with a blacksmith for the same slot as the item you’re trying to mend, and then using the blacksmith interface to repair the durability. When you fail an enchant you’ll go down a tier in levels on it and that sucks. Honestly, just try to get your tuvala as high as you can. When you end season+ your tuvala gear will get exchanged from season+ to regular server stuff, and you’ll be able to use it on non season characters.

Everything else? I’m ignoring for now. Sure some min/max people are out there trying to pen accessories, but we get a set after season+ so I’m just not bothering.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

In what I can only assume is an attempt to keep people from wandering over to any other new games that may have released this week (see what I did there) Pearl Abyss announced a bunch of new events that have started up – and some of them I’m pretty excited about.

Fishing for silver and gold is exactly what it sounds like. This event runs for 14 days and if you’re a fan of fishing, you can catch special fish in specific locations that are worth 500,000 silver and 10,000,000 silver respectively. I’ve been working on this one already, and made more money than I’ve ever had – granted in the bigger picture type of scenario it’s barely a drop in the bucket, but it’s really nice easy money especially if you spend your free time AFK fishing. On that same note, they have a gathering version where you can find golden insect amber in your travels.

The mysterious knight might show up while you’re adventuring, and if you see this NPC you should hail him and claim the 300% experience buff that he’s offering. There’s also daily attendance rewards, the loyalty event where you should check out the loyalty shop each day to get items for only 100 points, and of course the season+ pass event. There’s a legendary giveaway where if you manage to get PEN on three of your tuvala items you’ll be automatically entered into a draw for a legendary account upgrade, and if you have never played Black Desert Online before but you want a free copy of the game, you can sign up for a 14 day trial, get to 50 (it takes no time at all) and next maintenance it will auto upgrade to a full account.

Honestly? This is exactly the sort of stuff that keeps me playing. Like a lot of gamers, I love loot boxes, I love free things, and I love events. They may not be your thing, and that’s perfectly alright, but for me they bring around good feelings and happiness – which is something that I want to see more of in gaming. For now? It’s back to fishing.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Of course if you’re not already confused by Black Desert Online, there are a ton of other systems in the game that can help you out with that. Now that I’ve gotten a handle on combat, questing, AFK fishing, AFK training, and pets – next up is to figure out what butlers, maids, and fairy are for. I’ve actually unlocked one butler, one maid, and I have a fairy in my inventory but I have absolutely NO idea what they’re for, or how they work. I keep seeing people mention that I should feed my green gear chests to my fairy, but I don’t have an actual physical one yet that I can tell. Mousing over the fairy object says I should take it to some tree and use it there, whatever that means. It’s one of the things I want to figure out before too long. I think I can send my maids / butlers on tasks to .. do .. well, I have no idea what. Something useful? Maybe. Hopefully?

In the meantime I’ve just been AFK grinding my way to level 60. Real life has been incredibly rough and I haven’t managed to find any time to actually play. By the time I have a few moments in the evening I’m just too tired to even think. I’ve been trying to keep up on some cross stitch projects I have going, getting a few rows of knitting in here and there, and then of course there’s the two toddlers and just every day life to contend with. Needless to say, gaming has taken a very back seat interest. I’m hoping things calm down soon(tm) but we’ll just have to see.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!