BDO Black Desert Gear Guide For Beginners/Noobs 2022

I will be going over some really basic stuff, how to enchant gear, how to repair it, quality, acquisition and stuff like that. If you’re already familiar with that and just want to know how to gear up, skip to that section.

Gearing in this game is a bit different than what you might be familiar with from other games.

In this game, basic gear has no level requirement (except awakening, 56) and rather low looking stats. The power of your gear mostly comes from enchanting it higher and higher as you progress. Note: I am saying mostly there are still noticeable differences between the base items as they may give better bonuses or may give higher stat increases from enchanting.

Q: How do i get base gear?

90% of the time, you are going to buy your gear via the marketplace NPC (can be found in each major town). Drops are so random that they are rather unreliable for gear acquisition and it’s more of a lucky coincidence if you get what you need from a drop.
The other reliable way to get some gear is crafting it at workshops(usually requires lots of time to acquire/process materials and the actual crafting time) or buying it from an NPC’s amity shop (requires playing conversation minigame a lot)

There is also gear you can get from Boss drops or the night vendor, but that’s mostly stuff for later in the game.

Q: Okay so how do I enchant items?

You can enchant gear via the black spirit (unlocked early in the black spirit questline).

Weapons/armor and accessories are enchanted differently.
For weapons (that includes offhand and awakening weapon) you are going to need Black Stone (Weapon) till +15 and for armor Black Stone (Armor) till +15.
Weapons are safe to enchant till +7, armor is safe to enchant till +5
After your weapon/armor is +15, you are going to need Concentrated Magical Black Stone (Weapon / Armor).to enchant further. Progression after +15 goes:
PRI (+16) -> DUO (+17) -> TRI (+18) -> TET (+19) ->PEN (+20)

Accessoires are enchanted by adding another one of the same base accessoires.
There is no 0-15 for accessoires, instead their progression goes:
0 ->PRI (+1) -> DUO (+2) -> TRI (+3) -> TET (+4) -> PEN(+5)

example: to enchant a +0 bares necklace, i would need to add another +0 bares necklace.
to enchant a Pri/duo/etc bares necklace, i would still only need to add a +0 bares necklace.

Sidenote: Green weapons and armor up to +15 have 2 options available: enchant and durable. enchant has higher success rate, durable has lower penalty for failing(see below) and should only be used for failstacking (see further below).

Q: What happens if I fail an enchant?

Failing an enchant with a regular black stone on a weapon/armor will reduce the maximum durability of that item by 5 and you will gain 1 failstack(see below).
Green weapons/armor up to +15 with durable option only lose 4 durability and gain 1 failstack too.

Failing an enchant with a concentrated black stone will give 2-5 failstacks (depending on enchant level) and reduce max durability by 10.

When enchanting beyond duo a fail may also lead to the item degrading and going back 1 enchant level.

On accessoires, a fail means that the item is destroyed and you gain 1 failstack.

Q: How do i recover the maximum durability?

Option 1: recover the maximum durability on a weapon/armor by sacrificing 1 of the same base item. Each sacrificed item restores 10 durability.

Option 2: Sacrifice a Memory Fragment to restore the durability. The amount restored, depends on the quality of the item you use it on. 5 durability for green items, 2 for blue and 1 for yellow. (due to the high price of memory fragments, it’s only worth to use them on very expensive items, like boss gear)

For doing so, head to a blacksmith, select repair and then recover max durability, select the item you want to repair and then add the item you wanna sacrifice, select continuous if you have more than 1 item to sacrifice.

Another important item to mention here is Artisan’s Memory. This item can be acquired in the pearl or loyalty shop and will increase the amount of durability restored by 4 times.

example: i use a blue base quality item and sacrifice the same item with an artisan’s memory, this recovers 40 durability.
if i’d use 1 memory fragments to restore the durability, i’d recover 8 durability with an artisan’s memory.

Artisan’s memories should only be used on items of blue/yellow base quality obviously, not worth wasting them on green gear.

You also have a tiny chance to get 1 maximum durability back when repairing equipment.

Q: What are failstacks In Black Desert?

Basically, each failed enchant gives you a slightly higher chance to succeed on the next enchant attempt (who would’ve guessed, eh?).
Important to note here:
– failstacks are character bound, not item or family
– the enchant chance is based on how high the item is enchanted (a +7 has a higher success chance than a +14 item)
– maximum success chance with failstacks has a softcap, based on the item and enhancement level. that means after hitting a certain amount the success chance per fail stack will increase by a lower amount.

Things to take away from this:
– high failstacks should be used on higher enchanted items, since these have lower success rates (also, because they can degrade above duo or get outright destroyed if accessoires)
– failstacks that are higher than the cap of the item you want to enchant should be saved and used on an item with a higher cap
– save a failstack by swapping to a different character and enchanting on that one. sometimes that means you have to build a new stack first, but you are saving money long-term by doing so (if you run out of chars to save them you can save them into a blacksmiths secret book too, sold by any blacksmith. these cost a bit tho so better to use chars)

For example: when enchanting green gear to +15, you might end up with a failstack of 15-20, it’s better to switch character, because the stack is too valuable for green gear of that enchant level.

There are various guides out there on how to failstack properly, i won’t go deeper into it here.
So i’ll just link a Guide to failstacking and a Table with recommended failstack values .
You can degrade items back from +15 to +14 at Priests (can be found in Churches in major towns) for 100k Silver.

Old method: *Note that you will want one low level alt with negative karma though to degrade items from +15 back to +14 (pve deaths with negative karma have a chance to degrade gear. -1k karma to be attacked by guards in town, below lvl 10 to be able to instantly revive on the spot in balenos region, kill horses to lower karma on the char)*

Q: How does Quality work?

Gear is divided into white, green, blue and yellow quality. White quality gear is mostly just very early game stuff, so it can be pretty much ignored (although it can be useful for failstacking).

Weapons and Armors that are not Boss gear can be reformed into better quality.
Increasing the quality yields higher AP/DP on the item as well as extra bonuses.
You can reform into yellow(ultimate) quality which gives different bonuses depending on the equipment slot.

Mainhand weapons gain +1 atk or cast spd, +1 crit, a base ap increase and a notable accuracy boost.
offhands gain a base stat increase and +10% extra special attack damage (special attack includes stuff like critical, back, down attacks, etc.).
Awakening weapons gain +2 AP and Armor gains extra DP.

Reforming needs reform stones, there are different versions of those. Grade 1 to 3 reform stones have a chance to upgrade, that can fail, while ultimate reform stones have a 100% chance to succeed. Awakening weapons can only be reformed with ultimate stones.
Ultimate weapon/armor reform stones are made by heating 1x Sharp/Hard Black Crystal Shard with 10x Grade 3 reform stone Weapon/Armor respectively.

To reform an item simply summon the Black Spirit and choose reform.

Keep in mind that reforming will decrease the amount of durability that Memory Fragments restore. But you can still sacrifice the base item to restore the durability on reformed items.

Enchant rate stays the same on reformed gear. Base quality is what matters.

Ultimate quality items cannot be registered on the central marketplace and first need to be downgraded to green quality via Blacksmith or Arms Dealer NPC.

Gearing Up In BDO/Black Desert Online

I’ll be going over some gear you should be getting as a beginner, so when i say “this is the best” it doesn’t necessarily mean best-in-slot, rather it means the best item to get as a beginner.

Q: Can i get a TL;DR?

Rosar Weapon, Accuracy offhand(not setbonus) depending on class.
Grunil set or strength of heve+roaring magical armor

whatever trashy accessories you can get are fine till your gear is good enough to farm Asula 5 Set + get 1x General Accessoire.

Q: What weapon and offhand should i use?

Rosar mainhand is a good one to use early on right now. It offers the highest AP and 2 crystal slots. Bares is a similarly good option with only 1 crystal slot and lower ap but all species dmg to make up for it. Another good option is Azwell, as it offers higher accuracy in exchange for 1 less ap than Rosar and only 1 Crystal slot. Elsh is another very good option, highest accuracy out of all non-boss weapons, relatively low ap, but +species dmg to make up for it. It’s a bit rare though and unreliable to get in larger quantities.

For the offhand, you want to use the one with +accuracy(not in the set bonus), even if it offers less AP or DP than other offhand. The dim magical one you get for free is somewhat okay’ ish for the time being but immediately turns to shit if you upgrade it to the later stages (freed/roaring) as it only has 1 crystal slot then and lower accuracy.
(wizard/witch can use the steel dagger, since they already get pretty high accuracy from their skills)

Q: What armor should I get?

Get a full set of Heve or Grunil *. Once you’re at level 52 you get the dim magical armor from the black spirit questline (that means you have to do the main quests up till mediah). Replace the Heve main armor with that. The dim magical armor can be upgraded later and once at its final stage it gives 50 hp 20 accuracy and as much DP as a pri (aka +16) heve/grunil. And that for free.

*Hint: don’t upgrade your heve/grunil chest armor above the safe enchant (+5), that way you can simply extract the blackstones at a blacksmith later and you get all of them back. Can also substitute the heve/grunil chest for something else, just make sure to get heve/grunil pieces for the 3 other slots

Q: What accessories should I get? Are the black spirit quest rewards okay?

The quest rewards are okay as an absolute beginner, but you should aim to replace them with something better when you can afford it.

There is a large variety of possible accessories to grab, I’ll list a couple for each slot that is okay.
(don’t invest too much into accessory upgrades early on, you get more from upgrading your weapons instead.).

A rather cheap option at the beginning is the Root Treant set, not offering a lot of AP but good bonus stats(very high accuracy and some extra LT) or you can use some cheap bares accessories. The root treant set also has another drop-only version, the treant spirit set, offering slightly less ap but almost no accuracy. Comparable to Jarrete, but better bonuses. You can mix both sets for the set bonus.

Grinding in mediah one can get the Asula Set which is drop-only and can’t be traded. This can potentially take a long time to get all pieces but it’s decently powerful and will save you lots of silver. Since it’s family-bound there is no resale value once you progress to something better, can still be used to level alt chars at least.

You can get 1 asula ring early in the Mediah black spirit main questline, which can save you a lot of grinding.
As of now, the Asula set is enchantable, but it’s not 100% and enchanting it only provides +ap vs monsters, some accuracy, and dp. Generally, it’s probably better to move on to real accessories instead of wasting time and silver(in the form of failstacks) on enchanting asula, altho getting it to pri or duo might be an option.

Also, get 1 general’s accessoire from the questline (53-58), it offers a lot of +monster damage (close to 1:1ap) while not having much normal ap. Decently strong and can easily be combined with a 5 piece asula set (belt or earring are both good choices, the ring is not quite as recommendable). Due to how AP scaling works, it will eventually be replaced though.

Later on, you can also get a rather decent (8ap, 14 acc) earring from kamasylve mainquestline and even later (requires Val pt1 and Kama pt1+2 mq) a Ring with 11 ap from this quest.

Q: I got this expensive accessory from an event, it’s better than what i have right now, should i use that?

No, you should sell it. The enchanted versions of the cheaper accessoires are either equivalent or better than these expensive items and the money from selling them is better used for progressing your gear instead till you can actually afford those expensive items at higher enchant levels.

Example: Ogre Ring +0 has 10 AP and is worth 95m, while an Asula Necklace already offers 11 ap and is pretty much free.

*Note: the only expensive items you shouldn’t sell usually are boss pieces, like bheg’s/leebur’s gloves, muskan’s/urugon’s shoes, dim tree spirit armor or giaths/griffons helmet. Accessories are fine to sell usually though*

Q: What should I prioritize when upgrading my gear in BDO?

Usually you want to prioritize your Weapon and Offhand, armor on the side and accessoires last. Always go with the option that gives you the best AP/DP per silver invested.

Don’t skimp out on accuracy in favor of AP though. It doesn’t help to hit harder if you miss your attacks.

Q:  Is it better to buy enhanced gear or should i enchant myself?

It’s not that hard to enchant green weapons/armor to +15 nowadays, usually around 40-50 blackstones is enough for 0-15 on a green item. So it’s rather easy to do and will spend less silver or roughly the same amount on it.
But since the introduction of +15 gear dropping it is relatively easy to find it pre-enhanced too.

For accessoires it’s usually cheaper to buy them pre-enhanced, but it can take a while for them to pop up on the market.

Similarly, higher enhanced versions of weapons/armor will not be up that often on the market or very expensive and if you don’t wanna wait for a long time, it might be better to do it yourself instead of waiting.

Q: What Crystals should i transfuse into my gear as a beginner?

Shoes- use two +2 movespeed or +1 movespeed +20 LT

For the chest armor you probably want Cobelinus (+100HP +20 weight limit), these are a bit expensive at around 1m and not really worth to get till you have the Roaring magical armor though. Till then you can use any cheap crystal instead.

Helmet – 2x Evasion crystal or if you have any the +10% combat xp ones. Caster classes (Wizard/Witch/Sorceress/Valkyrie) can use the +2 casting speed crystals instead.

Gloves – two +2 attack speed crystals (casters can use critical instead or accuracy, cast spd if you got xp gem in helmet)

Mainhand – accuracy or ap crystals

Offhand – AP

(Note: these are really just >beginner< choices, your late game crystal setup can vastly differ, check your respective class discords for recommended endgame setups)

Q: I got to level 56, what awakening weapon should I use? I got a green +10 and a blue one from the quest, which one should I enchant?

As a beginner, you most likely cannot afford to enchant the blue one very high directly. For the time being it can be better to use a green one (Altinova Arms vendor sells them for silver so they are easy to repair) and enchant that to +15/pri/duo or tri at most. Transition to the blue one or skip to the yellow one (dandelion) when you can afford it.

A newly added blue awakening weapon “Hughol’s Awakening Weapon” can be crafted at Duvencrune and then upgraded to “Dragonslayer Awakening Weapon” which is almost equal to Dandelion, but easier to repair.

Q: Now i use my awakening weapon all the time, do i still need my pre-awakening weapon?

Yes you do. A few percent of your pre-awakening weapons AP are transferred to your awakening skill dmg. The accuracy on it transfers and the crystal effects and item effect from ultimate/boss weapons apply too. And you’ll need it later when you start using your absolute skills more.

Don’t slack on keeping your pre-awakening weapon up-to-date, even if it doesn’t give you more awakening ap in the stat screen.

Q: Speaking of better gear, should i get a liverto or kzarka or offin to replace my green weapon?

I generally would advise against getting a Liverto, as it is quite expensive for what it offers (slight accuracy and ap upgrade over most greens and +3 crit instead of +1 atk/cast & crit that ult greens have) and the better option here is usually to instead save the money and get a kzarka instead.
Kzarka is a large upgrade over green weapons though, offering +3 atk or cast speed, higher ap and accuracy as well as a good amount of species damage and 2 gem slots.
The other boss option is Offin Tett, offering the same accuracy as liverto, 2 gem slots, 2 atk/cast spd and 2 crit. It’s usually much harder to get though compared to kzarka.

A recently added challenge reward will give you a +15 Liverto once per family upon reaching lvl55, which makes it somewhat worth using, albeit it’s probably still not advisable to take it any higher than Duo due to the high cost, which is better saved for getting a Kzarka later or other gear upgrades.

Q: Is it worth upgrading to Lemoria or Akums Armor?

Lemoria is usually considered extremely bad due to having only 1 Crystal Slot. Akums, on the other hand, is a rather respectable option, having 2 Crystal Slots and being able to be reformed to ultimate. It still carries the same problem of being rather expensive to upgrade compared to what it offers, making skipping directly to Boss gear an attractive option.

Q: I got all that done and now i want to transition to boss armor, what should i get first?

The priority list goes bheg’s gloves /Leebur’s Gloves>>> muskan’s shoes / urugon’s shoes > dim tree spirit’s armor >> giath’s helmet./ griffon’s helmet

Bhegs gloves are the most important piece by far and the one you should aim to get first and foremost. Once you got it high enough enchanted to be somewhat on par with your current ones, you can swap them in. Also Urugons shoes are preferred in the current meta over muskan. Griffons helmet over Giath, but the difference is much smaller here. Bhegs are preferable over Leeburs, since they give less accuracy and are more evasion focused.

Q: What boss offhand should I go for? Best Boss Offhand

Generally you will be sticking with your green offhand for a long time (at least till you have kzarka and maybe even bhegs) then you can afford to run a Kutum accuracy wise.
Kutum offers a good variety of stats, ap, dp, little bit of accuracy and a big amount of ap vs monsters as well as 2 gem slots. This makes Kutum the BiS offhand for pve and a decent option in pvp.

The other bosshand nouver only offers pure ap, tiny amount of dr, zero accuracy and 2 gem slots. Meaning it is mostly only useful for people that already have a lot of accuracy from gear and want to go for a more dmg focused build in pvp. For very specific AP numbers Nouver can overtake Kutum in pve.

Both boss offhands can be reformed with a drop from the Boss Garmoth, for +150HP, 10% special attack evasion and +100 Stamina.