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Tips for starters?
Leon1e
Member UncommonPosts: 791
Hey guys. My boyfriend and I decided to checkout BDO after watching HOURS upon hours of articles and reviews because we weren't sure we want to invest in a korean title again. Well we did. Suffice to say its one of the better purchases we've made gaming concerned.
The UI is absolutely terrible but the game underneath is awesome. Which brings me to my next question...
What should starters in this game be going?
We followed the main quest line and we are lvl 14 now in Haidel. We got our beginner horses and were fishing for a little bit, which was fun! Our next quests is lvl 17 and we do feel a little bit underleveled. Mobs started to make dents in our healthpools.
We find it really hard finding quests in this game :O Is there some full quest log or anything to help us level up?
What is the game's max level?
Does it have raids/dugeons or its more pvp oriented ala archeage?
We are about to cross into diamond division in guild wars 2 but damn is this game fun after the months of no new content from gw2. It's kinda refreshing.
What should we focus on from now on? I have no clue how crafting works. The tutorial is rather annoying. What are our options I feel pretty limited as it is. Granted we are used to themepark and no handholding at first is weird.
Loved the minigames of fishing and carrying those carts in the dwarven mines
If there's more of that, sign me up! xD
The UI is absolutely terrible but the game underneath is awesome. Which brings me to my next question...
What should starters in this game be going?
We followed the main quest line and we are lvl 14 now in Haidel. We got our beginner horses and were fishing for a little bit, which was fun! Our next quests is lvl 17 and we do feel a little bit underleveled. Mobs started to make dents in our healthpools.
We find it really hard finding quests in this game :O Is there some full quest log or anything to help us level up?
What is the game's max level?
Does it have raids/dugeons or its more pvp oriented ala archeage?
We are about to cross into diamond division in guild wars 2 but damn is this game fun after the months of no new content from gw2. It's kinda refreshing.
What should we focus on from now on? I have no clue how crafting works. The tutorial is rather annoying. What are our options I feel pretty limited as it is. Granted we are used to themepark and no handholding at first is weird.
Loved the minigames of fishing and carrying those carts in the dwarven mines
If there's more of that, sign me up! xD 
Comments
I also recommend talking to NPCs. Every single one of the named ones. See a question mark on your map? That's an NPC you haven't talked to.
Knowledge plays a big role in what quests are unlocked and how to progress in life skills as gathering/alchemy quests are also given out by NPCs.
All I can add is that Most all of the quests I have done involve crafting, trading or gathering. So if your not into crafting / gathering / farming / trading / diplomacy / acquiring housing workshops storage / etc, you might as well just grind mobs to end game and PvP because that's end game.
All the true content that lies between levels 1 and 50 is the stuff I just mentioned. Going between the first two starter towns alone ( Olvia and Velia ) doing all the trading / gathering / crafting quests there is a crazy amount of content.
I've lost count alone on the number of NPC's you need to raise your amenity with to unlock quests and goods in the first two towns, just doing that will take you a ridiculous amount of time alone.
Again, if that type of content is not for you, then just grind it out to end game and PvP. If you just kind of skipped over it go back to the starter town talk to everyone there again, and see if there are quests to unlock by getting to know them better, discover all the trade routes and farms in the starter area and do their quests, Then move to Velia and the surrounding farms build wagons and buy or capture horses to pull them to get rich trading.
Theres 3 main types of progression. I'd try a bit of all of them or focus on what you want to do
Questing - gives you the Contribution points that are useful for buying houses, lodging for workers and connecting nodes, more for the micromanaging type of gameplay. So if you want to go say build a fishing boat it would be useful to do a lot of these.
Combat - grinding monsters or a lot of black spirit quests give skill points so you can level up and get new skills too.
Life skills, trade cook fish etc - give their own quests once you increase in levels of it. You can summon the black spirit with , and click guide to see if he has any starting quests for you for that.
Energy is great to have and max increases are gained from Knowledge- talk to every npc play their minigames, kill monsters for knowledge and find locations. Will be spread over all your alts
Fighting lots of mobs or summoning bosses is the main way of leveling, and the black spirit will give you lots of quests to guide you in that regard.
Also as mentioned above by other posters, the NPCs in the game are really important. By talking to them and building relationships through the conversation mini game you will get extra quests. The quest itself doesn't usually have an xp reward, but could reward you with extra "contribution points", energy, items, or unlocking recipes etc.
Crafting is tied to getting housing and opening and connecting "nodes" by using you contribution points. You can do some basic crafting at any time, but if you want to learn cooking for example go and talk to the cook in Velia and he will run you through a series of quests that show you all about it.
I jumped into the game with that themepark leveling mentality as the easy way out and already stopped leveling at around lvl 32-33. Im going back to the beggining and doing all the content that i missed. Havent done any housing stuff yet, cant decide where do i want to own real estate. Havent hired any workers or done any trading or anything.
On top of it, im hooked on 4 classes (sorceress, tamer, witch, valkyrie) so its going to take me a longer time to do stuff while playing all 4. Good thing some resources and knowledge are shared account wide.
There is a lot of stuff to do outside of leveling. Take your time and try all the systems in the game.
Also, when you have to fight (for leveling, for knowledge, for quests) i recommend to stick with mobs that have red colored names. Violet colored names are a few levels higher than you, hit like a truck and you will miss so many hits its not even funny. I spend more potions than the cost of buying them back....lol
rojoArcueid's post is on point. The best advice I can give is to forget everything you learned in prior MMORPGs and play BDO like its your first, because in many respects that is exactly how you should play it. Taking me as an example, I have engaged in very little combat in the game. Most of my game play has involved everything else but combat. You might ask why I would do that? Well, because that is exactly what is refreshing about BDO. That's not to say I don't enjoy the combat aspects of the game when I do stumble upon it, but that's exactly what makes the game so good. It's a lot more than just combat and leveling. Personally, I've grown very tired of MMORPGs that all center around the very basic concept of combat and rushing to that "so-called" end-game only to hop on that dreaded treadmill that is dungeons and raids. If all you've done so far before getting to Haidel is combat you are missing everything that makes BDO such a special MMORPG. The game is deep. Much too deep to cover in a post. My guess is that there are features in this game that players have yet to discover. My advice, take your time, read guides, and immerse yourself in the game. It is a gem. Enjoy it.
There is so much, it is difficult to tell what you might be missing at the start. Outside of combat, I would highly recommend some basic cooking and get yourself a worter or two goin. G l h f
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
One issue I have had with teh game (and that forced me to rush a bit) is that it's SO FREAKING CROWDED
Guess I'll have to join less populated channels. But thanks to work and basically real life we are one of the people who can play only at "peak hours". Which means tons of people.
I still have no idea what those workers or nodes are. I tried setting up node but nothing was responsive :O im pretty sure i did something wrong.
Someone mentioned the conversation minigame, yes, how does this work :O I usually open the conversation panel, there are bunch of NPC avatars and bunch of circles where I should supposedly put them at but when I drag to drop, nothing happens
^ That's one of the reasons I claimed the UI is terrible. The UI is far from self explanatory, you have to know what you're clicking :V and for a starter like me that missed all the beta events and get more gold spam in global chat rather than Q&A from community (already turned world chat off) I can't really ask ingame.
We actually had a discussion about it last night xD . We think that it's impossible the same team that designed this gorgeous game is the same team that designed the UI. There's absolutely no way! xD
the link below goes to a guide but plenty of other guides there as well.
For the conversation mini game you have to right click on the faces of the npcs you want to enter into the circles (I had the same issue as you!). The more NPCs you have met generally the more options you will have in these mini games.
For the nodes try this:
1) Go to Velia, on your UI in the top right cornor next to the mini map there should be a "npc" button; click on this and in the pop up list choose "worker". This will highlight and draw a path to the worker manager. Go to him and hire a worker.
2) Now go to Loggia Farm and talk to the "node manager" standing in front of the entrance to the farm yard, and choose "node management". On the screen that pops up choose "contribution invest". This will link Loggia farm and Velia. Next in the same screen click on the potato farm node next to Loggia farm (it should be a dotted white circle). Invest contribution points into this as well.
Now you have a worker, a connection from Loggia Farm to Velia, and Loggia Farm's production node (potatoes).
3) Send your worker to harvest potatoes at the farm (you can do this from anywhere, just open the map, click on the resource node and choose start work and assign a worker)
4) Learn how to cook (talk to the npc I mentioned in the post above). Cooking is helpful for various reasons, but one is that you need to feed your workers. The easiest way to do this is to learn cooking and craft beer. You can make beer from potatoes, which is why I recommended this as a first node set up.
5) To see how your worker is going click the pick icon near the top left of the screen. This will bring up the worker menu and say what task it is doing and how much stamina it has left. You can feed it from here.
6) Your worker will deposit the potatoes into the warehouse in Velia. It you don't know where this is, click on the previously mentioned npc search tool and choose "storage".
Here is a nice guide with pictures : http://dulfy.net/2016/03/01/black-desert-node-management-and-hiring-workers-basic-guide/
Note, I also had a lot of trouble understanding how to work nodes, but it is pretty easy to grasp once you do the first one.
The greatest tip i could give to a starter in this game is to open their quest log and switch all quests in the upper right corner where it says "Prefer" ... just click ALL.
Man this game opens up so much with quests. Already did all the starter gathering and trading quests. And I had REALLY REALLY hard time comprehending what to do in this game. I only had the quests I earned through Amity thanks to @YashaX who explained me how conversation minigame works.
But these days I already have my first node, house, lodging and storage! I'm hyped!
One thing i didn't get about trading though. Before the quests I went to velia's trader. I took 2 books worth 800 silver each and it was said I'd have 105% profit if I carry them to Olvia. (wasted 1 energy to see market prices so I would know)
15-20 minutes later (because carrying stuff on your back is not easy) I went to Olvia's trader and there I could only sell the books with 56% loss :U Even after winning the bargain minigame I was still on a huge loss T_T What did I do wrong :c
Note that there is a similar situation for items you might find while questing or grinding mobs, or fishing. For example if you fish in an area where you have not opened the node you can only sell the fish for 30% of the normal price to traders. In the case of fishing and mob grinding though you only need to have the node where you got the item from open, not a complete node network linking where you got the item from to where you sell it (you need that for normal trading).