Complete Gearing Guide

Introduction

This guide will help you progress your gear in Black Desert with examples on how to progress

• Gearing in Black Desert is relatively simple once you get the gist of it, making upgrading easy to follow 
• There are a lot of methods for reducing or removing the RNG elements of upgrading now 
• This guide will provide a gear upgrade route for you to work towards an end game gear set 
• The upgrade path in this guide will be one of many options, aiming to be a streamlined process 

 

Starting Out 

To help this guide stay on topic, I'll be front loading a bunch of information by linking to other guides that we've already have available, as they'll help you through your gearing journey.

 

If you're just here for the upgrade path, skip ahead by scrolling down or using the menu to the right.

 

When starting Black Desert it's strongly recommended that you play a Season Character. The Season Characters were made as a catch up mechanic, offering a great starting off point for your gear. 

 

We have a guide on the Season Servers, detailing the rewards, how to progress and some optimization: 

 

 

There's a good amount of information in the guide. so you can work through it at your own pace. 

 

The Season Server will provide you with a gear set that we'll be using as the basis of this gearing path. 

 

There isn't much if any "Season Specific" content you'll have to do. Just level up and complete your main quest lines and max out your Tuvala gear set. 

 

Loot Pets

Upgrading gear costs silver, as you might expect. If you're a new player you might not know about loot pets. 

 

The guide below will explain how to get some extra pets and how to upgrade your pets. Basically they pick up your loot and help you get your hands on silver. 

 

 

Gear Brackets

In Black Desert there's something called AP / DP Brackets, AP is your Attack Power while DP is Defence Power. Put simply, reaching certain levels of AP or DP will give you bonus AP or DP. 

 

 

We have a Bracket Tool that will let you take a look at the different brackets here!   

The guide will refer to these brackets because reaching these gear brackets is an important part of gear progression. 

 

Starting Gear & Additional Resources

Gearing in Black Desert has a lot of variables, none of them are overly complicated but for the purposes of a written guide the upgrade path will be streamlined. 

 

Different upgrade paths may be mentioned but only one set path will be shown during the guide.

 

The starting gear that we will be working with is the Tuvala Gear Set: 

All of the gear progression milestones are available for you to look at on our gear planner here! 

 

If you'd like to know a bit more about how to use our Gear Planner, you can check out the guide we have for it: 

 

Gear isn't the only way to increase your power in Black Desert. Magic Crystals, Artifacts and Skill Add-ons can have a huge impact on your kill speed. 

 

We've got guides for these and they'd be good to use while progressing through your gear upgrading. 

 

 

 

Upgrade Path

Just in case you skipped to this point, we'll be starting out with PEN Tuvala gear. To make things streamlined, we'll also be including the additional stats from journals. 

 

If you'd like to check out our gear planner, you can see all versions of the progression here! 

 

Journals provide bonus AP and DP that is applied to your AP / DP score without upgrading your gear.

 

Don't worry if you haven't completed them yet, you can work on them over time. For simplicity, we'll be starting with them completed. 

 

You can check out our Journal guides if you need help getting through them, you can see which ones are journals here:

 

So, here's PEN Tuvala and a side by side comparison with PEN Tuvala + Journals, there's quite a jump in stats: 

 

 

Season Rewards and Accessories 

The first set of upgrades are all basically free, you'll have to do a bit of work to unlock them but if you've completed the Season server then chances are you've already unlocked them. 

 

 

There's a pretty big jump in gear score here, so let's take a look at what's changed. First of all are the Main and Awakening Weapons have been switched out for Blackstar weapons. 

 

These Blackstar weapons are given out as a catch up for all adventurers. You'll be able to choose a PEN and TET Blackstar from the (Y) window in game. 

 

 

From these rewards, for this guide we'll be using a PEN Mainhand and a TET Awakening weapon. Even if you're an Awakening user, this is still the recommended choices. 

 

 

A PEN awakening might seem like the better choice, but the Main hand just gives more stats outright, making it the better choice. 

 

 

The other thing we change in this first upgrade is the accessories. We change out most of our Tuvala Accessories for Capotia Accessories. 

 

To unlock these Capotia accessories, you'll need to use a Season Gift Exchange Coupon and talk to NPC Fuhgar. 

 

 

To obtain a Season Gift Exchange Coupon you'll need to hit level 10 on a Season Character and then grab the coupon as a reward from the Season Pass. 

 

 

While you're on a Season Character you can't take advantage of the Capotia or Blackstar gear. 

 

Meaning by this point it's presumed that you've graduated and have at least 1 Season Gift Exchange Coupon. Unlock the Capotia Necklace first. 

 

 

 

All accounts start with 3 Season Tickets, these will allow you to make 3 Season Characters.  

 

You can only have 1 Season Character at any given time, meaning you'll have to graduate to make a new Season Character. 

 

Basically, you'll want to complete the Season Servers all 3 times in order to gain coupons to exchange for coupons. 

 

Once you've completed the main questline, you won't have to repeat them, you can access the simplified season questline. 

 

 

However, if you don't want to complete the Season servers again and just want to speed run your accessories, you can do that to. 

 

Hit level 10 on your new Season Character, accept your Season Gift Exchange Coupon and then force graduate your character. 

 

 

Clicking the bottom left part of the Season Pass will allow you to quick graduate, you'll have to write a confirmation to make sure you understand that you're graduating early. 

 

If you do this method make sure you hit Level 10 in order to get your Season Gift Exchange Coupon. 

In general, this method isn't recommended just because the Season Servers offer so much to new players in terms of rewards and gifts that wasting them on a quick graduation isn't the best idea. 

 

But if you really don't want to level 2 more characters to complete the past, it is an option. Either way, when you're done with this you'll have 2 extra tickets. 

 

 

We'll be unlocking the Capotia Belt and Capotia Ring next because they provide AP, the Capotia Earring only gives DP. 

 

You can also level up to Level 62 and grab the TRI Capotia Ring from the rewards section which you can then upgrade.

 

 

To upgrade this Capotia Ring you'll need to fish using the Season Fishing Rod on a Season server which you can then exchange it in your currency menu in the top right  corner of your screen. 

 

 

 

Replacing Tuvala Earrings

We're going to replace one of our Tuvala Earrings with a Capotia Earring that can be upgraded to PEN through login rewards. 

 

 

For the Capotia Earring, you can grab one from your (Y) tab, make sure you select the earring. We'll enhance this to PEN using the Dreamy Crystals of Balance.

 

The crystals are guaranteed enhancements and are obtained from logging in, it'll take a while but all this is doing is giving us some extra DP and takes no effort to do. 

 

 

For the other earring, Bronte's Bolt is an option. You can obtain it by completing the Mountain of Eternal Winter main questline, which you'll need to complete to upgrade your helmet anyway. 

 

You can skip over this without too much impact, but the earring does give some nice accuracy. If you don't feel like questing you can leave the Mountain of Eternal Winter quests until later if you'd like. 

 

For the sake of simplicity, I'll leave one earring as Tuvala for the extra 1 AP to help hit brackets, but the option to use the Bronte's Bolt is there if you're grinding areas that need more accuracy.

 

 

If you're not sure about accuracy and hit rates, you can take a look at our Hit Rate Calculator in the gear planner, you can find it on the left side bar. 

 

The hit rate shown in the image is without Magical Crystals or Skill Add-ons, you can add your crystals.

 

 

If you're following our Magic Crystal Guide, all of the builds are listed as presets that can be applied to the gear sets. 

 

PEN Boss Armor Piece & Armor Reform

This step is a pretty quick one, we'll use the Jetina's Guaranteed PEN system to change over our Seasonal Tuvala gear to standard TET Boss gear.

 

Check out our Guaranteed PEN Boss Gear guide for more information if you need to. 

 

While the stats are the same, the boss gear can be upgraded further to PEN, we'll be doing the same with our Sub Weapon, making it into a Kutum Offhand. 

 

 

One of the new pieces on this upgrade section is the PEN Red Nose's Armor, to unlock this we'll grab it as a free quest reward from completing the Magnus questline. 

 

The Magnus questline opens up city to city fast travel and globally shared warehouse storage, so even without the PEN armor piece, it's worth doing. 

 

 We have a guide that details step by step how to complete the Magnus questline, it should only take a few hours.

 

Completing the Magnus lets you select 1 piece of PEN armor. In our case we'll be taking the Red Nose. 

 

The Dim Tree Spirit's Armor might look like the better choice, but it will cost more Caphras Stones to enhance than the Red Nose by a considerable amount.

 

Dim Tree needs 8260 Caphras while the Red Nose is only 7224, saving you about 2 billion silver.

 

These Caphras upgrades will enhance our armor into a new gear set further in the guide.   

The additional HP provided by Dim Tree will likely go completely unnoticed in the PvE spots you're grinding in this gear anyway. 

 

Heart of Karanda, Khan's Heart & Heart of Kutum  

 

These are really amazing mid game options, I won't include them in the builds just because they're not technically manditory but that doesn't make them not worthwhile. 

 

The Heart of Karanda will give you an extra magic crystal slot, which really shouldn't be undervalued. The Khan's Heart will serve as a discount Vell's Heart that's easier to obtain. 

 

 

The Heart of Kutum will give you a bunch of HP now that 1% Special evasion has been changed to be +75 Max HP. 

 

 

PEN Boss & PEN Crescent

 

While you are working on this section, store and keep your Caphras Stones, we'll use them in the next step.

 

The previous upgrades mentioned were all basically free, with time investments being the only real requirements to obtaining the gear (Excluding Magical Crystals and Lightstones).  

 

This step will require you to grind for silver and resources in order to make enhancements and further progress your gear, this step should be expected to be a goal to work towards.

 

If you're not sure where to grind you can use our Best Grind Spot tracker to help you decide!

 

 

I'd recommend upgrading your Reformed Kutum Offhand to level 4, this will give you the AP to hit the 281 Main hand and the 273 Awakening brackets if you don't use a Bronte's Bolt. 

There's more details of how to upgrade and how to make use this system in our Guaranteed PEN guide.

 

Make sure to check current prices of Boss gear against the cost of using the Jetina system, buying outright might be cheaper at certain levels depending on your server. 

 

Generally the most common upgrade path is PEN Gloves, PEN Boots, PEN Helmet. The build shown here is the standard "DR" build, because the armor pieces focus more around Damage Reduction than Evasion as a defensive stat.

 

 

You might have noticed the PEN Crescent RIng, this is something you'll work on slowly. Like the Jetina's PEN Boss gear system, the guide above details how to get your PEN ring. 

 

The basic gist of it is that you'll need to gather / buy certain items in order to enhance your Ring of Crescent Guardian 

to PEN. These enhancements are guarenteed with no RNG involved. 

 

The items needed to enhance your free Crescent Ring all the way up to PEN. 

 

Just in case you don't know, there's usually a long lasting code from Black Desert's update events, the most recent of which being the Heidel Ball at the time of writing. 

 

 

You can see these codes on our home page. What we're interested in is the J's Hammer of Loyalty that are usually given out during these events. 

 

Basically they let you attempt an enhancement without risk of downgrade, just like how Cron Stones work. I'd recommend you save these hammers to use on your Awakening Blackstar for a PEN attempt. 

 

You should make sure you have at least a 160 Fail stack for this (150+10 from Valk's Cry) before doing this. This is completely RNG but it's up to you if you want to burn the hammers. 

 

The only reason these are mentioned now is due to the difference in Cron cost between Blackstar and Boss Gear.

 

 

Blackstar costs far more to enhance in terms of Cron Stones, almost 10x the amount, meaning the Hammers are far more efficiently used on Blackstar than Boss gear.

 

So it's recommended to not use them on Boss gear during this upgrade stage even if it seems tempting. 

 

 

If we go by NPC prices for Cron Stones at 3 million silver each, then you can already realize how much silver this saves you to use the attempts on the Blackstar instead of Boss gear. 

 

You can also check out our Enhancement Simulator to see what failstacks to use on your gear too. 

 

Accessory Cups

While you're progressing through your gear, it's a good idea to work on your accessory upgrade cups. These enhance your accessories with additional effects. 

 

The easiest one to get hold of is the Necklace accessory cup, Cup of Arid Moonlight which will provide extra HP for a low cost. 

 

 

Caphras Stones & 2nd Ring

 

The changes to this section are simple but might take a little while to complete. We'll be adding Caphras Stones to our PEN Boss armor while working on our second PEN Crescent ring.

 

If you're not familiar with Caphras Stones, we have a guide on them here: 

 

 

The basic description is that you right click them and shove them in your gear for extra stats without RNG. At Caphras level 10, boss gear can be converted into more powerful armor. 

 

In this case we'll be adding Caphras Stones in each armor piece up to Caphras Level 4. This is because Caphras have a "Soft Cap" before they start getting much more expensive. 

 

 

As you can see, level 4 to level 5 costs nearly as many Caphras Stones as level 1-4. You could race one piece of armor all the way to level 10 but it will take longer than getting each piece to level 4. 

 

All 4 armor pieces to level 4 will cost 3988 Caphras Stone where as 1 armor piece to level 10 will cost 7224 Caphras. 

 

Each piece to level 4 will also result in 12 DP where as 1 armor piece to level 10 is only 10 DP. 

 

Hammer of Precision, Vells Heart & Garmoth Heart

You might have seen it in your (Y) Rewards window but a J's hammer that works on accessories was added to the game called a Hammer of Precision. 

 

 

If you'd like to know more about this hammer, we have a guide on it here: 

 

For the purposes of this guide, because the hammer can be sold unlike other hammers, I think the injection of around 20 billion silver (After market tax sold at min price) 

 

Some people may consider it more valueable to save for a PEN Deboreka Necklace / accessory enhancement attempt

 

 

This is because the value of the 11548 Cron Stones needed for the attempt is around 34.6 billion silver at 3 million silver each. 

 

While that value is definitely worth considering, at this stage in the game an extra 20 billion is going to be more valueable.

 

The enhancement is also still RNG, so you could save the hammer for a long time only for the enhancement to fail. 

We're so far away from PEN Deboreka Necklace accessories at this pont that it's not something we're worried about right now.

 

 

I'd recommend placing a preorder on a Vell's Heart and a Garmoth's Heart at this point by using the money from the hammer, it'll likely take a while until your order fills, so I'll leave them out of the build for a while. 

 

If the order for the Garmoth's Heart fills, work on placing an order for a second. You'll need two of them eventually. 

There are also questlines available that are meant to assist in obtaining a Garmoth's Heart but this second heart can be something you focus on later if you'd like to.

 

 

 

Black Distortion earrings & Tungrad Belt

Now that we've just built up some extra DP with Caphras Stones, we're immediately going to sacrifice it for more AP.

 

 

Black Distortion earrings / Vaha's Dawn earrings give a large amount of AP in exchange for sacrificing DP. At this point in the build, the earrings will give us an extra 10 AP for 8 DP. 

 

But because our previous earring was a PEN Capotia Earring we lose an additional 4 DP. This might seem like a lot, but there's plenty of DP for us to get in the future.

 

Next, aim for a TET Tungrad Belt, this will give you an extra 1 AP over your previous belt. This might not sound like much but it will let you hit the 301 AP bracket. 

 

 

You may wonder why we only shoot for the TET belt here instead of PEN, while you could save for a PEN Tungrad Belt, the cost is 2/3rds of a TET Deboreka belt which has more value long term. 

 

 

Fallen God Armor 

So now that we've reduced our DP, we're going to build it back up again. Focus on making a piece of your Armor to Caphras Level 10. 

 

 

You'll be able to see the upgrade method in detail here: 

 

 

Basically, upgrade a piece of armor to Caphras Level 10 and then you'll need to use a Flame of Despair to use as an upgrade material. 

 

Most of the time you'll be able to see Flames of Despair available on the Central Marketplace, so we'll use the Fallen God's Armor as our first example. 

 

Once you've made the Fallen God's Armor work on upgrading it to DUO. I'd recommend not using Cron Stones while hitting duo, there's more information in the Fallen God's Armor guide above. 

 

Armor Upgrades

The previous Fallen God upgrade will give us the 12 DP back that we lost from the earrings previously, but we'll keep working on DP for now. 

 

 

Repeat the process of the Fallen God armor with other pieces of armor, the gloves are easiest, then the helmet. We'll be getting these pieces to DUO again. 

 

In this section of the guide I've left the boots as just Caphras Level 10 because the upgrade material needed for the boots is harder to obtain. 

 

 

 

After you've completed these enhancements, you can push for taps on your TET Blackstar Awakening weapon to aim for PEN. 

 

This might be a long process so expect it to be more of a side quest than your main goal right now.  

 

Exalted Vell, Garmoths & Kutum Upgrade 

 

At this point you'll likely have the Vell's Heart at the very least, so we'll be upgrading it to an Exalted Vell's Heart for the extra DP. 

 

 

Basically you craft two different reform stones that will each give +2 DP when upgrading your Vell's, you can also just buy them from the Central Marketplace. 

 

 

We'll add on the Garmoth's Hearts to the Awakening and Sub weapon and work on making our Kutum Caphras Level 7 for the extra 1 AP and 2 DP. 

 

If you're into PvP, you can use your second Garmoth's Heart on a Nouver Offhand if you're running one since this gear set is a Damage Reduction set but in this build I'm sticking to Kutum for PvE. 

 

The 1 AP from the Caphras level 7 Kutum will push us into the 305 AP bracket and set us up to achieve another bracket in the next set of upgrades. 

 

Deboreka Necklace 

For this section we'll be introducing the first Deboreka piece, the Deboreka Necklace.

 

 

Technically, at this point a PEN Ogre Ring would give more AP than a TET Deboreka Necklace but having the Deboreka neck sets you up for future enhancing. 

 

 

The PEN Ogre RIng is a bit of a dead end and the price isn't that far from a TET Deboreka neck.

 

 

Switching out and reselling a PEN Ogre would cost you billions in tax, so I'd recommend to just avoid it.

 

The TET Deboreka Necklace will give us 4 AP which is enough to hit the 309 AP bracket anyway. 

 

In this step I've also added the PEN Awakening Blackstar, you might have gotten it sooner, you might get it later, but if you've been working on it as a side goal chances are you have one by this point. 

 

I've also added some of the accessory cups, the rings have been given the % Crit damage because its a PvE focused set up. 

 

 

Now that Special Evasion has been removed, Crit damage might be considered more valuable in PvP but the +125 HP ring cups are a great all rounder, so both options are viable. 

Whichever you choose, I'd suggest 2 of the same type to make sure you're getting value out of the chosen stat rather than mixing one of each. 

 

Deboreka Accessories

Now that we've been introduced to the Deboreka accessories, we're going to add TET versions of the other pieces to complete the 5 piece set for the AP set bonuses. 

 

 

I've added the DR belt accessory cup as well as the accessory cups that give extra AP to the earrings. We've also added the DR version of the Ator's Shoes

 

The reason I've left the PEN Ring of Crescent Guardian in place is because it allows some flexibility. If you'd like at this point you could add something like a PEN Ominous Ring for extra accuracy. 

 

Though the same can be said for the earrings, you can switch out your Jetina PEN crescents for Narc Earrings, or you can just go full AP and get all Deboreka accessories. 

 

Kabua's Artifacts

By this point you may already have Kabua's Artifacts, they're the Best in Slot for artifacts by a considerable margin, they're mentioned in our artifacts guide but they're worth mentioning here as well. 

 

 

 

We'll also add Caphras Level 14 to the Kutum for the extra AP and DP as well as the last Deboreka Ring, this is an end game set.

 

Pushing your gear further would just be personal choice in accessories or enhancing your Deboreka accessories to PEN or enhancing your armor to TRI. 

 

 

Again, this is just full on AP / PvE build. At this point in the game you should have a firm understanding of the stats and what best suits the type of content you want to get involved in. 

 

It's not unusual to sacrifice some AP at end game for either more DP / Evasion or Accuracy, so don't feel like you need to fully max out AP, especially if you're into PvP. 

 

This should provide you with a basis to get to a high gear score, what you do from there is more up to player preference. 

 

Did this help give you a gear planning route, or are you already well on your way to end game gear? Let us know!

 

 

Why not check out some of our other guides while you're here?