Potential New Player Looking for Advice

[Spectre]

Hey everyone, I'm looking at this game, and trying to figure a few things out about it before I decide whether to pick it up or not.

Firstly, I'm trying to figure out which class I want to play. Having looked at a few guides on the classes, Sorceress looks interesting as one player put it that "Sorceresses only die due to player error" due to having a high number of I-Frames, and being capable of engaging in melee and mid-range with lots of mobility and being able to take on groups, which is sort of the style of play I'm looking more for. That being said, I haven't seen much about the newer classes.

Secondly, I've seen a number of posts that this game is P2W and a massive grind. As I understand it, this games crafting is a lot like Archeage's crafting in the end game where it's massively RNG dependent and you can easily break a depressing amount of great gear in pursuit of incredible gear. This really really turned me off Archeage and why I ultimately stopped playing it. The amount of investment to increase my gear by even a tiny amount became too absurd. I'm wondering how bad this is here, and if this is the only P2W aspect of the game or if there are others.

Thirdly, in addition to the equipment grind, I understand there's no hard capped level, and the game has been around so long that the veteran players have ground out so many time consuming levels, that PvP is very unbalanced for anyone starting the game now and demands massive amounts of grinding to even begin to close the gap. How significant is this actually? Is casual play even remotely possible whilst remaining competitive?

Fourthly, I enjoy crafting in games, and would love a game would I could be a somewhat renowned crafter with enough effort and skill. As I'm understanding this games Life skills, the player is primarily only responsible for gathering materials, and the player then hires workers to do the actual crafting of equipment. How does crafting feel in this game with regards to crafting equipment through workers?

Finally, I understand that this game is very PvP focused, which I'm not opposed to as I typically played open world pvp games previously. That being said, I do enjoy PvE content quite a lot and it tends to be my primary focus in most games. How is the PvE content of this game, and have much investment does it take to get into the end-game PvE content?

Thanks in advance for any help, suggestions, and clarifications.

[Sweets]

most of this can be sum up as grind

1 i suggest playing the class that appeal to you, most classes can be improved with time and effort and what is good now wont always be the best

2 yes it has some loop holes where you can pay to get the ball going but i wouldnt say this ruins the game in any way and yes you will struggle to level your gear but unlike archeage they have try make it less painful and there is a lot new ways to get armor and place holder armor to help you get through the game

3 have no comment as i never met someone who was so high in level they just broke the game

4 crafting is a thing and its very popular but I wouldnt be the one to tell you about it

And last. Yes there is pve content and you will be doing pve more then pvp
There is tons of pve content in the form of mob grinding and questing but also field bosses, world bosses, dark rifts and so on. The amount of gathering activities is insane and some ppl never touch combat at all doing them.

pvp is a major part of black desert and there are lots of guild wars in the game and node wars
I see ppl also do arena and war games a lot so there is that
hope this helps

[Tsel13]

First play the class that you like the best.
I’ve played half of the offered character classes until I finally decided on my main.
As for a Sorceress not dying only by player mistake, for PVE that might hold true, but not PVP.
There are some very good PVP players out there that know what to look for; strike, defend, and evade at the right moments against each class because they have learned those classes movements and animations.

There are classes that have High Attacks per Minute (APM) and a few with low APM.
High APM, many attacks to do a lot of damage in a minute.
Low APM, slower attack speed doing couple of attacks in a minute, but dish out the same basic damage as the high APM classes.
The difference means less key mashing for the low APM classes.
Nova Succession and Guardian being two such low APM classes.

You don’t need to P2W in BDO.
It all depends on your patience level. If you are willing to do things bit by bit instead of in chunks. Then there is no need to P2W. Yes, I’ve sunk a few dollars in the game on a couple of outfits, but that’s it. Everything else, I get from free loyalties or via the market. The market is in game money not real-life money.

If you don’t care for RNG then you can patiently build up your in-game money and buy what you want from the market. I RNG 50% of the time and the other 50% I buy from the market. I RNG my armors and weapons to TET. PEN’s I either buy from the market or caphra stone TET to PEN. Accessories and belts, I get free from giveaways or free RNG boxes or buy from the market.

For me, I have found that the faithful veterans, even the long-time red players, leave me alone. I don’t bother grinding in highly contested areas. The ones I have to watchout for are the new blue 56 to 61 level P2W players. That just kill you because they think it’s funny or they think they’re god’s gift to whatever. In a grinding area, sometimes you’re just killed because they don’t see you. If you’re in a crowd of enemies and they’re zoomed in on their character while playing, sometimes they don’t see other people there and end up killing you when they hit that crowd, you’re in. In other instances, you’re getting pounded in a crowd of enemies and they kill you brain farting thinking to save you from them and also kill you in the process. Accidents sometimes happen like that.

Crafting is very different in BDO than in other games.
Depending on the items it can be….
You 100%.
Market 25%, You 25%, Workers 50% (or any different combination of percentages).
There are things that you will have to get from the market.
There are things you will have to do yourself.
To make life easier on yourself you will need workers and nodes, but you mainly need to get your Contribution Points built up first. If you join a guild, they can escort you around to get that built up easily. If you’re like me it’ll take you a few months to get the contribution points built up to craft and make decent money.

And as “June” already posted there is a TON of PVE content in BDO.
Getting to level 61 is the easy part. It’s getting to level 62 and higher that starts taking a lot of time.

[joj0.st4r]

1.try her and see if you like her
2.there is alot you can p2w in the game
from day one being able to buy the max amount ofpremium outfits(you can only buy 25 or if it is 35 pearl items to sell/week) and sell to the marketplace
to be able to be full tet without having to play the game
(to then week 2 start looking at pens)
to certain cash shop only clothes that will make some lifeskills provide more profit/h
to pets that let certain lifeskills get more drops
to maids/buttlers that lets you move things to and from storage/marketplace without having to physically go there

and value pack
you can buy a 1day value pack for loyalty but it takes 2 weeks to collect enough loyalty to buy it
without value pack you have to pay and extreme amount in tax
and other things...

things that all add up in favour of those that are willing to pay for advantage or if you are rich enough IRL to bypass the whole gearing system and just buy pearl items to resell for ingame currency to just buy the gear

not saying alot of ppl do...but you can get a much smoother ride

3.levels are kind of meaningless after level 60-61
you want alot of skill points to max out all your skills and that is the important thing that will take ALOT OF TIME

4.I never craft items so I would not know if it feels fun/meaningfull but I guess it does

5.there are no raids or dungeons like say WoW and most bosses are just zergfests
not sure if I even want dungeons/raids here
if it in some way becomes THE thing to do to make silver/gearing it will just turn into wow

[Fredericks of Cursewood]

1. You get multiple characters right from the start. I don't remember for sure if it is 5 or 6, but enough to try out several different types of classes. There are a lot of advantages to having multiple characters and once you figure out the game, leveling goes pretty quick. I would not get hung up on playing one character and that needing to be your main. A lot of it depends on what you want out of the game. PvP vs PvE vs Life Skills have different needs and some classes are very good in some areas and some are not very good. Even within the PvP framwork some classes excel in 1v1 and others excel in group or guild PvP. My advice is to start several characters and just play with what you like while learning about the game.

2. I have been mostly life skilling and have around 1000 hours into the game. I think that I have sunk around $30-40 into the game. It has really not been P2W at all for me. There are some convenience items that would quicken my leveling, but it isn't necessary from my point of view.

3. I have spent a great deal of time on the Olvia servers which are there for new and returning players and have bonus to XP and no PvP. Even on the regular servers, I seldom have anything that resembles a conflict with another player. I really don't think it is an issue unless you are grinding mobs in certain area and someone else wants that area for their grinding spot. For me, I have never seen that as a problem.

4. To say that the crafting is complicated, might be an understatement. There are some life skills that are really crafting orientated like Cooking. Others are not that orientated like Trading, Bartering, Gathering, Fishing, etc; except you may need certain hard to get items for your cooking and you have to be somewhat proficient at those other life skills in order to progress with your main life skill.

5. I'll just say that the world is really really big and no fast travel. Its another reason to have multiple characters since you can have them spread out in various locals. If you need to procure ingredients from a certain region or in some cases even progress quest with a distant npc, it can be done by using an alt in that area.

A little bit of example is with my Cooking life skill. Milk is a real bottleneck for anyone interested in cooking. So I started my own dairy farm in order to make recipes that have a lot of milk in them like Oatmeal. Since there are no "nodes" that produce milk, you can't have workers gather it for you. Anyone who has milk to sell on the market, has it snatched immediately because there are so many buy orders and really not enough people selling to make a difference. So a major portion of my cooking effort is actually centered around getting ingredients like milk. On the flip side, products that are made from milk are somewhat scarce and I don't have any problem selling them at decent price. So my cooking skills really makes it necessary to farm and to gather ingredients which are life skills in their own right. In some respects "Gathering" is the most lucrative life skill since you concentrate all of your effort on gathering items that are in high demand.