We won’t lie. Ever since Black Desert Mobile came out, our writers and reviewers have been in a fit. The developers over at Pearl Abyss are redefining the possibilities of mobile gameplay with BDM. If you would’ve told us 5 years ago that we could play a legitimate MMORPG on a mobile device, we would’ve rolled on the floor laughing. And then got up just to find another floor. If you’re a beginner, we recommend you take a quick look at our tips and tricks article for BDM. Believe us, it’s worth it.

This time around, we’d like to focus on your armor, accessories, and stats. Since the latter contribute significantly to your overall CP, you’ll want to know everything about each of these, as well as what it takes to develop them. Given that BDM has no less than 7 types of rarity when it comes to your gear, knowing how to invest will not only spare you a lot of resources, but also help you progress faster and better through the game.

Weapons and Armor

The most straightforward part about your Black Desert Mobile character are the weapons and armor. They come in various rarities (from grey to white, green, blue, purple, orange, and red) and, although you can get weapons and armor pieces from completing quests, boss rush chests, and the marketplace, your main source of high-quality items is Shakatu’s Shop. As we’ve explained in our guide to farming, selling prices are quite high when a game/server first opens, so you might want to check an item’s price on the Marketplace before using it yourself.

To get ancient gold coins and purchase gear from Shakatu, you have to complete boss rush and ancient ruins. As you can tell from our newbie Witch, Blue items aren’t that hard to come by. You can go ahead and spend most of your gold on getting better and better pieces. With a bit of luck, you’ll soon land on purple and even orange items. Do note that you’ll need Black Spirit Awakening 5 to equip orange gear (which BDM refers to as epic), which means you need to progress quite a bit through the main quest (we estimate you’ll get it at about level 50 or so).

You need upgrade stones of the appropriate rarity to upgrade your items. These can be obtained in a variety of ways throughout the game, including quests, ancient ruins, and plain old monster killing. To upgrade an item, you can click on your Black Spirit at the bottom of the screen, then Item Enhancement up on the far right, and select which piece you’d like to start with. We recommend you always use lower-quality stones first and always go up to 100% success rate. When you want to replace an item with a higher quality one, you can easily transfer the enhancement for a small price, i.e. losing 10% of the upgrade. So, if you have +10 blue gloves, you can transfer the augmentation to the purple ones and they’ll be +9 instead.

The really cool part is that you can get a Gear Resonance effect at different upgrade milestones: +15 on all items gives you +3 attack, +20 gives you +12 attack and +2 defense and so on. Needless to say, you should be upgrading these with every chance you get. Don’t hold back and don’t go for anything less than 100% success rate.

Accessory Improvement

Unlike weapons and armor, accessories are a whole different story. To upgrade a piece of jewelry (earrings, belt, necklace, ring or bracelet) you’ll need an identical item (rarity and type) to fuse into it. As you probably know by now, higher rarity pieces are extremely hard to come by, which is also the reason why jewelry are the hardest and most expensive to upgrade. To give you a perspective on how much stronger an item gets with rarity, a +8 blue is roughly on par with a +4 purple.

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Given that purple accessories are so expensive on the marketplace, we advise you hold back on going higher than blue. With a full set of +8 jewelry you get the same resonance bonus as you would with purples, but the cost of getting them that high is much more manageable. Another important aspect of upgrading jewelry is that you cannot make it a 100% success chance. When you fail, all of your progress is lost and you return to +0 with that item.

If you’re not paying attention, levelling up your rings and necklaces can easily turn into a gambling game. You might not care that much if you don’t mind paying for some in-game packages, but we like to keep it f2p. You can prevent an item from completely going to 0 if you use a restore pass or silver. The latter might be ok for you to begin with, but silver costs will escalate really fast and your odds of improving only get worse, while restore passes are not easy to come by.

Since you get quite a number of blue pieces from the main questline, many players have created secondary and tertiary characters of the same class. You can choose the same rewards and then pool all the jewelry on just one hero, so you won’t have to spend one silver looking for extra pieces on the marketplace.

Which Stats Should You Prioritize?

Last, but definitely not least, there are the stats. There are 4 primary stats in Black Desert Mobile: Attack, Defense, HP, and MP. Attack Speed, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Movement Speed are secondary, while the elements are as following:

• Aal (Fire, which gives Attack)
• Serret (Ice, which increases number of targets)
• Labreve (Thunder, which gives you a chance to deal extra damage)
• Ahib (Poison, which increases your crit chance)

You’ll notice that your total CP is calculated based on Attack and Defense, to which a host of factors contribute, from your camp development to your gear, and so on. If you have a choice of two identical gems or items with primary stats, attack will always give more CP, while everything secondary with the exception of crit chance seems to be on par. From what we can tell, crit chance is more or less useless as orange gear will help you reach the cap without any extras.

So far, these are the basics of gear and stats in BDM. Even if it seems a bit overwhelming to begin with, we guarantee everything will start to make much more sense the more you play the game. For more information, don’t hesitate to check out our other guides.

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