My cycle of about half a year on and half a year off with Black Desert Online continues. I’ve been playing again for a while now – with bouts of Helldivers 2 and Hunt: Showdown in between – and actually made a pretty big, more or less unplanned leap in terms of gear progress.
Last time I took a break I’d been working on getting the third and final piece for Ornette’s Spirit Essence, the infinite health potion. Grinding at that particular spot, Forest Ronaros, didn’t feel overly fun to me, which certainly was one of the factors that made me step away from the game at the time.
Turns out Pearl Abyss have made some tweaks to the Marni’s Realm system in the meantime, one of which being a decrease in each realm’s size, combined with a substantial reduction of spawn times. In other words, you now have only about half a dozen packs to kill over and over, with next to no “travel time” or waiting around.
While this probably sounds quite boring (or even more boring than before) it actually feels pretty good, especially if your main peeve prior to this change was that mobs stood too far apart and you had to spend more time running around than actually killing stuff.
I also got lucky and had the “full” piece drop long before I would’ve had accumulated 100 pity pieces, so only two weeks or so later a server-wide message heralded my grand achievement:
Since I don’t really need its mana-counterpart I decided that Lafi Bedmountain’s Upgraded Compass would be my next chase-item. While I don’t technically need that thing either it definitely wouldn’t hurt to have it, given that I’m still working on my carrack and fully intend to use it once it’s finished, meaning that I already sail a lot now and will continue to do so going forward.
The grindspots for those parts are located in the Valencian desert, which suits me just fine as it gives me a chance to regularly marvel at my Diné’s speed in the sand. Also, I always liked the look, sound and feel of that whole region. I even used this as an opportunity to take a closer look at Valencia City’s available housing again, and have actually relocated my main residence once more.
I chose Hystria Ruins as my first grindspot for the compass, and it worked out quite well right from the start. However, I did feel a very noticable difference in terms of killspeed, and the mobs hit harder than I was used to too. It was obviously about time to do something about my gear, which hadn’t changed all that much over the past five years, believe it or not.
It’s not that I couldn’t have upgraded my stuff sooner, I just didn’t really need anything better than what I was already wearing. This had now changed, so I took stock of my belongings. By then I’d accumulated just shy of thirty billion raw silver, and, coincidentally, right at that time the folks at Pearl Abyss decided to introduce a special consumable item for high-level enhancing and gift one to every player, which I sold for another ~24 billion.
With those funds I went to work. Two TRI earrings and a TRI belt got replaced by TET pieces, a PEN Crescent Guardian ring was crafted to take the place of a TRI Eye of the Ruins ring, and my PEN Dandelion awakening weapon gave way to a DUO Godr-Ayed Gardbrace. Seeing the Dandy go makes me a bit sad as it was the first piece I’ve ever enhanced to PEN myself, but that’s the way it goes.
I also enhanced three armor pieces to TET, and the helmet further to PEN. Then I poured all the Caphras stones I had into the latter for additional stat boosts. Only a couple hundred more and I’ll be able to exchange the thing for a Labreska helmet, which is even better.
Lastly, during my absence every player was also gifted a box containing a TET Blackstar weapon of one’s choosing. I used that to replace my TET Kzarka mainhand, another huge upgrade.
Thusly equipped I actually exceed the compass spots’ soft cap for AP, but that’s certainly better than being undergeared, and I can tell a very noticeable difference. I now pull 400 to 500 million net profit per hour at Hystria, which is a new record high for me by quite a margin.
The next planned upgrades are the Labreska helmet, another PEN Crescent ring and probably also enhancing the chest piece to PEN. Once I have these done I’ll probably go and check out some high-end grindspots in Serendia, specifically those that drop materials needed to craft 3% crit damage upgrades for rings.
I assume by then a change of scenery will be very welcome, and I can always return to Hystria for another shot at the compass later (some people have spent hundreds of hours there without ever getting the rarer piece of the two). But who knows, maybe I’ll luck out and get it today.
One can dream, right?
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