Black Desert Information

Black Desert General Pastebin Information - 2/13/2016

 

Table of contents

01 What is this game?

02 Class Structures

03 Characters and their Family

04 Cities, Nodes, and Crafting

05 Combat (Short Section)

06 PvP / PvE

000 Exterior Guides

 

===> 01 What is this game?

 

    This game is an sandbox flavored MMO. It is not a complete sandbox, but you can do a lot more in this game than you can others. The entiriety of the game is present from the get go and you shouldnt have to be any level to engage in anything beyond skill collections. You must buy this game if you would like to play on the NA/EU version, it costs $30, there is no subscription plan currently and Daum has not indicated they are planning to implement an subscription policy. There is a cash shop present upon which I will    expand further down, don't worry, it is very non-invasive and will likely not have an impact on the game. Please ask around for information and check out videos before deciding if you're going to spend money on this game. It's not a standard WoW clone and some things may not be handled to your liking so make an informed decision.

 

    Currently there are CBT2 keys being passed out at various sites. Snag one if you want to try the game, some anons who have already pre-ordered the game are also snagging these and posting the keys. Check our irc at irc.rizon.net/#InfiniteDesert for immediate responses and possible keys. CBT2 takes place 2/16 - 2/20 I believe. The full game   releases March 3rd.

 

===> 02 Class Structures

   

    Simply put, there is no holy trinity present in this game. Some characters will have the ability to restore health through their skill to themselves or everyone around them. There is no true healer class, alternatively there is a "tank" role. All classes are currently balanced and nobody really has an edge over the others. Each class is also gradually receiving an awakening weapon which addresses their weakness. This awakening weapon is hot swappable and thus you can switch it with your primary weapon on the fly, just not inbetween combos. Awakening weapons are currently unconfirmed for immediate release in NA/EU versions as they are still in development and only 3 are present in game on the KR client. As of now Ranger, Sorceress, Tamer and Berserker are the only gender locked classes. Warrior and Valkyrie is debatable. The combat is much like     Vindictus, but deeper.

 

    => Warrior (Awakening Released)

    This is your basic sword and board class. He will awaken and acquire a great sword and play very much like Berserk. For all intents and purposes this class can serve as a tank with his sword and board simply because he has an AoE taunt and has many skills that chain off of blocks. He is not slow and is the much more aggressive counterpart to the Valkyrie.

 

    => Valkyrie (Awkening Unreleased, Revealed)

    This is your other sword and board light wielder class. She is capable of healing people and restoring their stamina, albeit on a 1 minute cooldown. This class also serves moreso as a tank than Warrior as she has an AoE taunt and block techniques. Her awakening is the Lance and Greatshield, it'll be a slower playstyle than she currently uses but she'll block much more and hit even harder, no information on what happens to her light powers while wielding these.

 

    => Wizard / Witch (Awakening Unknown)

    Your magic caster that specializes in bathing large amounts of enemies in your element of choice. You will not be standing around a lot and there is a lot of movement involved. Generally speaking you'll want to partner up with someone to help keep enemies from swarming you if you're uncomfortable with handling large swathes of mobs. Some lore is floating around that women are more compatible with magic thus learning it much quicker and younger ages than men do. You'll find most magic wielding classes are young girls.

 

    =>Ranger (Awakening Released)

    Your elven archer, highly mobile and at no point does she really sit still. Upon starting you'll find a very stiff and rigid class, as you acquire more skills that let you chain shots off dodging and other skills you'll start to find this is one of the most mobile classes and she can weave in and out of swathes of mobs as well as firing off multiple shots at once. Once she acquires her awakening you might find yourself doing some DMC style switching, she gets dual wield elemental swords and hot swapping on the fly allows you to handle people in melee as well as dish out tremendous damage at range if they attempt to disengage.

 

    =>Sorceress (Awkening Released)

    This will be your "hand to hand" class supplemented with the ability to use shadow magic. Right from the start she is incredibly mobile and engaging to play. She is considered the top tier PvP class due to her slippery nature and ability to pound out a lot of damage while remaining hard to target. She awakens into a Scythe wielder that allows her to have some more range as well as giving her much more AoE options. Her clothes are very drab.

 

    =>Tamer (Awakening Unreleased, Revealed)

    This is the closest to loli you guys are going to get. She doesn't tame things as her name would suggest, rather, she uses a short sword along with shadow magic. One of her abilities is to summon a shadow beast that fights along side you for a duration dependant on how many skill points you have invested in it. The cooldown for summoning this beast is 2 minutes and its base duration is 2 minutes 30 seconds, ideally you should be able to keep this beat out at all times, but players can kill it and cut your damage if your cooldown is currently in effect. Her pet mimicks your inputs and will do attacks based on what you're doing and generally compliment her fighting style. Tamer is very mobile and can slip in and out of melee range as needed, she also has a kick that acts as a charge. She also has a very strong grab attack. You may have heard rumors about her nerfs, these simply forced her dash ability to use stamina as well as brought the damage of her grab attack in line with other classes. She is still perfectly viable however her beast's damage scales badly into PvP scenarios as people are wearing higher enhanced gear. To cope with this Daum gave her awakening a Bo Staff which will allow her to fight on par with other's damage without the need of her beast. One of the higher ranks of her beast will also allow it to emit a healing aura.

 

    =>Berserker (Awakening Released)

    This is a giant who dual wields greataxes. He is very immobile from what I've heard, however, his awakening into some elemental gauntlet makes him a hand to hand brawler and you get an ability similar to Iron Man that lets you blast off the ground from your palm. It also doesn't help that you can dye his plate armor red and gold and effectively RP Iron Man. Expect some Iron Man characters. Berserker excels at handling large amounts of mobs as he has an ability from the axes to regenerate health very quickly and can    swap to elemental gauntlets for a lot of AoE. This is your physical AoE class. People speculate this is the toughest class to play in PvP due to his low mobility.

 

    =>Blader / Plum (Awakening Unreleased, Revealed)

    This is your Samurai class. Pretty good mobility, but abilities are a little rigid. You'll often find your attacks following a forward motion and using Chase to reposition if you need to step back. This class has a high capability of criting a lot and has a counter ability on 10 second cooldown that deals massive damage and automatically crits. These two will differ in their awakenings, Blader will have a dual wield with a spear and sword while Plum will wield a single large spear. Blader will acquire more attacks allowing him to deal with many more different close range situations while Plum gains a heightened ability to move around the battlefield as well as focusing on frontal attacks. These classes are currently unavaible to the NA/EU release.

 

    =>Ninja / Kunoichi (Awakening Unknown)

    Tons of mobility, even has a double jump. They use the same weapon as the Tamer in conjunction with throwing stars and kunai. They also have Ninjutsu abilties and a lot of AoE. These two are very versatile and have a complex control scheme. This class does have a concealment ability, but it is not for the purposes of something like Rogue's in WoW, it is short term and used to confuse your current enemies briefly as you reposition for a new strike. I believe the counter ability allows you to replace yourself with a log while chaining into a concealment. This is also the only class that can maintain quiet a few aerial combos. They are currently unavailable to the NA/EU release.

 

===> 03 Characters and their Family

   

    Your family is shorthand for your account. Everything except life experience is shared among your family. Life experience encompasses things like fishing, gathering, and your combat level and skill points.

   

    => Vigor

    This is your characters stamina for conversing with NPCs, investigating knowledge pieces, and various gathering actions. The total amount of vigor you can have is dependent on how much of the world you have explored and with which engaged; it is also shared among your family. While logged in you gain 1 vigor every three minutes, and while logged out regenerated a little slower. You can acquire more vigor through quests and dailies as well as resting in a bed at your residence to gain 2 vigor every three minutes instead of 1. Each character in your family regenerates vigor independent of the rest thus it is extremely beneficial to have multiple characters, even if you don't really play them; you can expend their accumulated vigor on nodes from afar anyways.

 

    => Contribution

    This is shared completely among your family. You will initially start with 10 points that you can expend investing in cities and nodes. In cities you use these to buy up property for workshops, residences, and factories. You can also use these to invest in nodes which when connected with adjacent nodes and cities will allow you to form a trade route. You can acquire more contribution from various quests throughout the world that give you contribution Exp. Since quests can be completed by every character in your family you can increase your contribution points through the same quests on different characters. The cap to contribution points is unknown to me at this time thus if there does not exist a cap one character can feasibly reach alone then you should definitely invest in making another character for the sake of acquiring more contribution exp. Rule of thumb you should always walk to the node manager as it costs 10 vigor to invest contribution points from afar.

 

    => Banks

    This system warrants a bullet point by itself. Money has weight and you generally cannot carry more than a million silver at a time. Every bank is independent and thus the inventories are not magically shared across a continent. If you store something, including money, in one city another will not have access to providing those assets. You can, from the map, send notice to a bank in another city to pack up your assets and have them shipped to another bank. I'm not certain you can do this with silver; my experience in that is that you must personally visit that bank and exchange your silver for a gold ingot valued at one million silver pieces, then you can feasibly transport your money and exchange it at other banks.

 

    => Life Experience

    This is your tab containing cooking, fishing, processing, gathering skills and every other skill your character should reasonably hone. As mentioned before these are not shared within your family. Stamina, Strength and Health are also trained, do not fall under Life Experience, but are also not shared.

 

    => Conversations

    This is going to generate a lot of buzz. It's very interesting on paper, but in practice the current system sometimes fucks you over. It takes some vigor to engage in conversation with NPCs. When you walk up to an NPC you'll notice a ring around them with some icons maybe. These icons represent knowledge, shop opportunites, quests, and permanent access to temporary buffs. To have successful conversations with NPCs you're going to want knowledge from creatures, items, meeting other NPCs, and memorials/monuments. I cannot stress enough that you'er going to want to have alot of options from which to pick when talking to NPCs due to the janky objectives. Each NPC has a constellation that creates a path for the conversation, you pick appropriate topics to fill in that will help you meet the conversation objective. Completing this objective rewards you with amnity, ~10-15% of the generated favor on that stage. The first stage costs vigor while subsequent stages gamble your generated amnity against having no vigor cost. Now this is the part that gets janky, sometimes you'll get an objective that is impossible to meet. For example you might get one that says something like "fail to spark interest 4 consecutive times" while only having 2 or 3 topics that have a low enough chance to spark interest, or in some cases the NPC just doesn't have any topics that fail to spark interest. Boom you just lost all that amnity and it's damn frustrating. Sometimes you'll acquire enough amnity that the NPC will want to give you a task, exit talking to them and re-engage, most of the time the quest will be immidiately available, sometimes the quest won't be available until a certain time of the day/night cycle. For example a slaver wants you to capture some run away goblins, but he'll only offer the quest at nightfall when the goblins are trying to run away. These quests will be permanently available to your family and thus it's worth expending the effort if you want to have multiple characters.

 

    => Gear

    Gearfags get out, you craft the best gear and it is not bound to anyone. The only thing that separates the quality of gear is its weight, stats, and enhancement level.

 

===> 04 Cities, Nodes, and Crafting

 

    => Cities

    As I said before, cities are independent of each other and thus what you may have going in one city is not go to be happening in another. You do not have to invest contribution into activating cities like nodes, but acquiring residences for workshops and so on cost contribution. You need to connect nodes to a city to take full advantage of your workers. Workers are bound to whichever city you hire them in and thus you should pick a city that you would like to establish yourself in; preferable one nearby node resources you find beneficial. Each node provides a resource to a nearby city as well as some providing more access to residences. Your number of workers are limited to how many lodgings you have built, same with your stables and banking storage. You can invest your vigor into cities and notes in batches of 10, these eventually level up that node or city and are unreclaimable. I'm not sure what leveling these up do at this time as the number of resources gathered by workers are also dependent upon your worker's stats and level.

 

    Every city, and some nodes, will have a marketplace. Marketplaces are things that city exports and you can buy those exports and transport them to another city for profit. Usually it's best to buy when the exports are down to 90% of general cost and take them to a nearby node who may be experiencing a dire need for imports, usually a system message pops up and says something about a specific node paying 200% or so for certain types of imports. Take advantage of that. The other stipulation is that to trade, profitably, between markets you should have those two markets connected via node routes. When you open your map you will see an activated node change from grey to a color along with a thin line connecting it to another node or city. Once you connect those nodes in such away that they form some path between two markets you will be able to profitably trade in those markets. There is a distance bonus for trading, weigh your time spent transporting against certain market demands.

 

    => Nodes

    These are minor settlements outside cities. Walk to these to discover them and talk with a node manager to see adjacent resources that it is capable of harvesting. Invest your contribution points as you see fit, I'd reccomend doing this directly at the node manager otherwise it'll cost 10 vigor to place those points. Also you can only invest in sub-nodes via the node's manager. Like cities and nodes, you can level up these sub-nodes by investing vigor. Once you have an invested node connected to an adjacent city, you can send workers out to these nodes to collect resources en mass instead of having to personally chopping shit down or mining.

 

    => Trade Routes

    As said before you create these by connecting nodes such that your major markets are connected. Generally you'll want a donkey or wagon to transport a lot of things at once, you'll also be less susceptible to bandits (which you can see from the map). You can also carry freight on your back and walk it to your destination, this is how you level up your strength and increase your inventory weight limit. When transporting freight via wagon, you'll want to stick to the roads since every where has a bumpiness rating. Traveling off road has a higher bumpiness rating which gives a chance to break some of your freight during transport. You can mark a foreign market from your map and press T if you feel like afking for that run, you're character will path along the road. You'll be missing out on the hilarious wagon physics though.

 

    => Crafting

    Naturally you want a boat, a wagon, and all sorts of gear and weapons. The best of the best is only obtainable through crafting. You'll need to manually level up your gathering (mining, lumberjacking, plants, blood sucking, and skinning) and processing skills to supplement your crafting endeavors. Processing allows you to mix, grind, heat, dry, thin, and combine raw ingredients for further refinement at an Alchemy, Cooking, or repair station. The higher tier version of these stations are only acquireable through crafting at a workshop and you can purchase the base version from a few NPCs. Place these in your residence and you can start crafting food with real affects, potions with affects aside from HP and MP restoration, and repair your gear yourself. There is no compendium dictating what and how you can craft or process things, you'll have to experiment or find the recipes from NPCs. After discovering something your character will record it for future use. Or you can look it up on the internet like the dirty fag you are. Leveling up your processing allows you to create more per input and gathering allows you to gather more at a time as well giving you access to finding more rare ingredients when gathering. Now, drying and thinning can only be done under certain weather conditions, that being a sunny and windy day respectively. Cooking is a necessary skill in this game or your workers aren't going to be working for long, you have to keep them fed, also cooking provides better food for your pets and mounts. Some food also increases the enhancement level of certain skills like fishing for a time period. Seriously, get cooking.

 

    => Residences

    This is your home, you can have only one (per city?). This is the decoratable room. Place your cooking, alchemy, and smithing utensils here. Also find a bed as soon as you can. You can also combo style points by designing your residence reasonably, like putting food decorations on your table. While out hunting you may get an animal's head on a plaque, you can put these on your walls and activate them for buffs. By default your residence is dimly lit, you can rectify this by crafting a chandalier or candle stick; these are togglable. If your residence has windows, you can open and close them, or even put drapes over them for style points. Pets all chill out in your residence while not summoned, so expect to see them wandering around your room. Not all residences are rectangles and some are bigger than others, when checking a potential residence for building either a residence or workshop you'll be presented with the residence floor plan. I also imagine wardrobes offer storage space for clothes and armor.

 

===> 05 Combat

 

    Pretty straight forward, you use WASD and Shift in conjunction with LMB, RMB, F, E, and Q to activate most of your abilites. Some abilites are only activatible via the hotbar 1-0. Some skills learned chain off other skills and require you to LMB or RMB right after a skill to combo them. Creatures have some basic AI, so it's pretty easy to manipulate large amounts of them if you aren't terribly retarded. Remember, slay all heretic goblins who think they can party. Bind an HP/MP pot to your hotbar if you think you'll need them, the system does and will leave a small notification next to your bar if none are bound.  

 

===> 06 PvP / PvE

 

    => PvE

    There is none, PvEflags btfo. Get wrekt. Get dunkt. Get fukt. Ok no really, on a serious note, there are no raids or instanced dungeons. Everything is open world and some bosses spawn sporadically while others must be summoned via a scroll at what I can only assume are these scary looking statues placed throughout the map. There are some mobs that randomly spawn as violent variants, have higher hp and damage, they reward a few g's and quality items when killed. You can also go hunt moby dick on the high seas.

 

    => PvP

    Rejoice for killing scrubs is the way of life in this game. Simply murder some regular scrubs and then murder some other murder scrubs to keep your karma balance in check. Accumulating enough karma makes you into an outlaw and you can't go into cities anymore without being attacked. Compete in sieges to gain control of cities and their castles, you'll need some siege weapons too (which are explicitely only craftable). You can also acquire some armor that hides your nameplate, use this in conjunction with crouching and prone position to hide in tall grass and bushes. Guilds can decaler war on each other if you'd like to indiscriminately murder those of a specific guild without the karma penalty. There is also a bounty system that allows you to kill people who have had a bounty put upon them by a player. Some loot appears to drop from players but I'm not certain if it's anything they carried. If you're into griefing then I can't say this game's PvP will satisfy that itch.  

 

===> 000 Exterior Informative Guides

    Pvt Wiggles, Top 10 things you should know, very informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H1V5ApIlIE

    Pvt Wiggles is also making some other in depth videos, check them out.

    Reddit Contribution Details: https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/2xrzr9/guide_to_contribution_points/