Welcome to the Blade & Soul NEO gearing guide! Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting your journey, understanding how to optimize your equipment is crucial to making the most of your character. From weapons to accessories, Soul Shields to badges, TenTen' guide will walk you through all the essential systems and help you gear up effectively.
Weapons
Weapons have three stages of evolution:
1. Base Form: Typically obtained from dungeon drops or crafted in the Transmutation menu.
2. Awakened Form: Evolve your base weapon using Transformation Stones.
3. True Form: The final stage of evolution.
Upgrading weapons increases stats and attack power, but the upgrade chance is random. Each failure increases your upgrade probability until you reach a guaranteed upgrade (Pity System).
Weapons may have two stat lines (like evasion and crit) and potentially a Soul Core slot or Mantra slot. If your weapon lacks these slots, you might acquire them when evolving. The additional enhancement effects from upgrades are generally minor.
Soul Cores
Soul Cores are obtained from heroic bosses, such as the Exile or Blackram Narrow. If you don't receive a soul core directly, you can obtain Soul Core Crystals, which allow you to transmute into Soul Cores.
You can slot Soul Cores into your weapon. Each Soul Core has unique effects, and you can summon additional attacks by clicking the Soul Core button in your skills tab. You can reroll stat lines using Soul Core Crystals.
Key stats to prioritize include:
• Critical Damage
• Piercing
• Accuracy (least important)
While the other stats may not significantly impact your performance, they can be relevant in PvP scenarios.
Accuracy: This stat is crucial as it determines whether your hits land successfully. Enemies can randomly evade or block attacks due to their RNG-based evasion or block chance. Achieving 100% accuracy ensures that every hit goes through, especially when executing high-damage skills.
Piercing: This stat allows you to ignore a portion of the enemy's defense. Currently, piercing isn't a major focus since enemies in our version have low defenses. However, as the game progresses and enemies start to have higher defenses, piercing will become increasingly important. Both accuracy and piercing scale with the enemy's level, so you'll want to prioritize these stats against tougher foes.
Critical Rate: This stat determines how often you land critical hits. Ideally, you should aim for a critical rate between 2,500 and 3,000, which translates to approximately 50% critical rate. However, keep in mind that critical hits have diminishing returns. It's not advisable to stack too much critical rate, especially since classes like Assassins or Kung Fu Masters receive a 40% critical rate boost from their blue buff. Aiming for a sweet spot of around 55% critical rate is optimal.
Mantra Slots
The final feature that may appear on your weapon is the Mantra Stone slot. Weapons and accessories can have 2 to 3 Mantra Stone slots, where you can insert Mantra Stones. The bonuses provided by Mantra Stones are quite minimal, making them less significant for your overall performance.
To utilize Mantra Stones, you can click the button at the bottom of the Manage Equipment window to input a specific combination of Mantra Stones (e.g., three of the same type like Gun Gun Gun, or combinations like Gun Gun Suh, or Gun Gun Hae). This will allow you to roll for random bonuses.
However, the bonuses (such as a 10% chance to recover 20% focus on a successful defensive skill) are generally not impactful enough to prioritize. Therefore, this system is considered to be of low importance.
Accessories
Accessories function almost identically to weapons, but instead of Soul sort, they feature Skill sort. You can evolve them in the same manner using Transformation Stones, progressing from their base form to the Awakening form and finally to their True form.
In Blade & Soul Neo, each skill has its own unique skill tree. To access these skill trees, you need to find the corresponding skill books and attach them to specific accessories. With the latest patch, you can now attach skills to any open skill slot on your accessories.
Once you've attached a skill, it will start granting Mastery. For instance, after attaching multiple skill books of the same type, you can increase the damage of your skills. At Mastery level 4, a skill may receive a one-second cooldown reduction, and at Mastery level 12, it can gain a two-second cooldown reduction.
Soul Shields
In this game, the Soul Shield functions similarly to artifacts from Genshin Impact. Each Soul Shield has HP and two random stat lines, which can include attributes like critical rate or critical damage. Additionally, there are set bonuses: equipping three, five, or eight pieces from the same Soul Shield set grants you valuable bonuses.
Unlike equipment such as weapons or accessories, you can evolve your Soul Shield by fusing the same piece onto it. For instance, if you fuse another Soul Shield with the same slot, you can transfer its stats to your base Soul Shield. This process increases one of the same stat lines. So, if both the base Soul Shield and the offering Soul Shield have defense stats, your overall defense will also increase. The fusion process requires some wood fragments and silver.
You can also fuse Primers into your Soul Shield to add a third stat line. This additional stat does not replace the base stats; for example, if your base stat is 39, it can increase up to a maximum of 62. However, you can exceed this maximum by fusing a Primer. Primers can be obtained by spending Shield Bases at NPCs, and these bases are acquired through Soul Wardens crafting. Therefore, it's essential to start your Soul Wardens crafting as soon as possible.
It's important to note that while you can obtain critical rate, accuracy, and piercing Primers, there is no critical damage Primer available. As a result, the most crucial base stat to focus on when selecting your Soul Shield is critical damage, since you cannot acquire critical damage Primers.
Augment
The final aspect of equipment to grasp is augment. Augments are essentially enhancements that can be applied using psyches. By placing a psyche on your equipment, you can receive two additional random stats or bonuses. Each piece of equipment has a corresponding psyche, which you can find in the BNS NEO Marketplace, where you can buy items with Divine gems. There are specific psyches for weapons, soul shields, and accessories. All these psyches function similarly across different equipment types.
The key feature of augmenting is the ability to choose. Initially, you'll have a base augment, and then you'll receive two new random augments. You can decide whether to keep the original augment or select one of the new options. This process is somewhat reminiscent of the cubing system in MapleStory.
Soul Badge
You can acquire Soul Badges by dismantling the corresponding regional outfits. For instance, dismantling a Cinderland outfit will yield a Desert Soul Badge, while later, dismantling a Moonwater outfit will grant you a Moonwater Soul Badge. You can then trade these badges with the merchant for a Desert Soul Badge chest.
Soul Badges provide an additional damage effect to specific skills. They also come with a random stat line, which is categorized and can be reset by clicking on the reset effect and using specific items.
The first category includes stats like accuracy, block, and evasion, with accuracy being the most advantageous. The second category features HP, health regeneration, and piercing, with piercing being the best choice. The final category includes critical rate, critical damage, and defense.
Using the same fragments, you can upgrade your Soul Badge up to +10 to enhance its stat lines.
Mystic Badges
Mystic Badges, on the other hand, serve as skill modifiers. For example, when you use a Moonwater Mystic Badge on the Guardian Tempest skill, you gain additional stacks of Rolling Typhoon. After casting Guardian Tempest, a small buff appears, allowing you to accumulate extra stacks of Rolling Typhoon for the next three seconds.
You can obtain Mystic Badge Powders by dismantling premium outfits purchased from the Hongmoon Store. These powders can then be traded for Mystic Badge fragments at NPCs.
Similar to Soul Badges, you can evolve Mystic Badges all the way to +10 to enhance their stat lines.
Insignia and Gallery
The last two topics to cover are Insignia and Gallery. Insignias are quite straightforward; they function similarly to runes from the original League of Legends. You can acquire these from the level 45 Mushin's Tower solo dungeon. The key aspect here is to focus solely on attack power, so you should only equip runes that enhance attack power.
On the other hand, the Gallery is akin to a card set system. By collecting specific sets of cards, you can unlock unique effects. There are numerous card sets available in the game, and by registering your cards into a specific set, you can activate the corresponding effect by paying the Bond Activation.
You can obtain cards through various in-game activities. Many players aim for the Deva Card by farming the Deva Boss. Dungeons also drop cards, but you can also acquire cards by fusing existing ones. For example, by combining five cards from the same region, you can obtain a higher-level card; for instance, fusing five green cards may yield a random blue card.
Cards can be shared across all your characters. This means that when your alternate character acquires a card, you can use it on your main character. As a result, many players create dedicated card-farming alt characters whose sole purpose is to repeatedly farm bosses for cards. This strategy allows their main character to save energy and avoid the grind of farming cards.
Final Thoughts
Blade & Soul NEO offers a robust gearing system that allows players to tailor their characters for both PvE and PvP scenarios. By focusing on key stats like critical rate, critical damage, and accuracy while utilizing systems like Soul Cores, badges, and Soul Shields effectively, you can maximize your performance and enjoy everything the game has to offer.
Remember, gearing up is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time exploring each system, farm resources efficiently, and don’t hesitate to experiment with different builds to find what works best for you. Good luck on your journey in Blade & Soul NEO!
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