Beginner’s Guide to Season Servers in BDO
Seasons are a way for new players to get a “fast pass” start in BDO, and a great way to earn catch up gear to get your account started. This guide is going to be a step-by-step guide on how to complete your season character, as well as provide a list on what you should be doing after the season ends.
Getting Started
To get started, I just want to quickly explain BDO’s server architecture. BDO runs off of a channel system similar to OSRS – you can freely switch between channels and aren’t committed to any single one like WoW or New World. There are 2 types of servers: normal servers and season servers. Season servers are only accessible by season characters, and have extra bonuses such as extra experience, additional enhancement materials granted for the season (as well as season specific rewards), and open world PvP is disabled. Season characters can still play on normal servers but it’s recommended to play on the season servers as a new player.
The first thing you want to do is create a brand new season character. In terms of what class you should pick, I highly recommend picking something you think looks fun over something that you think will be efficient. BDO is a VERY long term game, and you’ll have more fun playing something you enjoy over something that’s “meta”, especially because the meta can shift pretty frequently.
Now once you create your character it’ll tell you to start your adventure. For basically everyone, I recommend choosing the ancient stone chamber. For new players, this gets you right into the main story, and for veteran players, this allows you to quickly get to Alustin to do the quest skip.
What’s Next?
Now that you’re in the game, you might wonder “what should I do now?”. Well, for now, follow the quest line that the game puts you on, and soon after you start your journey, you’ll quickly come upon Alustin in Velia. This gives you the option of manually going through the quests, or choosing the simplified route and just grinding instead. It’s ultimately up to you, but my personal preference and recommendation is to go through the simplified route for the season so you dont have to quest through mediah if youve already done it.
Your overall goal for the season is to get level 61, complete the season pass and get your season gear – known as Tuvala gear – to PEN. Gear in BDO can be enhanced, with PEN being the highest enhancement rating. A quick explanation on the gearing process for seasons is you get Naru Gear doing the main quests that needs to be enhanced. When that gets to PEN, you can exchange that for Tuvala gear, which is the gear you want to mainly focus on and your goal gear for the season. If you want a more in depth guide to the gearing process for seasons, as well as how to enhance tuvala and naru gear, I have a guide here. I’ll explain what you need to do with your tuvala gear at the end of the season later in the guide.
You’ll also have a guide of what you should be doing by checking the season pass on the top right. The season pass offers challenges you can complete for extra rewards, and is something you want to 100% make sure you complete. You can also purchase the paid pass in the pearl shop if you want even more rewards, and is generally a pretty solid deal and is worth the money if you think BDO is something you’ll be invested in long term.
If you choose to go the simple route, you’ll want to go talk to Fughar near the stables of any city, and he’ll have quests that give you the equivalent guide and experience that you would have gotten for questing. If you go the main route, you’ll want to quest up through the end of Mediah – you’ll know you reached that point when you get a quest that tells you to go to Valencia. It’s important to do this quest because you get tons of experience, free pets and increased inventory space. When you hit level 56 you’ll also get your awakening and succession quests, which i recommend doing as soon as you get them. Ignore any quests related to the magnus for now.
In addition to the story quests, you’ll also want to do weekly quests for Tuvala enhancement materials. Open your black spirit, go to the “Recurring” tab, and go under the [Season Weekly] Stronger Tuvala gear category. This will give you a weekly kill quest where you need to grind some monsters which will give you those Tuvala enhancement materials as a reward. You can choose one of these per week. The one I recommend grabbing is the quest called New Mushroom Dish which sends you to polly’s forest in kamasylvia. This is a really solid spot for new players to grind in as it provides fantastic skill and combat experience, as well as some solid silver per hour. Even outside of the weekly quest, this is a fantastic spot to grind and is worth spending time at. If you want an idea for some additional spots, you can check out my grind spot guide listed here.
As you level up through levels 58-61, you’ll get a pen tuvala ring and pen tuvala earring for playing on a season character, as well as a capotia ring, earring, belt and a necklace. Between these pieces, and all of the Tuvala gear you get from the season, you’ll have a full set of gear ready to go! Something to keep in mind is that you cant use the capotia pieces until the season is over, but you’ll want to use them when that happens.
Graduation & Post Season
Once you’ve completed your season pass, you will unlock the process of “graduation”, allowing you to turn your season character into a regular character, and turn all of your season gear into non-season gear so it can be worn by your now non-season character. However, as a new player, i recommend staying on the season servers as long as possible to progress your account as much as you can with the season server bonuses, as well as not having to worry about PvP.
At the end of your seasons character journey, you’ll have a bunch of leftover season enhancement mats, which you can just sell since you can’t save them and use them on a future season character. While on the season server you can also get the Treant’s Tear item, which is a season exclusive item that’s worth grabbing if you ever plan on doing life skills. Grinding out the infinite potions on your season character is a great goal to set for yourself, since the gear requirements for the spots aren’t absurdly high and this will help your account progression a ton. I have a guide on the infinite potion, and guides on the rotations for all of the spots on my YouTube channel.
The last thing you’ll want to work on is the Season Seal of Journey, which can give you some exclusive items when you turn them in. The one’s i think are worth it are the “1 exchange per family” items. They are all pretty solid, however, the ones that I think stand above the others are the 3 weapon exchange coupons and the Combat/Skill Exp exchange coupon, as these are only given out by PA every so often, and these are really good to have in your back pocket because they help you with rerolling should you ever need to in the future. These Seals can be exchanged at Pulvio in velia, and if you just click on the item it should path you straight to him.
Now, once you decide you decide you’re ready to graduate, swap your server from a season server to a non-season server, as you cant be on a season server when trying to graduate. You want to open up the black spirit pass and click the graduation button. Then, press confirm on the screen that pops-up, your character will reload, and then you’re good to go. Just re-equip all your gear and you can get back out onto your adventures. During the graduation process you’ll get a voucher from fughar that allows you to exchange it with him for a PEN capotia accessory. I highly recommend choosing the necklace, as you get by far the most amount of stats from that piece over the other options.
Once you go through the graduation process, your next step will be to get into the guaranteed PEN armor and accessory systems and start your journey post season. Bring your Tuvala pieces to jetina, and exchange them with her for the jetina boss armor pieces; the process is explained in the guides for those systems which I have for armor/weapons, and here for accessories.
