Best Crystals to Use in BDO (PvE and PvP)

Crystals are items you get in Black Desert Online that you can slot in a crystal profile to give your character more stats. These are a very important part of a character build in BDO, and something you definitely want to take the time to setup. Thankfully, these crystals are account wide, so once you have the profiles setup all of your characters have access to them.

To setup your crystals (assuming you have some in your possession), you need to first add them into your crystal inventory – open your bags, click crystals and this will open your inventory where you can add any crystals you’ve purchased into. Once that’s complete, talk to the Black Spirit and hit transfusion. This will open up your crystal profiles and you can setup different crystal profiles for different activities, such as PvP, PvE, Node Wars, Life skills, etc. In the past, you used to be restricted by the types of crystals you could use based on which piece of gear they could be slotted into. Now with the crystal profiles, crystals are now categorized, and you can use a certain amount of crystals per category per crystal profile.

PvE Crystals

The chart here shows how to setup the best in slot crystal profile for PvE, courtesy of the guardian discord.

The base crystals you see at the top are (from left to right); Dark Red Fang Crystal – Valor, Corrupted Magic Crystal, Rebellious Spirit Crystal, and Glorious Crystal of Gallantry – Ah’krad (the Glorious Crystals should only be slotted once you have your Garmoth heart). If you need more accuracy, you’re going to want to pickup JIN Magic Crystal – Vipers, and if you need anymore you want to get Crystal of Elkarr. If you’re not hitting AP caps for the spot you’re grinding at, you’re going to want to grab yourself some Ancient Magic Crystal of Crimson Flame – Power (at least 4), otherwise you can consider some crystals that give CC resists. Personally for PvE, I user 4 power crystals, 2 Dark Red Fang Crystal – Valor, 2 Corrupted Magic Crystal, 2 Rebellious Spirit Crystal, and 2 JIN Magic Crystal – Vipers.

PvP Crystals

For PvP, the screenshots below are going to show what you want to grab for PvP.

The above crystal screenshots showcase 2 different setups: a general PvP build for more brawly classes like Guardian and Drakania, and a more offensive focused build for classes like Dark Knight and Maewha. PvP crystals are going to vary a bit more based on personal preferences and on a class by class basis, but these 2 profiles will serve as a good starting point for most people going into PvP, depending on if you’re a more rat assassin class, or a frontline brawler.