I see. So pet is kinda like the end-game meta for Black Desert, then?
How about the tamer's pet? Well, I doubt it.
No, not at all.
Pets are mandatory. I highly recommend that you do not play Black Desert if you're not going to buy pets. The game is set up to cost 6-10 dollars, to justify the purchase of pets.
You might ask why the developers didn't just decide to charge 50 dollars for the game instead of hiding basic features that are essential to the core experience instead of making customers sour over feeling they have opt-in over hidden costs.
Nobody really knows, but people suspect that the developers being Korean, and this being an accepted practice in Korea, makes it fair. A pet cost 10 US dollars, and you can use 4 pets at once. I'd say that 40 Dollars worth of pets are needed if you're going to play.
I do not recommend you to breed your pets. If you breed your pets they can get into a higher tier pet, but one of them will be destroyed. With the maximum tier being Tier 4 and the system being based on RNG (Random chance of luck) you essentially got a gambling system where whales spend hundreds of dollars on these pets to get the best pets.
Pets are auto loot. And they are mandatory to playing this game effectively.
Once you get later into the game, you'll be effectively able to kill 100-200 enemies per minute. You're able to do this because you get super powerful and get amazing at the fantastic combat. You need and want to kill that many enemies very fast because the game is about efficiency. And at later times in the game, xp gain is very very very slow, so you need to be as effective as possible.
It's not just a matter of that manually looting everything- 100-200 enemies every minute will essentially make any progress you would make completely naught, the other aspect is that enemy corpses disappear so fast that you cannot even loot them before they disappear.
It's not uncommon for lvl 60s to outperform pets abillity to pick-up all loot. Even with all 4 tier 4 pets out.
I knew pets was going to piss of the western gaming community, because the west is not used to this sort of hidden-fee payment model. The game is set up incentivize and hook you into buying these pets.
With this being said though, the pets are really cool. They are best animated, and most awesome pets I' have seen in a game. they need to be fed, they learn new skills, have good selection of animations and are quite enjoyable. I do not regret buying mine. But I would say to anyone who is into the game; Playing without pets to about lvl 50-55 might be the way to go.
If you then- at that point, decide that you want to stick with the game, and afk play over night, and spend 1-2 years getting to 56, or just stop and focus on life skill for the forseeable future, I'd say that the amount of time and fun you're going to get out of the game easily justifies the 40 dollars.
And if you care about how your character looks, also buy a costume for your main character when you've tried them all, and really really know which one you want to main. You enjoy playing your character for many hundreds of hours when you look cool. the default sets are okay, but they feel generic as everyone are running around in them.
I wish PA/Kakao would have been more upfront and transparent about these behind-a-paywall-features, that customers expect from similar products. But BDO is an amazing and at the same time, frustrating experience.
But given how many who play the game run around with pets and cash shop costumes, I bet their business model is really working for them.
In my opinion, it's going to be nearly impossible to have a good time with the game (doing combat) without pets. It's just absurd to think that you can play like that. the loot and money you'd miss out on, or the slow progress you'd have to reduce yourself to to only fight a couple of mobs and loot. Both scenarios are beyond stupid and a waste of time.
I've been camping those on the marketplace for a long time. I want to never have to pick up a item again. I can't even macro pickup chains on my steam controller to make it less spammy with A...AAA...AAAA...A.......A.......AAAA (A = pick up and confirm pick up loot button).
