Gear – Simplified
stargrace 
One of the most confusing things to me when I started playing BDO was gear. It’s still pretty confusing, so let’s look at just season+ characters and simplify things. First of all, if you’re a season character you can’t wear regular gear, so you’ll be looting gear that you can’t wear sometimes. When you’re questing, you’ll be given blue gear – Naru gear (I know technically you get white and green gear first but let’s start with Naru). You’ll see tons of people talking about ‘PEN’ – and this is a tier of enchanting. As you quest, or log in daily, or just exist, you’ll earn beginner black stone armour/weapon. You summon your black spirit dude, click enchant – and with the stones and the armour in your inventory, you use the UI to enchant the gear.
The game fools you because the first few times you do this, you’ll have 100% chance at success. Then things get hard. Now, Naru is special gear and they’ve made it even easier than regular servers, so you SHOULD be able to get all of your gear to PEN without too much difficulty. I believe that means 1-15 and then 5 levels above that to reach PEN. Needless to say it uses a ton of materials.
So once you’ve gotten your gear (ignore accessories!) to full blue naru PEN, you’ll remove it, and go talk to Fughar – type his name into search if you’re not sure where he’s at and you’ll get an auto path to him. Talking to him gives you some quests to turn in that Naru PEN gear for Tuvala gear. It’s yellow/orange, and it’s enchanted a bit to be better than the Naru you were wearing.
Your next goal is to take that Tuvala gear and enchant THAT using the supplies you’ll be collecting – ideally to PEN level before season+ ends sometime in December.
This is where the grind of the game comes into play. You’ll fail. A lot. Your items will go down in durability. You can repair this durability by exchanging tuvala ore with a blacksmith for the same slot as the item you’re trying to mend, and then using the blacksmith interface to repair the durability. When you fail an enchant you’ll go down a tier in levels on it and that sucks. Honestly, just try to get your tuvala as high as you can. When you end season+ your tuvala gear will get exchanged from season+ to regular server stuff, and you’ll be able to use it on non season characters.
Everything else? I’m ignoring for now. Sure some min/max people are out there trying to pen accessories, but we get a set after season+ so I’m just not bothering.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!