Best Leveling Guide – Dune Awakening

Welcome to the Best Leveling Guide for Dune Awakening!  Today we will discuss all the ways in which you gain experience in Dune Awakening and what the best options are for grinding experience and gaining skill points in Dune Awakening.

1. Quests and Journies

There are no repeatable quests in Dune Awakening currently. You will have quests to unlock classes, join a faction, and various zone quests in Hagga Basin. These are all worth completing and give experience on top of a fair amount of starting Solari to spend. Outside of quests, there are Journies to complete too. The Journies aren’t bad to complete because they’re generally simple and give 200 experience to do simple tasks like first time building or using various tools. These are extra little bags of experience you should regularly check to see if you can obtain every now and then after completing areas.  To access your quests and journies, press J and browse between the first two tabs.

2. Mining

Mining is the slowest form of gaining Experience in Dune Awakening.  You will accumulate a lot of weight quickly and you won’t be mining for long.  This requires you to travel for most of the time and mining resources only provides 5 experience per node.  This is static and never changes.  Since your goal with mining is to target effeciency by collecting more resources rather than harvesting more nodes, Mining ranks last for leveling and gaining experience in Dune Awakening.

3. Picking Up Scrap

Picking up random junk off the ground is actually one of if not the best ways to gain experience in Dune Awakening. This is kind of stupid in design, but you get 2 experience points per piece of anything you pick up off the ground. I ran a few tests, and was able to get about 2500XP in a half hour picking up items. This is dependent on having a good loop to run filled with tons of trash and no bases blocking you. Southern Hagga Basin turns out to be a pretty good route.

Basically you can loop areas down here and pickup scrap, plant fibers, and granite. Every resource has 3 items to pick up, which is 6 EXP. This is definitely a bit boring, but it is optimal with a good route and resources will respawn quickly. When your weight hits higher ends, you dump scrap and granite on the ground and can continue farming. Additionally, you can craft loads of bandages, which weigh 1 pound per stack. Basically, this isn’t a bad thing to do now and again when you want to stock up fibers or bandages while accumulating good Experience. The only way you can outpace it, is through killing lots of mobs, and you have to kill really efficiently.

But 2500 XP in 30minutes is about 84 xp per minute, which is picking up 42 items per minute. That is a ton – so you’ll have to find and focus areas where there are huge surpluses of starter resources. These do exist in South Hagga Basin, but there’s also places in other areas that aren’t terribly bad that just have huge mixes of resources and even bases with mobs nearby. They will still give you low amounts of something like 10XP per kill, but you can just drop a Mentat turret to do the job and continue along your way picking things up.

4. Killing Mobs

Killing Mobs is one of the best methods to gain experience in Dune Awakening.  Killing Mobs will require you to have decent gear at higher levels, but this is great when you are lower level.  If mobs are higher level and more difficult, you will gain large amounts of experience, around 20+ experience per kill. At higher levels you will get reduced EXP for killing mobs, so it’s 12, 14, or 16XP for mobs. Ranged will usually give lower, heavies and higher level areas will give you more XP of 16 per mob. That’s the equivalent of picking up 6 to 8 items in Hagga Basin, so you’ll have to be efficient. If your curious, killing players in PvP gives 33 Experience, but there’s a significant cooldown.

I have made optimal routes to grind mobs on and have a map layout below. Comms Stations and higher level PvP zones like The Aegis or Passage of Artemis are tougher but give you more experience in Dune Awakening. These are the best options. The only downside with this strategy is sometimes these spawns are killed and not spawned. Beyond that, we must travel and kill efficiently. I recommend using my melee build to kill in these areas. It kills fast in PvE, and you take no damage really with Holtzman shield up all the time. You can use mark 5 gear for this, such as Joltsword. The rest is just using the right skills and technique.

You will learn to clear these areas out quickly if you do them a few times. When you’re finished clearing an area, you want to jump off the edge or get outside the zone as quick as possible with a flying knee and board your ornithopter. This can be done in midair as well and will save you time. A pro tip for traveling in such a manner – keep your vehicle backup tool on you when you get in your vehicle. You are able to exit and spam the load button and you will load it quickly. This will help you get in and out quickly. Lastly, do not forget to activate your Holtzman shield whenever you exit your vehicle to fight.

All in all, killing efficiently is not a bad option. In about a 30minute window I killed about 165 mobs and earned about 2500 Experience too. It was about the same as picking up trash down south, but my test run was a bit slower my first time, so I was doing it faster in subsequent runs. Additionally, the other problem with killing mobs is sometimes they’re not spawned at some stations. So you will fly to them and nothings there. This cut into my time as well, so I recommend flying real close and seeing if mobs are there before exiting vehicles doing this route.

Last piece of advice on killing mobs is that they do have longer spawn times, over 30 minutes. Therefore, it is important to switch sietches by logging out to the character screen and going to a different sietch. This will place you at Griffin’s Tradepost. From here you can talk to the ornithopter pilot and ask him to take you back north to Pinnacle Station and jump back to farming mobs. All in all, killing mobs and being a trash collector are pretty close ways to EXP, the real issue between the 2 of them is travel time and availability.

5. Discovery

Discovery EXP gives you a lot per point, for the most part. You may get 100, 200, or even 300 for discovering some locations. Some of these cave locations give 200 or maybe 100, but small caves in Hagga Basin will only give 20 for the most part. I’d recommend scouting all of them and killing everything quickly you come across.  Additionally, discovery Experience in bugged currently and will only credit you experience if you discover things while outside of your vehicle.  It’s imperative that you get out of vehicles before getting too close or you will miss out on tons of discovery experience while leveling up.  This also goes for sandbike as well as your ornithopter.

The best thing you can do is naturally explore areas you haven’t discovered, pickup trash everywhere, and kill mobs as you move through, and go to the next. The more trash that’s in the area, the better. That’s the most optimal format, and it comes in bursts, but clear out areas on foot and just get out of your vehicle before discovering locations. I recommend having mobility skills on bar for this technique such as Maxed Bindu Sprint, Shigawire, and Flying Knee or Mentat Turret if you’re running past lower level mobs it can solo. Just tear ass across the map – make sure you pack some extra suspensor belts and just discover areas you skipped, pickup trash and throw it away when you’re full or overweight.

The Deep Desert resets every week and is worth the experience but will not dramatically outperform these other methods. You can get 8100 experience scanning all 81 sectors, but there’s also the discovery of testing stations and caves to collect on too and these will be 100 and 200 experience boosts. From my experience, shipwrecks aren’t giving experience at all, so don’t worry about those. But scanning requires a lot of flying, waiting while scanning, but its nice to change it up, because any 1 method may get quite boring. But again, get out of your vehicle before you arrive. It’s not bad to just bail out of your ornithopter as you fly in above and pick it up on the ground.

All in all, these are your best methods to grind experience in Dune Awakening. Beyond level 150 though, experience begins to exponentially increase. In fact, halfway to level 200 in Dune Awakening, is level 180.

The curve is exponential and can be punishing in the last 20 levels.  If you intend to grind these before any DLC content, I might recommend waiting until the Landsraad decree comes around offering 50% more experience for a week as well.  This may make things more tolerable and worth grinding that week specifically.  But that’s about everything I’ve got for info on grinding Experience in Dune Awakening for now!

The post Best Leveling Guide – Dune Awakening appeared first on AlcastHQ.