Rise of the Angry Earth survival guide
Welcome to Season 3 and all the excitement the expansion entails. Along with a whole lot of fun and new content, there comes a degree of overwhelm, which is what this article is here to help you with. Learn how to adjust to a new New World, with mounts, artifacts and a complete overhaul of our gear.
Mounts
The first thing you should do once you load in after purchasing Rise of the Angry Earth, is go get yourself a mount. This is going to make moving around much faster, as well as just being cool and fun.
Look for a horseshoe icon in Everfall, north of Oxboro settlement. You’ll be sent on a short quest and quickly gain your first trusty steed – a horse.
If you want to unlock the wolf and lion, you’ll need to continue on the riding quest line, which requires you to race between assigned locations, against the clock. There’s no need to do this immediately, although it is good for your riding XP, which makes you faster.
You can also feed your mount three times a day to add to your riding skill.
Note: if you’ve made a new character or just started the game, you’ll need to wait until you reach level 25 before you can do the mount quest.
Do the main questline
With the expansion comes an extension of the main storyline, from the new settlement in Edengrove to the depths of the Elysian Wilds in the deep south. Once you have your mount, it’s a good idea to take this quest and follow it to the end. You’ll receive the Attuned Leather Pants Artifact as a reward and learn about the new zone along the way.
Sort out your gear
You’ll soon realise that leveling comes quickly and you’ll be level 65 and wanting new gear almost immediately. The new max Gear Score is 700, so the majority of our 625 gear and below will need to be replaced. It is no longer possible to upgrade gear with umbral shards, so it’s most likely your BIS 625 set will never reach 700.
But don’t be too hasty, there are some exceptions and you can hold onto some items until you get better ones to replace them.
Set up your gear sets
Choose which role or roles you would like to play and fill your gearsets with your best items. You can then use this as a space to put new gear in as you get it. With gear biasing, whatever you are wearing is more likely to drop. So, for example, if you’re a Bow/Spear user in light armour, you’ll get more Light Dex gear than anything else and more bows and spears than other weapons. So you should be able to swap in new dropped items pretty fast.
What not to delete
As well as the items you are wearing and have loaded into gear sets, there are a few other things you should keep, to start with at least.
- Named PVP track gear – apparently, this can be upgraded at the gypsum kiln, at the very least don’t delete it until you have checked.
- Protection amulets. Until you collect new protection amulets, you can still get away with 625 for M2 without impacting your total gear score too much
- Beloved earrings – these cannot be acquired any more, so if you have a threat issue you might want to hold onto yours.
- Luck gear. Luck doesn’t scale past 2.9%, so you can keep using the same gear until you get better.
- Crafting and refining gear. All crafting bonuses are still the same, so there is no need to replace it.
- Gathering sets. These do have new patterns with higher bonuses but you can keep using your old ones until you get the new versions.
Salvage salvage salvage
What to salvage? Everything else! If you have a bank full of items you were saving “just in case”, that time is never gonna come. It is time to melt them all down, and in the process you will gain a few things:
- Dark matter. Anything that is over 600GS and not a named expedition drop will give you 1 Dark Matter. It doesn’t seem like much but you’re going to need a lot of the stuff, so every bit counts.
- Coin
- Bank space (yay!)
- Materia. Any materia from the level 60+ expeditions can be converted into the new Dense materia at a rate of 80 to 1.
- Salvage scraps – anything under 600GS has a chance of giving purple salvage scraps that can be converted to the related crafting XP at a craft station.
- Legendary fragments – 600GS and over has a guaranteed drop of one, which can be converted to the old cooldown mats or sold.
Crafting new expedition replicas
Something you can do to boost your gear score quite quickly is to strategically craft 700GS expedition replicas at the Gypsum Kiln, using Dense materia. You get a decent amount of Dense Mutation materia from the Season Pass, as well as some specific expedition Dense Materia.
Weapons impact your gear score the most, however you can probably get high level weapons through looting, as well as Artifact and Named item farming.
The next greatest impact is the Chest piece, so it might be worth crafting one with Magnify on it, that can boost your Gear Score across multiple sets. Magnify is a new perk that adds to your highest attribute, so is quite flexible but can be tricky when trying to balance two or more high stats.
Magnify jewelry can also be used across different sets, so that’s another good one to craft.
You will get one random perk and two pre-determined perks, and the random perk can be changed (at some expense).
Artifacts
New items called Artifacts have been added to the game – you can look at a list of them here. They are found in various locations, dropping from world bosses, mutated expedition bosses, Season Pass, PVP track, and the main Quest line. There are often groups farming the open world bosses, keep an eye out in recruitment chat for the artifact name and x to join up.
Once you get an Artifact, you’ll need to complete some tasks in order to unlock the perks. The final perk can be customised at the gypsum kiln, by using a Matrix, 500 Dark Matter, 5 Gypsum Orbs and a Chromatic Seal, plus the desired perk craft mod.
Upgrading gear
Umbral shards have been completely removed from the game and there is no incremental upgrade system any more. Speaking of which, you should salvage any umbral shards you have laying about for a nice little payday.
The only way to upgrade items now is via the gypsum kiln, and this is restricted to specific items only. These are mostly new Named items that can be found across all the high level zones and in expeditions. They can drop at a range of Gear Score levels and can be boosted to 700 by adding or changing the final perk. You’ll need a Matrix, 250 Dark Matter, 1 Gypsum Orb, and 3 Chromatic Seals, plus the perk craft mod. We have a more in depth guide to upgrading items here.
Maximise your Faction Reputation
The Chromatic Seals that you use to upgrade Artifacts and Named items are purchased on the final Tier of the Faction vendor. They are Bind on Pickup, so the only way to gain access to upgrading is to achieve the sixth rank in your Faction. You can buy one Chromatic Seal per day and they cost 5000 gold and 20000 tokens (19000 if you have the fort bonus).
Faction missions are an easy way to gain reputation, and they’ll help build up your token stash too.
Have fun!
There’s lots to do in the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, so just have some fun. You might choose to battle other players in large scale Open World skirmishes for faction influence, or explore the new Savage Divide expedition. All your craft skills have had their cap increased to 250 (don’t worry, if you had aptitude levels you will get those back when you hit this new cap) and there are shiny new resources to gather. Travelling the map is more fun than ever on our new mounts, especially in a group. Combine this with mutations, the Season Pass, events and more, and the only problem becomes having enough time to do it all. Enjoy 🙂
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