I've just returned to playing dcuo recently, the last content I remember playing was crisis in central city and the celestial power set. Ive been told that was like 5+ years ago, doesn't seem like it's been that long but maybe it has. Obviously a lot about the game has changed since then. I came back to see skill trees gone, weapon mastery added, 3+ new power sets, a whole boatload of episodes and new content I don't recognize, etc etc. So I started over fresh on the villain side to help relearn the game (only played heroes in the past), and I just hit level 30 last night with my water powered villain. Now im sitting at like 34ish combat rating and everything seems to require 200+. Was hoping to get into atlantean content right away but that's like 256 or something crazy. So what's the most efficient/quickest way to raise that combat rating? Any suggestions?
How to increase CR quickly: 1. Do events to monger Source Marks. 2. Spend Source Marks in equips from vendors inside safehouses. Problem solved.
Lynx!!!! Welcome back. Speed leveling has gotten pretty easy now. There are multiple ways to doing this. I’m short the main thing you should do at the start of every day you play is to do the current content on event version as well as the open world. This will give you 2 main things. Marks for current dlc as well as gear that you can open for any role for your power. For the moment don’t open gear and don’t spend the marks. After you do these make sure you do the solos, duos, alerts, and open world stuff for your current cr rating. These pieces will most likely give you already open stuff so you won’t have a choice as to what to get. But these you can put on right away. Put on the highest gear possible including support/dps gear just to get your rating higher. Do your vault and stabilizer daily as well. The vault will give you one piece of gear that you can open to any role while the stabilizer will give you stabilizer pieces. These are used to open time capsules which I will go into more detail later. After you do those look at your in duty and see what stuff will give your source marks for your cr. There is a cr range that will give you source marks. If you are to high you won’t get source marks and you are to low you won’t be able to go in lol. Do any solo and duo (alert if they actually pop lol) that gives you source marks each day. After you did everything you may have a slightly higher cr so you should double check if you passed the cr gap to go to the next dlc. If you did than do the open world stuff and content for that new dlc that you gained access too. Keep doing this until you hit a wall where you can’t get any higher for that day. After you finish than it’s time to spend source marks. Any gear that cost source Marks Have had their price reduced to be very cheap. Which is why you save this step for last each day. Look at your gear and see which is the lowest piece of gear. Only buy one at of time. Buy the highest gear available to you with source marks and check if your cr went past the next cr gap. Keep doing this until you pass the gap. If you did than don’t buy any more gear. Do the next dlc stuff again repeating the process. If you didn’t than keep buying gear one at a time until you pass the gap. If you hit a gap than check your gear and if you have to use the lex coins which are the current dlcs currency and use those to buy gear from the dlc vendor that sales purple gear. Remember to replace your lowest gear possible first.
Now to catch you up on anything you missed. Gear Mods are no longer in the game. Instead they were replaced By augments. They seem a little confusing at first but they are pretty strain forward. They stay with your character for the rest of the game. Instead of replacing the gear mods you just keep leveling them up until they hit max. Very dlc they increase it by 10 levels. Current max is 267 I believe. When ever you salvage gear you will get exobytes. The exobytes will be either red (damage), blue (vit), green (resto), purple (dom), and colorless (anything). You can feed any color into any augment but you do get a boost in experience when ever you feed the exobytes that match the augments. Colored exobytes can not be enhanced but colorless can (I’ll go into more detail on this soon). Exobytes come in different colors as shown above but they also come in different ranks too. They will be low medium and high (forgot the names lol) grey background in the lowest, green in medium, and blue background in pristine which is the only one I remember the name of lol. As said before the colored ones exobytes can not be enhanced to the next rank but the colorless ones can. If you have a low it can be enhanced to medium and again to blue which is pristine. To enhance the exobytes you need exo material. You get these from open world which is where we got exobits before. Now they drop exo material. These don’t have any color. You just go around the cities and basically find them around. Rank up exobytes and feed them to your augments. Starting in the teen titans dlc you will get adaptive (head) augments. These give you a base stat boost plus additional buffs for that specific dlc. Every dlc after titans will have their own adaptive augments so these ones will be replaced. Starting at titans dlc each boss and mission will give you a possible choice to pick a dlc exobytes as a reward. These give you a bonus for feed them to adaptive augment for that dlc. These can no be enhanced so just feed them as you wish.
Next up are artifacts. These are probably the most confusing to a returning player. They basically give you base specific stat buffs, percentage stat buffs, as well as additional benefits. Each artifact will have different benefits so I won’t explain them just yet. You will hear a lot on the forums that they are pay to win and that you have to spend money to level them. Don’t let that freak you out because you don’t have to spend a dime to level them up. I’ll first explain what to do with them and than I will explain how the rest. Once you get an artifact it will be at rank 0. You will need nth metal to level them up. Nth metal drops from everything in the game. Kill an add and you can get nth. Beat a boss and you can get nth. Even if you pick up an exo material node and you can get nth metal. However they are not a random drop. They are on an account wide timer. Every couple of minutes when you complete an action listed above you will automatically get an nth metal at a 100% drop chance. However the nth you get is random. You can get an nth that gives 10 exp all the way up to 500 exp. Unfortunately the lower ones have a higher drop chance. The timer itself is very backwards on my opinion. If you are constantly in combat or performing the task than the timer is around 8 minutes between nth drop. However if you are not doing anything and just perform an action only when needed than the timer becomes around 2 minutes. Not sure why this is implemented but unfortunately it is. Since you will rarely not being doing anything, especially since you are trying to speed level your cr than you will be stuck on an 8 minute timer. Now that you have nth metal you feed them into the artifact that you want. Every 20 levels you will have to perform a breakthrough. To do breakthroughs you will need catalyst. You get these catalyst from John Constantine I’m either the watch tower for hero’s or hall of doom for villains. When you go to the artifact it will tell you what catalyst you need. At 20 I believe you need 2 green catalyst. At 40 you will need 2 green and 1 blue, and at 60 you will need 3 green, 2 blue, 1 purple. Every rank after that you will need 1 additional catalyst of each color to do a break through. Max rank is 200. The higher the artifact level the more nth exp is needed. And the higher ranks have a much lower chance to succeed in a breakthrough. Reason is that the only guaranteed successful break through is the rank 20 break through. Which has a success rate of 100%. At 40 it is 95%, 60 is 90%, but the success rate diminishes rapidly. At 200 I believe you only have 2% success rate I think. Now I know this seems like it will never happen but you can use seals to force break throughs. There are 2 types of seals in the game. Seals of preservation, and seals of completions. You can buy them from the market place for real money. Seals of preservation will let you keep your catalyst that you used if you failed a break through. So if you fail the break through than you lose the seal but keep the catalyst. If you succeed than it will take your catalyst like a regular breakthrough but instead of using your seal you keep it. Seals of completions will turn the breath through chance from what ever percentage it is all the way up to 100%. This forces that pesky 200 rank 2% to become a 100% success chance. On the early breakthrough ranks the catalyst requirements are low so I’d recommend that you don’t even bother with a seal at all. This is because source marks are pretty much used for only a few things in the game once you are at endgame. Up to around rank 80 or what ever rank you feel comfortable losing the catalyst for just let it break through on its own. If you fail just get the catalyst again. For the mid ranges I’d say use the seal of preservation. I personally use preservation seals all the way up to and including a 40% breakthrough chance. After the 40% the next breakthrough has a 20% chance of success. At this point I just use a seal of completion. At maxed out artifact required 1.6 (almost 1.7) mil nth experience. This is a lot. You can speed up the process by getting perfected nth metal that gives you 75k experience towards your artifact. You can buy these from the market place as well. Now, I know what it seems like. You have to spend money if you hope to be end game ready. However that is not the case. Each end game content consists of a raid, alert, solo/duo. And there is an elite raid. The current dlc has 2 raids, 1 alert, and a solo. Both raids have elite versions. (I’ll go into more detail about these later). To do regular (Nom Elite) content at the most you can get buy with rank 120 artifacts. Some of my alts only have one rank 80 artifact and that’s it lol. With rank 120 artifacts you are more than ok to do regular content. Even if you have 3 rank 80 artifacts you will be fine. For elite content you can do them just fine with 160 artifacts or 120 if you know what you’re doing. My 2 primary alts only have 120 artifacts and they have completed elite too. So 200 rank artifacts are not needed at all. A 160 rank artifact will require about 670k exp. it’s the last 2 ranks that require the bulk of the exp. Needing 1mil exp to get from 160 to 200. Now, I know I said that you don’t have to spend a dime to rank up artifacts. Yes I said that and I meant that. This is how. By having a membership you will get 500 loyalty points per month (pc has different name but basically the same thing). The perfected nth metal that gives you 75k exp cost 1000 loyalty points (or 900 market place cash. 1000 without membership). This means that every 2 month you can use the points from having a membership to get yourself a perfected nth metal. Once you get the the level you want. You can instead use the points to buy seals. Seals of completion have the same price both for loyalty and for market place cash. So every 2 months you can buy a seal of completion. Seals of preservation are cheaper. I believe they cost 200 loyalty points. The vendors for these loyalty points are in the police stations for hero’s and in the club houses (that’s what the villains are called right) for villains. Now that you bought a perfected nth metal you have 2 choices. You can spend them right away, or you can do what I do and save them in your bank. Normally before each new dlc that introduces new artifacts they will have a bonus nth metal weekend (week because of the virus). The bonus event will double all nth metal you feed into artifacts for that even time line. So that 75k nth metal you bought a couple months ago goes from 75k experience up to 150k experience. Also, there is another bonus even that affects artifacts. We just had one recently and these events are more common. This is the bonus catalyst weekend (week). During this event you will get catalyst as regular drops for doing content. On top of that you also get a free unstable seal of completion. These seal does the exact same thing as a regular seal of completion. The difference is that it will only last 7 days from the time you accept the seal. So every couple of events you will get a free seal. So by being patient you can save on money and just rank them up passively. Ok, now I said earlier that as regular drops you get nth metal that goes from 10 up to 500. However there is actually another rank. And that is the nth that gives you 3k experience. I mentioned earlier that you should do the vault and stabilizer daily. That is for another reason. The stabilizer will give you nth metal and so will the vault. However the vault has a weekly bonus. Each week when you do the vault you get a 3k nth metal. So that’s something you get for free. What I’d recommend is to put all purple (500) and the vault nth (3000) along with the 75k nth in your bank and save them for the bonus artifact weekend. Everything else I personally feed. If you want to min max than save everything and only use then on bonus weekends. But they will take up a lot of space. And NOW. You went though all this trouble to rank up artifacts. What’s the point. As you rank them up every 20 levels you will get increased base stats as well as increased percentage stats. However as mentioned at the start you also gain extra benefits. At rank 80, 120, 160, and 200 you will unlock a bonus effect from the artifact. Each artifact will give you different effects and some even synergize with other artifacts. Here are some (not all) notable artifacts to keep an eye out for. Might dps: Solar amp, transformation, strategist, grimorium, eye of gemini, soul cloak Prec dps: Transformation, Strategist, grimorium, eye of Gemini Healer: Page of destiny, orb of arion, soul cloak, eye of Gemini Troll: Amulet of rao, soul cloak, parasite power harness, bop comlink, strategist Tank: Mystic symbols, manacles of force, everymen, refractor, eye of Gemini There are a bunch of other artifacts. Some powers benefit more from one set up than others. And some slightly alter your play style.
I know your question was specifically on leveling but I thought I’d share some key things that you could use. Hope that’s ok. I’m sure there are more stuff I’m forgetting so if you have any other questions feel free to reach out.
Thanks for the tips. Yea, I'd already kinda worked out the artifact system with some help from people ingame, have one up to level 62 or so now, just trying to get to 80 for that first active effect.
Sounds good. A few people I know who came back ended up leaving because they were either overwhelmed by artifacts or they heard it was a paywall so just wanted to make sure someone else didn’t fall for it lol
Obviously the "run everything relevant" strategy is the fastest way to gear up, if you define fastest as in "I need to have this done by Saturday." On the flip side, if your definition of "fastest" is that you need to level up the character with the minimum amount of gameplay time, for example someone who wants to have a higher end alt, but doesn't want to sacrifice significant gameplay on their main to do it, I'll boil it down to brass tacks. Run the Vault and the Event stuff. That is it. If you don't have the time to run all of the Event stuff, then prioritize them as follows: Bounties > Raids > Dailies > Alerts > Duos > Challenge. The goal is to create a situation where a group of other players can blitz you through easily, with the minimal investment of time. A weaker character will spend more time running the Lobo solo than they will the Fire and Brimstone raid, but the raid carries much better rewards. The reason to run the event stuff rather than the CR relevant is because the Event stuff grants essentially double rewards. You get the source marks to buy your gear. You get the attunables to equip and raise your gear. But you also get the Episode specific currency. Since you cannot actually buy the Episode gear, you have the option to use it on Purple attunables to further speed through the ladder, or to save it for later. If you save it, one of two things will happen. When you do finally level past the point of Source Marks and you can use it, you can speed through the slow-zone of leveling because you're not starting that stuff from scratch. Or, alternatively, if you wait too long and it rolls over into Source Marks territory, those Episode Specific currencies convert into Source Marks. That means effectively you got double the Source Marks for running that content when compared to anything else. I have characters on Nintendo Switch that I only play long enough to log in for the Vault and the free Mark from the episode quest giver. We're talking 1 minute or less per day on those characters. And yet, I have 5 characters who doing this has brought them over CR200. The last one I run the three daily missions with in the Episode, so she gets about 10 minutes of gameplay per day, and she's CR303. Minimum effort with maximum results. Literally, playing on the Switch is something that I do while I'm waiting in queues on PC. Maybe 15 minutes per day, but I'm rapidly climbing the ladder and building viable characters. While "run everything CR relevant" is obviously the fastest calendar way to do it, if you don't have 16 hours per day to run stuff, you'll have to pare back a bit. And the best way to do that is to focus first on the newest episode Event stuff, because it gives double the marks in the form of two currencies, and then pad the rest out with a little extra CR relevant stuff as time permits.
In the watchtower there is a skip vendor, it's the robot where everyone is dueling across from the Quark vendor. Tier 1 - 7 do Events and Raids and Duos, save those marks you'll hit the end of tier 7 soon enough. The Event Drops DO NOT get Weapon, Chest or Legs. Tier 8 - Endgame, Events, Open World and Duos. Buy Weapon, Chest and Legs from the skip vendor, these have the most weight and you should have plenty of gear from events and the vault to get you to end game. Go back and play everything Below tier 8 for Skill Points and Marks from the raids to unlock your gear mods, orbitals etc you did not unlock on your way to Level 30. You should have far more SP than the skip token (120 to 140 most likely). There are some raids Tier 8 through Endgame that are not torture for an undergeared, Low SP player, Threat Below, Earth 3 stuff etc, but they aren't necessary. Open world weekly missions are usually less of a pain, kill 50 this, pick up 80 that... pretty easy, look on LFG for people doing Starro Spam etc, you get the idea... I can get full gear in both roles in one week like this, I don't get the gear for my non DPS role until the last DLC. Tip for the future: When you get to the last bit of gear you can buy in the skip vendor go to that open world when it unlocks and buy the full set of gear, this will unlock a feat that you can unlock with Replay Badges to make that set (besides Weapon, mask, neck and rings) half the marks to make your next time even easier if you want to get a toon of each support role or something.
