Anthem Guide: Leveling, Combos, Masterworks, Everything You Need To Know

Leveling To 30

Anthem caps you at level 30. That’s when the endgame loop becomes available with the Grandmaster (GM) difficulties unlocked offering you better drops. However, Anthem also technically “caps” you within each activity that you do.

As we’ve detailed before in a previous piece, Anthem’s leveling works by way of feats or medals that you collect depending on what you did in each play session. You earn tiers of these medals — from getting multi-kills against enemies, getting ultimate kills, completing public events, or even harvesting materials. Once you’ve attained the highest tier, that’s it, no more XP for that particular medal.

For instance, when doing freeplay mode:

• You get 200 XP for your first world event completion;
• 400 XP for the second;
• 800 XP for the third — you will not receive any experience points for successive world event completions after this until you end your freeplay session.

Thumbs up guys? Come on, thumbs up?

Note 1: You do not gain experience points directly and in real-time from kills unlike most other action or roleplaying games. Since Anthem’s activities work as “sessions or expeditions” you’ll need to end a particular session to see your XP tallied.

Missions and contracts, regardless of the difficulty, award 800 XP upon completion. Strongholds, meanwhile, only provide 200 XP per completion. Add to that are extra feats/medals that you were able to obtain during this activity. If you’d like to breeze through the leveling process to hit level 30, then your best bet would be to complete Anthem’s story campaign, and then do additional contracts until you hit the cap.

Note 2: As of now, experience points past level 30 are useless. The game still tallies them at the end of each activity but it doesn’t fill up any bar. BioWare, however, mentioned that there will be some use for XP in the future.

Really? A common item at GM2? Really?

Item Drops And Rarity

While you’re leveling to 30, you might be wondering about item rarities and what they’d be good for. The item rarities are as follows:

• Common (white) – useless; throw these out
• Uncommon (green) – generally useless; you might end up equipping these for your alts until you end up with something better
• Rare (blue) – also generally useless; will get used by alts while collecting new items
• Epic (purple) – are useless once you’ve obtained masterwork or legendary counterparts; caps at 36 power when you’re level 30
• Masterwork (orange) – the items you’ll want since they have 45 power at level 30, along with numerous affixes; guaranteed to drop from completing Strongholds or Legendary Contracts at GM1 or higher
• Legendary (yellow) – extremely rare drops capping at 47 power at level 30; mod affixes are higher than masterwork counterparts (ie. higher damage, armor, or roll values)

Masterwork and Legendary items can drop from mobs or chests even on normal or hard difficulty, although they have higher chances at GM1+ difficulty modes. Completing a Stronghold at GM1 or higher guarantees a Masterwork or Legendary gear/skill. Completing a Legendary Contract at GM1 or higher guarantees a Masterwork component. As for Masterwork or Legendary weapons, these are completely random drops.

Note 1: As we’ve mentioned before in an article, there’s a problem with Anthem’s loot drop rates. Even at higher difficulties or at higher power, you can still end up obtaining common, uncommon, and rare drops that you probably won’t use.

Note 2: Grandmaster 1 (GM1) is the current “sweet spot” when farming loot. Due to problematic drop rates, GM2 and GM3 are not worth the extra time investment.

Note 3: When you’re unable to pick up an epic or higher tier item (or you disconnected/crashed), the game will tell you to check the Vault or Forge to check out what you’ve obtained. If they’re not there (and they likely won’t be), simply start a freeplay session and exit it. The item will be in your “expedition summary” screen.

How many guns were sacrificed to RNGesus for this baby?

Masterworks, Legendaries, And God Rolls

Given that Anthem just released recently, players are still determining the various “god rolls” you can obtain. For those not aware, “god rolls” are items which have extremely high coefficients, or ones where every affix complemented the item itself or your playstyle. The image above from Reddit user JinVanLe shows an example of a particular “god roll” given that the item rolled with the “+weapon damage” affix twice.

To be clear, you don’t need to focus on getting god rolls immediately. If RNG blesses you with one, then consider yourself lucky. But chasing great rolls can be a painstaking process, and likely something you’ll wait to do when you’re ready to min-max your Javelin’s capabilities.

For the most part, you’ll probably have a smattering of epic or masterwork items with decent or mediocre values, but how exactly do you determine which ones are good? You’d want to look for affixes that synergize with the weapons and abilities you’re using.

I’ve also added a few images below to explain the affixes for certain items:

This masterworked version of Burning Orb (for my Storm javelin) has a couple of affixes that synergize with the skill. But the values are fairly low, and I don’t even plan on focusing on this build.

Masterwork components are exceptionally useful since they provide more armor/shield buffs compared to epic ones. Still, the rolls for this one are abysmal.

Note 1: Rather than listing all Masterwork/Legendary items, I’d like to give credit to the efforts of Reddit users KrystallAnn and Wykk who have made this massive compilation of all Masterwork and Legendary drops in Anthem. Feel free to check it out, and send them some Reddit gold if you feel like it.

Note 2: Masterwork components stack with epic components. You can have a masterwork component that boosts the recharge rate of your skills, and an epic version with the same effect.

Note 3: The Harvest affix will affect the rarity and amount of crafting materials you obtain from world deposits like plants or minerals. The Luck affix increases the chance of rarer drops like Masterworks or Legendaries from chests and enemy kills.

Note 4: As of now, you can’t obtain Support equipment that’s above Epic quality.

The crafting menu for each type of equipment.

Crafting

Crafting in Anthem is an almost forgetable experience. Forgetable in the sense that you’d probably want to erase it from memory the moment you laid eyes on it. That’s because it’s both straightforward and convoluted at the same time.

It’s straightforward since you’ll be able to craft new weapons, gear/skill pieces, and components. You’ll use up resource materials that you’ve farmed, and the results will still be subject to RNG rolls. That’s fine. That’s crafting in general for most games.

The downside is that you need reputation to unlock new recipes or blueprints for Javelin components. You’ll need to do missions from the three factions — Arcanists, Sentinels, and Freelancers — to climb up the reputation ranks. You need to attain the same threshold for all three before the next one opens up. For instance, if you’ve completed Arcanist rank 3, you can’t do rank 4 yet until you’ve completed the ranks for the Sentinel and Freelancer reputations.

The final reputation progression for factions, allowing you to unlock masterwork components.

That image above is from Reddit user Charleigh_Bdo. Each faction requires 50,000 points to complete. That means 150,000 points across all three factions so that you can unlock the ability to craft all the masterwork components. It might be a lot faster to obtain them in-game (from Legendary Contracts).

If you do want to speed up the process, you’ll need to do the contracts specific to each faction (100 rep per completion). The Strongholds also grant reputation to a specific faction at 200 rep per completion:

• Tyrant Mine = Arcanist
• Temple of Scar = Sentinel
• Heart of Rage = Freelancer

Let’s take a more in-depth look at combat now with Javelins, combos, and the current endgame activities. Head on over to part two of our guide.