A lot of progression in V Rising is bottlenecked on you getting certain upgrades. Sometimes a single increase in gear score is enough, and other times you need to replace a few pieces to get anywhere. There always comes that point where you just have to go out and farm or push to get a certain boss taken out.

It’s kind of funny how it’s always a struggle to get the first pieces of a gear set and the materials for it. Once you have a couple, it becomes rather easy to unlock better methods in either being able to craft using lower-quality materials or less of a struggle to farm the drops themselves.

Things then simply become having the materials on hand to repair your items. A lot of the time, I'm wearing the next gear set before that happens. At least it was that way at the lower levels. Now, mid-game, that is sometimes not always the case.

A rather unfortunate thing is that you often need to use your current gear as part of the crafting upgrade. The result means not having any old piece of gear to pass on to any servants or anyone else. That also means if you don’t like a certain type of gear or want to use different kinds of weapons, you have to craft a bunch of lower-tier armors as well to have the set that better fits your needs.

Something I'm always on the hunt for is 100% rogue blood. While going out to farm some materials, I needed to make some new gear. I spotted one of the guards glowing red. This is an indication that they have high-quality blood.

Not only was it better than the blood I had. Even if I had a 100% already. Blood quality also impacts servants when you send them out on missions. While at this time, my servant was not that useful, as he needed some massive gear upgrades. He also didn't have the greatest blood quality. Making me not want to spend the time to upgrade his gear either.

While it would have been best if this guard were alone. I just had to avoid killing him and taking out the two others near him. While it would have been nice to have pulled him out without getting the far-left guard to follow. At least the one on the far right stayed behind.

It did help a little bit that he was ranged. So I just had to keep enough distance while fighting the others and not worry too much about killing him. Then came the time of hoping I don’t get too many critical hits while lowering his health low enough to capture him and take him back to my base. Thankfully, no issues on that last part.

While there is an item that can be crafted, it would send my newly captured guard back to my base. I did not have one on me. I also did not have a free cage for it to be put in. As this finding was rather unexpected.

The good news was that the trip back was not that bad. No one tried to mess with us. I’d have been rather disappointed if I had lost the high-quality blood I just acquired on the trip back. Now he is safely locked in my base.

I was then back to slaying some further bosses yet again. I was in a rather icy and snow-filled region of the game that puts you in a certain kind of holiday spirit. This massive creature I had just taken down roams around the snowy banks of the lands.

While I was not expecting to be fighting him. I realize I was rather close. It also happened when my better quality of blood was running out. So for the fight, I went and found something in the area. It made the fight a bit more challenging. Thankfully not impossible.

While it was tempting to return to my base to resupply on blood and drop some loot off. After doing a little more farming in the region. I came across another wandering boss. I felt that would deny myself yet another boss kill.

A fun part of being mid-game is that you can start to get broken weapon shattered drops. While I was not looking to acquire the iron spear. In case I ever changed my mind, I now had the hard part to get. All from a random kill drop as well.

Naturally, the weapon I wanted did not drop. So I'd have to acquire it the hard way. Every so often, I'd get alerts that an event was starting. During the event of Rift Incursions, you can get Stygain Shards drops. I needed to farm quite a lot of them to get the weapon I wanted.

The Rift Incursions end up having a couple of different stages in each area. First, you've got to go around clearing out some spawns. A few waves of enemies spawn in. Once you defeat them all, you get a shower of shards spewing out. Along with getting a couple of random drops from the creatures.

Once all the spawn areas have been cleared. You then get a boss encounter. Sometimes these are a lot easier to kill than a normal boss. Other times, they can be a bit more challenging. The good thing is, if you get killed, they don’t regen health back to 100%. So as long as you do enough damage before getting killed. After a few attempts, you can take them out.

This encounter was just the tier one site. After a while, they despawn, and then tier two sites appear for a short amount of time.

These Rift Incursions spawn enough that if one has started and you missed it. You don’t feel like you missed out on anything important. I’ve lost count of how many times I'll be in the middle of something and notice the pop-up for it and just skip it for that time.

The cool part is that the weapons can also be upgraded. Which is kind of nice, you don’t have to re-farm the base shattered drop. You just need a certain item or the next weapon tier. The only downside is if you want multiple different weapons. It ends up being quite a lot of farming of shards unless you luck out and get the shattered weapon drop itself instead of buying it off the vendor. It’ be nice to have a ranged weapon as well.

Final Thoughts

Always nice when you can make some solid progression on upgrades. Not all upgrades end up being purely gear or weapons, as you have seen. Even unlocking a new potion for better buffs that I don’t use often can make the difference when you have hit a wall.

Information

Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about V Rising (Tracking link that takes you to the game's Steam page. I receive no commissions on sales. It’s simply a request to be used by the game publisher).

Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.