The Dauntless mastery system is somewhat more complex than the usual experience based advancement system we see in so many games. The mastery system is separated into a single main tier called the slayer level and then 7 sub-tiers which are: behemoths, axes, chain blades, hammers, repeaters, pikes and swords.
The only way to increase your slayer level is to advance in your sub-tier masteries. To advance your mastery level in any of the sub-tiers you need to complete the objectives that are listed in the mastery interface for that sub-tier. You gain no benefit from half completing the objectives and no benefit from simply grinding the same behemoth again and again after a certain point.
This system is really clever in the way it rewards the players for experiencing all the content the game has to offer instead of penalizing them for not doing some super-specific min/max behavior as far too many MMO’s do. But enough of that, on to the mastery system itself.
The Mastery System Levels
Your Slayer Level
This is the main mastery level, sort of like regular levels in other MMO games. The rewards from advancing in this mastery are at first slayer cores, titles, more consumable slots and most importantly, the ability to upgrade your weapons and armor to a higher tier. For example, you need a slayer level of 8 before you can upgrade any of your gear to level +5.
At level 18 you have managed to get the highest tier of weapons and armor you can get from the slayer level, which is +10. After this, you start getting interesting bonuses like more health and stamina, more loot, and more cores. To be able to enhance your weapons and armor further you now need to focus on behemoth and your weapon mastery.
The only way to increase your slayer level is to advance in your behemoth mastery and weapon mastery. Exactly how that works is unclear, but I assume that your slayer “experience” is simply the sum of your sub-tier “experience”.
Behemoth Mastery
In my opinion, this is one of the most important masteries to advance in as it is required to be able to upgrade all armors above +10. for example, to get your armor to +11 you need a behemoth mastery of 25. Other benefits are cores, more potions, double break parts, added elemental resists, etc.
The fastest way to level this mastery is to complete the first 4 objectives for every behemoth in the game. This means that you need to craft every armor piece in the game, upgrade them to +6 and preferably to +10 when you can, and use the armor of the same type as the behemoth you are fighting 10 times.
For example, if you are up against a Drask, you need to wear Drask armor to complete the objective. It is important to note that always you need to wear a full set of the specific armor to complete that objective.
You should also attempt to break parts of every behemoth you hunt. The first tier of this objective is to break 25 parts, which is easily doable.
After this, it becomes harder to advance in the behemoth mastery. Just continue to focus on completing the objectives and try to be patient.
Weapon Mastery
White each weapon has its own mastery system the overall structure is the same for all the weapons types. What you need to do is to advance is to hunt and fight behemoths with all the elemental flavors of your weapon type of choice and break their parts. You also advance for making all the weapons of the same type (e.g. making Ember Cutlass, Onus of Boreos, Valomyr’s Regard, etc ) and enhancing them first to +6 and then to +10.
The repeaters follow the same system, but here you need to work with the barrels and prisms of the repeater instead of elemental flavors of the weapons. The benefits of leveling up weapon mastery are cores, mods, titles and the ability to enhance your weapons beyond +10.
So that’s about it for Dauntless’s mastery system. Just remember to start working on your mastery levels as soon as possible to make sure you don’t bottleneck yourself. If you found this information useful then feel free to share it with your friends and allies in Dauntless and feel free to check out my other Dauntless guides.
Good luck on your hunting.
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