Stellar Blade – best Gear and how to unlock more Gear sockets

Stellar Blade – best Gear and how to unlock more Gear sockets

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✓ at a glance

The best Gear in Stellar Blade

  • We think the best Gear to equip in Stellar Blade is a mixture of defence and offence.
  • The Protection and Shield enhancing Gear are fantastic.
  • Pick what is right for your playstyle.
  • Every Gear has a stronger variant in New Game+

Finding the best Gear in Stellar Blade can be tough since they throw so many at you, giving you plenty of options. Gears are small upgrades you can have EVE equip to better enhance an aspect of her stats. These benefits range from reducing damage taken, increasing damage dealt, increasing SP gains, and so on. You can only equip four at a time and each one has three rarities to gather.

Stellar Blade best Gear- the main character EVE deflects an attack from a large monster
Gears enhance your combat capabilities in Stellar Blade. Image captured by VideoGamer

The best Gear to equip in Stellar Blade

We think the best Gear to equip are as follows: Melee Protection, Protection, Shield Enhancement, and Burst Expansion. This build really focuses on mitigating damage since we take a lot of risks trying to parry everything. When you start a New Game+, you will find a Mk2 version of every Gear, and these are simply better versions of the Gear.

To begin with, you can only equip one Gear until you use Omnibolts to increase how many you can wear at once. Each Gear you collect is a fixed drop, so make sure you look around each place to get them. Every Gear in Stellar Blade has three rarities and you will start the game by finding one-star Gears, the goal is to find the three-star version of your favourite.

✓ JAck’s advice

Gears cannot be upgraded.

Unlike the Exospine, the only way to find a direct upgrade for your Gear is to track down the next version of it. These are typically from boss rewards and some locked chests.

Melee Protection Gear

We had the Melee Protection Gear glued to us from start to finish. This Gear, at max level, reduces all melee damage taken by 12% which is a huge bonus to your survivability. Even if you don’t have the best version of this Gear, using the two-star and one-star Melee Protection Gear grants 10% and 7% melee damage reduction respectively. All in all, this Gear is excellent for keeping you alive, especially in longer boss fights. If you want, you can triple-up on this Gear and stack all three for a total of 29% damage reduction, but this is slightly overkill.

Protection Gear

Arguably better than the melee protection Gear, the Protection Gear is a flat damage reduction. This covers all sources and doesn’t just apply to melee damage you take. Generally, your enemies will be hitting you in close range, but later on, there are plenty of pesky ranged enemies to deal with and this gear helps stop them chipping away at you. At max rank, the Protection Gear offers an 8% damage reduction.

Shield Enhancement Gear

The Shield Enhancement Gear increases your max shield capacity, which means you will take less damage as your shields are up for longer. Your shield stat in Stellar Blade doesn’t totally mitigate damage, but it can help keep you safe from small attacks. Having more shield means you can be a bit riskier with your blocking and parrying, which makes for much more fun combat scenarios, in our opinion. At max level, this gear increases your shield capacity by 300.

Burst Expansion Gear

Burst Skills are some of the strongest abilities in Stellar Blade, but you have to accumulate enough Burst energy before you can use them. This is the same as with Beta Skills, but charging takes much longer here. The Burst Expansion Gear increases the maximum Burst Energy you can hold by 400, giving you a gigantic Burst capacity. While this doesn’t charge your Burst faster, you can hold more Burst energy which translates to using your Burst Skills more often. This is, naturally, desirable since Burst attacks and counters are incredibly strong.

Beta Enhancement Gear

The Beta Enhancement Gear is another fantastic gear for increasing your combat prowess. When equipped, your Beta Skills will deal more damage. Beta Skills are the bread and butter of your combos and they can be used to stun enemies, create openings, and blast through enemy health. Arguably, the Beta Skills are strong enough as is, so it’s up to you if you want the extra damage from this gear. At max rank, this Gear grants Beta Skill attack power +8%.

Combat Supply Gear

The Combat Supply gear is fantastic for longer exploration sections when you are low on healing and don’t have a supply camp in site. This Gear grants you 160HP when you kill an enemy, which isn’t a huge amount but it definitely adds up if you are tackling lots of little Naytiba over a long period. The low-rarity versions of this gear aren’t very good but can be helpful in a pinch. Make sure you’re always checking your Gears are good for the fight, for example, this is no good during a boss fight.

Stellar Blade best gears - EVE in the equipment menu showing the Gears
Equip your Gear in the menu. This cannot be done during combat. Image taken by VideoGamer

Double Edged Gear

For those who want to sacrifice more power for being hurt more by enemy attacks, this is the one for you. The Double Edged Gear is a surefire way to an early grave, especially if you’re not careful. It grans a huge attack power boost of 25% but the damage you take is increased by 38%. Naturally, this trade-off is going to be enjoyable for some and it will add another layer of difficulty if you’re after it.

Training Gear

We used the Training Gear as soon as we got it because it dramatically increases how much SP you get from killing any Naytiba. This might also increase SP gains from quests, but we haven’t been able to test that after finishing the game. Even at the first and second rarity, the Training Gear is incredibly worthwhile and you will notice the abundance of Skill Points you accumulate thanks to it. It’s not like SP is hard to come by, but this helps if you want a boost.

How to unlock Gear slots in Stellar Blade

To unlock more Gear slots, all you need to do is gather a key item called the Omnibolt. This item is found in large quantities from bosses, chests, and from completing missions. When you have enough, head over to any Repair Console and select the Gear Socket option. This will use the Omnibolts you’ve collected and unlock a new Gear slot for EVE. Even though we unlocked all Gear sockets, we still found another 18 Omnibolts around, so there are plenty if you happen to miss any.