How power levels work in Babylon’s Fall

Babylon’s Fall is an action RPG with a heavy focus on co-op gameplay and a fleshed-out loot system. Developed by Platinum Games, it shares similarities to previous games from the studio, but it does a few things to help it stand out.

Billed as a live service title, you’re going to spend a lot of time messing around with equipment. When it comes to the loot hunt, Babylon’s Fall works a little differently than your typical RPG.

Understanding power levels

On a basic level, each character has both a player level and a power level. The player level is much more traditional, determined by the number of experience points gained in battles. It’s the power level that you’re going to spend much more time engaging with.

Each piece of gear, whether it’s a weapon or armor has an individual power level rating, indicated by its number. Your overall power level is dictated by the average power level of the gear you have equipped. If you want a higher power level, you’ll need to equip gear with bigger numbers even if their stat distribution isn’t to your liking. This tradeoff may put people off in other games, but it’s much more manageable in Babylon’s Fall.

Farming for gear

While all missions have a recommended power level, this doesn’t actually impact the farming experience. All gear acquired as drops throughout missions scale along with your current power level.

This means you can repeat easier missions at your leisure if you’re after a specific benefit or stat distribution. Let’s say you equip a new helmet that dramatically decreases your spirit and spirit regeneration at the expense of a marginal improvement to vitality.

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t want this so you’d just tough it out until something more enticing drops. In this game, you can equip that higher-level helmet even if you don’t like its stats, then farm for better gear drops on an earlier mission. In this sense, Babylon’s Fall streamlines the loot hunt. You aren’t required to seek out the most difficult content to continue building out your character.

Keep in mind that this scaling does have its limits. For example, the second cloister caps at power level 30 drops, whereas the third cloister caps at power level 40 drops. If you find yourself capping on gear drops, move onto the next cloister and repeat the easier missions within that area to continue farming for gear. This only applies to story missions. Gear caps are more lenient with skirmishes and sieges.