The ULTIMATE Prestige Guide For Hunt: Showdown 1896

Hi guys, REX here! I often get questions about the prestige system in Hunt: Showdown. Is it worth it? How does it work and how long does it take to reach max prestige? What are the best ways to prestige faster, and should I do it? In this video I will walk you through the various mechanics of the prestige system and answer all of these questions, so without further ado – let’s dive into it!

What is prestiging?

If you have played other shooters like Call Of Duty for example, you may be familiar with the concept of prestiging. In short, prestiging is a way to reset most of your progress in exchange for some kind of reward – typically a flashy badge on your account showing your prestige level as well as certain cosmetic rewards. In Hunt: Showdown, you can prestige to level 100, and each level comes with a specific reward, usually a predetermined cosmetic item, a hunter unlock or a choice between a random skin, hunt dollars or a 10% experience boost to your account that lasts until you prestige again.

How do I increase my prestige level, and what happens if I prestige?

In order to explain how prestiging works, we have to look at the bloodline system, which is basically your account level. The bloodline rank starts at level 1 and maxes out at level 100, at which point you can prestige if you so choose. As you level up your bloodline you gain access to new tools, consumables and traits, and at certain levels you gain a predetermined amount of hunt dollars. You can check the available rewards and unlocks by clicking the bloodline rank icon at the top left of the screen, and from this menu you can also see how much exp is required to reach the next rank. Once you prestige, your bloodline rank is reset back to level 1, meaning you lose access to unlocked tools, consumables and traits. All of the hunters in your roster are lost, alongside any stockpiled equipment and hunt dollars, which means you start from scratch as if you were playing on a new account. Upon prestiging, you start with 8000 hunt dollars unless you choose the extra 2000 hunt dollars when possible – however this is not recommended for reasons which I’ll cover later in this guide. Despite losing your progress when you prestige, you will still have access to all the base variants for each weapon family as well as all non-scarce weapon ammo types. All unlocked weapon variants will be lost until you unlock them again. Finally, you will gain one level to your prestige badge to showcase your prestige level, which is also visible to other players in the lobby and to players you kill in game.

How can I level up?

Since the speed of reaching bloodline rank 100 is the limiting factor for how quickly you can prestige, we need to take a look at how bloodline experience is gained. There are a few ways to gain bloodline exp, so let’s start with the most basic mechanics.

• First off, nearly everything you do in a game grants a certain amount of hunter experience, be it killing AI or enemy hunters, killing and banishing bosses or extracting with bounties.
• All of the experience you gain goes into levelling up your hunter – and at certain levels which are listed on screen, you gain bloodline exp as well which helps level up your bloodline and unlocking new items. If your hunter dies in the mission, you gain HALF of all accumulated exp to your bloodline progression, but the hunter is lost.
• If your hunter survives the match, all of the experience gained in the match goes towards levelling up your hunter, up to the max level of 50. After your hunter reaches level 50, all experience you gain is directly added to your bloodline instead – which significantly speeds up the bloodline levelling process and in turn allows you to prestige faster, but keep in mind if your hunter dies it is permanently lost. This is relevant because there is another mechanic in play once you hit level 50 on your hunter – namely retiring. Upon reaching level 50, you gain 500 hunt dollars and the ability to retire the hunter for 10,000 experience to your bloodline, which is a great way to boost your bloodline level, especially in the lower levels. The tradeoff becomes this: do you want the flat 10,000 hunter exp and start over – or do you take the chance on surviving more rounds for the increased exp straight to your bloodline if you survive? I’ll get back to this topic in a little bit.
• Finally, there are two types of posters that can be found in game that grant experience points; namely hunter experience posters and bloodline experience posters. The hunter experience posters are tan colored and will grant you 1000 hunter experience when you interact with them. The bloodline experience posters feature a bloody handprint and will grant 500 exp to your bloodline. As a sidenote, there is a third type of poster – also tan in color that grants trait points to your hunter. This poster can easily be mistaken for the hunter exp poster if you are new to the game.

How can I utilize burn traits and event mechanics to prestige EVEN faster?

As you may or may not know, there are three types of traits in Hunt: Showdown; regular traits, which are white in color, scarce traits which can only be obtained in game and are blue in color, and finally burn traits which are spent upon use and are red in color. The rarest burn trait is called Death Cheat, and this trait can only be acquired in game. Death cheat is a part of the core game, and here are the ways you can obtain it:

• Meatheads will often drop a trait upon death, and this trait has a chance of being a burn trait with an even smaller chance of being death cheat.
• The boss Scrapbeak, will sometimes drop a trait during the fight, which similar to meatheads has a chance of being a random burn trait.
• You can sometimes find burn traits randomly spawning in the environment, with death cheat being a possibility.
• The Wild Target Hellborn always drops a random burn trait, and the wild target Rotjaw always drops a random scarce trait. Since Death Cheat is considered both a burn trait, meaning it is spent upon use, and a scarce trait, meaning it can only be obtained in game – both of these bosses have a chance of dropping Death Cheat.

Death cheat is relevant because of two main reasons:

• First off, by acquiring death cheat, you keep your hunter if he dies at the cost of burning off the trait, which gives you a second chance to get back into a game and continue levelling up your hunter. This means you can hit more hunter level milestones for extra bloodline exp and even hit the max level more frequently on your hunters for even higher bloodline exp rewards.
• Secondly, if you have death cheat on a maxed-out hunter, this allows you to keep playing that hunter and funnel all experience gained straight into your bloodline if you survive the match without risking the ability to retire the hunter for 10,000 exp.
• Should you die with a maxed hunter that has death cheat, you can then either take a chance on loading into another game and surviving or potentially acquiring another death cheat – or retire it for the guaranteed exp. In my opinion, the best and safest way is to play your hunter until it dies, THEN retire the hunter for the guaranteed added experience. Gambling on survival does not likely pay off in the long run.
• You should NEVER retire a hunter that has death cheat with just ONE exception, which is being close enough to bloodline rank 100 that retiring the hunter would get you there, in which case retiring the hunter for 10,000 experience and then prestiging is the best call.

We have already covered all the various mechanics that affect your bloodline rank in order to max out for a prestige – but if you want to supercharge your levelling speed, events are certainly the time to do it! Events in Hunt: Showdown typically run for about 2 months at a time, with a shorter break in-between. During events, we typically see a pledge mark system introduced alongside custom rewards that can be unlocked in game, and two of these rewards can greatly increase the efficiency of your prestiging journey.

• During events, we typically see Death Cheat being added as an additional sealed trait spawn that can occasionally be found in hunting towers, watch towers, in armories and at supply points. This means you can further increase your chance of acquiring death cheat to speed up the process if you effectively target all available spawn points.
• Secondly, sealed hunter experience posters grant TWICE as much hunter experience as regular hunter EXP posters – more specifically 2000 experience points. This is a significant amount and will greatly increase your hunter levelling speed, and these posters are usually quite commonly found in watchtowers, armories and supply points, meaning you could acquire multiple in a single game for massive exp boost.

What can I do to make the prestige experience less painful?

I covered all the downside to prestiging earlier in this guide. In short, you reset to factory standard and you have to start from scratch – so how can you make the experience smoother and less painful? There are a few mechanics that can help you along the way on your prestige journey, which I’ll now cover in detail.

• First off, work benches can always be found at static points in each compound, and there are great online resources showcasing these spawn locations. I’ll leave links in the description. Work benches have a chance of spawning a blueprint or gun oil, which unlocks new weapon variants. When you interact with a gun oil, you will unlock the next weapon variant in your currently equipped weapon’s progression line. In this example, I interact with a gun oil whilst holding the sparks rifle, and it unlocks the sparks pistol which is next in line. If you have already unlocked everything for the equipped weapon, you will gain a random unlock progression for another weapon instead. Likewise, if you find a blueprint you will gain one random weapon unlock instead. There can only be ONE blueprint or gun oil spawn per compound, so if you find one you can move on to the next compound – but it is possible to find multiple per match. By learning all the work bench locations you can greatly enhance your weapon unlock speed, which is extremely useful in expanding your arsenal, but also contributes to your financial stability. This is because every unlock grants an instance of an item, which you can either use to save money on purchasing new equipment – or sell for a portion of the buying price to buy other gear. Certain weapon families like the mosin or dolch for example are very expensive to purchase, meaning you can sell them for a decent amount of hunt dollars once you unlock them.
• Next up, cash registers can be found at various spawnpoints around the maps. The available spawn points are always the same, which means it is recommended to memorize their locations so that you can check the same spawns in the future. Cash registers grant you between 50 and 1000 hunt dollars, which can come in handy if you are running low following a prestige. On the topic of cash registers, there is typically another even better sealed variant available during events, which can be unlocked for pledge marks. The sealed cash registers grant between 250 and 1000 hunt dollars instead, with a much higher chance of high rolls than the regular cash registers. Utilizing these cash registers effectively will prevent you from going broke during a prestige, which means you can play stronger and more expensive loadouts along the way.

How long does it take to reach max prestige?

There are 100 prestige levels in Hunt: Showdown, and if you have watched this far – you probably already realize that the exact speed of levelling up is highly dependent on a long list of factors, for example your general strategy towards prestiging, your skill level and thus your survivability, and how much you play. Someone who has thousands of hours in the game and knows the ins and outs can likely prestige much faster than a beginner, but even random luck can factor in as you could get shot and killed in a spawn fight or have tremendous luck and extract successfully 10 games in a row. There is no exact time that it takes to reach the next prestige level, and the truth is it varies a lot from each level to the next, however I estimate that it takes anywhere from 10 to 20 hours of gameplay per level depending on all the factors I’ve previously mentioned AND depending on whether there is an active event to increase your levelling efficiency. I personally didn’t prestige actively for most of my 5500 hours of gameplay, but once I started really going for it I was able to get a level roughly every 10 hours of playtime on average, which – by my estimation equates to about 1000 hours of gameplay if I was to do that continuously without a break. For most players, somewhere between 1000 and 2000 hours of playtime is a reasonable estimate.

What are the prestige rewards, and are they worth it?

There’s a long list of prestige rewards on the path from 1 to 100. You can see the entire list of available weapon skins, hunters and hunt dollars by clicking the prestige level icon at the top left of the screen. Certain levels will give you the option to choose a reward, as I mentioned earlier, while other rewards are static and the same for everyone. In general, when presented with the option to choose – I recommend taking the random skin when possible, and otherwise the 10% experience boost, as it will help you level up to prestige faster. Even if you don’t plan on going all the way to 100, it is recommended to end on a 10% experience boost, as you would have this permanently available to you unless you decided to prestige again in the future. As for the skin unlocks, the most notable are the “Fifty Laurels” skin for the Ranger 73 unlocked at prestige level 50, and “The Centenary” for the Mosin Nagant unlocked at level 100. Upon reaching prestige level 100 you also unlock the hunter “John Victor”, the guide who takes you through the tutorial – which I find quite cool! As a final sidenote, once you have reached the max bloodline rank, every 25,000 experience you gain towards your bloodline will grant you 1000 hunt dollars, and this persists even after reaching prestige 100.

The million-dollar question – Is it worth it?

The answer is no. In all seriousness though – this entirely depends on what you want out of the game and what kind of player you are. For a casual player who just wants to play a couple of hours per week, or someone who just started playing the game – prestiging is only going to make the experience rougher. For more active or seasoned players, prestiging could offer an extra challenge and something specific to work towards, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering Hunt: Showdown doesn’t offer much of an endgame. Whether it is worth it is something each player must figure out for themself. Do you want the flashy badge? Do you care about the skins, and do you play actively enough for it to make sense? Once you can answer these questions, you’ll likely have your answer. On a final note, given all the changes we’ve seen to the prestige system over the years – I’d say it’s a quite forgiving system in the current state of the game, and if you don’t find it to take away too much from your experience, then why not! There really aren’t that many downsides to it anymore, aside from the time investment, and you will earn a lot about the game through memorizing work bench spawns, cash register spawns and optimizing your gameplay for levelling speed, which will more than likely benefit you even after you are done prestiging.

That’s it for this prestige guide! Hopefully you learned something that can help you along the way – and if you liked this guide please consider subscribing to the channel. We put a tremendous amount of time and effort into these videos and by subscribing you are letting us know that what we are doing is helpful – which might encourage us to do more similar videos in the future!

What do YOU think about the current prestige system? Is it worth the time investment? Let me know in the comments – and until next time I’ll see you in the bayou!