User:Lement

HV notes

Investments

Scavenger/Quartermaster/Luck of the Draw/Archeologist should all be trained equally barring unusual cases. Crystarium and Monster Lab can both pay off the initial investment as well, so they all compete with each other. Of course, killing speed wise Innate arcana(with item worlds, too) competes with above.

Monster Lab payoff post 0.71: To bring a monster to level 25 it is relatively quick, costing about 4500 C with cheap elemental crystals and paying off in 8 and half days. However, additional upgrades to this take longer; just raising to 50 takes half a year to pay off, but the payoff time isn't always increasing; for 350 to 450 it stays about the same, for 550 it is faster than for 400(just shy of a year). Since rare materials chance stay the same more chances is pretty much what you need for those, and that increases payoff speed just by a little bit.

Scavenger payoff: Depends on how much you play, really, but falling above no Crystarium and below Crystarium I makes things simple. With halfway between them it isn't that hard to assume average round giving 50 credits in drops(although crudes are only worth 20C some pieces may sell for hundreds in the bazaar if not worth selling to players and artifacts are worth 18k a piece)[IWBTH obviously gives far better drops]. Running through 20 stamina that gives you 2000 rounds for 100k relative credits, most of which is probably from artifacts/blood tokens, but fair share is from equips. Now that one has a figure, it is easy to figure that increasing drops by 2% gives roughly 2k more per day(it will drop if you train only scavenger, but that's what the other trainings are for). Obviously, one should create PL25s in Monster Lab as one gets chaos tokens and spend rest on trainings until they take 342k to upgrade.

However, what about Crystarium I? Well, it has a special place since you can straight long-term reinvest the crystals(which you may have trouble selling otherwise), but assuming it gives you 25% increase in wealth accumulation it isn't too hard to figure it out - however, this is muddled by crysfest consuming stamina at half the normal rate and gipping your credits in luck of the draw/quartermaster. I would carefully place it's payoff value at around 3 months, though it is half that if you spend more in crysfest, less than that if you're spending your games on IWBTH/BT for drops, and one has to consider the lost revenue from LOTD/Quartermaster for actual payoff values, since that figure puts those at 0.

As for Innate arcana, it is truly useful in MP conversation and saving the turns you take: Alt+nr+cast takes about 3 times as long as you spend for a single turn. For every 60 turns of buffs, that's additional 5% slowdown. Further IA reduce your MP usage, meaning you have to use MP pots far less often, allowing you to go longer in 'fest, getting more max bonus. Finally, not having it own really hurts mages in random encounters, and melees too by quite a bit due the high cast times of spells such as protection/regen. Going by that, effectively used IA will effectively pay off in about 3.5 to 4,5 months, depending on how you play.

Low levels

(this is purely practical advice) You suck, let's admit it. You just don't have the stats required for efficient play. First, you should grab some free gear from Want to Sell section in the forums. Then you should do every day arenas and hourly battles on the highest difficulty you can find, spending the rest of the time fighting in your worst's crude equipment's Item World at highest comfortable difficulty(test your newfound gears to judge this) to gather XP fastest. Do this until you're about level 90 or 100(holy mages and melees& and other mages). After every hourly, set up adept leaner(Bazaar>Trainer) to train another level if you don't have preexisting training. Outside hourlies, don't deliberate your every move, a turn shouldn't last more than 2 seconds.

Q: What is hourly battle? A: Hourly battles or random encounters are [You have encountered a monster!] links instead of ads on the main page and galleries - to fight just click on the link. Every one occurs at least one hour after the last one, so you might want to get a timer plugin or script for them to remind you. They have vastly increased drop chances and EXP modifier, so one should play them at highest difficulty possible when wanting XP, spending as many pots as it takes.

Along the way, don't forget to assign the XP points you get to your stats and ability points to your ability tree.Their assignment depends on which you play as, but since you're powerleveling from get-go, don't worry about proficiencies. Do note that mage is fast, but has than less than half the survivability as melee at high difficulties until much later when choosing which to play when. You lack XP, AP and gear so it'd be better to focus on either melee or mage, but they both have their advantages. For Chaos tokens that you get, create unnamed monsters one by one and assign to them only the crystals that naturally drop - you don't want to spend credits on them at this point in time.

Mage should wear gossamer of the elementalist/gossamer of heaven-sent/phase of single element. Do note that holy gear costs a lot in WTS section due level 200+ arenas and also that you can't take advantage of explosions until about 150 so it depends. Keep your naked END about 7 points behind lowest of INT/WIS(WIS gives greater benefit per point, but INT gives 60% more damage than WIS. Choose according to your troubles), and STR further 3 points behind and DEX further 3 points behind that. AGI should be lower than DEX until you can start gaining a turn from it, after which it should be ~STR.

Melee should wear mix of pieces that offer the best mitigation/damage increase available and use scythe or if that is too difficult, mace for quick clearing of rounds. Keep STR=DEX=AGI=END=WIS, with INT costing 1/4 of WIS to train.

For assigning Ability points: Both mage and melee should grab Haste, Shadow Veil, all the item slots, all the aura slots, focused aura, Cure, regen, scroll slots, X-item and X-attack. Both could use 5 AP in weaken at times, which is all or nothing but reduces incoming damage from the monster by over 50% when maxed, is fast and is cheapest debuff too. Then comes their type-specific abilities and then both should also max their MP tanks after that, and have about 5 maxed HP tanks.

Mage should further grab Magic Missile and put 12 AP in 4 elemental spells - fire and elec tiers, because at higher difficulties mechanoids' huge elec weakness makes them unable to survive first cast while anything that survived and had the spell Deep Burns is liable to take major even more damage from the fire spell while there would be only one common player-greated monster class that tends survive:dragonkin, and one basic: Blue Slime. Before custom monsters were added elec was best element for mage, too. After the abovementioned tanks, rest in XP tanks.

Melee should certainly get Protection - it beats Shadow Veil, haste and regen I in terms of benefit. After the abovementioned tanks, equal tiers of XP tanks, SP tanks and OC tanks.

Once you hit 100,check if you have 3 blood tokens and use some of the money you have gathered to get together with what you have about 50 Scrolls of Swiftness and 9 scrolls of life. Reassign your Ability tree to remove XP tanks and reassign your stats to be more balanced. Make sure you have at least 90 agility, 80 str, 70 dex and take either your best ethereal 1h weapon or buy one if they all suck, equip a shield of the battlecaster in off-hand and wear your best gossamer of the curse-weaver or thrice-blessed/spirit-weaver gear for bad gossamer pieces, make sure you have difficulty set on normal and scroll slots containing Scroll of Swiftness and Scroll of Life. Put 5 AP into Slow. If you already have weaken, go into Crude equipment's item world on easy, cast weaken on a monster and hold down r until you run out of mana, then use restoratives - don't cripple your mana potions with this, but otherwise do it until your deprecating proficiency is about 50. You'll need it later anyway.

Start a fight in Ring of Blood against Flying spaghetti monster or Invisible Pink Unicorn - first is 2 times beefier. Cast Haste, use scroll of life(in case FSM starts with 25%+ MP/close to max SP bar), use scroll of swiftness, cast slow on the monster, use shadow veil, hit monster 3-5 times, use shield bash. Make sure you don't die in those first turns. Now, make sure FSM always has slow on, you always have haste and most turns haste and scroll of swiftness on. This way you can hit opponent with Shield Bash again(cooldown of 10 turns) before Stunned on him expires(5 turns), allowing you to permanently stun him. Keep this up, this takes long time, and do it for both of them(make sure you're not out of supplies in-between of the battles). If you spirit stance there's a good chance you'll run below 35 overcharge at wrong moment and die. You probably will get more from trophy if you sell it, but if you're melee spend it on 2h, if mage on staff. You also now have 300k credits plus whatever you got so far, which you can spend partly on improving your gear, partly on trainings - and you should probably spend more of it on trainings than gear.

At this point in time, you should lower your difficulty a bit to get your proficiencies up - spell proficiency is what matters for mage, weapon proficiency then armor proficiency for melee as well as keeping to 1 armor type(light/heavy/cloth) and 1 spell element/weapon type(2h/1h/DW). Once those are up, mage can do item worlds on normal/easy, but melees should wait until 150 or 170 to do them with reasonable speed on higher difficulty. Do your arenas daily for good source of credits, and save your blood tokens for fighting FSM, albeit you can fight Real life and below once, as they aren't that much worse in terms of value on first clear. For 2h, start using estocs over bleed past 170, too.

My Monster Lab monsters:

No PLVL Class 1 36 Sprite Kenji Setou

2 150 Beast Emi Ibarazaki

3 25 Arthropod Bio-Meat

4 25 Dragonkin Rikshakar

5 25 Avion Armor Training Avon Seller

6 25 Humanoid DayDreamer

7 25 Mechanoid Sword of Inevitable Justice

8 25 Celestial Rin Tezuka

9 27 Elemental Quatzalcoatl

10 25 Reptile Snake of Eden