Guide for Newbies Growing Mercs
☆☆☆ 1. Leveling Up ☆☆☆
- Repeating Campaign (Fordder): My recommendation is stage 25-10, or 41-3. When you do, make sure to fill all 9 mercs. Mercs who are not for leveling should be at max level. More max level mercs you have, leveling mercs will get more bonus experience points.
- Mystic Island (Fordder): Right side will give more experience than left side. Meaning Crystal Cave is the best place to get experience points, however it's also true Crystal Cave gives the most amount of Mystic Dust. Because of that more often it is targeted by pillagers. You may want to put your best team for Crystal Cave. So I recommend to put leveling mercs on Mystic Ruins instead.
- Using Slime (Leveling Merc): The fastest way to level. After a while you realize you get lots of slime just by playing, so you may not need to do anything special, but for people who just started, it maybe ok to go dungeon Slime Forest and get some slime. However it's wise to use horseshoes for something else.
☆☆☆ 2. Rank-Up ☆☆☆
In order to rank-up, you have to use a lot of normal scrolls to recruit silver star mercs (fodders), level them up, rank them up, then use them for ranking up leveling mercs. Please see "1. Leveling Up" for efficient methods for leveling fodders.
- Obtaining Normal Scrolls: Campaign 5-10 (hard) is the best place. Repeat it every day. With 100 horseshoes, you can repeat 25 laps, and that would give you around 14 to 30 scrolls. You can also get some from daily rewards. In my case I use 90 scrolls a day. To keep up, I have to use about 200 to 300 horseshoes running 5-10.
- Leveling and Ranking up Silver Star Mercs: I send them to Mystic Island. Use Mine, Golden Valley, and Forest. Keep in mind ★2 mercs have to go to Forest because Mine and Golden Valley won't provide enough experience points for ★2 mercs to max level. After one cycle you can rank them up and create eight or nine ★3 mercs. You can also use slime to level two of the ★3 mercs and rank them up to create two ★4 mercs. You can do 2 cycles a day, so you can make four ★4 mercs a day with this method.
☆☆☆ 3. Awakening ☆☆☆
Once rank-up, you can awaken them. However to do that you need crystals. You can get crystals from event rewards or buy with diamond (real money), or get them little by little from Crystal Cave everyday. You will never have enough crystals at the beginning, but after a while you will have too many crystals, so maybe be patient is my advice.
☆☆☆ 4. Skill-Up ☆☆☆
To skill-up, you need either skill books or duplicated mercs. Also having all 3 soul gear at max level will give +1 skill level. The original star determines which skill book to use. For example, originally ★3 merc who is ★6 merc now still need ★3 skill book. Likewise ★4 mercs need ★4 skill books. Legends need legend skill books. ★3 merc does not need to use skill books since it is very easy to get so many duplicates. They will skill-up without any efforts. Believe or not, surprisingly ★4 merc also will eventually skill-up. So unless you want to skill-up quick, you should not spend any Honor points to buy ★4 skill books.
- Special Package: Every once in a while, they release special package which comes with a ★5 skill book for 2500~3000 diamonds.
- Trading with Mystic Dust: Once a day you can exchange Mystic Dust for ★4・5 skill book pieces. If you buy them everyday, you can make one ★4 skill book every month, one ★5 skill books every 2 month. You can also buy one ★5 skill book every month. Additionally if you collect dust every day, you will have enough dust to buy slime, scroll, and horseshoe everyday on top of skill book related items.
- Trading with Honor Points: You can buy one ★4 skill book every week, and two ★5 skill book every month. If you play majority of games, you should get plenty of Honor Points, however honor points are also used to trade Legend Companion Gift, so you have to pick where you want to spend honor points.
- Trading with Ancient Coins: You can buy two legend skill books every month. You can get coins from guild war, world boss, arena etc. I'm at rank Crystal I, and get max rewards from world boss, I can get around 1600 coins per month which is worth two skill books. With help of new contents or event rewards, maybe get little more.
- Merc Combine: By combining two of the same star mercs who's skill is +9, then you can get one +1 higher star random merc. Example if you have two ★3+9 mercs, you can get one ★4 merc. If you use two of the same type mercs, such as supporter + supporter, you are guaranteed to get a supporter. So it is wise to skill-up gold ★3 mercs and get ★4 merc. At beginning you may use unwanted ★4 merc to rank-up as fodder, to create ★6 merc quicker, but sooner or later you should save ★4 mercs for merc combining to get ★5 merc.
☆☆☆ 5. Rune ☆☆☆
If you have extra horseshoes, maybe use it at Rune Temple. At beginning it always recommended to equip two runes for mercs who battle at arena no matter how weak the runes are. Once you collect decent number of runes to start out, then it is time to dismantle useless runes. Regardless of ★ rank, you should dismantle commons, or anything lower than ★5SR. Exception of Shield runes. ★4UR is very good and keep it, on the other hand, dismantle ★6R shield runes. For more info regarding to rune performance by ranks, please check here.
- Rune Temple 9F: 9F is the highest floor where you will only get single stats runes. Therefore, if you are aiming for single stats, repeat 9F. For guide please check here.
- Rune Temple 12F: 12F will drop both single and dual stats runes. Also 12F has the highest rating for rune piece per horseshoe, so if you are looking for dual stats or rune essence, then run 12F. For guide please check here.
☆☆☆ 6. Soul Gear ☆☆☆
You can buy soul gear with gold or soul pieces. You can obtain soul pieces from Co-op Raid rewards. For legend merc, you have to buy soul gear with ancient coins first. Soul gear can be leveled up by combining with other soul gear. If you combine soul gear with the same merc's another soul gear it can get more level points than using someone else's gear. How fast you can collect soul gear is mostly depending on how many horseshoes you can spend on dungeon Gold Vault. So save some horseshoes and use them up when dungeon opens. You can try Co-op Raid hard mode to get more soul pieces.
☆☆☆ 7. Companion ☆☆☆
To reach skill level +15, you will need Skill book / duplicates = +9, Soul Gear = +1, and duplicated companion = +5. (However not all mercs can go up to +15) Acquisition of companions are:
- Fate: Rise affinity by giving gift to companions. Once affinity is 100%, you can get 1 companion. 300 gift and 300 raging clicks needed for ★4 companion. 500 gift and 500 raging clicks needed for ★5 and legend companions. You can only obtain 1 companion each by fate. Also only ★5 and legend have ways to get gift in regular basis, so you can't get hopes up for ★3 and ★4 companions from the fate system.
- Gift: From daily mission, you can get ★5 gift x 20. From Guild Badge (rewards from Guild War), ★5 gift x 50 per week. By dismantling ★3 companions will give you few ★4 gift for each character. Dismantling ★4 companions will give you few ★5 gift for each character. However you can only dismantle companion when you already have V (+5) companion. For legend, you can use 5000 Honor points for 50 gift. You can buy 10 packages per month, so total of 50000 Honor points per month for 500 gift, but 50000 points is pretty steep.
- Gacha: You can spend diamonds and scrolls (including class specific scrolls) to recruit them.