Guidelines for transitioning into midgame. Preface This is a continuation of an earlygame primer which left off at world 10. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3587391954 Some assumptions: 1) Starting from this point the defense stops being able to keep up with your rapidly increasing offence and everyone of yours will typically die in one hit. As such, the role of the tank is officially relegated to a either a "sacrifice" or a "stunner". Whenever you need full party(which is very occasionally) it will be several sacrifices to die in the initial hits and a stunner. 2) The game is about to impose a series of progressively harder speed checks on your party which you can fix with either divine beasts, passives or forging. 3) Full party becomes an occasion, not a necessity. 4) While you CAN try to push past plane 10 right now. There is a LOT of stuff you can do in the earlier planes atm that will directly improve your damage output. 5) The ultimate goal is to reach plane 13: Flaming Mountain where you gain the missing set pieces for true OP'ness and switch MC to fighter for the foreseeable future. Note that after we get "Spirit Source Art" in the town of Plane 10 there's literally nothing we truly care about in further content until that moment. Abyss By reaching plane 10 you have immediately unlocked the Abyss. This is where (in the future) you will be gaining tons and tons of experience. Much much more than regular battles can provide. Right now though... the gains are quite a bit lackluster. I suggest that you grind a single pack of 2000 beasts until they are exhausted (to gain a bit of merit) and stop at that. Go and upgrade fortifications. We ONLY care about spawn rate and max waves for now. Upgrade to however much you can without investing time into farming more resources. The reason the rewards are lackluster at the moment is that waves exp scales with max beast king we have beaten. But right now you do not have enough firepower to beat it realistically fast, neither the setup necessary to avoid it wiping you with its aoe. So you are stuck at wave level 1 which gives even less exp than normal battles (if more skill points). Preparing for the grind inside the city Build Combat building and study building. Combat building will be discussed a bit further in. Start researching "awake lion" in the Study, we need the speed increase from that passive. Note: I propose postponing the real city setup until later. A good moment to do that will be when you start truly farming major battles and this is also at about the time where raising workers to level 100 becomes a matter of minutes. A lot of things coincide at that point to make it a most natural kickoff point for true city development. You can try doing that now, but work efficiency gear values scale with level and you will want to replace everything with later gear anyway. Changes to party composition. Plane 10 is where you can completely transform your party for far more efficiency. You do not *need* to, but it helps farming a lot if you do. What's happening is that in the very first shop of the plane you can get "Spirit Source Art". This skill will give your MC 3 energy for 1 energy from the battery character(gives energy, duh). Coupled with Wudang 9Y and about 60% cooldown reduction this allows your battery to feed 3 energy to your MC every turn. Which in turn means that your MC can spam Rule Forc every turn killing every enemy except bosses(and on earlier difficulties even them). This makes the rest of the party completely redundant and they start only slowing you down with their turns. For that setup to work you have to have energy regen offhand on both battery and MC. You also want ~90% cooldown reduction on MC but you can make do with rule forc + rain of arrows for now if you aren't yet there and it only requires about 60%. The difference is that we want to use an elemental damage increase trinket and until we're at 90 cdr only one of our attacks gets the benefit. Assuming you decide to go efficiency route, evict everyone from your party except mc and battery. also unassign current adjutants. They are all going into combat building in groups of 2-4. Equip everyone with relevant gear and assign them to 3 kingdoms: normal difficulty. Goal is to have "efficiency" parameter at 500. If you can do a higher one at 500, do that. On that note: research at least a third and 4th party slots. The more you can send, the better. The reason for the above is that combat parties are far better class exp and skillpoint source than just grinding with characters themselves. Collect their gains periodically and use to upgrade passives/class. Sending them to 3 kingdoms is specifically because instance tickets and intro letters are the cheapest on that plane. The combat parties will gain us extra currency to purchase those. Note: you will need to get zhao yun back in a while, but until certain preparations are complete he is kind of useless. Reaching 90% CDR. If you want to reach 90% cdr on mc, here's what you need to do: 1) Go make purple civilization 2-set from level 10 of ww2. this will be +18% cdr 2) "refine" both set pieces in the forge to add additional cdr, this will give 11-12% total. Don't bother with dedicated double cdr rolls yet, too expensive. 3) go grab cdr stones from jianghu secret and upgrade them in the farmacy 1 time to excellent quality. this will give +20% cdr(5%*4) 18+12+20 means we're at ~50. 4) go make a "tiger" 4 set of helmet, bracers, vest and feet(3 kingdoms, wu faction). this will give you +18% phys damage and +18% water damage(buff to rain of arrows), but more importantly, it will give you four more purples to roll-refine cdr on. in total, this will be 20-24% more cdr for a 70~ish now. Note: we do NOT care about our hp from now on. For all we care our character is a naked oneshot for the enemy. As such, we don't need to update anything but boots for a while. so once we rolled the cdr on our gear it stays there for a long ass time. 5) refine desert eagle to add a bit of cdr, this will be about 4% 6) refine your energy offhand for the same. in total we're at 80%~ish. Chances are that during the refinement process you have rolled at least one double cdr item which puts you to 85%. This is probably enough for AOE spam as long as your speed has not risen past 750~ish yet. Ideally, you want multiple double CDR items to hit the cap of 95% and comfortably aoe just with rule forc regardless of speed, but even if you can't reach that value for now, it's not super critical - you will just have one buffed attack and one raw attack instead of spamming buffed attack constantly. if you are willing to accept alternating aoes of differnt elements, even cdr of 60 will suffice. Battery character. Strictly speaking, the only thing that you need from a (temporary) battery is speed. In my own playthrough I went with switching Xin Shisiniang into a doctor, but if you are willing to wait a tiny bit until combat parties bring you back class exp and skill points, then Alia Stone from planet wars is a strictly better choice. her SPD stat will make the following somewhat less fiddly. Once you are in the endgame you will switch the battery to either susu or pale phoenix, but from my experience it's not really necessary until your MC equips their first red boots. To set up the battery energy refill loop you need to go into multiverse book and increase/decrease the stars in mc's AGI stat until he is just a tiny bit slower than the battery. This ensures that on every turn he gets +2 energy from his own regen and offhand and +3 energy from battery's skill. Effectively, mc is topped off on energy every turn and can spam whatever. We evicted everyone else because their turns are now irrelevant and are wasting time. When it's just battery and mc acting the grind goes much much faster. Something to remember about doctors - their AGI scaling is awful. You need to fix that immediately. Sending your prior party ppl into 3k with combat building was specifically so that they bring you much more class exp than the characters could have gathered themselves by fighting. Just switching the battery from doctor to TCM doctor will already help a lot. Note that the simplest and fastest fix for the speed at this point is to make Wu Tiger set light boots for your battery and enhance those a bit. This is not a full fix but this will already make her speed a lot more bearable. Note: "light" boots, not "cloth" boots. The next piece of the speed puzzle is grabbing a bit of medic speed passives from WW2 for her. Obviously, your summoners and batteries from now on will require refining speed secondaries on weapon/offhand. Depending on high high your level is the amount of those you need rises. (and thus, your need for more and more forge points) Divine beasts. Note that major piece of speed puzzle from now on are phoenixes you can get from auto-hunting. Those are the greatest source of extra speed for your characters. They take a while to hunt with auto-hunting, but having two primal phoenixes with decent speed and attack rolls makes things much easier so I suggest you fit the hunts in somewhere at this point. At this point it's already a good idea to start looking for an ideal bird (primal, perfect speed roll, good attack roll, 8 slots) that you can evolve through tiers instead of finding a new one every time. You also want a tiger for your dd's adjutant later too (tigers can roll highest strength). Note that usable beasts are all at uneven hunting tiers: 1,3,5,7... while all even ones have complete trash which you shouldn't bother with. Powerscaling the MC. While your away parties are farming cash for 3k you should go there too and also farm the place. Set autosell on plane instead of main city and sell everything. The reason for that is that first order of business is to gain a LOT of Wu merit. You need to max at least opposing gate fire and hundred steps. Maxing out rain of arrows helps but is not *that* necessary. Opposing gate fire when maxed gives us +20% attack which is massive for a plane 1 skill. It will also be our tool of choice when we go to actually beat the Beast King. To gain merit we you will be making a ton of plane cash, then buying intro letters and using them on the Wu quest pane to refresh tasks and complete them automatically. before doing that untick everything that requries actually going and doing something (aka challenge and destroy enemy). Also, don't forget to set Saladin as plane manager for extra merit and automatic quest acceptance/completion. In general: instance tickets and intro letters are much cheaper on plane 1 which is why grinding it a lot and setting combat teams to there is recommended. Once you've finished with wu's skills I also recommend you make a 4-set(chest, helmet, bracers, boots) of wu heavenly items. This will provide you with +18% phys damage and + 18% water damage for essentially free and water is what you are going to be using on Beast King for a while. Once you're finished with wu faction it's time to go grind a bit of cash on Planet Wars. What you need out of there are two skills from the town: missile storm and Ranged mode. You will not be using them, but their passive effects are awesome. You *can* grind cash for tier 3's and they are a nice attack bonus, but that is a very long grind. You are not staying in the mecha class long enough to justify it. Also learn focus aim from Mojin:xeiling for a nice free powerup for later. Fill the rest of the ATK/SPD passives as you want but the MC setup is close to finished for now. It's also recomemnded to farm a bit of cooldown reduction stones from "euro secret" so that you don't end up with your aoes on cooldown once your speed is high enough. Stunner. The next missing piece before you can go and beat the beast king is a stunner. Specifically, you want Zhao Yun to use Drakewhisper Hammer (wei faction of 3k) on the king for a 100% stun chance and then use it again before it's over creating a permastun situation. To achieve that you specifically need ~200% debuff duration and ~45% skill cooldown reduction. To reach that, you will need a bunch of Destiny Dan 1 to unlock slots on him until he can fit in 5 debuff duration stones. This is a good time to go farm Red Cliff major battle for more offhands while also getting flame souls and trading them for destiny dan 1's. Debuff duration stones are dropped from Secret Area: eastern secret. As usual - you need green quality ones and then upgrade them once. To reach the necessary debuff duration and cdr you will also need the usual: civilization set and refinement for properties on purple gear, nothing new there. If you do manage to find another energy regen offhand - give it to zhao yun. he will be able to stun the beast king 1 turn faster, but it's not strictly necessary until later when BK gets a lot faster. To help keep your stunner alive it's possible to deliberately set 1-2 people in the formation to take hits from BK and die. it's even beneficial to dps since the less people act - the better. Note: you don't strictly need zhao yun to be the stunner, it can be anyone who will act and set up the permastun before the BK acts too much (aka, aoes your full party). The LOOP. Once the stunner is ready it's time to actually start rising. Here is the party setup for initial BK runs. V _ V_ _ _ _ _ _ V B M Z _ _ And this is more elaborate once you can stun it one turn earlier. (offhand on zhaoyun) D _ D_ _ _ _ _ V S B M Z _ _ V is shorthand for Victim. Those are people who will take the initial hits and perish B is Battery D is Debuffer M is MC Z is Zhao Yun (aka stunner) S is Summon MC setup for these runs is focused aim / opposing gate fire + water trinket from multiverse book Streak BK a bit until it becomes too long. Then go raise the level of abyss waves and aoe wipe them with just mc and battery. Rinse. Repeat. Once you can no longer clear waves in one hit - go to the unbound tower and raise the max level a bit. The party formation is pretty much the same as for BK only you are using rule forc instead of opposing gate and focused aim. In general, your only goal in unbound battles is to delay enemies enough(with sacrifices) so that mc and (optionally) stunner can act. once adds are removed and boss is stunned, the level is effectively cleared. This is the place most bottlenecking you on speed so adjust accordingly. Upgrade desert eagle with quenches, raise BK, repeat. Reaching the goal. Once you are approximately level 103 you can quickly reach the Flaming Mountain on the last plane. Do it and fully switch your mc to the fighter role. Note that you will need to accumulate a shtton of merit before switching so that you do not leave your main damage dealer in an unusable half assembled state. To do that, buy intro letters in 3k and use them in flaming mountain quest pane to instantly refresh and finish quests. Assign all the appropriate passives from prior planes and learn/max Ultimate Strike and Inferno Rush. From now on you only need fire trinket and alternating these skills depending on what you are doing. Reincarnation priorities. Usually, when pushing past 100 level barrier you initially just reincarnate mc and the battery, push abyss levels a bit with just them until the rest can catch up to that border and a bit past it relatively quickly and do those too. Other than mc/battery the order of improvement goes a bit like: 1) CEO, managers of research and build (in that order) 2) combat parties 3) the rest of your workers (as much as it doesn't annoy you, making it al at once and assigning gear to them can become grating) Specifically when you are reincarnating everyone that only needs worker efficiency gear it's best to wait until you can quickly push them to like level 50 of the next respective 100 level tier so that their items get decent bonus compared to earlier ones. the exception to that are people whose talents can immediately benefit you when unlocked as gemstones are inserted (an example would be tokugawa ieyasu and his management efficiency core) Farming efficiency To be able to farm a lot of major battles, faction merit and secret areas you will need to have combat teams farming 3k for plane cash. The more high level the better. Also, research exploration speed a bit. With cash you can buy instance tickets and introduction letters. Intro letters can then be used to instantly refresh quests for a faction gaining a lot of merit quickly which can then be used to buy skills or exchanged for mirages. At no point do you need to farm tickets, letters or mirages from battles. This is too slow and you should just buy them. Booting up the City. Once you are at about beast wave level 22 it's time to actually develop the city. Bring everyone you have into beast waves fights (plus adjutants for faster levelling) and get them to 100. Pushing them PAST 100 is an undertaking best put on hold (so much destiny dan 1...) but now that they are at 100 you can start assigning purple/orange work efficiency gear for them. As you are a bit low on forge points, for now, my suggestion is to farm major battles for items, then once you are full, sort on item drop / work efficiency and *lock everything that you will need later*. Then you sell the rest, rinse, repeat. This will form the bulk of what you will later need to make your city efficient without spending forge points. This means you will need to research your backpack size a bit so that you don't get full quite as fast. At this point you can do several things in one go: farm major battles for worker gear, for orange booster items (those that raise the efficiency of one of the trades), farm destiny dans 1 and materials from keys and souls to recruit characters. A win win. Note how finding gear for workers perfectly coincides with the rest. Do that at the level where your workers can actually equip the stuff that drops though. What you want when you are farming is for your mc to be able to 1 shot every battle with aoe before the rest of your party moves and wastes the time. This lets you do it very quickly while the items on the rest of your party provide additional item drop% bonuses. I also suggest you recruit and use jester queen and yu xin at level 100 in your party during the farming with their core talents activated (they will provide additional item drop%) Once all the gear is assigned, your economy should receive a very substantial boost and you will see a large improvement in speeds of everything. Entering midgame. Once you've done all of the above you are ready for the midgame. What you should have done at this point: 1) Reclassed mc into fighter and maxed both fire aoe and fire single strike 2) Established the routine of Beast king -> beast waves -> quench the deagle for new levels -> unbound tower -> more beast king 3) Booted up the city in preparation for midgame. 4) Made sure you have good birds assigned for speed checks. With this you are in the midgame. Your next (approximate) goals: 1)level ~165 Treasures: (+fire damage trinket and +lot of attack on skill book) 2)level ~195 Approximate level where you can make the red claw from the world boss recipe. 3)level ~220 +2 energy offhand (MATK, same reasoning as with the earlier one - en regen is more important than stats) 4)switching for vermillion set and full red item setup Through all this you will iterate better gear and talents on your city workers as you breach 100 level thresholds. From that point on you can shoot through the levels and into the dlc. Optimized 200-300 takes 45 hours (yes, I checked) but you will probably spend about 1.5-2x of that figuring out the routine that works best. Final thoughts This guide is a bit more disjointed than I would have liked, but I've been sitting on my notes for a month and went quite a bit past it, so exact points blurred a bit in my memory. I expect most of it to be accurate but if something doesn't make sense ping me and I will fix. The testing run was done on a clean save, without dlc exp book or character image and reaching from level 1 to 200 on it took about 135 hours. I expect to hit 400 at about 270 hours so that's how much time it realistically takes to max out pre-dlc game.