When should I do my first challenge?

[Huillam]

As the reward isn't exactly game breaking I was planning to do the basic and 24h in a row.
There's a thread on kongregate where people suggest doing that after 2.5k xp earned but considering I've earned around 10k I'm not certain that's true for the current version of the game (and maybe I've simply been slow).

In term of progression I've been farming HSB for few hours (so not much progress here) and killed gordon only once (that one was nice enough to drop his weapon so the following kills should be much easier).

[Fel]

It's good to have at least a boosted HSB set if you don't want to take too long, but there is no real reason to do anything more than the first clear of both basic and 24h challenges that early.
Since your exp is coming exclusively from bosses right now it does make quite a bit of difference, and adventure stats are never bad, especially a fairly big +10% in a single challenge clear.

The rest of the basic challenge can be left for when just levelling and boosting gear (plus whatever advanced training you do at the time) is no longer enough to reach the next adventure zone, at that point you will have a better set of gear and most likely a lot of other bonuses that will help you clear the basic challenge a lot more easily.

[Huillam]

Boosted as in level 100 and green boosted or as in few levels and some boosts?
Altough I've been pretty lucky with gordon (I only killed him twice and got every items but the pants) and I expect to be able to kill him without advanced training soon.

I was planning to wait until that point, revert to 30mn runs to farm boosts and hopefully speedrun those two challenges thanks to the high amount of energy power.

[Aiharne]

I did my first basic / 24 hour challenges at around 1mil energy w/ comparable investments in power/bars and they were both just under 8 (7:47 and 6:24) hours each, if that helps.

[bbfloyd]

I'm still a bit noob FYI;

I focused on Energy Cap and Bars (probably marginal advice, but I wanted my Wandoos powerful earlier). Get to where you can speed rebirth and slightly grow number in 15-18 minute cycles on an energy economy. Then add enough magic cap to get 1 or 2 Time machine levels in 22 min or so.

It took about 16 hours or so to complete. I had not yet beat GRB.

I'm currently deciding if I'm ready to bust my "No Equipment" cherry myself...

[HotSipOfColdTea]

You should do basic and 24 hour (unlocks by doing a basic within 24 hours), ASAP when you unlock challenges. The bonuses are incredible for 1 clear.

After that, you hold on challenges until at least after beating titan 4.

[Astralite]

I beat 58 and started my Basic Challenge immediately (maybe just for the change of pace). Since you keep all your bonuses from exp and gear, it's like doing it all over again but super charged. Instead of having that 20,000 energy bar, I have 200,000 (probably low, I know). I have 40k magic for when I finally unlocked magic and it helped a lot more than the original 10k. I actually did more Rebirths, cashing in on exp than if I had just pushed to the next boss, taking hours to do. Make sure to collect and max each of the sets if you didn't the first time around, as they each give an xp bonus and some other stuff.

Since I was back in the forest zone and already maxxed my forest set, I bought the Basic Loot Filter (in Adventure Special) and turned off helm, chest, pants, feet so that it wouldn't loot the them, and just fill my inventory with the boosts and pendants (so I could work up my Forest Pendant, which I did, upgraded, now working on the second to get level 2). All the 2 boosts I got, I stacked until they hit 100 to get the 2% global boost to Boosts. I used the 1s and didn't start stacking those until the 2s were done. I've since finished all 6 and I'm throwing them all that pendant.

Since you've most likely already started on the cheese set, you might notice the difference between the Forest and Cheese. The Forest set concentrates on energy and the cheese on magic (it also has higher stats). While you're still in the lower bosses the Forest set is good for maxing your energy bar faster, and the energy power makes your augmentations level up faster.

At the point where your Cheese set is leveled up a bit and becomes a bit more powerful than the forest set (especially the weapon's Power stat), you can equip the set temporarily to kill bosses faster and switch back to keep filling your energy until you get closer to fighting the next boss.

At the point in a Rebirth when your energy bar is maxed and you've unlocked all the training and augmentations are slowing down, you can switch to the cheese set (because it affects Magic speed and power) again and it'll make your first magic ritual go much faster. Let that sit a while and gain blood and use before your next rebirth...make sure to level up your time machine enough that it'll provide steady gold to power the ritual when it becomes available.

Basically, the challenge slowed me down again enough to learn the mechanics better.

[Huillam]

I almost forgot that thread. Thanks for the info guys.
If that can help someone, I did the basic & 24h challenges in 4h each soon after defeating the second titan.

Talking of challenges:
I did find various advices but it's hard to know what is or isn't up to date.
Some suggested to delay challenges until they could be completed in more or less 15mn (it doesn't feel like I'm anywhere close to that point). Others suggested to do at least the basic pretty early on. To make things worse I've no idea whether the suggestion is to do the first completion or all 25.

If I were to do thoses completions right now that would be worth a nice increase in my stats. On the other hand not doing those, I would have a much higher GPS and could continue to pump levels into my diggers, boosts into my cube, and spend most of my time with my energy in NGU (and with decent stats). It's really hard to guess whether or not it's worth the trade-off.

Any advice?

[Fel]

The basic advice is along those lines:

Early on, do the first basic challenge and the first 24h challenge, then go back to farming whatever adventure mode zone you were at.

Around mega land/UUG, go back to complete the remaining basic challenge (at that point you should have the stats to crush it without even trying and the bonus adventure stats are very welcome) and if you can/want do the first clear of all of the challenges.
If you have the motivation, also get around 5-10 24h challenge clears (because with 80 of them if you leave everything together at the end it becomes very discouraging, plus the AP is good).

Around each titan from that point you can consider doing a few more no rebirth challenges if you want, to keep the newer titans down to 60 minutes (re)spawn.
It is not mandatory but more titan kills means getting their sets and levelling them faster as well.
It helps a lot to have the "quicker power fruit beta" and "quicker fruit of number" from itopod and a decently high stack on those two's bonus from regularly eating them, which is why a lot of people wait until near Walderp for no rebirth challenges.

Somewhere between Walderp and Beast, you should have the stats to clear some more challenges, which includes troll challenge at least up to the third clear (because you really want those rank 24 fruits, especially pomegranate and fruit of wisdom).
Fully clearing the 100 levels challenge and no equipment challenge will also help you a lot in levelling and boosting sets from those higher zones onward.
A few no time machine and no ngu challenges can also be nice at that point.
Getting 10-20 more clears of the 24h challenge if you feel like it will also help you lessen the massive grind that is fully clearing it later.

And finally, when you are nearing the end of the beast (it has 4 versions with a significant stat gap between each so titans from the beast onward are pretty big walls) and getting ready to move on to evil difficulty you will want to finish any remaining challenge, the only exception tends to be the 24h challenge because the last 10 or so can be quite long even at that point and it tends to be better to come back after getting the set from the nerd, the first titan of evil difficulty.


Those are obviously only guide lines, those that don't mind more active gameplay can do challenges earlier, same for those that really want a specific bonus.
Similarly, those that hate active gameplay can push them back even further, it's far from optimal but you can rush them even easier with stronger gear.

[Huillam]

More basic challenges for me then. Thanks for the infos Fel.