Stuck in a rut.

[TheMrDarkrider]

As of right now im at w2 working my way to the boss on a barbarian and working towards level 330 so i can do the journey man class of which i already have everything set up for when its ready.

But right now the issue is that the farther i go the more my defense doesnt matter or my damage. Which is obvious for a game like this. So what i need is better gear. The top level gear i can make right now is platinum. But the mine chance for the barb is about 10%. At mosy if i have the ore food equiped i can get 99 plat ore every hour. The based on my math i need at least 2350 plat bars to get the amount needed. Oh not to mention the jellyfish, tropilogs, crabycakes, ceral bugs and the like all of that i havent even gotten started on.

I have looked into the cauldron bubbles and vials but once again its all based on mats that are taking to long.

Im open to any suggestions other then spending irl money on upgrades.

[archmag]

You don't need to have no-damage defense to complete w2. I had 220 def on my Bowman when I cleared it (and still have only 239 while being able to clear rats in w1 which are stronger than almost all enemies from w2 and also can farm second map in w3 for a day with a stack of food equipped). You can heal with a stack of pizza, that's enough for afk or normal farming in w2. I only have Amarok's set on my leader and it gives enough defense (it's much easier to craft than golden equip but gives defense between golden and platinum). Still didn't craft a single platinum piece but crafted platinum ore bag for my miner instead (7500 platinum ore).

Make sure to farm Amarok's card to platinum cap as it gives +12.5% skill afk gain rate, meaning you get 12.5% more gain when you are using skills like mining, catching and others. It is additive instead of multiplicative, so if you have 31% and use that card, you will have 43% instead, that's almost 40% increase in material gains compared to not using that card. While farming it you will also gain more than enough materials to craft Amarok's set.

Don't spread your characters trying to do everything (or at least I hope you are using presets). You said your barbarian is mining and also your barbarian is working his way to the boss. Instead another character should be mining and investing his skillpoints into mining and barbarian should invest mostly in damage and spend his time fighting enemies to gain exp and clear portal requirements instead of mining. You can skill into both if you use presets but still will have to make two sets of equipment for a single character, one with mining efficiency, one with better defense.

Other small sources of defense which give a good cumulative bonus:
1. Steel bands and Sleek shank pendant that you can craft.
2. Some random keychains from running a party dungeon which is doable solo (don't expect to clear it fully solo, but it gets easier eventually and I can clear two tiers of bosses there alone).
3. Investing dungeon currency in global defense bonus.
4. Getting to the top of the tree to get access to consellations.
5. 4th box in post office which starts with accuracy.
6. Upgrade slots in armor and rings.
7. Donating statues.
8. Investing in defense stamp (you will need higher ore capacity to unlock higher levels).
9. Very small bonus from arcade (I only have 5 def from it).

Recently I made a list of bags which I can get to increase amount of slots and checked all my characters and noticed that almost all of them miss at least half of those and suffer because of reduced capacity. Spent a week farming snakes, frogs, green spores and mimics to fix the issue and now I rarely run out of space on any of my characters. This helps in farming a lot.

Anyway, just some ideas based on what I was improving for myself lately and how I dealt with w2. Not sure about you exact situation so can only give such advice which is based on my own experience, not on some guides or anything else. I am sure there are a lot more ways to optimize progression but this was enough for me.

[killj0yy]

try and keep skillers independent of your combat classes EG: 3 skillers , 3 combat classes

skillers focus purely on skilling and combat classes purely on combat - supplied BY skillers , it's a little more efficient this way and at a later point once you have the right cards and so forth and are sufficiently boosted enough switch those two lots of 3 around this way the gains for both will be hugely more efficient and so much faster

[kone]

It is unintuitive, but there's something you can add that makes progressing through maps a lot faster: food. It could be strength potions from shops/mobs that increase damage. It can be survivability the reason you might have low kills/EXP - not enough health food.

Honestly, defence is truly sidelined by food and food capacity while AFK. Take for instance W3 where people equip a 50% defence lowering star sign that gives higher AFK% - they get by with lots and lots of health food.

With regards to levelling up the skills, there's a bunch of important upgrades and resources awaiting in the later worlds. I'd recommend pushing combat as far as you can, class levelling for lots of talent points and potentially to the next world where they give great overall skill boosts from new cards and interactive . Amassing talent points and skill efficiency bonuses from external sources is more important than levelling up the skill itself which the only reward/benefit is equipping a better tool that might only be merely ok.

(Extra tip, you can equip just 1 skill boost food like the ore food before you leave your mining character to AFK - just 1 counts for the whole AFK session)

[TheMrDarkrider]

Originally posted by archmag:

You don't need to have no-damage defense to complete w2. I had 220 def on my Bowman when I cleared it (and still have only 239 while being able to clear rats in w1 which are stronger than almost all enemies from w2 and also can farm second map in w3 for a day with a stack of food equipped). You can heal with a stack of pizza, that's enough for afk or normal farming in w2. I only have Amarok's set on my leader and it gives enough defense (it's much easier to craft than golden equip but gives defense between golden and platinum). Still didn't craft a single platinum piece but crafted platinum ore bag for my miner instead (7500 platinum ore).

Make sure to farm Amarok's card to platinum cap as it gives +12.5% skill afk gain rate, meaning you get 12.5% more gain when you are using skills like mining, catching and others. It is additive instead of multiplicative, so if you have 31% and use that card, you will have 43% instead, that's almost 40% increase in material gains compared to not using that card. While farming it you will also gain more than enough materials to craft Amarok's set.

Don't spread your characters trying to do everything (or at least I hope you are using presets). You said your barbarian is mining and also your barbarian is working his way to the boss. Instead another character should be mining and investing his skillpoints into mining and barbarian should invest mostly in damage and spend his time fighting enemies to gain exp and clear portal requirements instead of mining. You can skill into both if you use presets but still will have to make two sets of equipment for a single character, one with mining efficiency, one with better defense.

Other small sources of defense which give a good cumulative bonus:
1. Steel bands and Sleek shank pendant that you can craft.
2. Some random keychains from running a party dungeon which is doable solo (don't expect to clear it fully solo, but it gets easier eventually and I can clear two tiers of bosses there alone).
3. Investing dungeon currency in global defense bonus.
4. Getting to the top of the tree to get access to consellations.
5. 4th box in post office which starts with accuracy.
6. Upgrade slots in armor and rings.
7. Donating statues.
8. Investing in defense stamp (you will need higher ore capacity to unlock higher levels).
9. Very small bonus from arcade (I only have 5 def from it).

Recently I made a list of bags which I can get to increase amount of slots and checked all my characters and noticed that almost all of them miss at least half of those and suffer because of reduced capacity. Spent a week farming snakes, frogs, green spores and mimics to fix the issue and now I rarely run out of space on any of my characters. This helps in farming a lot.

Anyway, just some ideas based on what I was improving for myself lately and how I dealt with w2. Not sure about you exact situation so can only give such advice which is based on my own experience, not on some guides or anything else. I am sure there are a lot more ways to optimize progression but this was enough for me.

Well i was able to farm out the amarock chest legs and boots not going for the head piece because the helm i got now is better. I saw in the guides about a hunter going to w3 where the sheep are and something about getting tons of xp from it. But it stated it would be like a 8-9 months process depending if you spend irl money.

And yes i have my first 3 players as dmg skill sets and the following 3 are for minning, choopin, and smithing. But with that being said for that second set i still need to progress them though the worlds to get higher quality mats. One such as bug, fishing, and who knows what else.

As of right now my main issue i think is i just need to get to 330 to get jounery man class. That way ill be able to farm candys, cards, gems, statues and the like much easier then the others.

One last thing is ive read though other posts and guides that i should just try to unlock all the worlds first and skip the side quests till afterwards. That i don’t agree with because alot of the side quest makes it so farming is much more bareable due to the fact that they give you boosts to your backpack, storage chest, and just generally equipment that is too good to pass up. For instance, my food storage was extremely low but when I completed the mushroom guy quest he game me a bag that vastly increased my food storage. I think it went from 88 to 177 witch is a huge jump.

[archmag]

Originally posted by TheMrDarkrider:

One last thing is ive read though other posts and guides that i should just try to unlock all the worlds first and skip the side quests till afterwards. That i don’t agree with because alot of the side quest makes it so farming is much more bareable due to the fact that they give you boosts to your backpack, storage chest, and just generally equipment that is too good to pass up. For instance, my food storage was extremely low but when I completed the mushroom guy quest he game me a bag that vastly increased my food storage. I think it went from 88 to 177 witch is a huge jump.

I am sure they don't mean to skip all quests. And it's not a lot of quests that give good rewards, only some of them, but most are rather bad. For example that mushroom Funguy gives a food bag which can increase you food capacity a lot without spending a lot of resources but the remaining four quests in his quest chain are not worth the rewards. Sure you will get some of them automatically, like 35 score in chopping minigame, but 10k logs from the sewers for just some armor tokens, nah... So yeah, do the ones that are easy or give good rewards, like unique stamps (only need to do them on one character) but leave other quests for much later. Uncovering more worlds and unlocking more questmasters to increase the pool of quests you can choose from is nice.

Well i was able to farm out the amarock chest legs and boots not going for the head piece because the helm i got now is better.

Don't forget that there is an achievement for equipping all 4 pieces that lets you teleport to forest village for free. You certainly want to get it so crafting one helm and at least equipping it once for that achievement is worth it.

Depending on how social you are either find a developed guild and join them or start your own. Even solo I managed to get my personal guild to level 10 and get some nice boosts to capacity, damage and stats from it. Plus it gives some extra daily and weekly goals to focus on.

I saw in the guides about a hunter going to w3 where the sheep are and something about getting tons of xp from it. But it stated it would be like a 8-9 months process depending if you spend irl money.

I am not sure how long I actually spent on it but it wasn't that much time unless you count the time when I wasn't playing the game for a year. I played few days in the very beginning when the game was released in 2021, had two character doing some stuff in frog and bean areas. I returned to the game when Idle Skilling was released in September 2022 with its special event that gives reward in Idleon. One of the characters crashed when collecting the rewards and on another character I collected some of the loot because capacity was minimal, like some mining statues and oak cards, a lot of upgrade tokens and took logs instead of leaves because I really didn't know what was more valuable. So essentially I've been playing the game seriously since release of Idle skilling, which was 2 months ago and at this time got to the third area of W3 past sheeps and snowflakes. I didn't spend any irl money on it but I got some rewards from the Idle skilling event. Mostly spent the rewards on chest storage.

I don't play very effectively as my main character has only 2-6k damage while even new Wizard (7th character) that I got last week has 5-12k. Barbarian (4th character) is also much stronger than main guy and can even clear arena challenges with his aoe attacks. At the same time my main guy struggles getting to wave 11. Wth additional arrow and homing arrows only attack a single target I have no idea, but character is very slow on multiple targets because of that. Still I enjoy playing at my own pace and it feels fine.

[Elenoe]

I think you got it all wrong.

1) all characters are warriors, all characters are skillers in their resp. areas. You can't have "one or the other". Before you get to W4 basically all chars should focus on combat and be progressing through worlds. After you get to W4 you still won't do any skilling, but every character will be trained in their resp. area of expertise to provide the best printing samples they can. All skilling materials comes from printing, starting when you reach W3

2) armor doesn't matter much. In W3 you cannot possibly have 0 damage set. You pack chars with food and just try to minimize the damage. Alchemy def bubble and dungeon flurbo shop are the huge sources. You only "focus" on weapons, those matter, with relevant stones attached (always use every slot on every piece you wear, which ever tier you can afford). And you mostly want boss armors, usually minus helmets. Will it help if I say that most of my characters are progressing W4 in amarok/efaunt armors?

3) beginner/jman/mman is the worst class by far to operate. He won't save you if that's the hopes. It's way deep in W4 when he can be "barely" used for any kind of farming. And even then some other classes are much more pleasant and competent for most tasks. During W3/W4 mman will be hindering you a LOT. His main contribution is skill efficiency bonus he can provide to others for printing. And that is ONLY if he has the higher level then your skillers. And he is real PITA to level since he has no profficiency in any skill whasoever. So you will be spending 3 weeks leveling him mining to some level, then 5hr candies for you dedicated miners to catch that level, taking a new print sample and that's it. Back to another month of mman leveling. Candies/cards/statues are endgame stuff for when you have nothing else to do. Mman won't "magically" bring those as a get go. He will always be the slowest, weakest and most hated one of the pack, hindering your skillers who could have leveled so much more without him :) But as said, doing actual "skilling" is not a thing, don't waste too much time on it. And bare in mind that your skillers can't under no circumstances outlevel the mman, or their results will be weak.

4) opening worlds is the priority, keep that in mind. You can do quests as you go, that's not a problem. Just don't waste time if they ask for something that requires extra farming. Any farming that does not contribute to zone progressing is wasting time and be assured it can be done later much much faster and easier. Every new world has new features, they all suck at start but you need to start working on them to be any good. Same as new zones are more XP/coin juicy then their predecesors. So choose your progress wisely.

5) about timeframe.. it took me less then a month to reach W4. Have no idea where would 8-9months in W3 come from. Maybe some old post. But now there is nothing in the W1-W3 you want to spent time "farming" on. You just progress through as fast as you can with as many characters you can... while having fun with some distractions. Keep unlocking worlds and more characters.

[TheMrDarkrider]

Originally posted by archmag:

I didn't know that there were bonuses for completing the achievements The achievements i really haven't looked though just yet. But ill def get that done when i can.

I already am in a guild that already has quite a few bonuses.

I do know that you can get rewards for playing the other game idle skilling but i feel like it would take to much time just to get some little reward. As for the events i havent gotten to do one yet but based on what ive read they tend to really help you out with the rewards that they give.

Sadly i have put money into this game. Not that much as some people. If there was a very reliable way to farm out gems each week that was at a limit i would do that but so far i haven't found a good system. It seems a lot of the gem rewards that you earn in game are very time gated and don't yield all that much to begin with.

[TheMrDarkrider]

Originally posted by Elenoe:

5) about timeframe.. it took me less then a month to reach W4. Have no idea where would 8-9months in W3 come from. Maybe some old post. But now there is nothing in the W1-W3 you want to spent time "farming" on. You just progress through as fast as you can with as many characters you can... while having fun with some distractions. Keep unlocking worlds and more characters.

The guide im referring to is this. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2556147613 i wasnt talking about that it would take 8-9 months just to get to w3. right now im at effaunts door but just have to do the quest to unlock the boss then ill be at w3. the 8-9 months thing was in reference to what is in the guide that said it took just that long to be able to set up his hunter so that he could use it to farm what ever he wants. Im not using it as god given gospel and of course metas and ways of farming change each day and each update. but im using that as an example. Please remember i just started out. i only have 6 characters to work with right and going to make my 7 the jman. So far ive learned that cards have a huge impact on how well you do as well as the statues. Now i could as you suggested just power though everything until i reach w4. But i feel like that is the easy way out. So far i like the kind of struggle the game presents as well as the all be it weird npc quests. What i will do is look though all the npc quests on the wiki page and pick the ones that mainly give you storage upgrades and the such so the grind is more bearable that way when i do make it to w4 and go back to the quests i haven't done they are that bad because of the carrying of items between everything.

[Akheira]

Well, I'm actually in W3 but even first location has almost 400 deffence... Soo I cannot farm there, because my TOP hero has 250 deffence... my totall lvl is 520 rn... (8 characters)... (with 41k mining power on squire with plat pickaxe)...

With 660 plat ore/hour (Brute eff in warrior 121, Copper loc. 124, Tool prof. 100 -can upgrade, Shieldiest statues 112/117, Tick tock 100, Supersource 100, Action frenzy 92 :/ ), mining eff armor + dungeon rings... +-lvl 21 in statues.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Akheira:

Well, I'm actually in W3 but even first location has almost 400 deffence... Soo I cannot farm there, because my TOP hero has 250 deffence... my totall lvl is 520 rn... (8 characters)... (with 41k mining power on squire with plat pickaxe)...

Why can't you farm there? I can farm 2nd map with 239 defense. Can farm even 3rd one but too slowly (78/hour) because my main character has bad damage. What exactly doesn't let you farm the first location? You seem to have more defense than me so should be fine there. Don't you have any food?

Defense displayed on AFK screen isn't requirement for farming. It is requirement for 0 damage. You can use other things to deal with the damage that you get, like special skill (Goblet Of Hemoglobin from merits shop in W1) that restores percentage of your hp per kill and health restoration food.

[Akheira]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by Akheira:

Well, I'm actually in W3 but even first location has almost 400 deffence... Soo I cannot farm there, because my TOP hero has 250 deffence... my totall lvl is 520 rn... (8 characters)... (with 41k mining power on squire with plat pickaxe)...

Why can't you farm there? I can farm 2nd map with 239 defense. Can farm even 3rd one but too slowly (78/hour) because my main character has bad damage. What exactly doesn't let you farm the first location? You seem to have more defense than me so should be fine there. Don't you have any food?

Defense displayed on AFK screen isn't requirement for farming. It is requirement for 0 damage. You can use other things to deal with the damage that you get, like special skill (Goblet Of Hemoglobin from merits shop in W1) that restores percentage of your hp per kill and health restoration food.

Low life actually. Cannot use potion for higher life it remain like 1h...

[archmag]

Originally posted by Akheira:

Low life actually. Cannot use potion for higher life it remain like 1h...

It's weird. It feels like you are being too careful or missing something. Is your 250 defense with 2nd shrine bonus or without it? Move some shrines to w3 if you don't have them there yet. First one increases your damage, second one HP and Def.

I tried 257 defense vs 418 required defense (snowflakes on the second map) and enemies deal just 5 damage.
On first map 318 defense (257 with 24% shrine) vs 400 required defense (sheep) enemies deals just 1 damage.
After each attack you become invulnerable for 2 seconds and food cooldown is 30 seconds so even farming actively I can overheal with simple pizza that heals 135hp.

For afk I need ~20 pizza per hour if I decide to farm one of those maps without a shrine. With shrine it is just 4 pizzas per hour. I got 12k of them while farming bags for everyone at snakes so I have enough for a long time.

I doubt you have less than 150 max hp at that stage because there are a lot of sources for it that even my archer has 330. 150 max hp and 250 def will be enough to farm using pizzas in afk mode even without shrines. I just got to 330 total levels and you are at 520, you are certainly past the point of where you can start farming w3.

[SLAIN]

Originally posted by Elenoe:

I think you got it all wrong.

1) all characters are warriors, all characters are skillers in their resp. areas. You can't have "one or the other". Before you get to W4 basically all chars should focus on combat and be progressing through worlds. After you get to W4 you still won't do any skilling, but every character will be trained in their resp. area of expertise to provide the best printing samples they can. All skilling materials comes from printing, starting when you reach W3

2) armor doesn't matter much. In W3 you cannot possibly have 0 damage set. You pack chars with food and just try to minimize the damage. Alchemy def bubble and dungeon flurbo shop are the huge sources. You only "focus" on weapons, those matter, with relevant stones attached (always use every slot on every piece you wear, which ever tier you can afford). And you mostly want boss armors, usually minus helmets. Will it help if I say that most of my characters are progressing W4 in amarok/efaunt armors?

3) beginner/jman/mman is the worst class by far to operate. He won't save you if that's the hopes. It's way deep in W4 when he can be "barely" used for any kind of farming. And even then some other classes are much more pleasant and competent for most tasks. During W3/W4 mman will be hindering you a LOT. His main contribution is skill efficiency bonus he can provide to others for printing. And that is ONLY if he has the higher level then your skillers. And he is real PITA to level since he has no profficiency in any skill whasoever. So you will be spending 3 weeks leveling him mining to some level, then 5hr candies for you dedicated miners to catch that level, taking a new print sample and that's it. Back to another month of mman leveling. Candies/cards/statues are endgame stuff for when you have nothing else to do. Mman won't "magically" bring those as a get go. He will always be the slowest, weakest and most hated one of the pack, hindering your skillers who could have leveled so much more without him :) But as said, doing actual "skilling" is not a thing, don't waste too much time on it. And bare in mind that your skillers can't under no circumstances outlevel the mman, or their results will be weak.

4) opening worlds is the priority, keep that in mind. You can do quests as you go, that's not a problem. Just don't waste time if they ask for something that requires extra farming. Any farming that does not contribute to zone progressing is wasting time and be assured it can be done later much much faster and easier. Every new world has new features, they all suck at start but you need to start working on them to be any good. Same as new zones are more XP/coin juicy then their predecesors. So choose your progress wisely.

5) about timeframe.. it took me less then a month to reach W4. Have no idea where would 8-9months in W3 come from. Maybe some old post. But now there is nothing in the W1-W3 you want to spent time "farming" on. You just progress through as fast as you can with as many characters you can... while having fun with some distractions. Keep unlocking worlds and more characters.

I mean, if you want to take ages to get anywhere in the game, this is how to play (first paragraph) Tho def not optimal or efficient.

[TheMrDarkrider]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by TheMrDarkrider:

One last thing is ive read though other posts and guides that i should just try to unlock all the worlds first and skip the side quests till afterwards. That i don’t agree with because alot of the side quest makes it so farming is much more bareable due to the fact that they give you boosts to your backpack, storage chest, and just generally equipment that is too good to pass up. For instance, my food storage was extremely low but when I completed the mushroom guy quest he game me a bag that vastly increased my food storage. I think it went from 88 to 177 witch is a huge jump.

I am sure they don't mean to skip all quests. And it's not a lot of quests that give good rewards, only some of them, but most are rather bad. For example that mushroom Funguy gives a food bag which can increase you food capacity a lot without spending a lot of resources but the remaining four quests in his quest chain are not worth the rewards. Sure you will get some of them automatically, like 35 score in chopping minigame, but 10k logs from the sewers for just some armor tokens, nah... So yeah, do the ones that are easy or give good rewards, like unique stamps (only need to do them on one character) but leave other quests for much later. Uncovering more worlds and unlocking more questmasters to increase the pool of quests you can choose from is nice.

Well i was able to farm out the amarock chest legs and boots not going for the head piece because the helm i got now is better.

Don't forget that there is an achievement for equipping all 4 pieces that lets you teleport to forest village for free. You certainly want to get it so crafting one helm and at least equipping it once for that achievement is worth it.

Depending on how social you are either find a developed guild and join them or start your own. Even solo I managed to get my personal guild to level 10 and get some nice boosts to capacity, damage and stats from it. Plus it gives some extra daily and weekly goals to focus on.

I saw in the guides about a hunter going to w3 where the sheep are and something about getting tons of xp from it. But it stated it would be like a 8-9 months process depending if you spend irl money.

I am not sure how long I actually spent on it but it wasn't that much time unless you count the time when I wasn't playing the game for a year. I played few days in the very beginning when the game was released in 2021, had two character doing some stuff in frog and bean areas. I returned to the game when Idle Skilling was released in September 2022 with its special event that gives reward in Idleon. One of the characters crashed when collecting the rewards and on another character I collected some of the loot because capacity was minimal, like some mining statues and oak cards, a lot of upgrade tokens and took logs instead of leaves because I really didn't know what was more valuable. So essentially I've been playing the game seriously since release of Idle skilling, which was 2 months ago and at this time got to the third area of W3 past sheeps and snowflakes. I didn't spend any irl money on it but I got some rewards from the Idle skilling event. Mostly spent the rewards on chest storage.

I don't play very effectively as my main character has only 2-6k damage while even new Wizard (7th character) that I got last week has 5-12k. Barbarian (4th character) is also much stronger than main guy and can even clear arena challenges with his aoe attacks. At the same time my main guy struggles getting to wave 11. Wth additional arrow and homing arrows only attack a single target I have no idea, but character is very slow on multiple targets because of that. Still I enjoy playing at my own pace and it feels fine.

luckily i just did w2 boss by the skin of my teeth on my first character. But now i gota worry about w3 monsters and boss. if w3 boss is any worse then w2 boss then ill be here for a while farming everything i can.

[Elenoe]

not really. W2 is the worst in terms of paying attention. W3 is more like the W1 one. Hits hard, but has only few predictable moves you avoid.