When should I be tackling medium missions in Stygian mode?

[Amnekian]

Im on week 24 and still have most of my cast in novice levels. Is the secret not having a full roster?

[No One]

Whenever you want.

[Rincewind]

Going into a medium mission pretty much mandates having a dedicated healer such as Vestal or Occultist. If you have one of those (a stress heal is also pretty handy) you should be good to hit up a medium length quest.

[Amnekian]

Originally posted by No One:

Whenever you want.

Not on week 87 I can't.

[No One]

I routinely max the roster ASAP and even throw out a bunch of recruits because I use fixed teams and for myriad reasons they don't fit. It's fine to stay out of veteran until the the mid-30 weeks, even on a time limit. Yeah, it feels late, but even with this kind of slow start I managed an all-bosses kill under the time limit.

The secret is to strongly favour long missions over medium or short.

[LaserGuy]

Originally posted by Amnekian:

Im on week 24 and still have most of my cast in novice levels. Is the secret not having a full roster?

As soon as humanly possible you should move to medium/long dungeons. In my Stygian games I typically do maybe 5-6 short missions in the entire game... the mandatory ones you need to do to open each area, plus maybe one or two more at the start of the game to try to open the Guild/Smith as safely as possible. Everything else is medium or long. Short simply don't provide enough loot/xp to be worthwhile unless you are scumming like crazy (i.e. wandering hallways waiting for battles to respawn... but in that case you may as well just do medium/long anyway), and even still, the trinket rewards on shorts are terrible, and getting good trinkets is vital to advancing.

[Skinny Pete]

Short missions are mostly a noob trap. They keep you broke and without good trinkets, don't trigger good town events, don't have secret rooms, and are otherwise more or less worthless.

You should only do them for a reason, like leveling up a stray underleveled character, getting a level 0 to level 1, or in the case of some Champion missions, to get a good Rare trinket. They may seem easy but they really aren't as you can't recover from a disastrous first encounter by just camping.

Once you figure out camping medium/long missions are actually easier, more profitable, and you usually end them in better shape.