Online worth it?

[Azhaius]

At the end of the base game trying to clear out masteries & enemy records and upgrade all my party gear, and the grind is starting to drag on me. Missions take a while to complete (even with Heixing and Giselle flying through as fast as they can), and the amount of materials you get per mission pales in comparison to the amount of materials required to craft and upgrade high level stuff.

Been online thus far, but really tempted to bring my save offline so I can speed up the material gathering / crafting process.

Thoughts?

[Kaysoky]

Have you been using the collector set when farming for materials? And using the (new) mastery sets (on Scholar, so Kylie and Ray) that boost item acquisition rates? And the Sweeper company mastery? And have you been scrapping (rather than selling) items?

There are a bunch of ways to boost your material gain, so I've never felt tempted to save-edit my way into infinite resources. What are you spending your materials on specifically?

[TargetPractice]

There are quite a few things you can do to make farming easier. First will be setting up your jurisdictions. Properly setup, your jurisdictions will passively get you Vill and equipment. You can buy most of the materials you need, and equipment can be dismantled for materials or sold for more Vill. However, before you dismantle or sell equipment, you should always identify it first. Identified equipment will sell for far more than the identify cost, and this is also the same for the additional materials you get from dismantling identified equipment.

After that, I would look at what stats you want on your equipment. A lot of times higher level equipment won't be the optimal choice, or they will only be marginally better than a cheaper to craft choice. Also, the only thing I suggest upgrading would be weapons and maybe bracelets. Upgrading only increases the base stat, and both armor and resistance scale logarithmically. This means that the more armor/resistance you have, the less effective adding more armor/resistance will become, respectfully. HP, Attack Power, and ESP Power scale linearly, so adding a certain amount will always be have the same effect, no matter how you already have in that stat.

Next, I would change my difficulty to Cruel, turn on [High-Risk, High-Return], and turn off any other difficulty setting like challenge mode (unless you want to farm info, EXP, or Friendship). High-Risk, High-Return will give you 2 drops from Elite, Epic, or Legendary enemies. Cruel difficulty will make all normal enemies into elites, and will spawn many more enemies. You can also increase how many material you get per drop with certain mastery sets and equipment sets. There is a section called Suggested Sets in this guide that can help you max how many materials you get per drop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2025825529

If that isn't enough, you can also further increase the chance you get the drops you want. Basically, anytime you increase the drop rate of the item you want but not all items that enemy can drop, you will further increase the drop rate of that item. For example, if you want an epic rarity material from an enemy whose lowest rarity drop is uncommon, you can equip Treasure Island and King's Wealth to increase the drop rate of the epic rarity material, but Alibaba won't help.

[Mochan]

Generally online mode doesn't do anything. But if you're already online I don't see any reason to switch to offline, unless you want to hack your savegame or something (which is a perfectly valid thing to do if that's what you want).