(postgame) i have no idea what i'm doing

[Koleda]

so recently i came back to this game but i'm really lost on what to do, i want to make all my characters ripped so i just don't really on my 4x reincarnated dark knight to literally do anything and cheese the entire game with him

i've been reincarnating some of my units to succubi/nekomatas because they level up fast when i use my dark knight with them then reincarnate them again to their respective classes after getting a few boosts in chara world and master a few classes

i kind of got tired grinding in nothing but martial training, so i wanted a new place where i can cheese my boyos to at least 10 mil stats to yeet non-carn baal at least

i also don't know what to do at the item world as i'm really used on how it was in D2 (on PSP) so if anyone can suggest things to do in D5's item world, it'll be really appreciated

[ShinkuTear]

Class grinding: Martial Training is the typical suggestion, as it can cover 5 characters at once normally, even more if you don't mind including 4 story characters in the process. If you have Geo Blast, or don't mind magichanging the unit onto someone with Geo Blast, then you can use the Carnage Item World as well.

Generally, any high level enemies and stages will work for class grinding.

Grinding for stat boosting shards is more involved, and is best done using the bonus stage with a massive number of Asagi enemies. Through use of either Metallia's Overload or a Sage with the Megaphone as a subweapon, you can capture an absurd number of high stat enemies to convert into shards.

Since the stats on shards and extracts are directly related to the stats of the source enemy, you'll want to use the strongest Asagi you can handle. If Asagi is too much, any other stage with lots of enemies is good.

Item World: So, first of all, for big stats, you need to get a Carnage item, which is separate from a normal item because it's largely only available from Carnage stages, and has better stats. You can work your way up the item rarity chain the old fashion way, or...

...One of the Mushroom monster class evilities makes you sometimes produce an item when damaged, and if you are Lv9999 and fighting on a Carnage stage, it should be a Carnage Mushroom Soup, a rank 39 consumable.

If you dive into it's Item World, it'll have high power enemies with generally high rank gear, high rank bonus gauge stuff, and high power Geo Symbols for you to Geo Blast. This will let you skip straight to similarly high rank equipment to use and power up.

Actually powering up equipment: If you care about maximizing the stats, there are a few things you'll want to do. Boost the equips stat bonus, from stuff like item bills, item generals/kings/gods, and bonus rooms. Drive the equips Rarity up, mostly by clearing enough floors. Level the item up for more stats...

...and finally, eventually work towards passing through 10,000 total floors on the item, if you want multiple of it. Any item can be duplicated through a somewhat uncommon item world event, but the chance is based on total floors passed/cleared in the item(including use of Divers), capping at 100% chance at 10,000 floors.

Floors in items are technically infinite, the cap is too huge to ever actually hit. Similarly, item bills are infinite, as you get 1 for each Item God you kill in that item.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I wanted to try and cover as much of your question as I could.

[CarThief]

I've found various useful uses for the Item World.

Carnage Elixir and/or Carnage Mushroom Soup (ideally Elixir, but you can attain Elixir from Mushroom Soup):

-Easy levelling. Just jank up the difficulty to 20 stars at the Cheat Shop, maximize XP gain to 1000%, go into said item world, and throw a Geo Stone onto a enemy or neutral entity.
Geo Blast seems to hand out less XP. Presumably since it's a Deathblow effect, so for the best XP, you'll want to throw Geo Stones at other people (or Item Symbols/Innocents/etc). They won't catch it, the stone breaks and dies, and you get a TON of XP.

It's enough to get to max level in 2-3 throws typically, unless you're on Elite Four, in which case it'll take more throws. (It helped me get Zetta to +100% attack by re-incarnating him from lvl9999 roughly a 100 times. One instant lvl9999 per thrown stone. Did have to throw in a lot of XP-booster evilities though.)
I recommend you just bring a LOT of movement. If you can beat up regular Baal, those Axel Gears are very helpful for this task.

-Easy class grinding. Same as above. Throw (or use Geo Blast on) a Geo Stone, and most classes are maxed out instantly. Some take two throws though, like Pirate or Dark Knight.
Other options are Raspberyl's evility that deathblows objects in the item world, or seeking other deathblow effects for in-between levelling (like that one Innocent-based squad that allows its members to deathblow innocents, i believe).
Though personal preference goes to just rushing through floors, stopping only to throw Geo Stones. Good thing to do on-the-side as you level up a item or go deeper down it's floors.
(Speaking of going down floors, start producing 10-floor Divers. They're rather slow to build. You'll need em later.)

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You're aware of how to get a character's stats to 10m right? You level all their classes to maximum (even the 3 "DLC" ones handed out by the special shop), then assign them to the Elite Four squad, and level em from 1 to 9999. Levelling goes fastest via Geo Throwing, from what i can tell. XP-boosting evilities help.

Make sure your Elite Four squad is at 100% power for a 100% growthrate. Your stats cannot exeed 100% growthrate, so stuff like growing your HIT/SPD faster is useless, but your SP and your HP do not have that cap, so feel free to throw HP/SP growth enhancers in there.

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Another 10M in stats you can attain is from fragments and extracts that give you stat bonuses.
The common strategy is to build a team to tackle the Asagi stage on difficulty level 20, capture them all (except the boss) with Metallia, and have... Pram? (the one with the unique evility that lasers one random enemy on the map) finish off the boss.

With the right setup, it would take maybe 10-25 or so minutes at most to get a extract with 10m in stats (roughly the item's cap, too, for non-HP/SP stats).
It's a lotta setup though. I don't remember the specifics, perhaps someone has a guide or a video link?

Oh, and ideally bring someone who's mastered the Maid subclass, equip them with the evility that increases the item's area of effect (and maybe also Cannon For An Arm to increase use-range, so they can use it on a group of 5 people, without being part of said 5 people).

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So, uh, that rounds up to...
-10M stats from levelling with all classes maxed and 100% growth.
-10M stats from extracts/shards.
-Use a combination of evilities to raise your stats to a maximum of +100%, which combined with the above two puts you at 40M. Because 20M(100%, from extracts & levelling) + another 100% = 200%, which is x2 the amount, thus 40M.
(Stats are capped at +100% You could use the Greedy Disposition evility though, to get +39% or so stats if you're rich.)
-Get the remaining 60M or so stats from grinding a item to 2M stats, equipping 3 of these items, and doing various things (listed below).

That should put you at 90-99M stats. You can exeed it if you maybe grind boss kills with Eclipse Power active, but i hear it's utter tedium. And that it only works on Item World bosses (so... probably just Proto? Some say the gatekeeper cat too, but dunno).

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Still working on my item somewhat, but as far as i understand it, to effeciently get a item levelled up, you gotta...
-Grind it with your difficulty set to 20 stars. (A fact i missed last time, resulting a 1.6m stat item on level 9999. Yet when i tried again on 20 stars, it was on 2M stats as early as around 2000-3000.)
Though this can be tough. It's best that you do the steps to get a 40M stat team first.

-Defeat all the Mystery Rooms (you can fight in) that you reasonably can to get a bonus (some kind of growth/accelleration bonus? Either way, it's shown in the exit screen as you see the item level. Probably maxes out around 500. If you do not recieve any bonuses for beating these rooms, you've hit the cap).
(Wouldn't blame anyone for skipping the Prinny/Bank rooms. Bank guardians are just friggin' OP.)

-Defeat invaders for the abovementioned bonus, too. Infact, go for the Invader Route, fight everyone. The Invader route should provide you the best growth for your item.

-Kill all the enemies you find, until you've hit the kill bonus. Think it capped at like 400.
It's confusing though, you don't see it in it's current state, you just see like "+14 kill bonus", but you can't tell what the total is. Frankly, i wouldn't worry too much about it. You can probably stop killing once the item is near/at 2M stats.

-Try and kill Proto should he appear. It's quite doable with a team of 40M units if their evilities are effecient. My favourite was 3-4 mages and Christo, with the mages having Accelleration Shot and damage-enhancers, go far away from Proto with the mage, put Christo besides them, and pelt him with 100% accuracy. Even the uber-strong giant version of Proto ougta eat 200-500M damage from that, and eventually die.
You'll also want a tank unit or two (i went with two) to guard and take hits for your team. Easily tanking 4-6 hits from Proto before they'd die. On that note, hope you got a healer too. Or have Christo heal on the side.

If you keep at it with the defeating of items/mystery rooms as you kill enemies and level your item up, you'll hit 2M stats in no time. After that, it's helpful to keep going with the levelling to some degree since the stats won't raise much beyond maybe 2.1M, but the item's HP/SP can still rise!
Though at that point, you could also focus entirely on speeding through floors, maybe grabbing fish and breaking spheres on the way for free level-ups.

Hope you've been creating Diver-10 items in the meanwhile! A good team for going through floors tends to involve...
-A Wrestler, who's move can, without fear of retaliation, take a Gatekeeper off of the gate. Make him move fast. Really fast, as he's meant to get to the gate which can be quite far away.
-A fast flying unit (or anyone equipped with Axel Gear). Maximize it's movement as much as possible. "No cost too great", as one good game would quote. It will move onto the gate after the gate has been cleared.

Optionally:
-A Thief or two, if you like opening chests.
-A dragon who can thow your wrestler or fast guy closer to the gate. It helps.
-A mage who can move fast and deals a lot of damage. Probably from your main team. They'll be your main sphere breaker. (Or in a pinch kill a Gatekeeper if needed.)
-Maybe someone dedicated to catching level-fish? They're only 1 level, but with how frequent they are, it's a shame not to catch em.

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Oh, and just having a 2M stat item won't do. You gotta level your weapon skill. Well, technically "armor" isn't a weapon but eh, videogames.
You gotta get your "armor" skill level to 100. It's where you see the fist, sword, etc rankings of your character.
Getting hit a lot (and surviving presumably) will level it. Harder hits level it better i think. You can raise the XP gained for weapon proficiencies in the cheat shop, i think, but i forgot which one it was.

After you did armor. You gotta level your equipment proficiencies too. Those are not shown in the skill rankings, but elsewhere. Those cap at 300%, and synergize exellently with 100 armor and a 2M stat item, resulting in, from what i heard, 20M stats per item!

To level them, it seems you have to go to the Chara World, and just beat it. Then talk to the guy who gives equipment proficiency to enhance one of them a bit higher.
Beating your Evil Heart will also give +1% to every proficiency, and using a Dowsing Rod (or finding warm springs through extreme luck) also gives +1%. There seems to be a cap though at how much you can attain in one Chara World run, on your equipment proficiencies.

I haven't gotten to this part yet, so i'm unfamiliar, but i guess i'll figure it out. Wonder if there's a Chara World evility to enhance the proficiency rewards...?

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Oh, another useful thing to know for the item grind and more.
You know the Curry Shop? If you put in 3 Elixirs and 100, say, Thimble (the lowest tier fist) items in it, you get a strong HP/SP increase + regen + 100% crit chance curry.

Maybe using Carnage Elixirs enhances the effects (not sure). You'll find a lot of Carnage Elixirs anyway as you level your item, so keep em for the curries.
To start the cycle, just make curry and wait for like, 100 days (battles). Then eat it, and immediately produce another curry, and by the time your current curry effect expires, the old one is at 100 days (the cap) and ready to be eaten. And repeat.

You should also get Dark Knight evility Purgatory, which enhances critical damage, for obvious reasons since you'll be doing critical hits with 100% chance.
A good curry buff like that can really enhance the team's damage output and make it feasible to beat a fully buffed up Proto in the Item World (without his Damage Cut nullifying your efforts).

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Um, phew. Lotta text.
That's a lot of things you can do to become stronger, though. And eventually beat up that Baal. Maybe. I'm close, but i'm not sure if i can. (But only one way to find out!)

[DLOZanma]

Sorry to hijack the thread, but with all that stuff, should i leave Raised Flag+Elite Four as the last thing to effectively do with a character? I'm probably saying a wrong thing, but AFAIK at least the E4 "growth" is not permanent and concernes only the current reincarnation, or something.

[CarThief]

Uh, depends if you're planning on doing anything with that character in the midst of levelling other things. If you are, then you may wanna beef em up first. You only need to do it once anyway, once they're at 9999, they're ready to go for all the other steps, no reincarnation required (as long as you didn't botch the levelling process).
Raised Flag isn't required, but some report having minor issues with not reaching full growths, so it's more of an insurance thing, i guess. Never used it myself though, and they got to 10M and later 20M just fine.

Also a nice thing to do as you level your item or advance floors for higher duplication chances. It's a long road, i suppose the key to it is to multi-task a thing or two, and if it gets too dull, swap it out for another thing for a bit.

I find having some side-goals helped. Like building a team, with evilities and all to by my Netherworld/Invasion team (though that's online functionality stuff, and Steam doesn't have that, but i was playing on Switch).

That was a good distraction to have for a bit. I do wonder, though... Do your evilities actually carry over when your team's used as an Invasion squad? Does the equipment carry over directly, or... Does it set you at the appropiate level for the item they're in, with appropiate equipment for that level? Heck, does a lvl9999 squad ever show up in lower-level item worlds (with a reduced level)? Or would a Carnage-geared squad enter non-Carnage item worlds?

So many questions, heh... Sadly found no answers so far. Not sure if i ever encountered a user-made squad in the IW. Seems doubtful though. But D5 for the Switch is new so, hm, perhaps not many or none have uploaded any yet?