Flonne Grinding: 1-9999 within minutes

Tired of actually having to pay attention? Needing to look at the screen to reach 9999 too much work for you? Here's how to hit max level within a couple hours of game start, with no attention required!

Introduction

This guide explains a simple, repeatable method of grinding levels on your squad, nearly from the very start of the game. All you need is access to the Item World, and the Boot Camp Squad, available as soon as Episode 3. No need for hundreds of statisticians, or post-game content.

Preparation

To get started, you will need:
- Boot Camp Squad, ideally with maximum level, but not required. Technically optional if you only want to level your healer, but it's free experience.
- A healer, with the 'Healing Hands' Evility, available with one star in the Male Clergy class. For this guide, we will use Flonne, but you can use any character with healing magic available. Optionally add Study Lover and Mana Lover for some bonus XP/mana.
You will need at least one healing spell with 3x3 area, requiring several thousand mana.
- A SP battery, most easily through the 'Angel Blessing' Evility, available with two stars in the Celestial Hostess class, though any %SP regen works. Any character works.
- Access to the Item World, and an item.
- 5000 mana for Triple EXP Strategy Assembly bonus

You'll be swimming in 9999999 mana soon after you start, but if you do not already have a few thousand mana, you can grind some by healing as well - Mana earned is approximately:
0.15 * M * L
where M = Mana gain multiplier, most easily 1.5 from the common Mana Lover Evility
where L = Sum of levels of units being healed
Pick an ordinary stage, (2-1 has a EXP+50% geo bonus), throw one enemy into the corner if necessary, then sit your highest-level units in a corner (healer in the center tile, SP recovery adjacent) and spam the highest-AOE healing magic with your healer until you get the mana you need. There is no difference between which healing magic you use, Heal gives the same mana as Tera Heal.
You will need a total of 5100 mana to raise a healing spell to maximum area, and 5000 mana for Triple EXP in the Strategy Assembly

Pressing Buttons Quickly

You will be pressing the same set of buttons repeatedly. A lot.
- Use a keyboard
- Learn the hotkeys
You can do everything with one hand if you map accept/cancel to something easy to reach. Personally, I use:
X for accept
Z for cancel
WASD for movement (default)
1 for execute (default)
2 for end turn (default)
4 for specials (default)
but this is up to you.

To have your healer heal your entire party with the widest area heal, the entire sequence of keys you need to press is
4XAWXX2
Seven keystrokes will run one turn.
The cursor will remain on the healer since she is the only unit who acted, and the spell selection will remain on the last spell you used.

Cautiously, you can do one turn per six seconds easily.
With practice, you can get this down to five, or even four if you decide to script the process.

Strategy Assembly

Pass the "Triple EXP!" at the Strategy Assembly
In case you don't know how to get approval:
-Buy 50 of each cheapest weapon type, plus 50 belts, shoes, and glasses
-Save outside the Assembly
-Bribe each senator until 'Love' by spamming their preferred item, starting from the highest level senators.
-If too many of the senators are items you can't buy (muscles, orbs, icons), just reload and try again.
This gets easier every time you do it, as senators who reappear keep their friendly relations after you bribed them once.

Map Selection

So, at this point you have:
- Your healer with 'Healing Hands' Evility equipped, and a max-range healing spell (don't bother to increase the power, just AoE. You'll have Omega/Tera Heal soon enough, and enough mana to max that out)
- Your SP battery with 'Angel Blessing' Evility equipped
- Passed the 3x EXP on next map topic at the Assembly
- Boot Camp Squad with your healer as the leader, and filled out with members you want trained

Now, it's time to find a map to grind on.
What you are looking for
- Ally Damage 50 Geo
- (Optional) Damage 20 Geo
- (Avoid) Attack Times + 1 - Seems useful at a glance, but most of your experience actually comes from healing, which the second cast doesn't do. The added animation time will slow you down significantly. Get rid of it.
- At least one 3x3 Geo tile area of the same color

Method:
- Save before starting
- Enter the item world. Mash accept to go into an item, then hit your menu button to see the geo effects on the map.
- If the map does not have the effects you are looking for, immediately Give Up and Return to Pocket Netherworld. Giving up preserves your 3x EXP
- Keep rolling until you find a valid map.

THIS MAY TAKE A WHILE. Be patient, and keep rolling.

(Optional) Speeding Up The Search

Depending on your luck, searching for a map may take a long time. As your stats increase, this search may even take longer than the grind itself. Fortunately, you can (somewhat) speed up the process with a Sage, using the Geo Change special ability.

Using Geo Change rerolls the entire map's geo effects. So, if when you enter the item world, if the correct geo symbols are not present, you can reroll it once to try again.
- Arrange your sage to the first slot in your character list
- Arrange your sage's special abilities to place Geo Change on the first slot
- Use Geo Change when you enter the Item World.
- Give Up if the map is still not useful.

Rolling twice is marginally faster than exiting on every map attempt. However, there is a more important aspect to Geo Change:
Using Geo Change does NOT reroll any geo symbols which are currently held
If you find an Ally Damage symbol, but no area of geo tiles big enough on the map, pick it up, Geo Change, and maybe you now have a 3x3 square of the same color, or an Encroach symbol to create one. This way, you can use nearly any map with a Ally Damage symbol, even if you get unlucky with the tiles.

Map Preparation

Once you find an valid map, you need to prepare the map for grinding. Be very careful. Check your moves before you execute, to make sure you aren't screwing anything up.
If you accidentally destroy your geo symbols, win the stage, or lose one of your characters to the Ally Damage effect, you're going right back to rolling for maps.

Before you start grinding, you need to isolate one enemy, and eliminate the rest.
An isolated enemy is either:
- The gatekeeper, assuming he cannot reach your 3x3 grinding square.
- On a disconnected patch of terrain
- Stuck behind an item symbol or geo symbol

-Pay attention to the attack range and specials of your isolated enemy.
-Make sure you do not accidentally kill him with a counter while throwing him around.
-If the isolation location is close to your grinding square, you may need to take a few turns to waste his SP first.
-You may also need to destroy/isolate any wandering geo symbols which happen to be on the map.

Once you can end your turn without anything happening except your 9 characters taking 50% damage, you are ready to start grinding.

The Grind

Now, it's time to actually start grinding.
The method is exactly the same as before. Surround your Healer with your SP battery and highest level party members, and start spamming heal. You will VERY quickly start gaining levels on both your healer, and entire boot camp squad.


One turn of healing:

100 levels of experience takes only 6 turns. At 5 seconds per turn, that is 200 levels per minute

Warnings:
- Memorize the key sequence for one turn, and do it quickly, but be careful. One misclick can easily wipe your squad, since your entire squad will die if you end a turn without healing. If this happens, deploy your 10th character and leave with a Mr. Gency Exit. Game Over means all progress is lost, don't take the risk.
- If you are very low level (such as immediately after a reincarnation), the HP gain from a level up will push you below 50%/70% HP, and the following damage effect WILL kill you. In this case, the first few heals should be followed up by a heal from a secondary healer, to top up the squad. Execute without ending turns for your first few turns to make sure nobody is going to die.
- After a few thousand levels, Heal/Mega Heal may no longer be sufficient to fully heal your entire squad. By now you will have millions of mana on your healer, so max out the AoE on all your healing spells and start using Omega/Tera Heal instead.

Finishing

- Leave with a Mr. Gency Exit, or finish 10 levels and leave from Innocent Town.
- Save

Why This Works (The Math)

Experimentally, the formula for EXP from healing is approximately:

(K1 * L) + (K2 * H)

Where K1, K2 are constants
L is the sum of levels healed
H is the sum of HP healed (not maximum heal, actual damage being healed)

With +10% EXP from Study Lover, +200% EXP from Healing Hands, 3x EXP from the Assembly,
K1 is approximately 450
K2 is approximately 66
Further increases, such as innocents, increase these constants additively. With +32% from innocent bonus,
K1 is approximately 500
K2 is approximately 73

Thus, the experience earned by healing scales with the levels of the units being healed.
A 3x3 heal of lv100 characters healing 50% of 7000 MaxHP each awards

9 * 100 * 500 + 9 * 3500 * 73
= 2,749,500 EXP
~= 68 levels at 305*L Exp/Lv

A 3x3 heal by a lv2000 healer and 8 lv1000 characters healing 50% of 123000 MaxHP each awards

(8 * 1000 + 2000) * 500 + 9 * 61500 * 73
= 45,405,500 EXP
~= 71 levels at 305*L Exp/Lv

Yes, you read that right. The experience gain per heal doesn't decrease with level. Leveling gets FASTER as you gain more levels, not slower.
After a reincarnation or two, you'll go from 20 levels per turn, to over 100 (There's even a special gold-star Level Up message for >100 levels/turn. Who knew.)

By the time you have 8 Lv9999 characters to surround your healer with 1M MaxHP,

( 9 * 9999 * 500 + 9 * 500,000 * 73)
= 373,495,500 EXP
~= 163 turns for 61B EXP to go 1-9999
~= 15 minutes at 11turns/min

And after a few maxed-out subclasses and reincarnations to get your characters to 10M MaxHP,

(9 * 9999 * 500 + 9 * 5,000,000 * 73)
= 3,329,995,500 EXP
~= 52 turns to raise an entire SQUAD of 7 members from 1-9999 with 35% EXP transfer 

The leveling process gets faster as your members get stronger, pretty much without limit. If you pass 870M MaxHP on each of your party members, a single turn of healing is enough to take the entire Boot Camp Squad from 1 to 9999, with 100B EXP each.

(Optional) Magichange

You can magichange any monster onto your healer to get the EXP/Mana split, if you want to grind an 8th character in addition to your boot camp squad. Use the 'Exceed the limit!' in the Assembly to get unlimited magichange turns.
No, you can't put the magichange'd monster as the leader of the channeling squad to also spread millions of mana to a second squad simultaneously.

(Postgame) Skipping the Search

After completing the main story, an easily accessible Ally Damage geosymbol is available on Scorching Flame > Challenge Stage.

On Turn 1, run a 10+ move character to the yellow symbols, throw one onto the yellow tiles and destroy it. Then, wait for the encroaching red tiles to remove the green bridges to the Super Encroach symbol, and destroy the symbol. After that, you can freely grind away without ever needing to search through the Item World for a fitting map.

[Swietek]

I started off with a healer (it probably took like 30m of that 4KA... spam) and then reincarned into sage. After you unlock Tera Heal you can forget about the rest, just increase it's range to max and it's going to be cheap as hell.
4 star out subclasses in martial training IV on bears with a spear (nice aoe clear).
Then you can go all out to unlock Carnage (LoC) and additional Cheat Shop points.
After your stats are high enough you can use clear Asagi clones in Carnage and grind slaves and shards this way.
Healer and Sage subclass is the most important. I would go for a Twin Dragon and Thief later to have that one well rounded character to do all the content.
Keep on grinding, that's why we are here.

[Niko]

Will also add as its a stage I tested a little, you can do this same setup for easy levels in Gorgeous!
I use the second stage and set up the 3x3 square of characters in the part of spawn without the geo-spot. All you need to do is clear the Valk/spearwomen and the other enemy units on the map wont bother you.
The stage has a lazer effect that does 50% of a units hp when hit, a lot easier to manage than having to reroll item world stages :D.

[Shikii]

this guide saved me a lot time thanks

[Altricad]

This is the craziest guide I've seen for DS5, good job sir/madam