This is a foolproof way to level quickly (for a free player) from as low as level 40. It takes advantage of the properties of the very, VERY high level fairies in the little landmass northeast of Tenebrant City. Look below for the location: it's called Fairyland.
Specifically, this region here:
Optionally, if you do not have the airship yet, there is also a tinier "Fairyland" east of the Hideout where you may also fight these fairies. You can sail there once you obtain the sailing ship from the Guild. But at the time you get the ship, you may not yet have the necessary jewels to make this work.
You need the following:
* Amelia's Bad Prayer skill
* Lucile with Amelia's Bad Prayer learned
* At LEAST one Preemptive Jewel (more is better). It can be worn on anyone in the party. An even better Jewel would be the Accelerator Jewel, but this must be equipped on Lucile. You can find one Preemptive Jewel in Naihmee Village, and both Jewels can be farmed in the Guild's Arena.
* Several Charge Puddings (or other Charge items to restore BG), you'll be using at least three per battle
Do the following in this order:
1. When you get the area I put on the map above, SAVE!
2. Arrange your formation like so:
- Lucile in the lead and in front
- Everyone else in the back
3. Equip the Preemptive Jewel on someone. This is VERY important!
* Or equip the Accelerator Jewel, but this MUST be on Lucile. She has to go first or everything fails.
4. Create a Beat Combo for Lucile that contains these skills in this order: Call + Hit Me
5. If you don't have an Accelerator Jewel, arrange your equipment or feed SPD Seeds so that Lucile is the fastest in the group. Oh yeah, did I mention SAVE?
6. Get into a battle. If you are using a Preemptive Jewel instead of an Accelerator Jewel (because you may not have one yet), this step will probably be the most tedious. Reset (hit the Back button on your tablet if that's what you're using) and load from title if you don't get the pre-emptive.
7. When the battle begins, Lucile's first move should be the Call + Hit Me combo.
8. During Amelia's turns, have her use Bad Prayer on the most packed or threatening column of enemies. See below on which monsters to target first.
9. Harvey and Olivia should feed Charge Puddings to Amelia and Lucile (in that order). You can hold off on feeding a pudding to Lucile on the first cycle, and instead use a Cure Matter if she got hit by Sleep/Paralyze.
10. On Lucile's second turn, if she was not targeted by Lunatic Hit, have her use Bad Prayer too.
11. Repeat from step 7.
If you are not worried about status effects, and you have a Trust Charge to spare, you may choose (in-between maintaining the Call + Hit Me chain) to use her Trust Charge on large groups for some very nice steals (the super rare steals here are Rune Swords, Rune Baghnakhs, Rune Rods and Rune Scythes).
What makes this work is that there are NO non-boss enemies that are immune to Countdown. And Amelia's Bad Prayer skill? It inflicts Countdown without fail. (One of Olivia's skills can also apply Countdown, but that doesn't work all the time.) However, if you are not using an Accelerator Jewel, this does take a bit of tedious resetting to get the necessary Pre-emptive encounter even with Preemptive Jewels on.
Prioritize killing Queen Sprites (the sprites with red hair and gold staves) and Fairy Fiends (ogres with... fairy wings?!) first (or just run); both have skills and spells that can kill your party in the back row and may end your run quickly. In particular, the Queen Sprite can cast Angst Gale, a hit-all spell (you'll know when it does when it makes a "casting delay" before using it) and the Fairy Fiend uses Double Claw, a randomly-targeted physical skill. If you run into too many of either of these two once, you may have to reset if Amelia is killed too soon. You may prevent Angst Gale deaths by equipping a Silhouette Jewel on Amelia, but the Fairy Fiend's Double Claw, being a physical and not magical skill, ignores that.
Another danger is the Rosy Sylph (archer fairies). The majority of dangerous status effects come from these, namely sleep (Eternal Song) and turn (Lunatic Hit). While sleep can be resisted and even prevented, "Turn" is technically not a status effect and CANNOT be prevented. This makes whomever hit by Lunatic Hit to turn around until they take damage, which will never happen to Lucile whenever her Call + Hit Me combo is still active (the undoing of the turn effect does not trigger from healing, of which every attack on Lucile becomes thanks to Hit Me). As a result, she has to waste a turn to face the correct way, which makes doing anything other than maintaining Call + Hit me rather dangerous as long as Rosy Sylphs are in play. If she gets 'delayed' before the turn when it's time to refresh the combo, it will likely spell the end of your run. You can 'fix' this problem yourself by having Harvey or Olivia use a weak healing potion or spell on Lucile, but only if they manage to get a turn in before Lucile is forced to turn around anyway. But if Lucile is under both sleep and turn, and you only have enough character turns to fix one of the two, you are probably screwed.
While not completely necessary for the run to function, you can make leveling even quicker by doing the following improvements:
For Lucile:
* Put Swoon/Countdown on Lucile's current weapon (swoon is functionally better, but Countdown can be upgraded to 100 compared to Swoon's 25% limit), as high as possible. If you're rather greedy and don't mind slowing down the leveling, you may also include Steal (as high a percentage as possible).
* Equip a Counter Jewel on Lucile.
This will make it so that anyone normal attacking Lucile will die immediately from the counter (or slowly in the case of Countdown) so you don't have to wait for Amelia's turns.
Now, here's another conundrum: most monsters aren't just going to spam normal attack; they're going to instead waste skills on Lucile when given the opportunity, especially skills that cause status effects that may slow down the process. How do you fix this problem?
* Equip any weapon that can apply Gnome, at least above 50%. This should go on either Harvey or Olivia, whomever is faster or can fit the requirements. An even better strategy is to apply Gnome to Lucile's weapon if you gave her a Counter Jewel; the percentage of Gnome in her case doesn't matter, as she'll be doing a lot of countering since she's the one tanking everything.
* Equip the All Jewel on the character who has that weapon. Alternatively, hit-all weapons such as Harvey's Broad Sword (or Lucile's Bear Claw, if you gave her a Counter Jewel) will also do; their low attack power doesn't matter for the purposes of leveling in this guide. In this case, supplement it with a Target Jewel so all of your normal attacks never miss.
This makes it so whomever is your melee attacker will neutralize every monster's skills by applying Gnome, preventing status spam and skills that delay turn. Note in most cases, delay turn (from those blue fairies spamming Double Slash) on Lucile is actually helpful for you, as Lucile herself will not be doing much beyond maintaining the Call + Hit Me train. However, you want to keep her status healthy so she's always countering hits; she cannot counter when she is asleep, paralyzed or turned around. (Both Sleep and Turn are the most relevant here since the Rosy Sylphs will spam both effects with no abandon, and only one can be prevented.)
Alternatively, you can also equip a Deity Wig on Lucile to prevent status effects being an issue to begin with. Grab it at Shawarl Checkpoint (but you need a Heavy Jewel; one is buyable at the Guild). Be aware that the Deity Wig will NOT, as said above, prevent the "turn" effect of the Rosy Sylph's Lunatic Hit, because it's technically not a status effect (and yet bosses are immune to this, regardless).
Why did I pick Gnome? Well, you can also substitute in Paralysis instead, but Gnome forces the mobs to autoattack, thereby triggering counter and making the previous suggestion to put Swoon/countdown on Lucile's weapon a viable tactic.
Oh, since the difficulty will not change the pace of this process (you'll either die horribly from something gone wrong or eventually get your kills in via Countdown regardless what mode you're in), set it on Expert for best leveling results. The below screenshot is what I got from a run in *Normal*. Notice my very low level when I completed this! (this was my 3rd run when I tried this pattern)
Summary: This is NOT the fastest way to level. This is only meant to get your baby steps out of the level range that the game expects you to stay until the Normal End and into the range of real level grinding. Battle will be slow going for the first hour of doing this, and even slower if you don't have an Accelerator Jewel. Yet this is still much faster to get to the level 100 range than trying to grind at the current area you may be stuck on (for me, as I mentioned, it was in Gloamfel Ravine). Once you have enough levels (or if you have high crit weapons and an All Jewel, skip this guide entirely), you should try Metal Isle A (northeast corner of the world), turn on Battle Shortcut and the highest difficulty that you can set while still getting autowins. If you have Rare jewels to increase Super Rare drop rates, then be sure to stick around Fairyland; every one of the fairies drops the Rune Weapons, the second best weapons in the game, and they often come with high stat values for those attempting to farm and customize 'perfect' effect value weapons.
==Where else could I level using this strategy?==
A few other places, actually. You can also try elite areas such as the Legendary Sewer (behind sealed door in Guild Training Area; it's only open during a New Game+ by the way). However, beware of all of the following:
* Monsters that can hit EVERYONE in your party at once, regardless of battle formation. Examples include the Chaos Dragon, the giant purple dragon in the Legendary Sewers; his Dragon Breath magic can easily take out everyone other than Lucile in short order. I strongly recommend you immediately run from creatures like that dragon.
* Monsters with skills like Swat; they can eject Lucile and you'll be dead in short order. A golem-type creature in the Legendary Sewers uses this; avoid or kill it at all costs.
==But what if I don't want to grind levels and just want to grind weapons instead?==
You're in the wrong guide, friend. Look at this guide instead.
==end of guide==
I wrote up this guide when I noticed there was NO quick leveling guide posted for this game, and checking around the forums, there was only vague information such as "goto Metal Isle A with crit weapons". Trouble is, at the time I didn't *have* any Crit weapons, and weapon farming as a free player on the first 40 levels just plain sucks. So I decided to poke around the areas where I, a guy not even at triple digit levels, had any business showing up with the ship and airship, and then looked deep into the mechanics of the game...
The devs really should have added stat resistance for the elite normal mobs. Too bad for them, good news for us.
Oh, and this is my first post. Hello, everyone.
EDIT: Because of the new forum requirements, I have to update the screenshots (read: seriously downsize enough to make any text unreadable) in order to make things readable again. The old pics are still below.
EDIT2: Changed file type to .jpg from .png. I hope the quality is still viable.
EDIT3: Since I restarted the game again for fun, I've done some touch-ups and indicated other dangers on this guide that I failed to mention before. I'd say this guide is just about complete.
Attachments of OLD, uncompressed pictures formerly used for guide purposes:
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