• Horn Card- Catch-all card for all but melee classes. Don't know what to bring but you aren't the tank? Default to Horn. Range reduction applies to physical and magic: including all elemental breaths, hell's judgment, and spells.
  
• Bathory Card- Most common element, and it completely negates dark blessing (coma), all dark exclusive but common attacks like dark JT, dark soul strike, dark grand cross, dark breath and darkness breath. Also grants minor reduction to acid breath for the rare few that uses it.
  
• Raydric or Noxious- 20% neutral is great if you will tank melee hits, but the range reduction is better overall again since it applies to elemental breaths and magic. Both applies against Hell's Judgment and Earthquake.
  

• Elemental/Racial weapon cards: you obviously need them if you are dps class so you need a weapon against the common dungeon mobs. If you need a specific race/element to focus on as starting point: assemble whatever you need to kill Selkie from Muspel first. Mini-muspel seems to be the most common party in terms of invitations on Main, and selkie killers is most sought after while needing some equipment/cards to get the job done.
  
• Piercing Staff: the magical equivalent to getting default generic racial carded weapons. Just default to this if you don't know which specific staff to bring, even if it's only at safe refine.
  
• Racial shield cards: when you are melee and can't use horn, or if the party is sufficiently small that you may end up as backup tank, you'll need the racial card of the predominant race in the dungeon. Notable ones are formless, demon and undead.
  
• Marc- needed if you are the priest; handy if you aren't to keep the dps up with no down time. Every water mvps can freeze.
  
• Pasana Card- needed if you want to do thor
  
• Medusa card- needed for priest as few mvp got wide stone curse. Other classes can get away without it if the priest is on the ball.
  
• Verit/Matyr- Matyr for the 2% optimization for more HP, but Verit is honestly not that far behind anyway. They are still the best generic cards in shoe slot.
  
• Isilla card- Obviously caster only, but there's just no physical equivalent to how hard Isilla can carry you forward in a class generic fashion.
  

• AK card- champs need it, but so do snipers to nail down ghost mvps faster. Outside of those, just sell it for a huge chunk of cash to catch up in like every other gear slot with the zeny.
  
• Alice card- some mvps's slaves are also boss flagged, so you get 40% on everything the mvp can throw at you. Dungeons like Thor are also entirely boss flagged so you get mileage like that too.
  
• Valk shields- goes without saying, since it's still best shield overall in the game in most scenarios. Individual valk shields isn't too pricy, but price stacks up super quickly for having a complete series of them.
  
• Orcus gears- better defensive options due to having some neutral resist on top of their given status, with much better accessibility than Nidhog Shadow Garb due to the much smaller party required.
  
• Nidhog Shadow Garb- garment from Nidhogg mvp giving massive resistance in garment slot, but you wouldn't need this guide by the time you're geared enough to aim for this.
  
• Stat enchant- gears too easy to assemble? Now try for a +3 relevant stat gear, AND have a refine higher than +4 on a Satan Morroc drop or Valk armor then. It gets pricey even on safe refine as is.
  

• Luxury Hat- if you got no headgear cards that you must have, then this is the *best* physical defense hat. Item list is short. It's from hatter jr not hatter so no prayers to RNGesus required. A +7 Luxury Hat is a staggering 14 def. Defensive classes are hard pressed to use anything else unless you need headgear cards for status resistance. Stacking range resistance handles magic anyway, thus this gear makes wings of victory a total joke for the difference in price.
  
• Goibne Spaulder- comes with 10% range reduction garment. It's the budget version of noxious since it's missing the 10% neutral resist. Great garment for its price.
  
• Flower Wings- no one sells ment anymore so don't go out of your way to get this. But if you have it in your storage already, it got its place. If you don't have any elemental armor or dungeon doesn't favor an element, then this is still the top tier raw defense option. It's 11 def 20 mdef at safe refine.
  
• Wool Scarf/Tidal shoes- still the best generic trans default option as the entry way towards the mvp stuff.
  
• "50ks"- divine clothes, pre-trans gears likes shoes and mufflers pop up at 50k or less in shops. Whoever sells them apparently got them by bucket-load. These are all good targets to get up to +7 with relative ease for you to have very usable gears before you move on to the expensive mvp-drop quality gears. They tend to have no class restriction too.
  

• Elemental immunity: stacking 100 elemental resist gears will completely neuter some bosses such as Giant Octopus and Ktullanux. Valk shields, elemental garment cards, random hat's elemental properties can add up pretty high. This mostly applies to water and fire, since there's no super severe wind/earth bosses and bathory is already a 100% nullification of shadow.
  
• Nightmare card: most other status can be healed by green pot. Freeze and stone curse requires armor card slot to handle for most part. Sleep is the last status that cannot be healed by items and completely incapacitates you. Slap a nightmare card on to some "meh" hat for the few mvps known to use wide sleep.
  

(05-19-2017, 04:25 AM)Spire Wrote: Well, at least for now, I'm very motivated to be playing my crusader, he's not far from becoming a Paladin (maybe a few weeks if no parties are forming while I'm online)

Thanks again for the awesome info! I'm sure I have lots of other questions, but I'll save them for further down the road.

(05-19-2017, 08:24 AM)Menace651 Wrote:

(05-19-2017, 04:25 AM)Spire Wrote: Well, at least for now, I'm very motivated to be playing my crusader, he's not far from becoming a Paladin (maybe a few weeks if no parties are forming while I'm online)

Thanks again for the awesome info! I'm sure I have lots of other questions, but I'll save them for further down the road.

The fastest and cheapest way I have found to solo level Crusaders and Paladins is to get a Hydra/BG Pike/Lance, stack a bunch of agi/flee and go spam Holy Cross on Anubises all day. You'll need a lot of SP items but we have fishing and miracle man so that shouldn't be a big problem. If you can, get someone to water endow you so you can Bash those annoying Pasanas and Minorouses lurking around down there.

Alternatively, you could go Holy Cross Raydrics, AK's, Bathories for drops or get a water endow and bash High Orcs too. I have found all other methods of leveling a Crusader/Paladin such as GC, Shield Chain, etc. are too gear intensive and not as fast and versatile as Holy Cross spamming.