Essential Equipment to Hunt

[Spire]

As far as I know there really isn't a guide for newer players (and old ones who have completely forgotten how to play) on what equipment/cards they should be trying to obtain.

So my question is, what cards/equipment are recommended for players to try and get a hold of, regardless of time investment? (excluding .03% mvp drops) (Example: +7 armor, raydric card, pasana armor, etc.)

I'm asking this because I would like to join up in parties, and would like to finish up a set of armor for my characters to swap around in order to be helpful and not a burden on other members.

[Namine]

Yeah I've been lazy on the guides...


Well I guess I can list class-generic stuff first if it's for purpose of party, aka pvm while omitting grinding gears.


Top Priority Cards

• 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.
  

"Nice to have"/Generic cards

• 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.
  

Top 1% Stuff

• 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.
  

Handy Defensive Budget Gears

• 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.
  

Things to Consider

• 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.
  

What classes do you play anyway? We can give more specific and helpful advice once we know what you plan to join parties as. I listed only defensive options for this reason, since any offensive stuff would've been class specific.

[Spire]

Thank you for the wonderful guide!

I've been working on my crusader as of late. Which of course means that I'll have to start farming up shield cards/shields. Teddy bear and Phenomena seem like they might be tougher for me but I'm sure in the end they'll be worth picking up.

Thanks for the breakdown of different party areas, I plan on making my crusader (When they eventually make it to paladin) a lure for parties, so the elemental armor cards are high priority on my list now as well.

I'll have to look up selkies on the wiki in order to Hunt down those cards. (If I'm not mistaken shield chain benefits from +% cards) So ill have something other than a Fortune sword to equip in muspel parties.

I was planning on spamming the custom quest for the Stylish hat in order to get a +7 (or higher because I'm a little insaine). Do you think it's worth the time investment? Or should I focus down on a different hat to over-upgrade?

Oh, I forgot to mention: Personally I prefer gear that isn't classlocked (Meteo Plate as an example), but Trans-locked is fine as it gives me something to level towards.

[Namine]

Welcome to playing one of the most expensive classes in the game!

Horn card still helps for the dungeons where even the tank isn't supposed to tank. You are just trying to mob but not really tank physically in places like thor. Since defender doesn't work for breath attacks (but does work on bow guardian and sword guardian's spear boom), Horn still applies for you against Kasa fire breath.

I would just save up zeny and buy penomena. Don't hunt for them. Bathory though, you definitely need it. It's sought after and pricy enough that I'll suggest hunting it in person.

As sader/pally, you can get away from having gears that the mobs that the hwiz and snipers will annihilate anyway. This makes teddy bear lower priority. Muspel floor 1 needs no tanks cause the casters will plow through them.

Don't hunt for it, but if you see it for cheap or someone has it, get a dragon's breath to help you against Fafnir. You just need to tank for like maybe 5 seconds to buy enough time for the creator to go nuts. Grab every cheap dragon defensive gear you can, yet don't go crazy on zeny about it. Look for them "passively".

Surtur is the only justification for teddy bear: 4 Eyes of Surtur will wreck anyone. The slave version uses Surtur's movement speed so it's extremely painful. I personally think that gearing to resist the 4 eyes of surtur is better than gearing for Surtur himself. Nameless Island is no longer a thing, so unless you are going to GC to level up yourself there, you really don't need undead resist anymore... In the rare event of nameless party, the banshees is what you need to deal with, not the necros or zombies. Those melt to storm gust anyway.

You can add stone buckler (or imperial guard) and cross shield on your list if you are using rapid smiting. Most threatening monsters are also conveniently Large size, so the 5% reduction helps. Imperial guard is even heavier, but the higher def is not as good as 5% large reduction to me. They're valid option though. Cross Shield is best shield for rapid smiting damage, but looking at who drops it......

If you're going devotion route, then obviously you want HP boosting gears so you can last longer. Ebony armor becomes your best armor for raw HP, but the class restriction is harsh compare to more trans-locked generic stuff. Death Knight is also locked away in WoE dungeons normally, but currently the glast heim event allows easy access to death knights (and by "easy", I mean 10 on a map.)

Legion Plate is old and restrictive, but that's exactly why that armor is much cheaper. I would "passively" look for it and buy it when I see it. It still has its place due to the high def.

Stylish Hat is the best HP headgear so it's worth the investment in that regards, if you don't go insane from the weapon-hunt portion of army supply. I don't think anything gives 700 HP in headgear, so it has value even if the 15 atk doesn't contribute to anything. Honestly I'll get the +4 for 400 HP, then worry about other slots first before you waste hours and hours for the 300 HP boost from +4 to +7. If you are tanking and not being devote/gospel slave, you need Def and not just HP (in which case, luxury hat). The much rarer, valentine gent trooper will give 1000 HP flat out though and it's still refineable, so for your purposes, it's the "1% headgear" to aim for eventually. But good luck on that one unless fairy auction or vday quest repeats the headgear.

Vital tree shoes deserve a mention for devotion: while it has less raw hp available, the heal boost may justify it. If your tank is getting bursted down really fast, you need to heal as fast as possible to keep him up. The 5% boost for all healing you receive may warrant the HP loss compare to other footgear. It also has innate 10% HP already, so the HP loss shouldn't be too significant. Sprint Mail, regardless of item description, also has bAddItemHealRate effect. It actually boosts item as well. The 2 together is 8%. Again, if you are just devotion and not actually tanking, it's worth considering just having it at safe refine for the heal power. The same logic applies for items that boost specific heal rate of particular items as well, if they aren't in the way of your HP boost.

Now you can also add safety ring (budget option) and glorious ring (the real gear) to your items to aim for as well since you are playing tank classes. Have fun in the endless torment of BG saving up to 2 glorious rings.

[Spire]

Lol, most expensive class in the game. Harrah!

I'll keep on the lookout for a Phenomena card, I'm sure someone will eventually be pawning one.

The stylish cap is more something I'm going to passively try and attain (because who has thousands of the items that it requires to make a +7, also cupcakering card is probably going to be perma attached to me until I get the +7)

I'll have to pick up some safety rings, that was definitely an item I forgot about. I'm not sure I have the endurance to go for the glorious rings (although it would be an amazing item to attain) I will also try and separate when I'm going to be attacking and luring (I imagine I'll be doing those two things seperately) so ill try and find me a few valk shields to put my reduction cards in. Maybe a horn card for a cross shield (Since I can't think of anything better to slide into it)

Honestly I'm torn between devotion and having the ability to heal myself, but I imagine that I'll be going devotion due to the stat spread ( since I can't stack vit/str/int and have a little dex so I don't wiff my shield chain to often)

[Namine]

You're using cross shield to attack, meaning you're in melee. Don't put horn into it. Whatever you are most likely to hunt on your own and need the damage boost from cross shield, slot the racial card into that. Treat it as how you'll slot weapon card priority instead.

Valk shield is great to have a +4 horn card before you start overrefining or making a series of collections based on valk shields.

Your attacks are more for keeping aggro and not so much doing real damage except for selective monsters that the SG spam won't get done (like banshee, but again nameless island is no longer a thing.) Selkie is the offender here cause everyone except HP needs to pull their offensive weight on them. Your priority is always going to be luring. In MVP, you are either the tank (in which case, reflect up, defender up, and somewhat attack/RS to keep aggro with gears towards maximum racial reductions then Def, in that order), or you're devoting/gospel, in which case get your HP gear + heal boost gear, with some backup tank material ready to go.

Honestly sad to say but Paladin just not in the greatest spot right now. While tanking is needed, it's not *always* needed. Party wants to be as efficient as possible, so tank is always the one to squeeze out if kiting or asura are on the table.

[Spire]

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.

[Menace651]

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.

[Spire]

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.

Thank You for the suggestion, but I can't really justify resetting at 96 especially since my leveling area has quite good cards in it (To both use and sell).

My crusaders stats are kind of all over the place as well, but I do okay in orc dungeon, (Giving me the chance to get orc skeleton cards, and drainliar cards.) Which is quite good now that I have picked up a moonlight dagger and a high orc card (I've got heal and GC so I didn't have the skill points to spend on reflect shield)

I'm not worried about gear intensity to be honest, if I was I wouldn't be playing a crusader after all

[Namine]

Orc skeleton is going to be really slow... though yes the cards are alright indeed. I wouldn't have the patience to stay there to 99 though.

If you're already in GC build, then certainly give Bathory a try. Sell the witched starsand for money, and farm for your crucial bathory. Whisper card can also be sold for a few mil as well.

For training gear, see if there's a cheap tormenting ghost hat on sale. It has reflect and it has 1 sp on reflect/attack too. This is ideal for you at this current point in time so it frees up your shield slot again. With shield slot open, you are open to go to new places again. The 30% resist will allow you to go to new locations, most notably thara frog against GH Castle 2 or Chiv 1 in the current event GH. If you got undead shield instead, go for Chiv 2 and try it out against the wight knights. The knights can hit pretty hard with high HP, but their exp ratio is quite high and the entire map is exclusively undead so the shield works on everything. Their drops aren't bad either.

On that topic, Castle 1 is swarming with Sinister Shadow. Dispel is their big thing but fortunately it does nothing against you! Just be careful of arc elder, but they are melee casters so you can give a wide berth against them. Mob the shadows and GC. See if you can handle the damage. They are very mobbable so it should speed up your leveling quite a bit.