Gear Crafting Guide – Early and Mid Game Progression

This is part 2 of a series of guides that aim to tell you everything you need to know about gearing, from the basic mechanics, to progression and endgame builds. Check out Part 1 of this guide where I explain the basics of the gear system if you haven’t already.

1. Gear Guide – Basic Mechanics
2. Gear Crafting Guide – Early and Mid Game Progression
3. Gear Guide – Endgame Builds

This guide aims to get your account to a state where you are ready for endgame crafting.

Preliminary Info

Offensive and Defensive Gearing

The five gear slots can be separated into two types — Offensive Gear (Weapon, Accessory, Gloves), and Defensive Gear (Body, Head). This guide will put a heavy emphasis on offensive gearing over defensive gearing, because in the early to midgame, a lot of the content is best cleared in a single turn, making defensive stats and utility not that useful until the endgame. I will talk more about defensive gearing in the Endgame Crafting Guide. For now, just focus on the Weapon, Accessory, and Gloves slots.

Gear Tiers and Probabilities

As explained in Part 1, crafted gear comes in four tiers, from I to IV or 1 to 4. When Layla crafts gear, the chances of that gear being of a specific tier follows these probabilities:

• Tier 1 — 50%
• Tier 2 — 30%
• Tier 3 — 15%
• Tier 4 — 5%

Tier 1 and 2 gear are practically worthless compared to Tier 3 and 4, so when crafting, only 1 out of 5 pieces are usable, and only 1 out of 20 are great. Manage your expectations when it comes to RNG.

Farming Gear Crafting Materials

You will be needing tons of mats to craft all this gear, so how do we farm them?

• Search — Using Lathel’s ability to search for materials across the map. While his ability is active, you will see search finds (green sparkles) on the map. Approach them to collect the mats! You can refer to the magnifying glass icon in the map menu to see how many search finds are yet to be collected. You may also refer to a guide for search pathing.

• Hunting Grounds — You can alternatively use Hunt Requests (scroll icon at the bottom of the overworld UI) to automatically grind the mats with the cost of rice. Only consider doing this if you don’t need the rice to farm slimes or gold instead. In order to unlock a Hunt Request, you must complete the pack’s story then manually defeat the hunting ground’s boss. In order to unlock other difficulties of a pack’s hunting ground, you must first complete that pack’s story in the corresponding difficulty (by speaking to Elin). PSA: To change the difficulty of a Hunting Ground, interact with the sign just outside of it.

Now that I’ve explained how to farm the mats, I’ll quickly delineate where to farm them:

• Ores (Iron, Copper Gold) — Search Story Pack 7 and 8; Hunting Ground VH 7 (Lizardman Altar)
• Hardwood — Search Story Pack 9’ Hunting Ground VH 9 (Mountain Keeper’s Shelter)
• Ability Pills — Any story pack merchant, 50 gold apiece. Do a daily quest first in that pack’s bulletin board to discount the ability pills by 10%.
• Everything Else — Gear Pass. That thing gives way too many of the other mats, meaning you can sell the surplus for gold.

Collection Bonus

You may have noticed that all of your units benefit from a Collection Buff, capping out at 80% ATK, MATK, and HP. This buff depends on your obtained costumes, gear, recipes, and collectibles. Crafting a specific gear of a specific tier once each count towards the Collection, so you definitely want to work on your collection for extra stats!

Gear Progression

Starting Out — Getting Fred or Layla

Fred was recently buffed to also be able to craft UR gear, therefore you can invest in either his or Layla's skill to unlock UR Crafting.

Fred is easy to obtain through pulling on banners, but if you somehow don't have him, you can get a copy of him for free by completing his side quest "Lignite Sage" in Story Pack 1 (Knight of Blood).

You can also easily get Layla through pulling on banners, but if you don’t have her yet, you can recruit her from the pub in Story Pack 6 (Pagan Tower) after clearing its story. Not to worry, since you can clear Story Pack 6 without crafting at all.

Grinding Skill XP

You will be needing to do tons of crafting in order to level up Layla’s ability. In order to do so, spam craft any of the following N gear:

These pieces don’t require hardwood to craft, making them very easy to spam. You can mass dismantle these fodder gear through the gear tab in the inventory.

Step 1 — Craft R4 Gear

Upgrade Layla’s crafting skill to Advanced by spamming N crafts, then craft the R4 gear for Weapon, Accessory, and Gloves: 

R3 is serviceable too, but if you find yourself lacking a bit of damage, consider grinding for R4, especially for the Collection Bonus. If you’re using a magic DPS, then craft the magic counterparts for the weapon and gloves instead.

Step 2 — Upgrade Skill to Expert

You can grind for the Collection Bonus while upgrading her skill, then spam N crafts after completing the R collection.

Step 3 — Craft SR4 Hero’s Ring

This CDMG ring does not require wood to craft, which makes it much easier to obtain. Get an SR4 (or SR3) of this ring, with two CDMG main stats.

Step 4 — Upgrade Skill to Legendary

Again this will take a lot of N crafts. You can work on the SR collection at this step, but since SR crafting is pretty expensive mats wise, you may want to skip to UR instead after getting Ancient Crystals (AC).

Step 5 — Obtain Ancient Crystals

There are a couple of ways to obtain AC:

• Tower of Pride (90 every 2 weeks if you can clear Floor 6)
• Tower of Desire boss floors
• Pick-up Events (20 when you upgrade a costume to +5 during their banner)
• Golden Threads shop (up to 30 per month for 10 threads each)
• Last Night

Tower of Pride is the most stable source of Ancient Crystal, so the most important thing for a new player is to clear it as soon as possible. The specifics of clearing Tower of Pride deserve its own guide, but once you complete the prior steps, you should have the gear necessary to complete floor 1, provided you bring the correct team as well.

Last Night is also really important for AC income, giving you Ancient Crystal daily depending on your highest score in the mode. I happen to have a guide for it!

Step 6 — Craft UR Gear

In order to tackle higher floors of Tower of Pride, you will need to use the AC you get from the lower floors. Craft the following pieces, from left to right:

• God-King’s Silver Arm (Gloves, Physical) / Shackle of Treachery (Gloves, Magic)
• Venomous Touch (Accessory)
• Evil Dragon’s Blade (Weapon, Physical) / Travel God’s Friend (Weapon, Magic)

My suggested progression for these pieces is to progress horizontally — get UR2 of each piece first, then UR3. Afterwards, focus on Venom UR4 first.

Closing Remarks

Once you are able to comfortably clear Tower of Pride 6, you have completed the midgame, and can now work towards endgame crafting. Stay tuned for that guide! (There are other resources out there for clearing Pride, but maybe a compiled guide might also be useful.)