A simple method for acquiring the best gear available from very early on, as well as millions of gold and thousands of essence (per run at the higher levels). And all without having to fiddle with your system clock to abuse the bank.
Other Soda Dungeon Guides:
- How to Get Loot & Money Quick.
- How to Get the Hidden Achievement.
- How to Beat Tengen and Demora.
- Fast Relic Coins.
Contents
Getting Started
All credit goes to Officer Hotpants!
Hire the following:
- 2 Healers
- 3 Thieves
Arranged in that order, let them run on auto starting on level 200. When they’re done, hopefully you’ll have recovered at least one Vaan’s Magnet. Continue running the same setup but make sure someone’s holding the magnet/s. Do this a few times until you have six magnets.
Thieves give you an increased chance to find items and open all three chests after defeating a boss. Between these two effects, they’re great for finding more and rarer equipment. Vaan’s magnet boosts item find chance AND gold income. So basically the thieves find you the magnet and other goodies, then the thieves use the magnet to find more magnets and even more & better goodies.
Essence Farming
This setup is good for more than just finding items, however. As promised, you’ll quickly rake in the gold, too, which can be exchanged at the well for essence. You can bring in enough gold to purchase thousands of essence in just a few hours. Thosuands of essence that, directed towards the HP and ATK relics, will make future runs longer and faster, boosting their income. I think you can see where this is going. In just two days time I was able to boost all of first selection of relics to level 50 (excepting the crit chance relic, which caps at 25). One of those relics increases gold income per party member. At level 50, that’s a 250% bonus to gold income. And if you need (or just wish) to boost it even faster then you can exchange one or two magnets for essence tokens (found level 400-500) which boost your chance to find essence by 25% apiece. Paired with the gnome VIP upgrade, which you’ll easily be able to max out with this method, you can bring in hundreds of essence directly per longer run in addition to millions of gold.
Optimal Party Loadout for the First 500 Levels
For optimal grinding, you eventually want to equip your party as follows:
- Healers – Midas Armor, Dragon Shield, Dhronen Sword, Anti-magic Bottle
- Thieves – Midas Armor, Gold Shield, Sacrosanct, Vaan’s Magnet/Essence Token
- Pet – Jenny
Each item can be found starting at the following levels:
- Gold Shield – 71-higher
- Anti-Magic Bottle – 91-100 (never seen it beyond here)
- Vaan’s Magnet – 201-higher
- Dhronen Sword – 301-higher
- Midas Armor – 401-higher
- Dragon Shield – 401-higher
- Essence Token – 401-higher
- Sacronsanct – 501-higher
Most of these will be self-explanatory when you find them but the swords might raise questions. Simply put, it’s perfect for debilitating the enemy and thereby keeping your party’s strength up. Enemies that survive being hit are likely to be either set on fire (doing extra damage on their turn) or put to sleep (robbing them of their turn entirely). Furthermore, if you find yourself having to briefly take control to get the party’s HP back up, you can use manually direct their attacks to prioritize simply putting enemies to sleep so that your healers can quickly get everyone back to full health.
On an essence run from level 1 to level 600 I was able to bring in just over 12million gold and 1,000 essence with this setup (2 magnets, 4 tokens). Mind you that this was with higher level gold shields found in later levels of the dungeon and a level 50 Liquid Gold relic. Don’t expect results quite on that level if you’re going in with basic shields and few or no levels in Liquid Gold.
If, however, you find your party wiping out too quickly to make much of a profit then you can equip them with Skeletis armor instead. You’ll lose a significant portion of the bonus to gold income but if you’re wiping in only 20 or 30 levels then you’re not making much anyway. Skeletis armor can be found between floors 201 and 300.
Optimal Party Loadout Beyond the First 500 Levels
- 1 Dark Mage
- 2 Healers
- 2 Thieves
The loadouts for the healers and thieves remain the same. The Dark Mage, however, is fairly different. The Dark Mage’s purpose is to deal with the growing difficulty of enemy groups. She’ll do high damage and potentially confuse or poison whole groups, greatly cutting down on the damage the party will sustain. You’ll want to give her the weapon with the largest magic boosting effect (most likely a wand), a dragon shield, Mekh’s Garb (again for the magic boosting effect), an anti-magic bottle & and a magic lamp.
- Mekh’s Armor – 501-600
- Magic Lamp – Stolen from (and occasionally dropped by) genie mini-bosses.
If you find yourself getting killed too fast, there’s always the option of switching to Skeletis armor until you’ve beefed up the party’s classes via relics. If you’re getting hit hard by ambushes then you can swap out a thief for a knight to ensure that you always have the advantage. Be aware, however, that having a knight in the party also eliminates traps from branching paths and that the auto-battle system will always enter them as a result of this. Since the purpose of these setups is to grind enemies for drops, skipping six and seven levels at a time with warps is horribly counter-productive. If you’re directly controlling the battles, however, then this obviously won’t be a problem.
About Merchants
Never waste your time and party slots on merchants. Their 20% bonus to gold is utterly useless as a single Vaan’s magnet gives twice that, their stats are terrible and their ability is only useful in very specific situations.
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