There's quite a long time since I posted my last entry in this blog. Now I will share with you some strategies about companion levelling.
First of all, why we bother to level up our companions up to level 5? Well there are two reasons; the first one is that the stats will be maxed (for instance level 5 Phoenix will give you +15% money as compared to 3% when it was still level 1). The second reason is that when companion reaches level 5, it will be able to be augmented. Augmentation might not always be good, but nevertheless it will increase the stats of your companion anyway, and you might get an interesting combination of stats in a single companion :D
This is one of my best augmentations :D
My post here will be heavily based on 2-min hunt system, so I assume that you have the various resources and know the different combinations and setups that made it possible. For a detailed info on this 2-min hunt strategies, please refer to this post.
We will calculate how long it will take to level up companions. This info is taken from GT Wiki:
- Level 1 to Level 2 will take 500 hunts
- Level 2 to Level 3 will take 500 hunts
- Level 3 to Level 4 will take 1500 hunts
- Level 4 to Level 5 will take 2500 hunts
The hunts here referring to any time you click on 'Let's hunt!' button. Whatever the result it will count towards the levelling. Therefore you don't need to worry about FTA's, fail to traps, etc; instead this actually can be exploited. I will discuss it on the later section. Oh and to roughly estimate on how much longer to level up, there is a level bar below the companion in the companion page. The bar was divided into 10 sections, so for example your pet is already on level 4 with 6 blue sections, that means you still need 1000 hunts to go.
There is around 875 hunts remaining before my spider reaches level 5.
From level 1 up to level 5 will need a total of 5,000 hunts, this means 10,000 minutes on 2-min setup basis. With a pointer of 12 hour per day hunt, it will take roughly 2 weeks to reach level 5. Of course you should estimate yourself on how many hours you are able to spend to play GT and clicking on the 2-min hunts constantly.
Basically there are 3 ways of setups that you can choose to level up your companion. All 3 setups will aim on 2 min hunts, of course. Those 3 are:
- Raw hunt with 100% catch rate
- Fake raw with 0% catch rate
This is an inverse of the first way. This setup will suit some lower level players who haven't had a wide range of resources for 2-min hunt setup. Nessy's will be used as bait and the primary component in t/sc reduction. As for not wasting the stock of Nessy's, the mystic power must be as low as possible (possibly zero) so that you will not catch any ghost by chance. And then given whatever number of raw power, you must go to an area where you will NOT BE ABLE TO CATCH any ghost in that area. Camp there for two weeks and your companion will reach level 5.
- Mystic based with precaution
Basically this is just your standard Nessy-hunting setup, using either arcane or bio to reach up to 70+ mystic. MM/BDB/CW/Nessy/any pet is a solid setup. The precaution here is just to hunt in a 'good' place. Good place means the castle has a lot of MYSTIC IMMUNE ghosts. Count Church is the best place, since there are only 5 types of ghosts where 2 of them are mystic immune. One might argue that your Nessy will be wasted. Actually that statement is WRONG, since your Nessy will be constantly refilled. You will often encounter Nessy-only ghosts and they will give you more and more Nessy's. Especially if your pet is Nessy hunter :D
In the next part I will discuss some interesting strategies regarding some particular companions. As you know that if you want to level up your seal, it is better to choose #3 since it synergizes with your seal (nessy-hunting). How about other companions, whelps, etc? I'll keep that to the next post, so just stay tuned!
p.s. Part 2 can be found here
Happy hunting and goodluck for tomorrow's mission! :D
