Runes of Magic US / AU

1. Join a guild that runs instances for gear drops.
2. Do mini-games (Malatina, gobbies, etc.) daily for shells to stat your gear.
3. Grind for TP and gold.

Cheap statting to get up the curve has only one letter. And that letter is X. As in, buy X stats, such as Illumine X, Thunder X, Elder X and Scholar X.

Well done! Forgot about the X stats. (They are dropped in bags in Chrysalia, btw.)

All good advice. To catch up, you will want to stat gear from Phirius shells (minigames) with X stats which are really cheap on the auction house. Just do a search on accessories and you'll find lots of necklaces and earrings with those great X stats. They're so good, they're almost a Hero stat. The usefulnes of those stats can't be overestimated.

That also means that you'll need to level up, because the shell gear starts at 70 now, and really, you want to just spend this weekend power-questing. Get to level cap, don't fool around if you're low on resources.

As far as looking for weapons, you'll do best farming DoD for mems and save up for a Flame Flux staff from the mem vendor outside... I think its outside Aeternal Circle, but don't quote me. You'll like how cheap charges are now- makes tiering cheaper.

The other reason you want to power-quest and level is that you'll want to do the new Energy of Justice events in Tergothen Bay, Kingdom of Rorazan and Chrysalia to get stats. It's much more efficient than mem farming these days- but mem pulls are still doable from the Tomb of Seven Heroes and Aeternal Circle mem vendors. You can use those with the X stats to get geared up super fast.

If you need more information, feel free to send me a pm. It's great to see returning players, and despite the (sometimes well-deserved) whining, mages in Chapter 5 actually have some utility- and the game did build in some super ways to get ahead without spending a mint.

Flame Flux staff = mem vendor in Chrysalia.

A few minor corrections/comments on Fan-post:

Quoted from "mnkmurphy885;582806"

Just do a search on accessories and you'll find lots of necklaces and earrings with those great X stats. They're so good, they're almost a Hero stat. The usefulnes of those stats can't be overestimated.

I search Armor for L74-75 and filter by stat I want. Some stats, such as Thunder X (Stam/Matt) drop only on L74 Kubn gear, not on accessories.

Quoted

As far as looking for weapons, you'll do best farming DoD for mems and save up for a Flame Flux staff from the mem vendor outside... I think its outside Aeternal Circle, but don't quote me. You'll like how cheap charges are now- makes tiering cheaper.

The rule is that weapons from instances that do not have hard mode are for sale as soon as they are "obsolete", and available in next zone. So, Flame Flux is in Chrysalia. Weapons are double the cost of stats, so prepare to farm whopping 1400 mems.

Also... cheapest charges are token-based (well, not counting free ones from Mini-games). In dia shop the cost for 10pack is 9 dias, and the standard exchange rate is 1 dia=20 tokens. Yet in token shop, they are not 180, they are 100. Effectively, they are permanently on sale there. In token shop you get no rubies, though, offsetting the advantage of lower price.

Quoted

mages in Chapter 5 actually have some utility

*bites his tongue*

AT charges are sometimes offered for 50 dias per 100 charges, so I'd wait for those sales if you don't have too much tokens. Also, it would probably be easier to trade 3 T9's for a T9 +16 Puppet Queen, its how many of us got ours, and saves a ton of mento farming. Trying to trade mine for T9's atm and nobody wants it

Easy mode on new instance also drops X stats, as well as clean Int/HP Remains once in a long time (while HM drops Stam/Matk... no clue what happened there o.O). Its easy to farm, and most guilds nowadays do nothing except that, and will take you as long as you can make it there.

Hard Mode is a massive pain everywhere, with a regular geared party, it took us almost an hour just to get past the 1-3 million HP trash mobs to the first boss. I survived boss fight with 94k HP (you'll want at least 100k+ HP for TOSH-Hard first boss though). I won't comment on Matk req, since my DPS was embarrasing The 3 of us DPS added to about 60k DPS total lol.

And boss fight took forever with his 65 million HP or so, ran out of mana 3 times during the fight at 30k mana >.<

Edit: Paz has nicely summerized current soft caps:
gch 130k
tosh 165k
ac who cares
kbn 250k
chaos vortex 600k
world bosses 475k except mandara which was like 800k+

You need the item set skill Recover Magic Ruisen. Never run out of mana again.

Think that one's from WA. Go farm it, it will change your life in instances like that.

Quoted from "mnkmurphy885;582897"

You need the item set skill Recover Magic Ruisen. Never run out of mana again.

Think that one's from WA. Go farm it, it will change your life in instances like that.

Recover Magic is from the ZS/DL set (Elemental Flame).

Unharmed Mage is the set skill from WA

Quoted from "ruisen2000;582868"

AT charges are sometimes offered for 50 dias per 100 charges, so I'd wait for those sales if you don't have too much tokens. Also, it would probably be easier to trade 3 T9's for a T9 +16 Puppet Queen, its how many of us got ours, and saves a ton of mento farming. Trying to trade mine for T9's atm and nobody wants it

Easy mode on new instance also drops X stats, as well as clean Int/HP Remains once in a long time (while HM drops Stam/Matk... no clue what happened there o.O). Its easy to farm, and most guilds nowadays do nothing except that, and will take you as long as you can make it there.

Hard Mode is a massive pain everywhere, with a regular geared party, it took us almost an hour just to get past the 1-3 million HP trash mobs to the first boss. I survived boss fight with 94k HP (you'll want at least 100k+ HP for TOSH-Hard first boss though). I won't comment on Matk req, since my DPS was embarrasing The 3 of us DPS added to about 60k DPS total lol.

And boss fight took forever with his 65 million HP or so, ran out of mana 3 times during the fight at 30k mana >.<

Edit: Paz has nicely summerized current soft caps:
gch 130k
tosh 165k
ac who cares
kbn 250k
chaos vortex 600k
world bosses 475k except mandara which was like 800k+

Ruisen you will scare him with those numbers, heck even I got scared about softcaps. I do fine with about 200k buffed in all instances and world bosses. The spider is kind of hard but still not too bad.

Quoted from "mnkmurphy885;582897"

You need the item set skill Recover Magic Ruisen. Never run out of mana again.

Think that one's from WA. Go farm it, it will change your life in instances like that.

I had lots of Mana Phirus E pots from gobs, so it was all right

Quoted from "narix11;582934"

Ruisen you will scare him with those numbers, heck even I got scared about softcaps. I do fine with about 200k buffed in all instances and world bosses. The spider is kind of hard but still not too bad.

Lol, I blame Paz and his big numbers and epeen. :p

Quoted from "narix11;582934"

Ruisen you will scare him with those numbers, heck even I got scared about softcaps. I do fine with about 200k buffed in all instances and world bosses. The spider is kind of hard but still not too bad.

I find this term softcap and its usage in itself a bit confusing or misleading, but maybe this is just a matter of perspective and terms used. Those values might scare some people and they also make a lot of people dumber (proven many times, higher matk is connected to lower IQ... No offence, but that was actually meant for the pure offence to everyone... ). Where other people would probably define hard cap as a point where damage stops increasing or increasement becomes really small to be noticeable. I would call above mentioned values rather a hard cap as they are rather a point where you do nearly maximum damage output and damage increase has already gotten much smaller. Basically hitting those values will make you do similar high damage in each instances. Those are also the kind of values which players I think, players should never reach permanently during normal level of instance. I'm not trying to say that damage increase will stop, it "will" and will increase long time even after going past thoes values...

It would be better to say to new players that having around 25%+ matk of enemy defence is minimum cap or recommended value to be able to do some small, but enough damage. This is also closer to more realistic value which is needed to fully finish any instance rather than those over geared high end caps. Having matk anything between something like <20-40% of defence or less would be the highest peak of damage output increase per matk. Having anything above 50%< will already cause player to make descent damage as well as halve the damage output increasement per matk. This could be seen rather as situation where softcap is around 20-50% of enemy defence. Having anything above 80-100%< where additional damage increase is much smaller, means that person is already full burst ready, over geared or highly buff stacked and current instance is already walk in a park and stealing candy or two from a child while at it...

Quoted from "Cagnazzo;583150"

So I've gotten a few pieces of the Juggler set (GCH) from tagging along on guild runs. However, although my guild is amazing and I can't thank them enough, I haven't been able to get an answer from them as to whether they're worth statting up. I got an underdura Cape and an underdura Ring. I'm pretty sure the cape is quite rare (at least on my server) but the ring I'm not sure about, and I don't know whether to stat it or not. Thoughts?

Jugglers set is still very decent. The only better set available now is the Aoth set from VN. You'll see a lot of mages using the Mento set though, mostly because many of us still can't obtain the Juggler set, or don't like hammering UD items.

If you're going with Jugglers (and I would, since you can obtain them for free, lucky you lol), you'll need the whole set for the 10% magic power set bonus, which is what makes the set decent.