[Beginner's Guide] How do you get strong in Crystal Saga?

[Ametabolism]

How do you get strong in Crystal Saga?

An inexperienced player would say: focus on levelling up, and you’ll be strong. I’m afraid that being strong in crystal saga is made up of many other components apart from levelling up. Solely focusing on levelling up will grant you access to new skills or more stat points to allocate but will not maximize the power of one`s character.

Let’s start by analyzing the components that makes a player strong (may change when the crystal saga releases new things)

Permanent upgrades

• Mounts
• Soul
• Wings
• Level/Stat point allocation / Skill Point Allocation
• Cash Shop Equipment
• Pixie

Semi-permanent Upgrades

• Equipment
• Gems
• Pets
• Titles

Temporary Upgrades

• Temporary Buffs
• Temporary Elixir Buffs
• Temporary Equipment (dragon sword, wheel of fate)

Intellectual Capital

• Tactics and skill
• Operations
• Decision Making (investment, and such)

Expendables

• Potions
• HP orb
• Blessed Stones

Notice this list is rather large and can be categorized into permanent (things that will never be downgraded or replaced and can only be upgraded), semi-permanent (things that can be replaced occasionally to upgrade and may involve some impairment risk), and temporary upgrades (they do not last for a long time)? My general recommendation – follows kaizen (continuous improvement/growth), and upgrade things in the permanent upgrade category first.

Permanent Upgrades

In the game, there is no terminology or jargon called permanent upgrades. Instead, I am implying the concept when you invest resources in upgrading the items within this category, the specific item will not be impaired (replaced by another asset permanently),and it will not depreciate (failed attempts will not reduce or damage your character, thus it can only improve or remain the same).

Mounts

Mounts are like equipment, and allow your character to move more effectively in many environments and they also provide a % upgrade to your hp, attack, defence, and healing. Battle mounts are extremely useful as you can attack while using them.

Using quests, you don’t need to buy mounts from npc stores (battle stallion, rabid raccoon for instance), but you will need access to mount upgrade tokens (found in defeating vault dungeon bosses and above) to upgrade your mount.

Obtain the baby turtle from quest, obtain the mount upgrade tokens through purchase or from farming dungeons, and upgrade your mount. In long-lived servers, mount upgrade tokens can be relatively cheap and easy to obtain. Thus, there is a decent incentive to upgrade your mount from a baby turtle, to black panther, to mystical scorpion, and finally to battle bear. You will receive 20 wings for finishing the quest to obtain a scorpion.

Any upgrade after the battle bear requires greater mount tokens, and are currently scarce & rather expensive.

Conclusion: upgrade your mount from baby turtle to battle bear as soon as you can. Upgrading the battle bear to gorilla and forward requires many more resources. A mount is considered to be a permanent upgrade as a logical person would not downgrade their mount and would only considering attempting to transform their mounts. You can also feed the mount to level it up, but it may be costly and this will only be a semi-permanent upgrade unless you have the best mount possible. There is some luck involved when transforming your mount, but every failure may contributes to work in progress, and will improve your odds of future transformations.

Souls
Souls upgrades are permanent as you cannot downgrade or remove the benefits after you have upgraded your soul.

Upgrading your soul yields permanent upgrades to your character’s stats and thus are considered another good upgrade to consider.

Soul upgrading requires purified crystals, crystal essence, soul shards and the life crystal shard relating to the soul you are upgrading.

The resources:
Purified Crystals: Another player has written a guide on farming purified crystals, using level 30 knights. In essence, purified crystals can be obtained from killing bosses that are within your level range, and does not necessarily have to come from indigo dungeons. They may come from killing your normal boss in vault, or sacrificial relics, or even in blood coliseum as long as your character’s level is close to the boss’ level. The general rule – if you’re character’s level is close to the level of the boss you are killing, you will likely receive a purified crystal. Purified crystals are invaluable resources overall and the easiest dungeon to obtain them are found in indigo dungeon.

Crystal essence is not a constraining resource, and is relatively abundant. You earn 2 crystal essence every 15 seconds your character is online, up to a maximum of 10,000 crystal essence. Leaving your character online will get you crystal essence over a long period of time (whether active or not).

Life crystal shards include: Ice shard, void shards, brilliance shard, heart shard, and light shards. These can be obtained in occasional events, dungeons, from other players (trading/buying them). For those who do not know, I derived this term from the item’s description (from ice shard for instance), and I am not certain as to whether this is the most accurate term to call these shards.

Soul Shards – these can only be obtained by fusing them in tree of life with he ranger (5 per day, using 10 soul root crystal per shard), crystal ladder @ tree of life (1 soul shard per 10 levels reached), and from cash shop (costing real money). Or you can even have them gifted to you buy other players buying the soul shards from cash shop, but that is not likely.

Conclusion: Soul upgrades are permanent. Your main soul constraint is likely soul shards, purified crystals and maybe life crystal shards. Participate in blessed bath often, have alternate characters sit in blessed baths to obtain free soul root crystals, and fuse 5 soul shards per day on your main character. Try and finish your crystal ladder up to level 20 at the least (on level 20, simply leave party if it is too difficult) and you can easily produce 7 soul shards per day.

Purified crystals can be farmed in indigo, and life crystal shards are from dungeon bosses or events.

Crystal essence is not a concern.

There is no impairment risk or depreciation risk involved in upgrading soul

Wings

Your first wings are obtainable in a level 20 quest called monikov’s prediction. The quest requires you to kill 10 chicklars, and 10 falcon hatchlings.

Upgrading wings requires heroic wings to upgrade initially. Until you reach ultimate demigod wings VIII, you will only be using Heroic wings. To upgrade from Ultimate demigod wings VIII to angel lord wings, you will need ethereal wings (obtainable in events, cash shop, dragon coins, other players, but not in dungeons). Heroic Wings comes from vault dungeons and above, world bosses if the party/player killing are all within the level range.

Wings improve your attack power, speed, defence, hp, healing, and luck, of course, to varying degrees depending on how well you have upgraded your wings. Wings are another great permanent upgrade, are unbreakable and you will not be taking them off often or even at all. Think of them as equipment that you will not replace and can only grow or remain the same.


Conclusion: as a non-cash player, you can upgrade up to ultimate demigod wings VIII. If you participated in enough events, you may have enough ethereal wings reserve to upgrade to angel lord wings (has a passive buff of +25% to all stats, last 6 seconds, 1% chance of activating when getting attacked). The easiest dungeon to farm for wings are vault difficult and hard. Due to the amount of heroic wings required to upgrade wings, the price of heroic wings are generally expensive, but if you can farm them in dungeons, the cost is rather low. Yes, there is chance involved, but no matter what the situation is, work in progress will often be generated for failed attempts, and you will eventually get the wing upgrades if you keep on trying. Your detailed wing guide can be found here: http://forum.r2games.com/showthread....ll-About-Wings!

Levelling up, Stat allocation and skill point allocation

This is your normal permanent upgrade, which improves your character. It often takes a long time at higher levels to level up. You will likely not gain a competitive advantage over others by simply levelling up as society will also level up in similar fashion. With good information available in guides, stat point allocation and skill point allocations are often done well.

You can, in theory purchase exp via offline tokens, torches, or by obtaining 2xp cards and vip to further increase your exp. However, buying exp is simply expensive, and it is more logical to simply do activities such as blessed baths, crystal ladder, redemptions and to afk train where mobs exists.

[Ametabolism]

Part 2

In general: do some research on guides, evaluate the information you receive, and devise a plan to allocate stat points and skill points effectively. The risk involved includes lost opportunities as you could have allocated stats and skill points differently, and levelling up may affect what bosses drop purified crystals and what activities your character can participate in. Levelling up may grant you access to new dungeons and are always useful unless you want to continue doing dragon spine.

Cash Shop Equipment
Some cash shop equipment are considered permanent upgrades, however, this cost real money and is not easy to obtain for everyone. As a result, only obtain this if you have the real money to do so or if you are willing to spend real money on the game. You can also find free crystals by doing surveys or using third party sites offering crystals in exchange for your work in finishing some tasks. Of course, do so at your own discretion as I have no clue what will happen to the information you submit.

Pixie
Upon rebirth, scions have the option of obtaining a pixie by accepting a quest from the goddess of fate, and defeating the world boss Platona. The pixie is upgraded by levelling it up (killing monsters for exp), and can be transformed by using enough soul shards, crystal essence and pixie upgrade crystals. For scions, upgrading the pixie is an option to statistically boost your character’s stats in combat. The pixie does not depreciate nor is it expected to be impaired and can be summoned at no cost. There is no loyalty or lifespan involved like pets, and thus should always be summoned.

Conclusion on Permanent Upgrades:
Permanent upgrades are useful and should be considered to be important upgrades. Because of the nature of permanent upgrades, I highly recommend upgrading the listed components to empower your character. They are generally low risk, yields permanent benefits and will not be impaired or replaced at the time of writing this guide. At some point, you will reach a point where it becomes economically unfeasible to further upgrade the above categories and thus, you should consider semi-permanent upgrades.

Semi Permanent Upgrades

Again, semi-permanent upgrades is my own jargon/terminology to express a concept. Semi-permanent upgrades are things that are subjected to impairment/replacement risk, and depreciation risk. However, if you were to not invest resources to upgrade semi-permanent upgrades, your semi-permanent upgrades will not be affected. However, when you invest resources within the items in the category: you may either impair your assets (replacing them thus losing value in old assets), or devalue them by negatively affecting your asset (failing an enchantment.

Equipment

Equipment is one of your basis for your character’s power. Having a full equipment set such as a pristine dream walker set, or a savage set for instance will yield set benefits. At low levels, consider getting the pristine dreamwalker set, and proceeding to epic ethereal set. At level 40, you can obtain the savage set (requires honour, badges and some gold). The savage set is the basis to eventually build the slayer set, and thus is useful for levelling up.

From time to time, you will have to consider switching equipment sets and gear. Every time you decide to replace equipment, you will impair the your old equipment as you will likely npc it or store it in vault.

Upgrading equipment involves: embedding gems and/or enchanting the gear.

Enchanting equipment requires materials such as inferior magic dust, magic dust, enchantment crystals or stones, and potentially some other cash shop related upgrading tools like dragon crystals and gold. Since you will often be faced with the decision to switch equipment sets after certain levels, enchanting equipment isn’t permanent unless you reach level 80 (and rebirthed), are using the purple level 80 slayer set and orange slayer weapon. Moreover, whenever you have any equipment enchanted at 4, and you wish to continue enchanting the equipment, you risk losing enchantment levels if your enchantment fails. For instance, if you want to upgrade your savage sword +4 to +5, and you fail, your savage sword will become +3. Its odd that this was never reported in the enchantment windows, as this is a significant cost.

Do note: if you upgrade your savage set, any enchantments accomplished will be lost and you will have to re-enchant it again at your own discretion.

Gems

Embedding gems requires: gems, socketing rods/greater socketing rods (can be synthesized using 5 socketing rods, purified crystals to synthesize certain gems, gold and maybe gem removers.

Gems are only worth embedding into you equipment if they will improve your character significantly and if you can extract them (using gem removers). Gems can be lost if you embed them into savage equipment and decide to upgrade the savage equipment to a different colour. Supposedly, upgrading the slayer set from one colour to the next retains the gems you have embedded, so make sure you use gem removers appropriately.

In general, the gems you want to consider are:
Topaz/rubies/emerald – can be embedded on gloves and weapons (offensive/healing gems)
Jade – can be embedded on armour, boots, and helmet (provides hp)
Sapphire gem – can be embedded in helmet or boot (provides magic defence defence)
Amber gems – can be embedded in armour or boot.

Because of a recent update, you can now exchange gems for other desired types of gems. While Jade may be valued the least, you can synthesize 1 scratched or shining gem, exchange it for a gem coupon (at starglade, event master), and then exchange the gem coupon for the desired gem (at tree of life, event master). In turn, you can obtain the unbounded gem of your likings simply by using the 2 npcs accordingly.
Example: You want to trade 1 shining jade for 1 shining topaz
1) Go to Starglade event master, and select - "Gem Coupon Exchange"
2) Select "Shining Gem Coupon Exchange", and Select "Shining Jade for Shining Gem Coupon"
3) Go to tree of life (You can use the teleporter npc), and find the event master @ tree of life
4) Select "Gem exchange", and select "Exchange for Shining (level 5) gem", followed by "exchange for Shining topaz gem"

By doing this, you should have spent 20silvers to convert 1 shining jade to 1 shining topaz.

[Ametabolism]

Part 3

Pets

I classified pets as semi-permanent as they can be replaced to improve them, can be sacrificed permanently in hopes of breeding, and overall, may depreciate if breeding fails or perhaps enchantment fails. A pet is not a permanent upgrade and may simply depreciate or become impaired. For some transferable pets, I find them useful as you can have alternate characters fund the coupon based rebirth ginseng, and growth food cost (to cover the lifespan loss and loyalty losses).

Also, some skills on pets can be considered useless when learned, and may reduce the value or usefulness of the pet.

Still, pets last a long time and can be used in pvp in guild resource, or in gotor and are useful tools, but are not risk free. Obviously, getting the basic non-cash pet is important for non-cash players who cannot afford to obtain the rarer pets.

Titles
The reason I consider titles to be semi-permanent upgrades is because there is a decent chance players will use different title bonuses depending on the situation. You can only use one title bonus at a time, and some titles are simply better than others. There is always opportunity cost in using one title over another, and thus is considered a semi-permanent upgrade.

Even then, titles are useful, especially for someone who doesn’t have many useful titles to begin with. They are risk free, but you may struggle to improve them as they often require you to accomplish a set task, is not always purchasable via gold or cash and can often be replaced.

Conclusion
Overall, semi-permanent upgrades are still viable for improvement and investment, and are useful to empower your character. However, given their nature, semi-permanent upgrades still have risks of impairment or being replaced for something better whereas permanent upgrades can only be improved without risk. I would consider the semi-permanent upgrades after I have reached high costs in permanent upgrades.

Temporary Upgrades

Again, this is my own jargon to represent a concept. The effects of temporary upgrades do not last forever and will expire after a set time period. I would not depend on temporary upgrades to empower my character as they are not always available.

Temporary buffs
Not all players have access to buffs. If your build (in your job class) grants you a buff, you might as well utilize it when possible or when tactically sound. In the end, they are useful to have, but cannot be relied upon as they will expire and can be negated when enemies use reckoning (removes buffs). Obvious conclusion: get them if you can do so cheaply of freely.

Temporary Elixir Buffs
Temporary elixir buffs are similar to illegal drugs. They empower your character, but only temporary and the effects will expire after a given time period. In turn, it is not real power, and the cost of using elixirs is quite high. 1 purified crystal and some essence for 3 elixirs is rather expensive, and in the long run, this elixir usage is not cheap. I’m assuming players have limited resource and cannot continue or will find it not feasible to constantly use elixirs for buffs 24/7. Only use them when participating in important fights or events.


Temporary Equipment
Items like dragon sword, wheel of fate or some cash shop equipment last for a limited time period before expiring. A dragon sword is not your permanent weapon, nor is wheel of fate, as you cannot obtain it all the time. Some cash shop equipment have expiry dates but can be renewed and might be reclassified as permanent if you can continue to pay for it. Still, it is not advisable to depend on temporary equipment as they are not always available.

Conclusion
Temporary upgrades are generally not worth investing. Temporary buffs are useful if you can get them, and unless you have an important battle to win, it is not advisable to continuously burn resources to obtain temporary elixir buffs. Players fight for dragon swords often for the gold honour badge for self development rather than the dragon sword, so consider dragonspine a way to provide you gold badges to improve your future equipment.

Intellectual Capital

I define intellectual capital as your knowledge, and thought processes that allows you to play crystal saga. I have identified 3 things in this category




Tactics
Using tactics and skill in pvp and pve is something players often do without thinking to in-depth. The player devising tactics and using their abilities effectively in game determines how well they perform against others. Sometimes, skills and tactics can overwhelm players with sheer statistical advantages if done correctly. For instance, attacking delivering players who have no escorts for the crystalloid may be beneficial despite opponents being stronger overall.

Developing gaming skills often involve choosing effective skill layouts (and hotkey usage), reaction time, and the works of activating moves or potions ,etc, while tactics involve determining the order of which skills are used, how they are used, and how you move your character & attack.

For instance, in sengolia, knights combining dragon hook and shieldbreaker can effectively snatch a player, stun them, and proceed to beatdown to hopefully execute a kill. For myself, I like have my character stand under a tree, so outsiders do not fully see what’s going on. Other tactics involved may include teamwork and how you pick your targets in sengolia. For instance, joining a team horde on 1 strong player can overwhelm them and allow you to score an easy kill, without becoming an easy target. I conceptually compare a mass of players on the same team moving in one direction like a moving blend group in assassin’s creed. It is difficult to pick off specific targets within the group, and allows for greater survivability.


Operations
Again, my own terminology, tactics is my term relating to the activities you undertake while playing crystal saga. This varies greatly from player to player, and involves allocating time and prioritizing which events & activities are important and how many of the events & activities you partake in. Everybody often has some degree of difference in their operations, and while not 1 operation is considered perfect (because of the infinite opportunity costs), some operations devised can be more effective than others. I would avoid idle time if possible (standing around, doing nothing productive)

What are some good operation models to follow?
I would devise a way to manage more than 1 character at a time, learn how to farm purified crystals from indigo dungeons, and invest enough resources to farm vault for wings or mount upgrade tokens. I also would recommend building enough alternate characters you care about to bring you into dungeons or ladders (my recommendation is 5).


Decision-making
Decision making is your ability to make good, well executed choices to achieve your goals. For instance, knowing the market prices of certain commodities and buying them below market price whenever someone has under-priced their item is one good way to make short term profits if you re-sell (given the market isn`t too volatile and supply & demand is stable. Or, following the just in time inventory concept (keeping inventory stocks at a minimal to: reduce storage costs, avoid price risk and avoiding tying up capital into items) can help. For instance, buying only what you need for good reasons or only synthesizing the gems you need can help you follow just in time. Nobody would want to tie up their gold into inventory that may later become obsolete.


Conclusion:
This intellectual capital category represents your intelligence in game. You cannot sell your intellectual capital, but you can constantly improve your tactics or day to day operations or, devise tools (in spreadsheet software) to help you make decisions well.

Expendables

In general, you have 3 items that can potentially assist you in combat:

• Potions - costs gold (for hp and mp potions, heals x amount of hp/mana over a timer period, level requirements are on most potions).
• HP orb – heals you when your hp is below 50%, has a cooldown of 15 seconds
• Blessed Stones – heals 35% hp and mana, has a cooldown which isn`t found in the item description

Potions are your cheapest form of healing and should be included in your gameplay usage in guild resource, gotor, champions bluff, or anywhere which allows you to use it. Again, they do not heal the most amount of hp, and as a result, cannot be fully relied upon to defeat opponents.

About potions in sengolia, delivery quest, dragonspine
In any of the listed events, you are only allowed to use combat healing flask, combat vitality flask, and combat mana flask.
Combat healing flask & combat mana flask can be used anytime in the event (except when you are dead), and are useful healing tools. They cost 10 bronze badges per 10 potions, thus the cost per unit is 1 bronze badge each.

Combat Healing flask is a unique potion in which it heals both your hp and mp, costing only 0.1 of a bronze badge per unit (10 potions for 1 bronze badge). However, you can only use this type of potion when you are not fighting.

Overall, you can have all potions in effect at the same time, but it might be costly in bronze badges, so do so at your discretion

[Ametabolism]

Final part to guide

Final remarks and conclusion:
For the experienced players, this guide will be useless, as you would have known all this components that make a player strong. For the inexperience players who do not understand crystal saga`s system, this guide should assist you in making decisions when you decide to upgrade your character.

The main message I wanted to present: Level is a not the only component of power in crystal saga, and players with limited resources should carefully allocate what they have and can obtain carefully. I simply defined a strong player as one who can obtain an abundant of resources, allocate them effectively and efficiently to become strong in crystal saga, whether in pvp or in pve and use such character effectively. Generally, if someone is very powerful in pve, they are powerful in pvp as they withstood dungeons, but more importantly, they have the resources to fund their character from defeating bosses in those dungeons. Yes, Leveling up is still important so you can empower your character in a priceless fashion, and access new dungeons, but so too are the specifics listed in my guide: especially the things listed in the permanent upgrade category.

How you obtain the abundant resource will require another guide, but the general idea is – build alternate characters for finishing dungeons and use them effectively and well at the same time.

If you are starting out in crystal saga
If your character is level 1-24, you cannot access dungeons, so continue leveling up. When you reach level 25, you have access to indigo, and you might struggle with this dungeon if you are not able to tank the boss. At level 30, you will have access to Revenant's vault dungeon, the easiest dungeon that allows you to earn wings and mount upgrade tokens at hard and nightmare difficulties.

For the most part, you will struggle at level 30-45 with vault dungeons. You would want the mount upgrade tokens and wings, and you may want to consider working with others or building alternate character's (such as priests) so you can farm vaults. The other option is, level up many more times and eventually, you should be able to solo vault nightmare for wings, and mount upgrade tokens.

[magmadude]

nice guide hope it isn't an experienced copy-paste job lol
good work for newbs, it will really help

[R21827889]

Good job but for lowbies they should focus on levelling because higher level means easy dungeon= strong wings and mounts

[Ametabolism]

Good job but for lowbies they should focus on levelling because higher level means easy dungeon= strong wings and mounts

Very good point. I forgot to add in the guide that low levels can't farm dungeons for those wings and mounts. Adjusted the conclusion a little bit, mentioning it is still important to level up.

To magmadude, thanks for the compliment. Luckily, this isn't a plagiarism job and all ideas and information presented are based off my knowledge and experience in crystal saga. I typed out everything it in a word document, drafted it andthen copied and pasted to post it here when I felt it was ready .

[Valkyrie9999]

Great guide.

[myth1123]

Awesome guide really helps.