Beginner's Guide

The Great Merchant is a game that won't give you much information and demands a lot of grinding.
This guide is for beginners who has no intend to spend real money or only a little sum of money.
It is fairly easy to get to level 80 to 100 with the battle quest or even to lvl 120 with a little grinding but very soon, you will feel lost and won't know what to do. So here is the guide to make the game a bit easier and giving you an idea of what you will have to do.

## Choose Japanese male or Chinese male when you start

Japan is probably the best country to start as it has:

1. Improved Viper
2. Honganji
3. Asumi

Improved Viper is the second best Damage Dealing hero of the game (1st is Awaken Euna) and has 3 great advantages: Easy to make it, able to cast a debuff skill and good longevity (= can be used even later when you have Sinsu or Devas).
Honganji and Azumi can cast skills that summon monsters/clones which will act as tankers.
China is also a very good country (especially if you are okay to spend a little bit of cash) as you can have the most powerful Damage Dealer among heroes, the Awaken Euna, and the one of the most useful officer of the game, Feiyan/Trebuchet.
Yoobang and Aohangji are also very important officers and may be extremely useful in certain situations.

Feiyan can cast Ice Wall that creates a wall of 9 ice pillars which will force the monsters to go round of it. Casted far enough, it can even prevent long-range monsters from attacking and if there's a very long line of ice walls or no issue to go round of it, the monsters will gather and be stuck to a single place. Moreover, she can also replenish the MP of the targeted mercenary, especially the Damage Dealer.
Aohangji is also very useful for intermediate game as it can cast the skill Battlebuddy that will share the damage received by the targeted ally + add physical/magical resistance of the two units. It can be used as to strengthen your tanker or DD (Damage Dealer).
## What you must get

All beginning players must get a Snake charmer as soon as they can. It isn't important if it's lvl 40 or 100 (although you are likely to see only lvl 100 sold, about 10M in the market), you just need to get it. Once you get it, you can then promote it to Parvati in Chennai (if you don't know the way to get to India, please refer to India).
Parvati is a great Damage Dealer with a skill that can be casted from a far range, has a fair AOE (Area of Effect), good damage and is wisdom based.

WARNING: As soon as you have bought your snake charmer, kill any weak field monsters (like chow chow, bandit, raccoon or whatever lies around) with your snake charmer. Otherwise, it won't be recognized in the mercenary guild when you'll go to India to have it promoted. This applies to all mercenaries and officers as well, you have to hunt at least one monster before being able to promote it.

## Where and what to hunt

There's many kind of monsters in the game. However, you will need to hunt only a few kind of monsters as the other ones as not efficient at all (low EXP or low value/useless items compared to the difficulty, etc).
Once you have passed about the 80 to 90% of the battle quest, you would have between lvl 80 to 90.
You absolutely have to consider about efficiency.

With Parvati (or any acceptable DD), you can hunt as following:

lvl 0~100: Imoogi (Infernous)

lvl 80~130: King Yama (Infernous)

lvl 120~200: Blue Wolf (White Tiger Forest)

It is highly advised to keep hunting on a the lower ground until you can hunt stronger monster in less than 20 seconds. If you cannot decimate partially or totally an army in less than 20 seconds, it isn't worth to fight stronger monsters as you would spend too much time and get less EXP per hour at the end.

Once you hit a certain level, you will see Parvati can hardly kill stronger monsters. However, at that point, you are very likely raised a DD to replace Parvati.