Characteristics

This thread has tips about stat and general experience progression. See the Progression thread for overall strategies to advance in the game. See Character Selection for the specific stat upgrade results.

## Experience Farming: Increasing Stats and Skills

NOTE: an alternative to focused experience farming is to simply conduct equipment farming, and gather experience points at a slower rate, as a natural byproduct of the equipment farming. This is particularly true after all the stats have already reached 50. Seeking strong chaos rings in particular is valuable for the endgame player, and once a hero has at least maxed stats, this approach may be advisable if a player approaching the Endgame is not happy with their equipment.

If the goal is to accumulate experience at the maximum possible rate to progress, it is recommended to play in the Obsidian Tower, using as many modifiers as is feasible - on the highest level that can be safely used. For the player seeking to make their final push into the Endgame, this is typically floor 50 while using a soul eater Passive item. Less modifiers and an earlier floor will be used if not at the endgame. The Crypt of Emptiness and borderlands will typically have the largest number of monsters and a simple layout, with large numbers of Camps, allowing the player to safely return to the fortress and reset back to lower starting level. The open layout of the crypt makes it the most dangerous dungeon at a given floor depth, while the Catacombs is often the least dangerous at a given floor depth - however the low number of camps in the catacombs presents its own danger. Borderlands is a good option that might be seen as a combination of crypt and catacombs, with far more camps than catacombs but much less risk of being swarmed than crypt. In general, most heroes will find it most effective to level their 3 favorite skills (doesn’t really matter which ones as you will level all 9 eventually in the Endgame anyway), and all 4 stats relatively evenly. Typically, exiting the dungeon around floor 55 when a camp appears, and re-entering at floor 50 is a good strategy for the late game player to level their hero at an optimal rate, while minimizing risk.

Close to the endgame (or at the endgame, or when using a new hero for an endgame player who has already maxed the fortress and given their comparably newer hero an optimized equipment set), with maximum strength equipment including a vampirism weapon, recommended obsidian tower modifiers for farming at optimal speed include the following: 1) we are surrounded 2) diplomatic visit 3) no time for vegetable soup 4) pincer 5) brave downworld 6) horde 7) breakthrough 8) lifeless ruins 9) antihero defense 10) while you sleep the enemy is training 11) the bonds of pain. Note that there is substantial variation in preferred modifiers among endgame players; the above however generally do not unduly lengthen the time it takes to farm a monsters on a given floor, while maximizing experience gain, and minimizing the nuisance of some mods. WARNING: brave downworld may cause game to crash and cause loss of equipment; it is thus recommended to manually cloudsave and turn off automatic cloudsave at the fortress before trying that mod.

The player will use an old map Artifact to find a camp, racing to the next floor if none is found (with a boss each floor to get a bit of farming simultaneously, and make “we are surrounded” safe to use by forcing an every floor boss), and then bounce in and out of the camp leveling their skills rapidly from the camp, since after the appropriate fortress upgrade it will cost less skill points to upgrade hero skills from within the camp, than it will from within the dungeon. This is most important as the skills rise past level 15, as the cost of leveling a skill from within a dungeon becomes inordinately expensive. Characteristics may be leveled at any time without increased cost. Pets must be leveled at the fortress, and typically are only leveled at the Endgame (and sometimes not even then, without using oblivion potions); and always in only a single stat (typically damage), otherwise the Endgame will be more expensive as you will then have to drink oblivion serums to re-level your pets with all their levels in a SINGLE STAT.