The introduction of the Monster Point shop brought with it an unprecedented rise in power level; with the possible exception of Odin Dragon, the MP dragons are all outstanding leads, offering either exceptional power (Ra Dragon), extreme ease of use (Shiva Dragon), or an unparalleled combination of both (Yomi and Neptune).

Unfortunately, as with many things, you pay for what you get — the 300k MP price is quite steep, representing about 300 stones’ worth of unwanted REM rolls. With skill inheritance right around the corner, the average non-IAP player is likely to be priced out of ever owning one of these beasts. Even very dedicated/lucky non-IAP players would probably take a year or more to be able to afford a single one.

The Gentleman Flower MP series makes matters even worse. It appears that they may be even more powerful than the originals, but to hit their full potential, you need THREE, which I thought would be completely out of reach for non-IAP players — by the time you have enough MP to afford even a second one, the metagame is sure to have moved on.

Then a friend pointed me to this:

What we have here is a Neptune Dragon run of Zaerog Mythical Plus that takes just a little over four minutes. I checked Youtube and 6 other Mythical Plus runs all dropped PreDra, so I’ll assume they’re 100% drops. A PreDra sells for 500 MP, and the dungeon costs 50 stamina, so you’re getting 10 MP/stamina — could this be a way to farm MP fast enough to be worth it?

Note that PreDRA Infestation is worth 8 MP/stamina, but it comes around so infrequently that it’s not a viable way of farming up enough MP quickly enough unless you’re stoning for stamina.

Assumptions

For the non-IAP case, assume you do not stone for stamina, in which case you get 480 stamina per day. During events where I farmed +eggs, I averaged about 100 stam a day of non-+egg farming (challenge dungeons, skillups and stones from limited time dungeons, mismanaging stam and rankups, whatever). Let’s be conservative and call it 130 stam a day, leaving 350 stam to spend on farming MP.

Let’s also assume you have a team and skills good enough to farm the dungeon — that is, you successfully clear the dungeon 100% of the time and you have enough time in the day such that your only limit is stamina.

Ignore for the moment that this run used a Neptune Dragon (300k MP); we’ll address that and these other assumptions in a bit.

Coin dungeon Mythical Plus

All of the Mythical Plus dungeons have pretty similar ratios: about 1,100 xp/stamina and 2,100 coins/stamina. Let’s say you have 200 stamina; then if you open the dungeon twice per day, conservatively you should be able to get in 10-12 runs per day (at least 8 just from natural stam, which is 440k rank xp, enough to rank up and get another 4, though you may have to play fewer than 4 to manage a rank up).

10 runs is just over a million coins, which is break even for 2 openings, so we don’t incur any additional cost there. We’ll also sell the boss drop for an extra 10 MP, so we’re getting somewhere between 5100 and 6120 MP per day.

This means that, without factoring in challenge dungeons, ranking dungeons, gift dungeons, or selling a single REM monster, it’s possible to farm an MP dragon in 50-60 days.

Now, 60 days is a whole lot better than “somewhere between 1 year and never”, but it’s still a pretty long time. Can we do better?

Multiplayer Mythical Plus

Let’s assume you have a partner who can play whenever you can play and that our previous assumptions hold (350 stam/day, 100% clear rate). What do the numbers look like then?

Multiplayer is permanently on half stam now, so the xp/stam ratio is incredible at around 2,100 xp/stam, and there’s no cost to open the dungeon or timing restrictions on when you can play. In practice the ratio is even better since you’ll earn back some stamina while the run is going on; if it takes 10 minutes, the run has a net cost of 22 stam, or ~2400 xp/stam. Since we’ll be aiming for fast farming, let’s be conservative and say it’s 2250 stam/xp, which means averaging 5 min/run.

At 2,250 xp/stam, you can rank up continuously until about rank 550, in which case time is your only limiting factor. Past that, you start to run into stamina as a bottleneck, but it’s not much of one:

At rank 600 you have 316 stam and 981k to level. 450 natural stam gets you 18 runs and just over a million xp, for another rank up and 200 stam (save another 100 stam for the next day so you can repeat. That’s another 8 runs, so 26 runs/day.

At rank 700 you have 366 stam and 1.5m to level. 350 natural stam gets you 14 runs and 787k xp, so you’re ranking up every other day and getting another 14 runs. That’s 21 runs/day (28 runs in 2 days on natural stam plus another 14 runs every two days on rank up stam, 28 + 14 = 42, divided by 2 = 21).

Past rank 700…well, if you’re non-IAP and past rank 700, you probably don’t need me to tell you what to do.

Since multiplayer also awards 25 MP/run, we get 535 MP/run. Summarizing:

Rank Runs/day MP/day Days to 300k <550 Unlimited Unlimited See below 600 26 13910 21.57 650 23 12305 24.38 700 21 11235 26.70

Wow. Even at rank 700, it takes less than a month to farm up 300k MP.

Revisiting assumptions: time

The first major assumption we made was that you have enough time to spend such that stamina is your only bottleneck. From the chart above, this clearly can’t be true, since you can play continuously up through rank 550, so time has to be a factor somewhere. The following table shows how many days it would take to get 300k MP as a function of how long each run takes and how much time you spend each day:

Minutes per day spent min/run 60 90 120 150 180 240 300 360 5 47 31 23 19 16 12 9 8 10 93 62 47 37 31 23 19 16 15 140 93 70 56 47 35 28 23 20 187 125 93 75 62 47 37 31 25 234 156 117 93 78 58 47 39 30 280 187 140 112 93 70 56 47

So for example, if it takes 15 min/run and you spend 3 hours a day farming, it would take 47 days to farm an MP dragon. If you were both extremely fast and very industrious, you could farm an MP dragon in under 2 weeks. I think that’s probably the limit — getting it down under a week would take about 7 hours a day for 7 straight days, hitting about 80-90 runs a day, which might be just barely possible for the truly committed (double entendre intended).

Revisiting assumptions: team

OK, you’re thinking, this is all well and good, but I don’t have a Neptune Dragon or skill delay resists, so I still need 300k MP before I can farm MP, which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Not at all! This method is usable with a completely farmable* team! Behold:

Team 1: Machine Hera, Voice, Vampire, Cyclone Devil Dragon, Lilith, Machine Hera

Team 2: Same, but subbing Aamir for Lilith.

* Where by “farmable” I mean, not reliant on REM luck, though you will almost certainly need a lot of stones.

Since all the Mythical Plus dungeons drop PreDra, there’s no reason for us to run Zaerog and his skill delay + 6-combo shield. Instead, we can run the much easier Nordis, who offers 4 trivial floors to start and type advantage on both bosses. With Machine Hera’s ridiculous leader skill, assuming all monsters are 297’d, you can mow through the dungeon with minimal skill:

F1-F4: 4-combo

F5: 2 TPA/5 total combos

F6: TPA/5 total combos

F7: TPA/5 total combos

F8: Lilith

F9: 2 TPA/5 total combos to drive him under 50%. Stall until he binds; Aamir to unbind, then heal to full. TPA/5 combos to kill.

F10: 2 TPA/5 total combos

F11: 3 TPA/5 total combos

Since one team will have Aamir and the other team Lilith, you have 6 orb changers; that’s one for each floor that you need more than one TPA with two left over. You also have nearly 20k RCV so should be able to stall for a few turns if you run into trouble. And, of course, this team is fully farmable — if you have any REM monsters, that only makes the team better.

Now obviously, for this to work, you’ll need to acquire a Machine Hera. You’ll need to be able to spike for at least 15m to attempt it, since Machine Hera can’t be delayed and heals under 30%, and if you have a team good enough to do that, you probably can run Nordis or one of the other Mythical Plus dungeons already.

However, depending on exactly how fast your team is, it may be worth spending 20 stones or more to brute force Machine Hera, since having one lets you farm the dungeon mindlessly and might cut your farming time in half or more. That’s definitely worth your consideration, especially if you plan on farming MP heavily enough to make multiple purchases.

Also, keep in mind that you can farm any of the Mythical Plus dungeons — you may have a team that’s particularly well-suited to one that isn’t Nordis, in which case you should run that instead. Let’s look at a few examples.

Teams without MP dragons or Machine Hera

I don’t want to try and list all the possible teams that can farm a rogue dungeon; that list is dependent on player skill (e.g. Ra is certainly powerful enough, and some players might be capable of running a dungeon 20+ times a day with him, but I’m not one of those players), and the amount of time you’re willing to spend (given equal skill, some teams are faster than others).

That being said, I don’t want to give the impression that you can only farm MP if you already have an MP dragon or a Machine Hera, so here are a few teams that I think should be able to farm at least one of the rogue dungeons:

Awoken Pandora, Haku, Hanzo, Persephone, Aamir/Lilith, Awoken Pandora

Awoken Shiva, Hino, Cao Cao/ROdin, Set, Urd, Awoken Shiva

Awoken Lakshmi, Gabriel, Andromeda/Neptune, Karin, Amberjack, Awoken Lakshmi

If you’re lucky enough to have a friend who does have an MP dragon, there’s a bunch of possibilities there too; see the second section of this handy guide:

BSonia and most water row leads go with Neptune Dragon

Urd, RValk, and DIzanami go with Shiva Dragon

Castor and Hamal go with Yomi Dragon

Again, this list is just a small sample! You may well have a team in your box capable of farming one of the rogue dungeons; I’d definitely recommend trying it a few times to see how long a run takes before throwing stones at Machine Hera. That being said, there’s a good chance Machine Hera is so much faster that it’d still be worth it; that’s a value judgement that’s up to you.

Recap

Using single player coin dungeons, a non-IAP player could farm 300k MP in about 60 days.

If you can play multiplayer, time efficiency becomes your limiting factor. It’s possible to farm 300k MP in a little as 10 days.

Farming speed is directly proportional to farming days. If you can cut your time per run in half, you’ll also cut the number of days in half.

Paying stones to acquire a Machine Hera may be worth doing depending on how fast you can farm with your existing team.