General Farming Tips
Consider the following in order to boost your power when farming so that you can one shot mobs. Unless you are extremely geared and have extensive deposits and unlocks you will need to take advantage of these things, especially elemental weaknesses whenever possible.
Buff Yourself
It will be a while until you're strong enough to farm well without buffing yourself, especially after your boost when you try to branch out into newer areas. This is even more true for alts which are very weak at the start since you'll have very little investment into your adventure handbook. Class skills that buff you are a given but I'm referring to consumables that grant you elemental damage, modifier bonuses, and stats.
You will not succeed if you don't come to terms with this, or at least it will take you so long that you'll never catch up if you ignore this. The bonuses from cooking, especially for new accounts, are staggering. At very low levels there's no problem here but as you rise into the 50's, 60's, and 70's on your alts you'll find it takes way too many hits to kill something. This only gets worse the higher you get as monsters HP explodes into very high values. The game was designed such that you need to load up on buffs, equip cards, and equip gear that leverages other advantages to help you one hit mobs.
Most consumables allow you to consume multiple which increases their duration allowing you to stretch them out over your entire farming session. For example, using a Great Nature provides a 15 minute buff that makes your attacks Earth Element. Consuming another increases that time to 30 minutes.
So plan out your farm time and consume an adequate amount of buffs to last through the session. If I was going to farm for 3 hours I’d consume 12 great natures for a total of 180 minutes (3 hours) buff duration.
Eating Food Dishes
Monsters will drop tons of materials used in cooking throughout your farm which are used to create dishes that give you significant stat buffs. Unlike consumable buffs which stack duration, eating multiple dishes does not extend the duration. However, the effects of food stack instead. These buffs range from attack/matk increases to move speed, ignore defense, or even cooldown reduction just to name a few. These will all help you farm faster and these ingredients are used for nothing else, this is their sole purpose so cook as much as you can!
Foods also provide you with HP/SP discharge, a "reserve tank" that automatically heals these resources when they get low. Eating a ton of a cheap food to give you a ton of SP discharge is great for farming sessions as this will help keep you from running out of SP.
For more on this visit the Cooking section.
Example Food Dishes
Elemental Weakness
Most monsters have an element and thus, a weakness. To exploit some of these weaknesses you’re typically going to need to obtain some elemental converters if your a physical damage class such as:
Great Nature (Earth)
Flame Heart (Fire)
Mystic Frozen (Ice)
Rough Wind (Wind)
Each of these imbues your physical attacks with their corresponding element. See the elemental weakness chart below to understand which elements to use against which type of enemy.
To see what element a monster you’re farming has either look it up on RomCodex or look in your adventure handbook in game. Once you’ve taken a photo of a monster you can go to that entry in your adventure handbook and click details to see the monster’s size, element, race, and other useful stats to help you figure out how best to farm it.
Mages have spells that exploit weakness without needing converters as they are element locked, but attacks from physical jobs are usually non-elemental by default so using converters will greatly improve your damage. Most of the time you’re farming mobs that have weaknesses that can give upwards 200% damage bonus with the right element and eventually mobs get so much health and defense that you won’t be able to farm without them. Exploiting weakness is extremely important to progression in this game!
Warning: Some abilities are not convertible and are either element locked (always fire for example) or are locked to only deal non-elemental damage such as mechanic's arm cannon ability. See the skills section for your job(s) on RomCodex to see if they are element locked or convertable.
Weapon Size Penalty
All monsters belong to one of three size groups: small, medium, or large. Depending on your weapon there are penalties to damage dealt to monsters in each grouping. See the below table to understand where your weapon fits.
This may make farming certain kinds of mobs harder since 25% or even 50% of your damage will be mitigated simply due to this size penalty. Blacksmiths provide a party wide buff that mitigates this but the rest of us either purchase or craft precision stones to reduce or remove this penalty to help deal more damage.
Normal Precision Stone
Size Penalty Decreased by 50%
Expert Precision Stone
Size Penalty Decreased by 100% (full damage)
Consuming these stones grants you the buff for 15 minutes. As with all buffs you can simply use a bunch of them at once to extend the buff duration to last through your farming session. I've included a table below showing the size penalties for each weapon. Note that mages don't have to worry about this.
Card Advantage
There are various cards that slot into weapons that increase damage to monsters of a specific element, race, and size. These add a significant chunk of damage so by the late 80s or higher you’re at the point where you’re going to need cards to deal more damage, eventually adding a second slot to your weapon to increase this bonus further. Cards are important for farming in this game, especially as you push into higher levels and need more damage.
You're probably going to collect one or two of each element, race, and size card just to switch in/out in various situations. I've included a table below showing each card and which mobs you'll use these against while farming.
Please note, magic damage does not gain bonuses for elemental or size based cards, only racial advantage cards or MVP/MINI damage cards work for mages!
Putting it All Together
Using a blacksmith farming character as an example, a Doom Axe has a special passive that provides a significant damage bonus if using a fire converter with points allocated into the blacksmith skill “Skin Tempering”. Therefore, farming any monsters with a weakness to fire is a massive advantage for this weapon since you’re not only dealing 200% by converting to fire, but gaining even more by using the Doom Axe.
Typically in the 60-70 level range you could, with enough gear and planning, start farming Orc Warrior and Orc Archer. They have about 40k HP which is a huge chunk for alts on new accounts to get through so using these advantages is key to one shotting here. Use the following advantages to boost your power as high as possible:
Image Taken from RomCodex page for Orc Warrior
Looking at our target on the left here, we can see our target is a Medium Sized, Earth Based Demi-Human with high defense. We will want to take advantage of as much of this as possible to increase our damage. Orc Archers also have the same traits except their defense is a bit lower but since both monsters are together in these mob packs we want to be able to one shot both so we'll focus on the tougher of the two.
Flame Heart - Since these orcs are earth element and thus, weak to fire, using a Flame Heart gives us a 200% damage bonus. This is amplified by the Doom Axe due to its special passive which, while under fire conversion, provides you with another 50% damage bonus due to points into Skin Tempering, even more if you tiered up the Doom Axe to T3 for yet another 10%!
Menblatt Card - Since orcs are earth a Menblatt Card will provide a sizeable 20% damage bonus. You may need to slot two of these in order to do enough damage so this could get expensive, but this gives a lot of bonus damage. You could also pair this card with a Hydra Card as this increases damage to Demi Human.
Since these orcs are medium sized Axes only deal 75% damage, however blacksmiths farming here can use weapon perfection to remove this penalty. If you’re playing a different class though and still suffer for example, a 75% damage penalty you would use a normal perfection stone to increase your damage to 87.5% or an expert perfection stone to increase it to 100% damage, removing the penalty altogether
Now I can focus on increasing stats by eating foods. Since Orcs have innately high defense we can eat some Original Will Seafood Soup which provides 40ATK and 2.5% ignore defense. Cooked dishes stack their effect rather than duration so eating multiple dishes increases this bonus significantly. At three stacks this gives 120 attack and 7.5% ignore defense and at six stacks, 240 attack and 15% ignore defense, a gargantuan increase. The amount of stacks you can consume is based on your Tasting level (see Cooking).
Now that I've popped all the buffs I can, if this is still not enough we can take further advantage by using specialized gear. For example, we can equip a Hockey Mask which gives 10% damage to demi-humans. We can further exploit this mob by equipping more ignore defense so we'll put on a Rosa Bracelet offhand and an Ancient Cape garment to ignore another 40% defense.
New players aren’t going to have access to large amounts of Original Will Seafood Soup, a 5 star meal so don't expect to just run out and get the best food right off the bat. You'll have to level up cooking to get access to all six buff slots and craft higher quality foods.
When I first farmed orcs here I made due with 2.5 star foods so make the best food you can in order to one shot whichever monsters you're farming. If you can already one shot then switch to a food that boosts in other areas you may speed up your farm such as movement speed to get to packs faster or cooldown reduction for more skills per minute.
As you get stronger you won’t need to use foods for the extra attack or even converters if you're strong enough but early on you really need to take advantage of these things. You're just not strong enough without them. Weaknesses are built into the game such that it expects you to take advantage of to progress. These weaknesses really shine when you start doing group content to kill tough MINI/MVP bosses. They have so much health that you want to abuse this as much as possible.