Guide to efficiently leveling high base int chars with zero starting funding.

Yeah you can do NL + I/L after you have your HS mule done. Are you planning to use the ice lightning to leech your NL (from level 10 onwards) and use the priest as a pure HS mule?

 

Yeah thats what I meant to recommend in my previous post - doing 2 characters at the same time is SOOO MUCH more efficient than doing 1 character solo.

If you plan to leech your nightlord WELL past level 135, I actually suggest that you start a fire poison right now and do ice lightning + fire poison + nightlord.

You can keep your HS mule at 81 (and just keep using it for HS) and use both of the mages to leech your nightlord.

For example, you can start training your ice lightning - and leech your NL while grinding on the i/l. Then, you can grind your fire poison mage and let your NL leech. You will find that by rotating between the two, you can keep all 3 at the same level.

As you earn mesos from grinding (you will earn tons from all the gachapon that you get), you can buy 3 way split leech to get your ice lighning, nightlord, and fire mage up higher and rush to fourth job.

The reason that its very useful to have 2 archmages is that the end game map for leech in maplelegends right now is shoalin 5-6. The optimal leech setup in 5-6 is to have 2 archmages and a HS mule (bishops are trash here unless funded over 1b with SI mule, whereas archmages are decent with like 50m funding).

Anyways sorry for that tangent, if that's not your thing, what you are doing now is perfectly fine as well. Just try to rush and get the nightlord and ice lightning to fourth job! That's when your investment pays off!

(Btw to your original question, yes it is very well worthwhile to make ice lightning. As you hit 4th job, you will realize that in order for a bishop to be an efficient leech mule, you will need ALOT of funding. On the otherhand an archmage basically just needs its lv 30 skillbook. You will find that you save over 1b making an archmage, because it takes more than 1b funding for a bishops damage to match an archmage that has like 50m funding

 

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand your question, could you rephrase it?

 

I suggest that you try and measure the exp per hour you get with both methods.

1) Kill with your HS Mule only and run an @xpm 5 command on your NL and other mages (that are leeching).

Doing so, you will see how much exp you are getting on them per hr.

2) After, try doing the same thing except killing with the other mages. Note, you MUST leave party on your priest in order to optimize your exp.

In my experience, I think that leeching your NL and fire poison with an ice mage will probably be faster, but that depends on the strength of your ice mage. If your priest is 1 hit killing all the mobs, keep going on the priest while leeching your other mules.

 

The main reason would be that there is a HUGE barrier to 1hitting some monsters between archmage and bishop.

For example, ULU estate 2 is a really solid leech map that you want to self leech at from lv 90 onwards. A bishop will have a very tough time 1hitting these monsters, most of the time you will need to have genesis 30, decent int gears, and somewhat high level (150+). Meanwhile, our archmage friends can 1hit ulu2 at level 130 without much gear simply with their lv 130 elemental wand and lv 30 mage skill.

IMO, if you are willing to fund the bishop to point where it can 1hit the monsters, it is the more efficient class to leech yourself with. Bishops use less potions per ultimate, meaning that you earn more mesos per hour farming.

Basically, archmage is low investment, high reward.

Bishop is high investment, slightly higher reward.

Both are viable, but if you want to just use the mage as a means to the end (that is leveling your INT char), archmage will probably do it faster.

 

If you already have a bishop you can just leech your character. So that means you are fine to just start. Just make sure to NOT solo leech. Either leech 2+ of your own characters at the same time OR sell split leech if you only have 1 character.

 

You can just go back and level an i/l to 4x and then try to level both together.

Alternatively one new idea is to just level the cleric to 81 (get max Holy symbol, and 1 point in shining ray), then use the cleric instead of the ice lightning to leech your characters.

Advantage is that you don't need to expel / invite for HS, and theoretically have 1 extra party slot so you could leech 5 characters at a time instead of 4. Max level shining ray should be decent in terms of mob clearing as well.

You will be pretty screwed for mid game leech however, as bishop requires insane funding to 1hit the ulu's and such.

Ideally if you can save enough mesos to buy leech through the period where bishops are terrible (85-108), you can perhaps skip straight to 2hit skele.

 

If you have the game knowledge and skill to effectively mist , the FP would carry best from lv 76 onwards.

before that I/L would win out. I went with ice lightning, but I think it’s doable with fire poison too.