Today’s session in Disgaea 3 started out with getting the last illegal ticket I needed to unlock Land of Carnage. I had to enter a new item, and it took until floor 53 before I finally got the ticket, since most of the pirates that showed up were ones I’d already defeated. Ah well, I’ve got all the ones I need now.

I then worked through more of the extra maps, recruiting Alex from the second game and, Laharl, Etna, and Flonne from the first. I also unlocked Baal but I don’t think I’ll be able to beat him yet, as he had 17,000,000 health versus my 500k…

And that was the cue to start the truly outrageous portion of the powerlevelling: duping specialists. Following a guide’s recommendations, I made a couple of dual-specialists: a Sprinter (ATK and SPD, for the meleers) and a Nerd (INT and SP, for the mages). Then I put all of the specialists I wanted more of onto a Testament, including those and some others like Gladiators and Professionals, equipped it on Laharl, and entered his class world.

In the class world you’ll occasionally see a ‘dropout’ clone of that person, and if you hit them with the Puppy Paw Stick, you have a chance of stealing an item they have equipped. In this case it’s the same Testament I just put on him, and then I can take the stolen one, merge the specialists into the original item, and repeat the process all over again. It takes a while to get started, but exponential growth soon kicks in and you can create tons of specialists.

It was definitely a slow start for me — it took until the fifth trip through Laharl’s class world before I finally got a successful steal with the Puppy Paw Stick. Fortunately it was a steady stream after that, with one successful dupe for every one or two runs. And it took a while, but before long I had a couple of Testaments full of level 19998 specialists of various types. Equipping those back on my main fighter improved his damage output several times over.

I’ll eventually want even more of those specialists, but with a more powerful fighter it was then time to do some reverse pirating, where you invade the item world on your own pirate ship instead. The monsters are much, much tougher when you reverse pirate, but it’s the only way you can get the most important types of specialists, for weapon masteries, and even more importantly, experience gain (the infamous Statisticians, which are what’s going to make getting to level 9999 practical). It’s basically just a smash-and-run job — show up on the level, throw yourself over to where the innocents are and try to capture them all in the first round, and then try to get as many people back on the ship as possible before it leaves in a couple turns, if they survive the first one.

After a few rounds of reverse pirating I managed to get mastery specialists for various weapons and one statistician. You only find very low level versions of them though, so now it’s time to start duping them via the same process as above so that everyone can get the appropriate high-level copies. But tomorrow; that’s enough duping for today…

Edit: And just as an aside, I’ve now put about an equal amount of time into the post-story game to get to this point as I did the main story — the counter’s currently around 80 hours, and the main story took 40.