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.

I finally finished the gruelling trek through the item world today, and it actually started getting decently tougher near the bottom. The main monsters weren’t too much of a danger, but some of the pirates that started showing up had so many hit points that it would take two or three rounds to defeat them, and they came close to killing my main guys when ganging up.

Unfortunately, even though I found a lot more pirates and a mystery room that sells the illegal tickets, I still ended the trip one frigging ticket short of the 24 needed to unlock Land of Carnage. I’ll have to start the item world of a new item, but hopefully I won’t have to go too deep into it before finding the one I need.

All I had time for in Disgaea 3 tonight was making it through another 30 floors of the Testament’s item world. It’s a lot slower going than item world was up to this point because I have to hang around on each floor for at least one turn now to see if pirates show up, so some time gets wasted on a round or two of combat.

The pirates did finally show up though, and I have three Illegal Tickets from beating them so far. Still need 21 more… I created the new pirate-related clubs, which should make getting them easier though, and created a bunch of new characters of classes I hadn’t done yet to fill the clubs.

I think I’m only missing two or three classes now, though I’m starting to run out of classroom space again, it’s already at its maximum size, and there’s still more characters to recruit. There’s apparently a DLC package in Japan that adds a second classroom, but who knows when it’ll be available here.

The Disgaea 3 powerlevelling continues apace, as I got Mao all the way up to over 3000 tonight. I’ve done HoO4 over 600 times now, but it’s a really quick map to do, as each run probably only takes 15 or 20 seconds. Unfortunately I discovered that my ninja can’t actually use the Big Bang skill, even though she knows it via reincarnation, so I won’t be powerlevelling her for now (edit: oh wait, you actually have to select which abilities are usable in combat, once you’ve collected more than 16 total…).

Still, with two higher-level characters it’s now actually practical for me to pass bills by force, so I used that to pass some difficult ones like getting the biggest classroom. I also unlocked more of the extra maps and did them to recruit Prism Red and Asagi.

Now I need some pirates and higher-rank items in order to start unlocking the really high-end maps, so I delved into the item world within a legendary Testament. I haven’t seen any pirates yet, but I’m only down to level 30 of 100 inside it, so there’s a long way to go…

In tonight’s Disgaea 3 session, I decided to narrow my levelling focus onto my female ninja and Mao for now, so I reincarnated her and got her the healing and Big Bang skills, and took Mao through Class World twice to get them for him.

I also leveled up the fist weapon I’d been using via Item World so that it does some extra damage, and finally collected the full 100 professionals, and started farming HoO4 with Mao instead. By the end of the evening I’d gotten him up to around level 1800 (my main is around 3300 now), and the female ninja into her sixth and final class tier.

I delved again into the item world in Disgaea 3 to pick up a few more professionals, but it gets tedious rather quickly, since you only find them in small amounts. I’ve only collected 60 levels total of them so far, and ideally you want 100 for a 100% critical rate.

So, to break up the tedium, I’ve also started working on raising up some other characters, since if there’s one thing better than having an ultra-powerful character, it’s having an army of ultra-powerful characters… The Big Bang skill is the best for powerlevelling due to the layout of the farming levels, so I’m working on fist users first, including Adell (one of the Disgaea 2 DLC characters), my druid, and my female ninja. I’ll have to use the Class World to transfer it to some of them though, since they can’t learn it on their own. I also put Adell through the standard five reincarnations for story characters, just to get it out of the way.

(Edit: Actually, reincarnating them into martial artists would probably be cheaper and quicker, for the non-story characters, especially since I have to do it anyway since they haven’t reached their maximum tiers yet. I could do it again for cleric skills too, like I did for my own character. The reincarnation costs go up, but mana is pretty easy to generate right now. I’ll still have to use Class World for Adell and Mao though.)

(Edit edit: And I still had some time to kill, so I went back and finished unlocking the rest of the DLC characters. The fights were no problem, though they reused the basic classroom map a bit too much. Looks like they all have unique skills and evilities that might come in useful, though. Kogure’s fight was a bit different in that it went into a completely different style for a little while, too.)

Continuing on in the Disgaea 3 post-game, I delved into the item world, where I collected a bunch of professionals (increases critical hit chance) and managers (increases mana gained per kill). I transferred them into my main’s weapon, and continued leveling up, eventually getting to the point where I could clear HoO4 by myself in one hit.

I continued farming that level for a while, occasionally increasing the enemy strength, but eventually got bored and started checking out the other available maps. I went through the Diez Gentlemen fights, just barely scraping by due to the ‘stronger enemies’ bills still in effect, but I eventually succeeded and got the Puppy Paw Stick, which will come in useful later on. I also unlocked and did the areas that let me recruit Master Big StarBigster and Salvatore, and there are still more maps to go in that series.

I continued farming HoO4 for a while longer, and now I’m around level 2500 and have more money than I know what to do with (over 10 billion HL), since there isn’t really anything stronger available in the shops anymore.

There’s still more to do, though…

As expected, I finished off Disgaea 3’s story today, wherein the big enemy was defeated and Mao was reconciled with his dad and all that garbage. That’s not really all that important, because now the “real” game has started…

I can unlock the DLC characters now, and did so for Adell and Rozalin from Disgaea 2, and Priere from La Pucelle, but I’ll need a bigger classroom before I can unlock too many more. There’s not really too much to them — there’s a short scene to introduce them, you fight them, and they then join you at level 100 after you defeat them. I’ll have to look more closely and see if there’s anything interesting like unique skills.

I can also unlock some extra maps, and did so for something involving Master Big Star , though I haven’t started it yet. Instead I started powerleveling via the 7-3 map, as described in the Gamefaqs guide. The details of powerleveling get tedious, but in the end I’d used the honor student and robber clubs to put characters through enough reincarnations to unlock at least their third or fourth class tier, put the story characters through their five reincarnations to get maximum stat growth, and got Mao and my personal character up to around level 400-500, with most others around 60-100. (Mao was up over 700 at one point before I had to reincarnate him.)

I also got the rest of the healing spells for my character and then reincarnated him into a martial artist. With his ultra-high SPD stat, he should be able to survive fairly well, which has always been the problem I’ve had with healers, and he can dish out some pretty good AE damage, too.

I then unlocked the House of Ordeals maps, which took a *lot* of bribing in Homeroom, and made it through a bunch of them with just Mao and myself. HoO3 was particularly annoying because it’s extremely long, and I had to abandon my first attempt because I accidentally destroyed a geoblock I absolutely needed to keep around, so I had to do it all over again.

HoO4 is where the next stretch of powerleveling will take place, but I’ll need to prepare for it a bit. It’s about time to start delving into Item World and collecting specialists.

I did all of chapter 7 in Disgaea 3 tonight, though there wasn’t really much notable about it. The story has devolved into some touchy-feely garbage about Mao’s true feelings, and character progression has been fairly straightforward.

There’s only something like four fights left to go, so I should be able to finish it off early tomorrow. Then I can start focusing on the real powerlevelling…