Back in Disgaea 3, it was time to level it up the Trapezohedron for a rather dramatic improvement in stats. I duped a few of them first, so that I had fresh copies I could level up in different ways, and then tried to follow a guide to creating “perfect” items, which requires passing certain bills early on, double-killing bosses, finding enough level spheres, reverse pirating, etc.

I thought I followed it pretty strictly, but in the end I wound up with stats slightly lower than what the guide said they should be. I think I might have found a level sphere too early, before all of the ATK bills had been passed, so that some level ups didn’t get the full effect. Oh well, it’s only something like a 0.1% difference, so it’s good enough as is.

I then wanted to dupe more of them, of course, and discovered the hard way that someone equipped with one of these is tough to beat. I had to rearrange my equipment and give Laharl the Puppy Paw Stick before I could reliably beat the dropouts. And, in the end, Laharl now has a complete, rarity-matched set of these Traps and his rank 40 weapon, and in total he now has over 50 million ATK and does over 207 million damage with some of his special attacks. The only improvement left for him will be to level up his weapon as well, though that’ll make a smaller difference.

I then finally went back and defeated Baal easily, now that his 47 million HPs wasn’t so intimidating anymore. Baal was also available in the Land of Carnage afterwards, and I took a shot at that, but…one of his guards killed Laharl in one hit. No matter how obscenely powerful you get, the game always has something worse to throw at you…

In yet more Disgaea 3 (I’ve really got to do something else with my vacation time so far…) I managed to get a legendary Arcadia, thanks to a little druid trick involving changing the bonus table. I entered its item world and stole the Trapezathingie from the item god, and this will be important since it’ll be the replacement for the Testaments everyone has in their accessory slots right now. I even managed to get a rarity 0 one first try.

I then spent a while looking for more rank 39 items and eventually found the axe I was missing before. I still need a rarity 0 Barefoot X, though. I have a few of them already, but wouldn’t get the rarity match bonus with them. Oh well, I’ll just continue working on the Trapezamabobs and hopefully run into one along the way.

I started off in Disgaea 3 today by duping more sprinter specialists, while also working on the class worlds of various story characters. I eventually got enough of them to fill Laharl’s equipment, and with a full set of sprinter-enhanced Testaments, he now has an ATK rating of over 11 million. The number doesn’t even fit in the screen’s field anymore.

I cleared more of the X-Dimension maps, though I had to skip a few since they were too tough, annoying, or needed things I was still a bit weak at, like long-range non-special-based attacks. All I needed was to complete 25 of the 43 total though, and it didn’t take too long, finally unlocking the Land of Carnage.

The Land of Carnage is…well, it’s just like the regular world, really, except that the monsters are much higher level. But higher levels means more xp, and after filling Mao’s equipment with Statisticians, a single round in the LoC version of HoO4 took him from level 1 to 6645. It only took three rounds to get to level 9999. I could probably do it in two if I put statisticians on his weapon as well.

I spent a while repeatedly reincarnating Laharl and getting him back up to level 9999, to maximize his reincarnation stats bonus, but that’s only part of what’s needed. I then spent some time reverse pirating to farm for legendary weapons from green chests, and when you do it in LoC you can find the rank 35-39 weapons. The monsters are extremely tough, often with dozens of millions of HPs, but all you really need to do is run in and smash as many chests as you can before dying.

After a bunch of aborted attempts (you can only reverse pirate items a finite number of times, so there’s no point in saving if you don’t find anything good that run), I eventually wound up with the rank 39 versions of the bow, sword, gun, fists, staff, and spear. I also found a pair of Barefoot X shoes, the best you can get and with a whopping movement bonus of 3, but I’m still missing the rank 39 versions of an axe and an emblem. The emblem will be particularly important, to replace the Testaments I’m using now.

The rank 39 weapons aren’t really important by themselves, though. Instead you have to enter their item world to get the ultimate rank 40 weapon of that type, and I started in on it on the sword I found. I skipped most of the levels, as usual, but it became tougher later on. The monsters started getting to the point where I couldn’t reliably kill them in one hit, so I had to start relying on using martial arts specials to knock them off the exit gate.

Around floor 80 it was getting too tough to continue, so I went back to the regular world and undid all of the Stronger Enemy bills I’d passed earlier. Even with the enemy difficulty back down to normal though, they were still quite difficult and couldn’t be killed in one round. I eventually made it to level 100, where the Item God is, and managed to steal a rarity 0 Baal Sword, the rank 40 sword, from him (though it took a few reloads to get that particular rarity — it’ll be important later on when trying to make a matching set).

But it’s still not over — now I have to do the Baal Sword’s item world, and then reverse pirate it and capture the level sphere all five times, trying to ensure I get the sword to level 200, before it can be considered “finished.” And then repeat that for all of the other weapon types as well. But at least once I’ve done it once for each type, I can then dupe them for other characters that use the same type, and I’ll probably actually do the fist weapon first, since most of my main characters use that.

It was another day of duping in Disgaea 3, as I spent a few hours duping mastery residents and statisticians. Despite some slow stretches, I’ve got enough now to fill up one person with statisticians and cover the weapon masteries of my main characters, so I think I’ll stop there for now. Along the way I also remembered to enter the hidden 10th floor portal (opened by clearing all the geos on the 10th floor) and use it to increase the sizes of clubs and get the legendary skills. I only saw the legendary skill trainer once though, so all I have is one of the sword skills so far. I also swapped roles and used Laharl to work on my character’s class world for a bit, getting him the movement and throw range increases.

I tested some of the new mastery specialists out on my personal character, and, the results were rather, um, dramatic:

Just the addition of the Fist Fighter and Guardian specialists were enough to quintuple my ATK rating.

I then filled Laharl up with Statisticians after one round in HoO4, he shot straight from level 1 to 1849. Soon afterwards I used them to level myself, Laharl, and my female ninja all the way up to level 9999 fairly quickly, though still slower than how I’ll be doing it in Land of Carnage…

Speaking of which, it’s almost time to start delving into LoC. I just need to dupe up some more of the dual-specialists to fill out more accessories (I only have enough for one right now) and beat enough of the X-Dimension maps. I started on some of them tonight, beating enough of them to get the Naive Glasses reward (makes you guaranteed to hit), and although they reuse the same chapters and names from the story missions, they’re definitely a lot trickier and tougher. I gave up on them for the night when a stray shot from an enemy archer destroyed the geo block I absolutely needed to complete the map.

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.