Elsword Starter’s Guide

Elsword Starter’s Guide by What does the furry say?

Foreword

If you’re reading this giude, you’re probably
a) completely new to the game and want some tips to help you get started.
b) not new to the game and just want a refresher.
c) really bored installing the damn game and want some tips before you even get started.
d) none of the above.

Yes, if you look on the official forums, there is an archive of people’s guides that are way more certified to make a guide than I am, but alas, with forum revamps and all, ALL OF THEM ARE GONE KC FIX PLS.

So in the meantime that the forum supervisors are over there trying to fix this little inconvenience, you can have this guide instead!

Elwiki is also the “official” database for all things Elsword, so if you want nonbiased detailed opinions on things, check this place out.

UI

So you want to be a cool robot destroying, demon slaying punk, don’t you? Well before you can do that, you need to understand how to destroy robots using nothing but a giant sword that looks too blunt to cut anything.

sword

So how do we go about learning the game? Well first, you have to understand the UI. Using sik mad photoship skillz, we are to delve right into it.

ui

HP is the most important part of Elsword online. If your health reaches 0, you die (no shi-). However, there is a thing that you can do to become immortal in this game, and the GMs still haven’t caught up on it. Basically, to activate god mode and never die, don’t get hit.

MP is the blue bar that lets you cast skills. You get more MP per second when you hit people and when you yourself get hit. And you know what happens when you get hit. The optimal way to get MP and spam out your super classy moves is by attacking. Speaking of skills…

Skills are what really define Elsword bar funky cel shading and character development. These skills let you do cool stuff like summon swords to hit people and make tons of explosions. Skills come in two varieties (and soontm to be 3, but that’s a deal that I can’t talk about) and will be explained in relative depth later.

That special thing? Not really special. I just found it hard to write out the words “Awakening” using a brush tool and a mouse. Anyways, what awakening does is fill up a little guage next to the character icon and once it’s filled all the way, you get a little bead in those empty circles. Pressing control will allow you to enter “Awakening” which basically makes you glow pretty colors (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧ and gives you a 20% damage boost. Nothing too special unless you’re playing specific characters.

The chat is exactly what it sounds like. The system likes to spam it with useless stuff and that can get kind of annoying, but you can disable it by right clicking on the chat tabs and then left clicking on the stuff you don’t want to see.

The Megaphone is basically a global server wide chat. You need money to get megaphones to use the chat though, but it’s usually just full of spam and people marketting items that you probably won’t have the money for ever.

Consumables are dungeon only items that you can assign to a slot and use in a dungeon to make you OP. Honestly, if you’ve played any standard RPG before, you should know what a consumable is.

Buffs are the things that make your character strong. Buffs look like little blue icons, and when you’re debuffed, you’ll notice that red icons appear as well.

The useless stuff over there is what channel you’re in and what area you’re currently in. Being in the right channel for your level range gives you extra XP and who doesn’t like extra XP?

Quests something description self explanatory

The map and other stuff is what it sounds like. You have a minimap that shows the layout of what stage you’re in and when you’re in a dungeon, there’s an icon that displays the amount of monsters you need to gib.
In other words, it’s useless.
The other stuff are things that I will get to editting into the guide later when I’m not lazy.

Over there in the bottom and left conveniently unmarked by me is the experience meter and thestamina bar. The experience meter displays how much XP you have until you level up!!!!1111! and the stamina bar basically restricts how long you get to play the game on that specific character. It drains by killing things in the field and dungeons (bar Henir’s Space and Time). You might be thinking, “AMG STAM BAR MSUT SUC!” and you would be right about that since it’s basically a Korea specific law and has nothing to do with good ol’ Murica (and Oceania). BUT, there’s a thing that people fail to consider. When you start levelling up, stamina drains A LOT slower than when you start out. (It doesn’t actually. When people start getting into the higher levels, people just stop finding the motivation to finish up their stamina bar because that’s when you get interesting things to do like SIK PVP NAO U GET 2 K1LL 34CH 0TH3R F0R ♥♥♥♥$ & G1GGL3$$$.) The stamina bar just makes sure you don’t reach the level cap in like 3 days and run out of things to do.

message

This special message that appears at the bottom of the screen is when somebody has way more luck than you’ll ever have. Explanation later in the guide.

skill bar

You can also set the skill bar to be on the bottom of the screen (that’s the default option by the way) but only plebs use this option.

Characters

Now we’re in the meat and bones of Elsword! Here we’ll discuss the characters of Elsword Online and why Elsword has the nickname of Elderp. Here I’m only showing you guys the very basics of the character. If I included every single job path that a character had, this guide would end up way too big for sanity’s purpose.

elsword

Elsword
Background
Elsword is the brother of the famed captain of the Red Knights, a red haired girl named Elesis who just so happens to be implied to be the same Elesis as the one in Grand Chase while also going through a multitude of name changes.

Gameplay
He wields a giant rock with a handle and swings it around to bludgeon things to death. He’s a relatively fast character and a good one to start off with, as his combos are pretty easy to pull off (later once you job advance that is).

He has a special ablitiy called: Way of the Sword
Basically, this system makes it so Elsword’s attacks fill up a guage, and depending on what attack he uses, it fills up the guage a certain way. Once he fills up the guage all the way, he gains an overpowered buff that makes him better than every other character in the entire game. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but it’s rather simple to use. A full explanation can be found here.

aisha

Aisha
Background
This tsundere ♥♥♥♥♥ is named Aisha. Her abnormally purple hair is genetic, and she loves putting on bling. She put on so much swag bling, that her swag levels skyrocketed and the gods were all like, “OH HELL NAW DAT’S CHEATING YO” so they took away all her swag and now she wants it back.

Gameplay
Aisha is your generic mage archetype. She can charge mp by standing still and has fireballs and magic based attacks. That’s basically it. SHE’S A PAIN TO DEAL WITH IN PVP BECAUSE SHE CAN TELEPORT EVERYWHERE AND ADSFKLASJGLKA

rena

Rena
Background
Rena AKA Ms. Fanservice is an elf. A shiny rock gets stolen and forces her to find it before her entire race dies. Her backstory basically sets the entire game’s plot up.

Gameplay
Rena is an expert user in: “Bow and body techniques” (yes, that’s officially what she uses). As your archer, she’s good with arrows. But being a ranged archer in an 2.5d action game is boring so she can literally kick people’s butts if she really wants to. She can double jump and can charge mp just like Aisha can. That’s it.

raven

Raven
Background
Raven AKA Mr. Fanservice has a very troubled past. If you want to be a super emo, go for it. He worked very hard for a kingdom and then said kingdom tried to kill him but did a pretty poor job at it obviously. They did get his entire family and all of his coworkers. Did I mention that he was also the boss of said coworkers? As boss of your employees, it’s your job to take care of them, and he did a pretty poor job of taking care of them. His now dead fiancee also happens to look a lot like Rena. Some robots took care of him following the betrayal and now he’s a cyborg with a cool robot arm.

Gameplay
As a character, you’ll notice a lot of similarities to Elsword (well Elderp does idolize Raven after all). First off is that both use swords. End similarities. Raven’s style of swordplay is a lot faster and more refined than Elsword, who’s more about brute force than anything, and this leads to his attack speed being faster than Elsword, but it also doesn’t do as much damage. He can also use his arm to attack, and while it is slower than him swinging his sword around, it does make cool explosions.

Raven also has a rather special system called “Core”. When you enter awakening as Raven, an evil looking creepy robot eye pops out of thin air and damages enemies whenever Raven uses a skill. If he’s hit in the front, the core goes in front of Raven, immobilizing him, but acting as a damage absorbing shield. If you get 3 awakening beads and then awaken, the core generates an electric field around Raven that deals moderate damage around him in a constant AoE. It used to be OP as hell, but the developers of the game successfully managed to balance it. Probably.

eve

Eve
Background
Once upon a time, Eve was the ruler of a race of completely sentient robots. Due to wars with sentient life forms that weren’t robots, the robots went insane so she basically sacrificed herself so the robots would live on. It kind of worked. The rest of her story is spoilers, but I think the game already spoils itself by making Eve a playable character at the beginning of the game.

Gameplay
Eve takes up the niche of summoner in this game. She attacks using her two loyal battle drones, Moby and Remy. Moby is the black one and Remy is the white one, but that doesn’t matter. Using her drones, she can fly around and whatnot. She’s a very balanced with a well developed arsenal of both ranged and melee attacks with her melee attacks having a ton of range and her ranged attacks might as well being melee. Unfortunately for her, the community deems anything that’s balanced as underpowered. Trust me, she isn’t. That is, if you don’t suck and can master her supreme mobility over everybody else in the game.

chung

Chung
Background
Chung has an identity crisis that all started when his home was invaded by demonic folk. His father (who happened to be the city protector) went crazy and started to destroy the city. Chung got his ♥♥♥ kicked but he’s fine because Elsword and his party managed to save him in time before he died a horrible violent death. He is now traumatized from the event and is now scared of the dark and refuses to let anybody call him his real name: Prince Seiker. Call him that anyways to ♥♥♥♥ him off.
Not only does he have an identity crisis, he also has a gender crisis. I’ve been referring to Chung as a he this entire time, but that’s for simplicity’s sake. In reality he’s actually a girl Hideyoshi.

hideyoshi

Gameplay
Chung is basically a really slow powerhouse tank. He hits hard, takes hits hard, and makes explosions. He uses an ammo system to make explosions, and he can refill his ammo through certain combos and skills.
He’s the only character who has a “heavy armor” system. What this means is that certain moves give Chung a blue outline, and if he’s hit by anything, he doesn’t flinch at all, and can counterattack with his cannon. This is really strong and annoying to deal with in PvP.
He has a special system called Freitunier that activates if you awaken while having 3 awakening beads that gives him a cool looking helmet and unlimited ammo.

chung 2

Characters Part 2

NOW THE NEXT CHARACTERS I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT AREN’T EVEN RELEASED YET I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TALKING ABOUT THEM BUT I’LL DO IT ANYWAYS #REBEL

ara

Ara
Background
Ara used to live in a village with her family which included her devilishly handsome big brother. One day, her village disappeared for no reason at all other than her brother was now evil and decided to blow it up for no reason other than he was now evil. He then shows up as a boss in a later dungeon. Ara goes on a super quest super to make her brother less evil.

Gameplay
Ara has a spear and is really fast. Her specialty involves cancelling out of skills to attack faster by using other skills to cancel out of the other skill’s animations because fast.

She’s really freaking fast.

elesis

Elesis
Background
Elesis is an interdimensional space traveller who travelled between dimensions under South Korean game developer’s KoG’s orders. Hailing from a dimension named “Grand Chase”, she joins the Elgang as Elsword’s cool big sister that’s better than Elsword in every way because i think she’s a real cool gal, seh fites domens and doesnt afraid of anything. She also finishes up Elderp’s story so once she’s introduced, if you’re an Elderp player, you might as well just switch to playing her since she becomes the main character.

Gameplay
She wields a giant rock with a handle and swings it around to bludgeon things to death. She’s a relatively fast character and a good one to start off with, as her combos are pretty easy to pull off (later once you job advance that is).

She has a special ablitiy called: Way of the Sword
Basically, this system makes it so Elesis’s attacks fill up a guage, and depending on what attack she uses, it fills up the guage a certain way. Once she fills up the guage all the way, she gains an overpowered buff that makes her better than every other character in the entire game. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but it’s rather simple to use. A full explanation can be found here.

Wait a minute…

“The Game” – PvE

You might have noticed in that UI picture that I didn’t talk about a certain thing that I marked: The game. There’s a good reason for this: I forgot about it and don’t feel like going all the way back and editting it was going to talk about it in a later section. So I’ll talk about it here. Once you start off the game by making a character, you’ll end up in a cutscene and be called a rookie by a red headed jerk. He has no purpose in the story, but he shows up in PvP as a punching bag occasionally.

Here in this tutorial area, you’ll be able to test out how the game works. Attack the midget wearing the funky mask if you want to, and once he dies, just move right into the glowy light and stay there until the bar that says “Moving” fills up all the way. Congratulations. Now move right again because I’m sure that if you don’t, the arrow saying “GO!!!!11111!” that doesn’t shut up even if you mute the game’s sound effects will probably get on your nerves. Now you’re in the field.

field

The field is basically a place where you grind by killing monsters for no real purpose other than XP and sweet loot while you wait to be queued up for a dungeon. Speaking of dungeon, remember this? Click on it.

field 2

Be quiet game, I’m trying to teach here! Anyways, once you click on that, you’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this:

field 3

Click on “Start Dungeon” and you’ll get into a dungeon. Go you. Now go beat up every single monster in the room because that’s the only way you’re allowed to break down that invincible door over there. Sorry sanic hegehog, you can’t skip through enemies in this game.

Keep going until you reach the boss. The boss is *usually harder than the enemies in the dungeon, so extra care should be taken. Well not the bosses in Ruben because they’re ♥♥♥♥ easy and if you actually manage to die here and you’re not purposelly trying to lose, you should probably uninstall the game because it’s PROBABLY not for you.

*Usually used sparingly. Usually.

“The Game” – PvP

SO YOU’RE TIRED OF BEING A SWAGLORD BECAUSE YOU JUST CLEARED ALL OF RUBEN WITHOUT TAKING A SINGLE HIT RIGHT? I KNOW A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN GO TO SHOW OTHER PEOPLE YOUR MAD SKILLZ CALLED ARENA. DO YOU WANT ME TO SHOW YOU HOW TO GET THERE?

ONCE YOU HIT level 8 (or 10) (I was using caps lock… huh…) you’ll notice another bar next to the “Dungeon” bar that says “Arena”. If you’re feeling fine and dandy and want to beat up other players for the lulz, click on this and instead of a dungeon map popping up, your screen should look a bit like this:

pvp

If you’re feeling manly, make sure the 1v1 box is bubbled in. Don’t worry about 3v3 because 3v3 is for scrubs.
I say this because I suck at 3v3 so I don’t like it.

That 1v1 box is bubbled? Good. Click on Start Match or press F8 to be queued up for some sik pvpz. Once the system finds a person that wants to kill you, you’ll have to accept this duel match duel by pressing accept.

You’re in? Great. Using the skills that you learned from PvE, take it to the next level by beating up whichever unlucky nooblord was matched against you.

pvp 2

The game even gives you the option for a sick rematch! (Up to 3 times that is.)

So you probably won your first PvP match! Good for you! Except the person you just beat up was probably just a bot that didn’t do anything because that’s what Elsword’s arena system does for first time PvPers.

pvp 3

Yeah, he was a scrub Elderp.

You’d better be prepared. Your journey to the top of the ranking ladder is only going to get harder from here as you get matched by people who are more skilled (or are just simply playing a more overpowered class than you are using coughchungcough). But remember, never give up! Even in extreme circumstances where your opponent lags horribly, you must never give up! And if you go on a losing streak (say, a 4x losing streak) you should probably take a break. Catch a breath, then go back to sik pvp when you’re calmer and not as likely to go on tilt.

Pro tip #1: You’re probably going to get matched with laggers. Deal with it.
Pro tip #2: You’re probably going to get matched with ragers. If said rager is an Elsword, it’s nothing new. If said rager is an Aisha/Rena, they’re probably just complaining that Elsword is a better character than they are because they have no idea of how they’re supposed to counter him. Doesn’t matter if Elsword is geniunely OP or not and they’re playing an OP class, if they complain about your class, BEAT THEM UP HARD. If said rager is any other character, it’s best to just ignore them.
Pro tip #3: You should learn to hate PvP because PvP sucks, just go to the sparring NPC who’s named Camilla and just go sparring. It’s a lot less stressful and probably a lot more fun.

ADVANCED $#!7

Now that basics are out of the way, we can get into advanced tactics, like who makes a good mid hero, and if you should have a jungler, and should you trilane. Oh, this game isn’t Dota 2, mibad. It’s Elsword, and despite its simplistic nature at first glance, there’s a lot of under the curtain stuff going on. So let’s get started.

SUBCLASSES
Once you hit level 15, you’ll receive a screen that looks like this:

subclass

OBVIOUSLY IT’S GOING TO BE IN ENGLISH AND CHANGE DEPENDING ON WHAT CHARACTER YOU’RE PLAYING, BUT YOU /SHOULD GET THE IDEA.

Once you get this, you can choose to advance into a flat out better subclass. Let’s take Chung as an example because the picture I just posted was of his 3 job paths. On the left, you have Shooting Guardian, a guy that now has a pistol so he can participate in every other military action movie. On the right, you have Fury Guardian, who is mad because Chung still doesn’t know what gender he is. And she still swings around that giant cannon like Donkey Kong throws barrels. In the middle is Shelling Guardian, who makes explosions that go pew pew. These three job paths give Chung access to new job exclusive combos and skills (tell that to Elesis) and are generally better than the normal jobless character in every way.

You can job change by starting a quest chain from looking on the quest board in Elder or buying a cash shop item. Either way, you’ll only be allowed to choose one class, so choose wisely! Of course you could always spend like $20 or more on changing your class again but that’s just plain stupidthoughtful on the developer’s part.

KNOCKING DOWN
SO YOU JUST CHANGED YOUR JOB CLASS AND ARE FEELING PRETTY GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF, NO? YOU GOT SOME SWEET NEW TOYS TO PLAY WITH AND ARE JUST ITCHING TO SHOW EVERYBODY HOW COOL YOU ARE RIGHT?

Hold up there, kiddo. Before you go ahead and do that, let me explain to you how knocking down works. You know that combo you do right? The one where you just press zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and win? YEAH THAT ♥♥♥♥ AIN’T GONNA WORK BUDDY. You see, when you knock down an enemy, be it in PvE or PvP, bad things happen. Nobody likes bad things. Certain combos knock enemies down, and you’ll notice this by the fact that they now have a red outline around them (or, if you’re in PvP, you can’t even attack them). When they’re in this state, guess what? THEY TAKE REDUCED DAMAGE, SLOWING DOWN THE ENTIRE RUN. IN THE WORST CASE SCENARIO, THIS CAN GET YOU AND YOUR PARTY KILLED. I’ll repeat that for extra emphasis. THEY TAKE REDUCED DAMAGE, SLOWING DOWN THE ENTIRE RUN. IN THE WORST CASE SCENARIO, THIS CAN GET YOU AND YOUR PARTY KILLED.

Do you have the in your head? Okay then. Here’s a list of things to do:

  • Figure out which combos you have that knockdown. Almost all the time, pressing zzzzzz and xxxxxxx results in a knockdown.
  • Figure out which combos launch. You can tell if a combo launches by the fact that they don’t actually knock down an enemy immediately and instead sends enemies flying up into the air.
  • Don’t use these combos unless they’re for a specific reason.
  • Figure out which skills you have that knockdown. If they knockdown, but do massive damage (like Hell Stone) it’s fine to use them every once in a while.
  • No, Mega Slash and Illusion Strike are not good skills. Not even when they’re maxed out and you have those swag PvP titles.

Knocking down is bad, however there are circumstances where it’s good to knockdown. For example, if you’re dealing with a group of mobs and just want to get to one specific enemy, you can knock down as a form of crowd control. Another example is if you’re going to do a skill that launches people (like Hell Stone. Hell Stone is really overpowered. Did I say that before?) and you want to feel good about yourself getting all the hits in, go ahead and knock down. (If you actually do that, that’s bad. Unfortunately, I’m a guilty user of that tactic because it gives you a nice combo score that I otherwise wouldn’t have had. huehuehuehuehuehue)

Launching enemies is also an iffy subject to talk about. On one hand, it’s usually not as bad as knocking down because if you’re skilled enough, you can “catch” them before they land on the ground and enter knocked down status by attacking them. However, this can easily mess up somebody’s combo that’s already going on, or make people miss their skills. Launching things into the air is generally not recommended unless you know what you’re doing.

ICE BURNERS
These things are a cash shop item that give you a chance to get some swag costumes. They look really cool, but it’s essentially a lottery system.

yeah gg

#TheEnd

There’s a lot more that I can cover, but I don’t feel like it. If you have a suggestion for anything I can add to this guide, please feel free to comment.

Unless you’re just being a ♥♥♥♥ about it. That makes me sad. and i dunt like to be sad.

Now go have some important links:

https://enforums.elswordonline.com/forum.php
These are the game’s official forums. If you have a question to ask and aren’t afraid about getting your mind scarred for life, feel free to drop by here.

http://elwiki.net/w/Main_Page
Elwiki is a fanmade site that generally contains useful information about the game. It’s not official, but it should get the job done.

Just be warned that it seems to suffer from a lot of internet attacks so the website would probably end up downed and broken when that does happen.

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