Dragon Nest SEA Hybrid FTG Gold Farming Guide

Dragon Nest SEA Hybrid FTG Gold Farming Guide by Arrogance

I would like to share a few tips on how to decently earn gold with the Hybrid FTG system. With this guide, you will most likely earn 500-800g in an afternoon/a couple of hours, probably even more if you are lucky. But this won’t be just a guide that will point you to where you should grind all day. I’m going to aim to teach you how to properly manage your resources, how you can save gold, so you can focus your finances on more important things.

Keep in mind that this guide might not be for everyone/every character. There are other ways to earn gold and there are also different factors that might affect the results. I’m also not going to do videos and show how to run dungeons. There are other people who are better at that.

Basically what I’m saying is this is just a simple guide to constantly earn gold decently till you hit the jackpot drop. Luck plays a big role in getting gold in this game. One day you are strugling to complete your set, the next day you get a 3rd stat FD plate and complete everything. Some days you really just get really lucky, and this guide will help you earn on a constant rate so you can get decent equips, till you get yourself that one lucky drop.

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First things first, before thinking of earning gold, you might want to consider the following:

Get Your Character to the Level Cap ASAP

Whenever an apprentice asks me how he can earn gold and get good equips like mine, I always tell them to focus on getting to max level first. This is because your income will jumpstart once you get to max level, even with the new FTG sytem. But wait, your FTG consumption is greatly hightened when you reach level cap right? Yes, that is correct. But even still the benefits still outweigh the disadvantages:

• You have better skills especially your ultimate skill, which mean you can clear dungeons faster.
• You can now participate in nests, which will jumpstart your earnings because of the chance to get epic plates and, if lucky, get FD plates worth more than 10k.
• Chaos runs will be easier.
• You can now start getting apprentices and earn more gold from there, which solves the FTG problem.

Before you get to max level, do not buy any expensive items. Restrain yourself from buying low level sets and save your gold. I would even recommend using overupgraded green equips till you are max level. Why? It’s because once you hit the level cap, all the stuff that you bought will be mediocre and rendered useless compared to what equipment you can wear when you hit max level. In grinding parties, no one will care if you are only wearing green equips, especially now when it’s so easy to reach max level with the new Hybrid FTG system. Once you hit the level cap, that’s the time to get your first rare set. Try to at least upgrade your rare sets to +8. That should be enough for you to participate in nests.

Get a Decent Guild

A guild composed of real life friends is the best guild that you can join. If you don’t have friends who play, join a guild that will help you in nest parties no matter what gear you have. There are other more hardcore guilds out there who require really good gear and check out your skills in PVP before letting you join. Stay away from these hardcore guilds. I’m not saying they are not good guilds, but these guilds are not what you need at the moment. You will get to that level someday.

But for now what you need is a good guild that will help you grow along with them. If the guild is good, you do not need epic equipment to join their nesting parties, they will not curse you for dieing once at Archbishop Normal, they will share the crystals/extracts in nests and they will join you in farming dungeons/RC hunts. In these guilds, the members are trustworthy enough to let you use their guild storage, or let them handle each other’s equips, which will play a big role in earning gold. More on that later.

Consider Buying A Pet

I bought a pet a couple of months ago and I’ve never been happier with the decision. It’s only 5500 CC and you don’t need to dress it up. I think it’s also a good way to say thank you to the publishers and the devs for bringing this awesome game to you.

If you don’t have ways to buy one, ask your Dad for his credit card and tell him it’s an early Christmas present, ask your friend to buy you one and do him favors (do his homework, help him paint the house, anything), get a job at McDonnalds and buy one yourself..

I consider my pet to be much more important than my costume because pets makes farming so much easier even with the Hybrid FTG system. The pet pays for itself overtime and it makes everything so much faster. It also gives decent stat bonuses.

The pet food, Horn Of Life, costs 1000g at Westwood at the time of writing, that’s just one or two days of farming gold. You still have 28 days to maximize your pet. What I do is I always keep one Horn Of Life in my inventory and when the time comes when I need to use it, that means it’s time to farm gold and pay attention to my pet. Always check TH for Horn Of Life prices. Buy one when cheap. Consider it as an investment.

Focus On One MAIN Character Alone

I have guildmates who have multiple characters in one account, all of them max level. I know that having multiple characters would mean more nest runs (which greately increases the chance of getting good drops). But that would also mean you need to invest more time and gold with these characters. This will also compel you to give them the best equips like your main if you are OC like me.

I only have one main character and it already requires a lot of time and patience from me with the current content (and when you follow this guide). I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to get alternate characters, I just don’t think you need more than one character to earn decent amounts of gold. I only have one character, so all my gold are focused on him alone. It makes everything easier. Sure you can create a separate character if your main is slow at farming. But do not invest too much on it and still focus on your main.

Hardcore Gears Are Overrated

As of writing and with the current cap, I can bravely say that harcore gears are overrated. By hardcore gear, I mean +10 nest sets with 1000k+ FD and max criticals. These setup is awesome if you can get them of course, but is it really needed? Right now, not really. With decent knowledge of current nest bosses, you can clear any nest with only +8 rares.

Yes, clearing Riverwort Ruins within 3 mins is cool, but does a couple of mins difference in dungeon clearing really matter? You may say that getting these sets are needed for SDN or for Guild Wars. But you will come to that, don’t worry about it. You might want to worry more about knowing the strategies involved in each SDN section rather than minding your equips, because clearing each SDN section is not as easy as releasing shamans at Archbishop nest.

What I’m basically saying is do not force yourself too much on getting the best equips immediately. Knowing this will lessen the pressure and keep yourself from purchasing items indiscriminately. Taking away the presure will let you invest your gold wisely. It will also make you enjoy the game more, because that’s what the game is all about. Having fun.

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Now that you have the proper mindset, are you ready to earn some good gold? Before going further, I would like to say that there is no secret way in earning gold fast. As cliche as it may sound, it’s still all about hard work and lots of luck. If you want to earn gold, you need to work for it. Here are some of my ways in earning gold:

The Apprentice System

This is probably the most profitable way in earning gold as a beginner. When you hit the level cap, your FTG now consumes a lot faster. You will probably consume everything in about 4-5 runs, and no FTG means incredibly low drop rate. To get around this problem, you need to get a random low level player and assign them as your apprentice (click on them, then click master request). Running dungeons with an apprentice will give you almost unlimited FTG and unlimited durability. Plus, Abyss dungeons gives you free Dimensional Keys when you finish them with an apprentice, which you can sell for more gold.

There are two ways to utilize the apprentice system:

Boosting lowbies at DTMI

You do this by getting apprentices at Calderock Ch1, then running Sigh Canyon and DTMI with your apprentice til he is lvl24. Here you get a chance to get low level skill plates.

These skill plates are actually a lot more expensive compared to mid level dungeons because more types of characters need them. Noteworthy would be warrior’s Side Kick Plates. DTMI is also a pretty straightforward map and it has mobs that are tightly packed and easy to take out. You also don’t need to kill everything here. With decent gear you can clear both dungeons in less than 2 mins, even around 1:20 if you are fast. In an afternoon you can probably farm about 30-40 stamps, even more, which you can use to seal plates or High Grade Codes.

The benefits of doing low level boosting are:

• You get lots of Incomplete Stamps which can be used to seal High Grade Codes. Where do you get High Grade Codes? More on that later.

• Since you get free Keys every run, you also get to farm Fragments of Skills, which can be traded to epic skill pouch at your local heraldry scholar. Level 50 skill plates are quite expensive now. Getting skill plates through Fragments mean you don’t need to spend gold to buy them, so you can invest your gold on more important things. You can also sell the Fragments at NPCs for gold but for me, it’s still better to keep them and exchange it for skill pouches. With one afternoon you should be able to farm around 600-800 Fragments, even more. Which mean at least one low level skill pouch per afternoon. That’s like one guaranteed gold bunny per day. Speaking of gold bunnies…

• You get a chance to encounter gold bunnies, which means more skill plates of course. How do you sell these skill plates? By using Inc stamps. Skill plates only need a couple of seals. Just make sure to seal the expensive ones. Just NPC sell the other lesser plates

• You get green NPC gifts which can be exchanged for guild points. More on this later.

• You may also get Low Grade Diamond codes which you can use to spark Fatal Kara Rings. A Kara ring with critical and atk pot still costs around 1k+ gold.

• If you have a pet, you will also earn additional cash from all the rough gems and random loots that you get. Set the party looting at free for all and all ordinary drops will be yours. The apprentices wont mind this because they are focused on leveling anyway.

• Again, how can you forget getting one extra key per run when you have a lowbie with you? (I’m not talking about the payment but the extra one you get when you have a lowbie)

Ordinary Agate Farming

This is the traditional way of farming for gold and I want to include this because it is still effective if you know how to adapt in the new Hybrid FTG system. The most popular right now (courtesy of Kazu) is Forsaken Islet Core Masters. Even at 0 FTG you can still get 6-8 agates per run.

But I think it’s just better to do it with an apprentice. Because of the new cap, you may now apprentice up to lvl39 players. Get a lvl32 apprentice and farm FIC Masters all the way. When I do this I can get at least 13-15 stacks of agates in just a couple of hours with my pet. That should still net you a couple of hundred gold.

The NPC Gifting System

A lot of people neglect the NPC Gifting system for some reason. When you gift NPCs, you earn guild points which can be exchanged at Dishonest Merchand Pero for some neat stuff. Each NPC have different associations (and earns different points). Press Y for the details on each NPC’s affiliation and your current points.

Golden Goose points can give you VIP tickets to lessen repair costs and sell more from all the loot (especially important if you have a pet). Free Adventurer points also get you Octagonal Waters which costs 90-100g per 100pcs. But the most important one is the Cassius Palace points which can be exchanged for epic code pouches.

Cassius Palace point farming is probably the best way to save money when you start crafting your epic equipment because you no longer need to buy the epic codes. Not buying codes for your epic equipment means MORE money to spend for other things like overupgrades or stat plates. Unfortunately, for now, the Guild Shop doesn’t have high grade code pouches yet (CC removed it before the 50 cap update). So you still need to wait for CC to update that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t save up on points. So how do you get gifts?

Again, boosting apprentices. Ord Agate/Fragment Farming and Gift Farming goes hand in hand because every silver bunny gives you two green gifts. Green gifts will give you 60 guild points each.

Whenever I boost apprentices at DTMI, for the whole afternoon I can collect at least 25-30 green gifts for Event Planner Irene alone (Cassius Palace points). Thats 1500-1800 Cassius points already. And thats just the gifts for Irene, not counting the gifts for other NPCs for more profit and the actual items that the NPC sends you everytime you give them a certain amount of gifts (these are usually rough or ordinary gems, waters, or just plain crap).

If you choose to grind at Forsaken Islet Core, you also get ordinary grade gifts, which again, can be gifted to NPCs all around Saint Heaven for about 20 points. Having a pet is especially important for this, though. When grinding at FIC, just turn on the Auto-Roll feature so you don’t need to press Y or N when you get loots (The auto-roll icon is above your 5th skill icon, at the left side of the mini-map. It looks like a small dice. Click that and click the check box)

Lotus Marsh Abyss Dungeon Grind

Lotus Marsh dungeons are longer and a bit harder than Saint Heaven dungeons. But the good thing about LM dungeons is you get “low level” royal chests when you complete certain requirements in runs. These low level chests are unlike the real royal chests (which nets you a ton of polished gems), but they still have the chance to yield High Grade Codes and one or two polished gems. The requirements are pretty easy to follow. Here’s an in-depth guide on each dungeon, courtesy of Vaahneon and TimeFox:

http://forum.cherryc…marsh-dungeons/

When grinding LM Abyss dungeons, party up with 3 other guild mates. One guild member should be low level so you won’t run out of FTG easily. If you don’t have one available, just get a random non-lvl50 player.

So which Lotus Marsh dungeon to grind? If you want to farm purely for High Grade Codes, just do Riverwort Ruins Abyss. But I would suggest grinding at Dragon Follower’s Base. This dungeon is a bit longer and may be a bit harder. But if you know how to dodge the boss’ attacks, with a party you may complete this in 4mins or less on average gears. The good thing about non-Riverwort Ruins dungeons is, apart from getting High Grade Codes, there is also a change to get green crafting mats, which are quite expensive (about 80g+ ea as per writing).

West Armory Abyss RC Grind

This method used to be an underground thing but a few people at GD spilled the beans and revealed it to everyone. Basically what you do is you run West Armory Abyss only until you get to open the “low grade” RC, which has a pretty good chance to drop polished gems, rare weapons, and High Grade Codes. Here’s how you do it:

• Remove all your armors, just use your two weapons (so you wont spend too much on repairs)
• Go to West Armory Abyss
• When the first door opens, kill the first two mobs at the left and right side so the 2nd door will open
• Run straight to the middle (passing over the red tiled floor) and destroy all walls in front of you (ignore the monsters first till you destroy all walls).
• Destroying all the walls first will reveal the low grade RC chest (there will be an announcement and a distinct sound if you did it correctly). Now you need to kill the scepter monsters and the first Elf monsters from the first spawned mob. You don’t need to kill the box monsters and the newly spawned ones, only the original mob.
• After killing the scepters and the elfs, new mobs will spawn at the north and two golems will be released from the small room at the north-east. This is where the low grade RC is located.
• Run towards the RC, evading all monsters, and open the chest. Pick up all loots and then let yourself be killed.
• Press F12, stage select, then repeat from step 2 until you need to repair your weapons.

This method, if done correctly, will give you a lot of polished gems, rare weapons, and a chance to get high grade codes from the low grade RC, even without FTG. It’s a lot faster than normal LM dungeon runs because you only need to clear half of Armory West (about 2 mins). The disadvantage of doing this is you wont be getting any green mats, and you need to dodge a lot because you wont be wearing any armors. But the chance of getting High Grade Codes is pretty high.

Chaos Runs

Chaos runs are not very profitable at the moment because we just got the new cap. Once the new 50 cap Chaos Dungeon arrives, it should also give you extra income.

Managing Seal Stamps

An easy and profitable way to dispose off all the epic items that you get from the farming that you did is to actually buy seal stamps at TH, seal the items then sell (You don’t say?).

Let me explain. What you do is when you buy seal stamps, making sure that you can sell these stamps again (Times in TH:2). For some reason, seal stamps become more expensive when there’s less of it in a stack. A 100 stack of seal stamps costs 55g per stamp (5500g) while a stack of 50 stamps costs 65g each (3250g). So always buy stacks of 100 stamps, then consume 50 stamps, and then sell the rest for even more profit!

What I do is I make sure I save up gold enough to buy 100 stack of seals everytime, so I can seal items and sell them off. After consuming/selling the seals, I buy another stack of seals, THEN that’s the time I buy my needed items from the profit that I gained from doing this. This way you wont have epic items clogging your storage and you always have a way to sell binded stuff.

Also when choosing what items to seal, make sure that the selling price of the items is more than the cost of sealing it. A High Grade Crystal Code should sell More than 220g each (if seals costs 55g each). Anything lower is not worth selling.

Playing the Market

Ultimately, the fastest way to earn large amounts of gold once you are able to save up a decent mount is to play the market and predict the changes in prices of items. This however requires experience and lots of gold. There are other guides out there that can better explain how to do this. But if you want to earn lots of gold, your goal is to be able to save up so you can play the market and triple your earnings.

Farm System

The farm system will yield a good amount of gold especially if you have the time to farm Revival Apples. There are other guides in this forum that can help you know more about the Farm System.
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A FEW MORE TIPS TO EARN MORE GOLD

Complete all NPC Quests

It’s easier to earn guild points if you are able to gift everyting to all NPCs.Take the time to complete all NPC quests to unlock their gifting system, especially those who are in the palace (Cassius Palace members) and Lotus Marsh (Free Adventurer). But before doing that, make sure to…

Consume Your FTG First Before Doing Quests

This is so you’d be able to maximize the use of your FTG. Don’t just indescriminately consume your FTG by doing daily quests and after two abyss dungeons, whine in the forums about how FTG sucks, etc. Make use of your FTG wisely. Party up, don’t be a loner. If you insist on being one, don’t expect to earn gold as much like the others.

Spark Sealed Epic Items

If you dont know yet, you can actually spark items without unsealing them. So if you have extra High Grade Codes lying around, you may choose to buy epic equipment and spark them without unsealing so you can sell them off later. Or keep those epic items/accessories that you get from nests (they are sealed and ready to be sold off). I have a few bravery crystal codes lying around, so I decided to buy a Totem Sword for 2kg and spark it. I got an Atk Str Agi spark, so I sold the sword for 4kg. That’s what you call fast money. If you don’t get good sparks then just keep the equipment in your inventory and spark them again later

Create Merchants for Selling Wares

Create other characters for the sole purpose of using them as merchants to sell goods. An account can have max of 4 characters. Having 3 other merchant characters mean 90x more TH slots per week, and even more storage space for you. Transfer items by sending them thru mail, OR a better way is to ask you guild leader to invite the merchants in the guild so you can transfer items via guild storage. You don’t need a TH ticken when you do this. You have a trust-worthy guild, right?

Share Codes with Guildmates

One other good thing about having a trust-worthy guild is you can share your codes with each other. You only need the codes for your class anyway, so for your extra codes, you may use them to spark your guildmate’s sealed equipment at a lower fee. Or you can agree to sparking each other’s equipment (like you, they have a lot of codes lying around that they cannot sell). This way you don’t have to buy a lot of codes for your equipment. BUT, again, you need to be able to trust your guidmates with your gear. This is not possible with any other random guild. In fact, I don’t even recommend it if you do not know your guildmates in real life.

Manage your Apprentices

When the Hybrid FTG system arrived, a lot of people complained that they cannot farm with their apprentices because they always leave them after just a few runs, or they are always AFK when you need them. Well, for me it’s all about managing and taking care of your apprentices. When looking for apprentices to grind with, I NEVER ask them to pay me gold/keys. You will never get decent apprentices from this. I even give my apprentices all the low grade epic codes (except for diamonds). I also give them extra stuff after every session.

Because of this, my apprentices are always happy. They are willing to grind with me for the whole day. That is so much better compared to asking them to pay you keys every run and earn just a couple of gold, only to be left by your apprentice after just 5 runs and waste your apprentice slot for the day. When you take care of your apprentice, they will never leave you and you will never worry about the 3 apprentice limit. You can also rotate them. If they are not online and you want to grind, just send them a mail telling them you will just re-apprentice them later, expell them, then get another one.

Your apprentice will appreciate your efforts so much they wont even mind if you get all the loot whenever you grind. Trust me on this. When they are 50, they will still be thankful and you now have a trusty companion in nests.

Focus on Buying the Important Stuff First

Never buy things that will not help you in the long run. Mounts are cool and all but emblems are expensive and they are ultimately useless as of now. You don’t need to overupgrade your nest sets past +7 immediately. Try to reach the critical cap first so you can grind faster. Buy only the stuff that will help you even more.

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I hope this guide will be able to help others who are still oblivious on how to earn gold with the FTG system. Again, like I said, there is no secret way in earning gold. It’s still about hard work and lots of luck.

Eventually you will hit the gold mine and complete your gear, or maybe find out a better way on how to earn gold. When that happens, I hope you also go back to the community and share your knowledge with the others, just like those who has helped you along the way.