Farming Skills Up for the Awoken Chinese

A commonly asked question is: what should I farm for to skill up my Awoken Chinese, jewels or pys? Well, there’s really no straight answer for that, but hopefully some of my past experiences can help you decide for yourself.

Py Farming – Alt. Coin Dungeons

I can tell you from extensive py farming for my Meimei System that it was extremely time consuming, tedious and mentally draining. I’ve spent over 75,000 total stamina in various alt. coin dungeons my entire PAD career and my drop rate has been about 2,000 per py. This is an acceptable rate for a guaranteed skill up, but there’s something to be said for the stress and/or anxiety endured when encountering pys that don’t drop or, even worse, when you don’t even encounter one after a couple thousand stamina. I’d prefer never to farm alt. coin dungeons again.

Spirit Jewels – Mythical Invades

The only realistic alternative to pys we currently have on NA is farming Spirit Jewels. I’m not sure what the exact invade rate for mythical descendeds is, but the most common numbers I see thrown out are somewhere between 10% and 15%. That means a jewel, on average, costs about 333 to 500 stamina per jewel or, more to the point, an awoken Chinese skill up can range anywhere from 1,332 to 2,500 stamina depending on the current skill up bonus. In the best case, this is more stamina (and likely time) efficient than py farming coin dungeons, but you also lose the residual benefits of +eggs, rank exp and fodder exp. You also have to play the RNG skill up game which no one is a fan of.

Spirit Jewels – Rush Invades

One alternative I hadn’t really considered until now is farming Rushes for jewels, particularly now that we’re in the middle of a 1.5x invade rate for said dungeons. After skilling up two more Awoken Hakus this way, here are my results:

Spirit Jewel Rush Farming – 1.5x Invade Rate
Date	Dungeon	Runs	Stamina	Jewels	Jewel / Run	Stam / Jewel
8/30/2015	Devil	25	2475	6	0.24	412.50
9/2/2015	God	68	6732	23	0.34	292.70
Total		93	9207	29	0.31	317.48

One would think that Rushes would have a significantly better rate than mythical descendeds, especially due to the invade bonus. It’s quite possible that I got extremely unlucky, but either way I’m not confident to conclude anything from this small sample size. I think, at best, I can speculate that the stamina rates for this and mythicals are within a reasonable range of each other. It may not be worth it to farm Rushes without the bonus, though.

That being said, one huge advantage Rushes present is time efficiency. If you have a team that can consistently speed clear Rushes (like the upcoming Shiva Dragon) and you’re short on time but not money, then this seems like a pretty good alternative since you can farm almost twice as fast. Then again, if you’re not short on money then you probably have a ROdin farming team for speedfarming alt. T2 technicals which may just be better for time efficiency.

Future Possibilities

In the future we’ll have the Kaliseum and the MP Shop as alternative outlets. The Kaliseum may be a decent place to farm if you can put together a relatively consistent team, but you’re still at the mercy of RNG, both in the dungeon itself and for which py drops. The MP Shop doesn’t even seem reasonable for the excessively wealthy and should only be an option if you’re extremely desperate.

Conclusion

It’s kind of shocking how fast you burn through stones when farming Rushes. Once I got over that initial shock, I was totally fine doing it. While the net rewards were significantly less than farming alt. coin dungeons, the time saved was a boon. I max skilled two Awoken Hakus in two days (around four hours total) where it took me almost two months to get the Woodpys for four Awoken Meimeis. Expensive? Yes, but the time saved is worth it, especially when it can be devoted to something more important (like 3x normals). Going forward, I’ll probably avoid py farming as much as possible, at least when it comes to the awoken Chinese. I still have plans for Leilan and Karin and I guess I could finish off one more Haku to finish the system; I’ll probably do all of this through Rushes if we keep getting the 1.5x invade bonus.

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If you’re interested in farming Rushes in the future and want to know the schedule, here’s how you figure it out:

• The invades rotate every three hours, in the order of fire, water, wood, light, and dark.
• The rotation starts when the first Rush of the event starts.
• The rotations continue in order through each following Rush until there are no more Rushes.

Or you can just check out this handy document (not mine).

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This is the team I used for farming:

I think God Rush is by far the easiest for the Meimei System. The team can’t survive both Zeus Dios’s and Beelzebub’s preemptives without healing in between, so I generally used the free turn Dios gives to do so (although a few resist latent tamas can address this issue in the future). Perseus can be used here to provide the necessary hearts and I often had enough orbs to kill Dios. Oh yeah, he also gives skill bind immunity against the invades. Since there’s only five floors you have a board change for each so you don’t need the full system or to stall to restart it.

The next easiest is Dragon Rush. I would use the same team as above so I could skill bind resist the invades, but since there’s seven floors you can’t faceroll quite as fast. Luckily there are plenty of floors to stall on so it’s trivial to restart the system train.

All of the other Rushes don’t have near 100% certainty. With Devil Rush, you’re either taking a chance of getting bound by Kraken or getting skill bound by the invade. They’re both survivable, but greatly reduce the chances of a clear. Vampire’s gravity also requires a heal before Satan’s preemptive, which can also be annoying. Hera Rush should be much easier in the future once the team can use dark resist latent awakenings or Awoken Susano to survive Divine Queen Hera’s preemptive.