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You know, I was all hype for trying to get this armor bc of the set effect so I bought it with gold. Later found out that the set effect is only 1% movement speed increase. Meanwhile my colossus valiance--
abyss drag v col valiance
33 def v 29
25 prot v 17
9 m. def v 13
7 m. prot v 13
imo 4 def, 8 prot and a decrease in magic defenses + 1% movement speed isn't worth it. I sold it right back.
Getting strong quickly is difficult to do in Mabinogi unfortunately without tons and tons of readily available AP. As stated above it's better to focus on one or two talents. In the beginning your main sources of AP will be your daily rebirths, and a few select generations. Talents such as dual guns, puppetry or ninja are hard to get started in and you want 800 cumulative of the stats that particular talent uses (ie. 400 str and 400 int for dual guns)
I always like to recommend beginners stick through with combat all the way up until Master (especially if you're an elf or giant) just so you can survive taking a hit and also to learn basic combat in the game. Unfortunately you won't be able to do Shadow Wizard comfortably solo for a long time yet (and honestly, Battle for Taillteann 2 is better solo). If you want to join Shadow Wizard spam parties in channel 1 you'll need an expert talent to join. Do keep in mind some parties will kick you if you're not contributing to the party.
Divine Link:
Getting to the point where you solo most content can be done by cutting some corners. If you can manage to finish g19 and g20 to obtain the skill Divine Link, you can basically make your pet your own personal tank after you train it up (pet age matters when you level it up). You'll be missing out on story and have no idea what's going on but I highly recommend trying to get this skill.
This is if you somewhat know what you're doing however. Finishing g19 and parts of g20 are VERY challenging for lower-leveled players.
Music:
Another thing to look at for soloing is ranking up your music skills. Getting r5+ song allows you to use any music buffs with any piece of equipment (although I recommend getting both song and playing instrument to r1 early). This will allow you to use Lullaby and Battlefield Overture. Lullaby's r1 duration is only 9 seconds, but the higher your Bard talent level the longer it will go. At Master Bard, Lullaby will go for 39 seconds, which allows you deal with multi-aggro efficiently. Battlefield Overture is also important because at r1 it will increase your attack by over 20%, which is a significiant amount of damage.
Personally, using the method of Music+Close Combat led me to solo most Hardmode content on my giant by ttl level 700. For elf, it is significantly harder due to the lack of str and defense. It *is* possible to do Music+Archery as an elf but it requires you have Divine Link, which can be difficult for beginners to obtain. It would probably be easiest to do Chains+Music in all honesty.
Money:
Early game you are not going to have resources or sustainability. However, Episode 7 of Saga happens to be very easy and any character no matter the level can do it. If you were to do Saga 7 once a day, hoard your boxes and open them all on Thursday you would get 210k gold a week per character you do it on. With 5 characters, this is 1m a week. Not only that, you'll be getting Saga coupons by opening these boxes. You can spend the coupons on a variety of things, but for money you can spend 3 for a certain color dye. If you manage to get lucky with a black dye, easy 1m+.
Another method is to farm adventure seals. Doing the Hillwen, Shyllien part time jobs, and the large nails will land you 3 seals a day per character. With 5 characters that is 15 seals a day (adventure seals are bank tradeable). Over the course of 24 days you can save up 350 adventure seals and buy a Royal Knight Armor. You can choose to save this, or sell it. Do keep in mind that if you choose to sell it, flooding the market will make the price go down.
I mentioned earlier about Shadow Wizard and Battle for Taillteann 2. Shadow Wizard gives 26k gold + drops from monsters. Battle for Taillteann gives 17k gold + drops from monsters. If you ever get to the point where soloing BFT2 is better, I recommend doing that if you don't have an efficient party for Shadow Wiz since BFT2 would give more gold/min.
Weapons:
A quick and dirty way to get some easy damage is to equip Black Dragon Knight weapons. For humans and giants, the BDK sword has a max damage of over 200 which is a very high amount early game. Elves can't use this but there is a BDK bow which also hits very hard. For quick dirty elf melee damage I recommend a beam sword.
Expert Talent AP:
Training every talent up to Expert will net you around ~2500 AP or something so it's best to do this while you're under level 1000 so you don't pay fees in gold. Do keep in mind for efficiency it's good to train while leveling under 1k. You don't want to sit there at level 950 with 10 talents untrained to expert. You'll lose out on AP if you don't continue to level past 1k.
AP in general:
Do your generations (check wiki for which ones give AP). Shamala (g17, 80 AP) and Saga (g18, both parts, 300+ AP) should be done early as difficulty spikes with higher ttl. Pre-1k I would try to get at least level 50 every day, or when you can. Get your talent you're working on to expert and ask around if someone can take you on the daily missions.
If you're willing to take a risk, there is always baltane missions, which are obtainable once you have access to Squires in Avalon. Keep in mind this will require you to have divine link + a high leveled pet to do efficiently. You must be between current level 60-100 to do basic mode. The one I recommend is called Nowhere to Run and each monster killed gives you ~4.4k exp. You can use modifiers such as Baltane Crystals and 2x Combat EXP potions for more and more AP. Using a Baltane Crystal x3 and a 2x Combat EXP potion will land you over 20k exp per monster you kill. This will require you to put out ~400 damage constantly, while taking VERY heavy hits which is why Divine Link is needed.
Exploration AP is easy to do also. You can run things like Longa Normal, Par Normal to get Artifacts to turn in for AP. You can also do Arc Lich sketching which is a high-risk, high-reward quest that anyone can do (I recommend the guide by fail5xsuccess on youtube).
If you're training a talent but are a bit tight on AP, keep in mind masteries that are not Combat, Production, Lance, Magic, Armor, Shield, Shuriken can be skipped over for a bit.
If you are wanting to min/max your character for a certain stat (which works very well for giants I might add) the Stats and Skills page on the Mabi wiki is a great tool to see what you should be training next.
As there is no other way to get your character strong other than having AP and weapons, you'll have to be a bit patient. Grind your gold when you can and take opportunities (like this event) as you see them.
