Hero Reference

Table of Contents

• What this guide doesn't contain
• Class breakdown
• Skill allocation (1st to 4th job)
• Hyper skill allocation
• Skill explanations
• Nodes (V Matrix)
• Link skills
• Inner ability
• Legion
• Hyper stats
• 1-hand or 2-hand?
• Sword or axe?
• Training spots (200+)
• Videos
• Appendix

What this guide doesn't contain

My goal in writing this guide is answer any question a player might have that is specific to the hero class (the explorer warrior sub-class). I will omit things that I think are too subjective or not directly related to hero, like optimal equipment which is subject to change and mostly shared by other warrior subclasses that use STR. I also won't include a level-by-level description of each skill as that info is easily available elsewhere.

In general I would say this guide is for experienced players who have questions that people who don't main hero are unlikely to be able to answer. Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful.



Class breakdown

This section is for players who are considering hero as a class to start playing, or players who aren't clear on the "identity" of hero as a class.

Defining positive attributes

• Easy to pick up
• Easy to master: perfect play does not involve managing many cooldowns or comboing skills together
• High single target damage
• Fast skills that don't leave you vulnerable and are easy to weave with jumps to keep moving
• 100% stance (knockback resistance to normal enemies)
• Strong mobbing (ability to kill monsters quickly when training) in certain maps after 5th job
• Tons of final damage %
• Scales well with gear because of above (hero buffs provide a lot of final damage % instead of att %, boss%, damage %, and crit chance %, and as such when gaining those stats they suffer less from diminishing returns than other classes)
• Possible to job change to paladin without requiring any gear changes when using sword+shield (not worth it though)
• Flashy and satisfying to play (this one is subjective but I'm leaving it in)

Defining drawbacks

• Not party or support-focused
• Much worse damage when forced to turn off single target mode (ex. multi body part bosses or multi-boss encounters)
• Low durability besides high hp (no resist-death, few ways to avoid 1-hit kills)
• Extremely poor self healing in situations where you cannot use potions freely
• Soloing bosses with adds (ex. Gollux) requires toggling single-target mode frequently
• Poor mobbing before 5th job
• As a flipside to having high scaling, you will see poor damage until you do start getting good gear with att %, boss %, and crit chance %
• May be boring for highly mechanical players

Skill allocation (1st to 4th job)

There won't be a level-by-level skill build. The progression is quick enough that that sort of thing is no longer necessary. In general (this goes for any class), when starting a new job put 1 into each attacking skill then max out your passives first.

1st job

Slash Blast: 20 (MAX)
War Leap: 20 (MAX)
Iron Body: 20 (MAX)
Warrior Mastery: 15 (MAX)

2nd job

Brandish: 19
Combo Fury: 10 (MAX)
Weapon Booster: 10 (MAX)
Rage: 20 (MAX)
Weapon Mastery: 10 (MAX)
Final Attack: 20 (MAX)
Physical Training: 5 (MAX)

3rd job

Intrepid Slash: 14
Rush: 10 (MAX)
Panic: 20 (MAX)
Shout: 20 (MAX)
Combo Synergy: 20 (MAX)
Self Recovery: 10 (MAX)
Chance Attack: 10 (MAX)
Endure: 20 (MAX)

4th job

Raging Blow: 30 (MAX)
Puncture: 30 (MAX)
Magic Crash: 10 (MAX)
Power Stance: 30 (MAX)
Enrage: 30 (MAX)
Maple Warrior: 30 (MAX)
Hero's Will: 5 (MAX)
Advanced Combo: 30 (MAX)
Combat Mastery: 30 (MAX)
Advanced Final Attack: 30 (MAX)



Hyper skill allocation

Passive skills

• Advanced Combo Attack - Reinforce
• Advanced Combo Attack - Boss Rush
• Advanced Final Attack - Opportunity
• Raging Blow - Reinforce
• Raging Blow - Extra Strike

Explanation

There is an argument to use AFA +20 attack instead of AFA +15% trigger chance. +15% trigger chance lets AFA trigger 75% of the time instead of 60% which is a 1.25 times increase to its contribution to your DPS. Judging from DPS tests using battle stats, AFA is about 10% of my damage, so the effect of the AFA hyper skill on my DPS is about a 2% increase. For end game players, 20 ATT is not enough to increase their damage by 2% so the extra trigger chance is better.

Some extra info: ACA reinforce increases the final damage of each combo orb from 10 to 12% (total of 120% final damage or 2.2 times damage when you have 10 orbs). ACA boss rush works as expected giving you a total of 20% boss damage when you have 10 orbs. Raging blow reinforce does not increase the damage of each hit of it from 268% to 288%, rather what it does is when calculating damage (for Raging Blow only), it acts as if your damage % stat is 20% higher than it actually is.



Skill explanations

This section is to explain skills that I think are important to mention or have some peculiarities or special properties that I think are worth knowing about, especially if these are things that are not mentioned in skill description.

War Leap

This pretty much sucks compared to any thief or pirate's flash jump but it's better than when warriors had nothing. A common technique to keep moving while attacking is to jump + jump in quick succession then immediately use raging blow. If done correctly the raging blow animation will finish before landing and you will be free to move and attack without being stuck in place in raging blow. Adjusting the timing of the flash jump will let you gain more height or more distance, and the height is sometimes necessary to attack a platform above you while training.

Combo Fury

This skill is peculiar in that it does not have a listed cooldown but doesn't let you use it for about 1 second after activation. The alt-fire (hold down and activate) is useful to close distance to fast-moving bosses such as Lucid stage 2 or ones that knock you away like Lotus stage 2/3, and another interesting property is that it lets you "float" for a short time when hooking to an enemy. The range of this skill is much larger than one flash jump or Rush.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Normal


Alternate

Weapon Mastery

This passively gives you +5% Damage (total damage) if you are using an axe, and no bonus for using a sword. See the Sword or Axe section for a more complete comparison.

(Advanced) Final Attack

This skill is a little hard to see in action as it has no animation. After hitting any enemy with a skill (not basic attack), when this activates you will automatically send out a medium-range attack that only strikes 1 target. I'm unsure if it activates on every single skill including those with cooldown, but you will primarily be activating it with Raging Blow.

Advanced Final Attack has a 60% activation rate, or 75% with the applicable passive hyper skill.

Rush

This is one of your best options for mobility in boss fights as it is very quick and covers a long distance with no cooldown. Hero's Rush for some reason moves about 50-70% farther than the same Rush for paladins and dark knight. This is a great thing for training and certain bosses but can be detrimental (or at least require more practice) for bosses like Magnus and Vellum because of the falling hazards in those fights.

An important property of Rush is that during the frames where your character is moving, you are immune to special super-knockback attacks such as Magnus' sword spin (see Power Stance for more info). While it cancels knockback, it does not cancel the stun from these attacks so you will still be unable to move or attack for short time (about 1 second). Finally, remember that Rush is a damaging skill so it will trigger damage reflection where flash jump will not.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Panic

This gives you an easy way to trigger Chance Attack (1.25 damage to enemies that are stunned, frozen, or blinded) on all types of enemies (debuff lasts 40 seconds on bosses). It says it has a 90% success rate but for some reason I have never seen it fail to apply status.This skill hits multiple enemies so remember to turn off Enrage before attacking if there are multiple targets. Try not to miss as it has a high combo orb cost to use it repeatedly. This and Puncture are the two debuffs you want to have on bosses at all times.

When Cadena is released this will also benefit her link skill.

Shout

Great mobbing move but the 10 second cooldown prevents it exclusively being used for training. It cannot stun bosses, and I can't really figure out what the alt-fire is for since Panic and Puncture are 100% reliable..

Spoiler: View hitbox

Normal


Alternate

Self Recovery

This is your pitiful only source of self-healing. Funny enough, because it heals a set amount (1500) it becomes worse the higher max HP you have when in situations where enemies only deal damage based a % of your max hp (such as Cygnus).

Raging Blow

Your bread and butter skill. This is where most of your damage comes from so get used to its pitiful range and damage.. except when the skill is enhanced by having Enrage, Cry Valhalla, or Burning Soul Blade active. This is a quick skill that has bad horizontal range but good vertical reach when un-enhanced, and great horizontal (for a melee attack) and vertical range when enhanced. By default hits a large number of targets (8) which is fantastic when mobbing in enhanced mode.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Non-enhanced


Enhanced

Puncture

The description for this still is slightly misleading. Rather being able to hit debuffed enemies as if you had 20% higher critical damage, it actually lets you hits enemies as if you had 20% more damage% (the stat window stat), and only on critical hits which is significantly worse than 20% critical damage. For me, this 20% modifier only increases the damage of my attacks by about 1.04 times, and because Puncture costs time to use and is weaker than Raging Blow, the overall DPM gain of using Puncture is quite low and gets lower the higher your damage% and boss% is. It is still worth using in party situations.

It has surprising vertical range (about as good as enhanced Raging Blow) which can be useful to hit platforms above you while training. However, it is noticeably slower than Raging Blow.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Magic Crash

Only useful on older bosses that use weapon cancel (take 1 damage buff) and damage reflection, and a couple others like Dodo who use defense up. This skill cancels some buffs on use, but for weapon cancel and damage reflection it does not cancel them, only prevents the buff from being applied if it is used while magic crash is active (i.e you need to use it pre-emptively).

Power Stance

Stance works against most knockback skills, including "super-knockback" skills like from Xerxes or King Sage Cat. It does not work on skills that deal %-hp damage and ignore blink frames such as Magnus' sword spin, Lotus' 2nd/3rd stage basic attack, and Chaos Vellum's crouched unburrow attack.

Enrage

Make sure to have this on an easy-to-reach key. It goes without saying but you should always have this on unless you really need to hit multiple targets at a time as it grants you 1.25 times damage and the enhanced Raging Blow which deals increased damage and has a much larger range. Of the 3 ways to activate enhanced Raging Blow, this is the only one which can be active 100% of the time.

Rising Rage

Very tall vertical range, good horizontal range (about the same as enhanced Raging Blow). This skill used to be a lot slower (2.5x slower than Raging Blow), but some time ago they sped it up so it's about 1.5x slower than Raging Blow now.

From testing, this deals about the same DPS as enhanced Raging Blow so you don't need to use it while single target DPSing unless you are using it to activate Weapon Aura or the target is out of range for Raging Blow.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Cry Valhalla

Situational skill with a long cooldown, but gives damage so it can be used even when its other effects are not needed. The "knockdown immunity" it provides is special and works on those attacks that are unaffected by Stance (see Stance), making it useful for Lotus and Magnus. It also enhances your Raging Blow and so lets you use the enhanced hitbox for mobbing multiple enemies which Enrage restricts you from doing.

Rope Lift

Highly recommend this skill as Hero has no vertical jump or other vertical mobility. You can interrupt the skill mid-lift by pressing the skill again or jumping to prevent you from slingshotting far above where you want to go.

Burning Soul Blade

The last of the 3 skills that lets you use enhanced Raging Blow. This one has much better uptime than Valhalla and so once you learn this you will be able to use enhanced Raging Blow for training much more freely. When combined with the special node "Relentless Attack" (lower cooldown of skills when combo kills are a multiple of 50), while training you can have 70-80% uptime on enhanced Raging Blow.

The skill has two modes: attached and stationary, and you can toggle between them by pressing the skill key while summoned. If you move too far away while it is in stationary mode (about 2/3 of a screen width on wide mode), it will teleport to you and revert to attached mode. While in stationary mode, it attacks at a fixed rate of once per second. In attached mode, it attacks only when you perform an attack, but still at a max rate of once per second. Because you will generally never be able to perform an attack the moment the 1-second attack cooldown is up, it will attack slightly slower than the stationary mode.

For pure DPS, keep it attached to you as it deals higher damage. While stationary it is useful for slow-moving bosses who frequently force you to stop attacking (dojo 48f Tarantulus or sometimes Lucid stage 1), and also for training in small maps where you can move around the map without moving too far from the sword.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Attached mode attack (Enrage OFF)


Attached mode attack (Enrage ON)


Stationary mode attack (Enrage OFF)


Stationary mode attack (Enrage ON)


Stationary mode leash range (before it returns to you)

Weapon Aura

This skill is difficult to use effectively as you need to time your powerful attacks to trigger the wave. There is no indicator on your buff bar but there is a small visual effect (fire around your character's legs) which appears just before the next aura wave is ready. Personally, I don't worry about optimizing this too much but if you can time your Rising Rage and Worldreaver for this skill consistently you should see some noticeable DPM gains (maybe 2-3%?).

Worldreaver

This skill, along with making your party members upset at you, gives you about 1 second worth of invincibility on use which can be precisely timed to avoid one-shot kills or debilitating status like Tarantulus' spiderweb bind. The combo orb effect is somewhat poorly described so I will explain it here. Basically when used, it consumes (at the time of writing) 6 combo orbs and gives you a buff that is equal to the 6 combo orbs you lost. This buff is not multiplicative with your existing combo orbs buff but rather acts like "you have 6 more orbs than you actually do". What this means is when you use it, you neither gain nor lose damage, but until the buff wears off you can gain your orbs back and deal damage as if you had 16 combo orbs (10 real plus 6 from worldreaver).

This skill is strong enough even without boost nodes that against most bosses and in dojo (except vs Tarantulus) I wouldn't save it just for the invincibility.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Blitz Shield

This skill allows you to survive one-shot kills since you can temporarily have more than your max HP (if you use the shield then heal to full). It doesn't deal enough damage to justify using it whenever it comes off cooldown for DPS.

The ability to use the skill first and activate it later with no delay is useful in dojo where you have a short time before the boss spawns on each floor.

Spoiler: View hitbox

Nodes (V Matrix)

It's tough especially when under level 220 or 230 to prioritize nodes with the few slots you have. In this section I'll list the nodes you want for Boost, Skill, and Special types and an approximate rating for how important they are to help prioritize them.

• Important
• Less important
• Nice to have

Boost Nodes

• Tri-node 1: Raging Blow, Rising Rage, Final Attack
• Tri-node 2: Raging Blow, Rising Rage, Final Attack
• Tri-node 3: choose 3 from Rush, Shout, Combo Fury, Puncture, Panic
• Tri-node 4: choose 3 from Rush, Shout, Combo Fury, Puncture, Panic

When starting off with nodes if you find it hard to find tri-nodes, just get ones that can get you to level 50 Raging Blow boost as that is by far your most important skill. Rush and Shout are useful if you want nodes that help your mobbing skills.

Skill Nodes

• Burning Soul Blade
• Worldreaver
• Weapon Aura
• Rope Lift
• Erda Nova
• Decent Holy Symbol
• Decent Combat Orders
• Decent Speed Infusion
• Decent Sharp Eyes
• Blitz Shield
• Decent Advanced Blessing

Holy symbol has increased priority just cause it's great for training. If you happen to have a bishop mule then it isn't needed as much. As for the order you want to level up these skills, the nodes I would max before working on any others are your boost nodes that boost Raging Blow and the skill node for Burning Soul Blade. The rest are not high priority to get to max level, and the decent skills in particular give very little benefit to leveling them up.

You can also deprioritize decent skill nodes if you happen to have equipment with those decent skills on them and don't mind switching to use them. Decent Holy Symbol is the only one that does not appear on equipment.

Special Nodes

• Relentless Attack (for training)
• Fatal Strike I (for bossing)
• Boss Slayer II (for bossing)

Because they are temporary don't waste node shards crafting special nodes unless your boost/skill nodes are in order. As mentioned in the skill explanation for Burning Soul Blade, Relentless Attack does work on it and gives you significantly increased uptime on enhanced Raging Blow while training (crafting this before a 2x weekend is excusable).

Examples



Sample V Matrix for level 210 (6 node slots). You may need more than 2 nodes to boost Raging Blow as much as possible so in that case remove Erda Nova and I guess either Worldreaver or Rope Lift (for training in some maps rope lift is more helpful). If you manage to use only two node slots for Raging Blow you may switch Erda Nova out for Decent Holy Symbol when training.




Sample V Matrix for level 230 (10 node slots). This is the general-purpose or bossing setup.

For training:

• - Erda Nova
• - Decent Sharp Eyes
• - Decent Combat Orders
• + Decent Holy Symbol
• + Relentless Attack (special node)
• + Blitz Shield (depends on map)

Sample V Matrix for level 250 (14 node slots). This is the general-purpose or bossing setup. The non-Raging-Blow tri-node I use is Combo Fury, Rush, and Shout.

For training:

• - Erda Nova
• - Decent Advanced Blessing
• + Relentless Attack (special node)
• + Rush/Shout/* tri-node

Link skills

I recommend getting any link skill you use up to at least level 2 (level 120 link skill mule, excluding Zero). See this page for detailed numbers on link skills: http://maplestory.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Link_Skills.

• Important
• Less important
• Nice to have

• Cannoneer (max level 3)
• Demon Slayer (max level 3)
• Phantom (max level 3)
• Luminous (max level 3)
• Xenon (max level 2)
• Demon Avenger (max level 3)
• Hayato (max level 2)
• Kanna (max level 2)
• Kinesis (max level 2)
• Angelic Buster (max level 3)
• Jett (max level 2)*
• Beast Tamer (max level 3)
• Zero (max level 5)
• Mercedes (max level 3)**
• Evan (max level 3)**
• Aran (max level 3)**
• Shade (max level 2?)

* costs 1,500 NX per month for upkeep of link skill (plus NX to get it to where you want)
** for training only

The ones I use are the first 12 in the list (up to Beast Tamer). The Jett link skill is up to 35 for ATT, M.ATT, and each basic stat.



Inner ability

First line: Increase attack speed
Second line: Boss damage (up to 10%), critical chance, attack, or item drop rate
Third line: Critical Chance (up to 20%), boss damage, attack, or item drop rate

You can't get multiple lines of the same property, so if you get Attack on second line you can't get it on third line.

Explanation

Unlike most classes Hero derives almost 0 benefit (besides convenience) from both buff duration and % chance to reset cooldown. So the first line is pretty inflexible, you definitely want attack speed which is required to hit the hard cap for attack speed when using a green monster park potion (for this you need 1-hand sword, booster, green pot, decent SI, and this IA).

If you have the luxury of rolling for perfect second and third lines I'd just go for the ones listed, the best is likely boss damage or item drop if you want that for farming purposes. Critical chance may put you over the cap but if that's the case you can take points out of legion to put them elsewhere.

Take note that rolling for perfect second and third lines is an absurdly lengthy and difficult process (millions or tens of millions of honor points) and will take you much longer than getting increase attack speed. If you are hardcore you may want to forget about your first line and try to roll perfect second/third line using miracle circulators, then after that use honor to get your first line to attack speed.



Legion

There are two parts to this: which character effects are useful for Hero and which squares you want to go for on the legion grid. I would recommend getting all legion mules to at least level 140. For the numbers on legion member bonuses, see here: http://maplestory.wikia.com/wiki/Legion_System.

Member bonuses to prioritize

These are approximately in order of importance. These stack together but you cannot stack them by having multiple of the same class.

• Zero*: EXP gained
  
• Jett: crit damage
• Shade: crit damage
• Hayato: crit damage
• Marksman: crit chance
• Night Lord: crit chance
• Demon Avenger: boss damage
• Kanna: boss damage
• Blaster: ignore enemy defense
• Beast Tamer: ignore enemy defense
• Mechanic: buff duration
• Wild Hunter: chance for skills to deal additional damage
  
• Hero: STR
• Paladin: STR
• Buccaneer: STR
• Thunder Breaker: STR
• Kaiser: STR
• Xenon: STR, DEX, and LUK
• Mercedes: skill cooldown
• Angelic Buster: DEX

*only if training

Once you have all those you will need to continue training mules if you want to rank your legion up to 6000 or 8000 to unlock more legion grid space.

Grid bonuses

In order of priority:

• Ignore enemy defense (up to 93% or so)
• Critical damage
• Critical rate (not exceeding 100%)
• Boss damage
• Ignore enemy defense (if you have extra)
• STR
• ATT

STR is better than ATT per square since it's 5 STR vs 1 ATT. A typical endgame player has ATT:STR ratio of between 1:2 and 1:3, so 5 STR should always be better than 1 ATT.

This is how my grid looks, including my stats without external buffs. My IA is NOT IDEAL for Hero.





Hyper stats

This is a little complicated because the optimal spread for hyper stats may differ between people depending on their stats. I'm going to show a build that should work for most people (just follow the steps incrementally until you run out of points).

• Raise STR, Crit chance, Crit damage, Boss damage, Damage, and Ignore defense to 4
• Raise everything except STR to 6
• Raise Damage to 8
• Raise Crit chance and Crit damage to 8
• Raise Damage to 10
• Raise Boss damage to 8
• Raise Crit damage, Crit chance, and Boss damage to 9
• Raise Crit damage, Crit chance, and Boss damage to 10
• Raise Ignore defense to 10
• Put the rest of the points into STR or wherever (I actually have some points into Speed since my speed while in drop gear is too low)

This guide presumes you are not fighting bosses with 300% defense too often while still low level so it leaves ignore defense at 6 until the end. You can customize these steps how you like.



1-hand or 2-hand?

TL;DR 1-hand if funded and in normal servers, 2-hand in Reboot or unfunded in normal servers

Explanation

This is going to be a technical explanation that will involve weapon multipliers and how attack speed works. For more background info, look here: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/MapleStory/Formulas.

Hero, for reasons unknown, has an increased weapon multiplier for swords and axes compared to other classes that wield the same weapons. This is 1.3 for 1-hand weapons (both sword and axe) and 1.44 for 2-hand weapons, instead of 1.2 and 1.34. The relative difference (1.44/1.3) is around 1.108 times, or in other words, if there were two heroes with the exact same gear and exact same total ATT except one had a 1-hand weapon and one had a 2-hand weapon, the 2-hand user would hit on average 1.108 times higher with all skills and attacks.

2-hand weapons however, are slower than 1-hand weapons. This difference is described by endgame 2-hand swords and axes having a base speed of 6 (normal) and 1-hand swords and axes having a base speed of 5 (fast-5). In optimal bossing circumstances (i.e excluding rune of swiftness), heroes can increase their attack speed by up to 5 stages: 2 from booster, 1 from green pot, 1 from decent speed infusion, 1 from inner ability. This means that 1-handers can reach the hard cap of 0 speed while two-handers can only get to 1.

How much faster is speed 0 than speed 1? This depends on the skill, and we'll use enhanced Raging Blow because it is most (~75%) of a hero's DPS. With a base delay of 780ms*, it reaches a delay of 510ms at speed 0 and 540ms at speed 1 (see above wiki link for this formula). This is not a big difference, and it's actually unlucky for Raging Blow to have 780 delay as normally the difference is larger. A 1-hand at 0 speed uses enhanced Raging Blow 1.059 times faster than a 2-hand at 1 speed (for reference the usual difference is 1.1 times faster).

*please just trust me on this

So 2-handers are 1.108 times stronger, but 1-handers are 1.059 times faster (with RB+, about 1.1 times faster with other skills). The difference stops here in Reboot and you would just use two-handers there. However in main servers if you are 1-hand you can use a scrolled and enhanced shield instead of the basic Hero secondary. A Terminus Defender shield can be scrolled (primed) to up to +153 STR and DEX at 15 stars, and it also has a higher tier of potential thanks to being level 160. You will need a shield like this to make up the difference for 1-handers.

As mentioned in the skill explanation for Burning Soul Blade, the more damaging attached mode only attacks when you perform an attack while it is off cooldown. This basically means it attacks once every two Raging Blows, so despite always being able to attack once a second it will attack slower when using a 2-hander, thus Burning Soul Blade is not inherently better for 2-handers as some may think. Summary below:

1-hand weapon (attack speed 0):

• 510ms enhanced Raging Blow
• 540ms normal Raging Blow
• 1.3 weapon multiplier
• can use a shield

2-hand weapon (attack speed 1):

• 540ms enhanced Raging Blow (1.059 times slower)
• 600ms normal Raging Blow (1.111 times slower)
• 1.44 weapon multiplier (1.108 times stronger)
• must use an unscrollable secondary weapon

Sword or axe?

This one is simpler than the above question. From Weapon Mastery you get +5% damage when using an Axe, and no bonus for using a Sword. If you're just interested in damage, get an Axe. There is no difference between equivalent (from the same set) swords and axes other than this, they have the same attack and attack speed (this is true for Fafnir and Arcane Umbra, could be wrong elsewhere).

The only reasons you would want to use a sword are to be able to switch to Paladin freely (Paladins can use swords and blunt weapons only, not axes), and for potentially higher resale value since more classes uses swords than axes.

There is also a difference in the appearance of Raging Blow (both modes) between using sword and axe, but it is only cosmetic.



Training spots (200+)

This is just a list of training areas I found to be good in Arcane River while farming nodes and grinding to 250. See the Videos section for how to mob efficiently in most of these maps.

Vanishing Journey

• Cave of Repose: Below the Cave
• Lake of Oblivion: Weathered Land of Rage (not as good but lower level)

Chu Chu Island

• Eree Valley: Below the Falls
• Slurpy Forest: Slurpy Forest Depths (probably the best)

Lachelein

• Lachelein Night Market: Chicken Festival 2

Arcana

• Arcana: Cavern Lower Path (best but crowded)
• Arcana: Labyrinthine Cavern - Upper Path (very empty)*

*This map is unique in that you almost exclusively use Rush. Because of this, your node setup will be different and you will want boost nodes that increase Rush damage. I don't recommend training here unless you can OHKO with Rush.

Remember to if possible use monster park green pot and DSI while grinding, it makes a difference.



Videos

Disclaimer: these are from my own Youtube channel. I'll try to include older videos for bossing as they have lower damage and show the mechanics of the boss.

• Hell Gollux (50m cap)
• Chaos Root Abyss bosses (50m cap, PLAYLIST)
• Post-revamp Dojo 51F

How-to videos for mobbing efficiently in Arcane River maps

• How to mob at Below the Cave
• How to mob at Slurpy Forest Depths
• How to mob at Below the Falls
• How to mob at Chicken Festival 2
• How to mob at Cavern Lower Path
• How to mob at Labyrinthine Cavern Upper Path

Appendix

Skill delay for Raging Blow (enhanced):

• Speed 0: 510ms
• Speed 1: 540ms
• Speed 2: 600ms (cap unless using extreme green potion)
• Speed 3: 660ms
• Speed 4: 690ms
• Speed 5: 750ms (base 1-hand speed)
• Speed 6: 780ms (base 2-hand speed)

Skill delay for Raging Blow (normal):

• Speed 0: 540ms
• Speed 1: 600ms
• Speed 2: 630ms (cap unless using extreme green potion)
• Speed 3: 690ms
• Speed 4: 750ms
• Speed 5: 810ms (base 1-hand speed)
• Speed 6: 840ms (base 2-hand speed)

Ways to increase attack speed (more info):

• Booster (-2 stages)
• Inner ability (-1 stage)
• Decent Speed Infusion (-1 stage)
• Extreme green potion (-1 stage, surpass cap of 2 speed)

Recommended ways to increase critical rate:

• Base + passive: 25%
• Phantom link skill: up to 20%
• Beast Tamer link skill: up to 10%
• Hyper stats: 15%
• Decent Sharp Eyes: 10%
• Legion grid: up to 40%
• Legion member bonus (Marksman and Night Lord): 3% each at Lv 140 or 4% each at Lv 200
• Magnificent soul weapon: up to 12%

Recommended ways to increase boss damage:

• Main potential on primary and secondary weapons
  • in my experience boss/boss/att% is optimal, ex: 30% boss 30% boss 9% att
  • on bonus potential att% is higher priority than boss%
• A-rank boss damage Nebulites on primary and secondary weapons: 25% each
• Demon Slayer link skill: up to 20%
• Beast Tamer link skill: up to 10%
  
• Hyper stats: 35%
• Legion grid: up to 40%
• Legion member bonus (Kanna and Demon Avenger): 3% each at Lv 140 or 5% each at Lv 200
  
• Holy Pink Beanity title: 10%