Lootun Walkthrough Guide (0.9)

The closest thing to a walkthrough you can get for a game like Lootun.

Lootun Walkthrough Guide (0.9)

Welcome to the closest thing to a walkthrough you can get for a game like Lootun. This isn’t a game where you must follow a specific path for the storyline, but if you know about the secret shortcuts, you can skip a lot of it. No. This is an idle game with gear and character management being the main focus. Things are written in pretty much the order they unlock in, only a few things are out of order, because there’s just so much to tell at certain points. I will not explain everything in detail, but it should be sufficient for you to figure out how to do what needs to be done. I don’t expect you to know everything about the game in advance, but I do expect you to be able to think for yourself. Keep in mind that all of the suggestions in this guide are based on personal opinion and may not be the optimal solution, but they work! You are free to use whatever you feel is better. So, let’s get this party started, shall we?

Character Creation

First thing you need to do is create your first character. You have the choice between Warrior, Ranger and Mage. Pick one, a name and a portrait. The choice of first character is entirely up to you, there are no benefits to picking one over the other. You can end up with a total of 15 characters, so it will be easy to mix and match your team as you see fit. For this walkthrough I will assume you are doing what most people do, use one of each class in your team.

After creating your character, you will be looking at the Equipment screen. You can see your gear, stats, skills and loot all shown here. But it’s rather empty, because you just started playing and haven’t actually done anything yet. Let’s change that. Your character has a little green plus sign on their portrait and in the Skills & Passives section to the right, you can see it says Warrior/Ranger/Mage Passives (1!). That means you have a point to spend. Click that button to be taken to the Mastery and Passives menu.

In your Class passives you have 5 rows of 5 talents to choose from. Each talent holds a max of 4 points and you need to spend the one you have. They are almost identical across the classes, except for the four talents in the top right corner. For a warrior they will be buffing your Armor and Melee/Ranged damage, for a Ranger it will be Evasion and Melee/Ranged, and for a Mage it will be Barrier and Melee/Magic. The other 21 talents are exactly the same, so regardless of your choice of class, pick the Health Regen talent.

During combat, this one will allow your characters to slowly, passively, heal while fighting. The other two Health Point talents will only increase your amount of HP, but not do any healing. There are ups and downs to both, but I find it most beneficial to be healing constantly. You can freely respec almost all passives throughout the game, so don’t hold back experimenting with things or using whatever suits your playstyle best. When you have set your point, close the window and click on the big Mission button on the left.

Combat Preparations

On this screen you will find all the regular missions you can run. This is where you fight enemies, get xp, loot and gold. You only have one option right now, Woodland, so click on that one. When you do that, a bunch of things show up on the right side. That’s the Mission Expertise passives. Whenever you kill an enemy in that map, you get expertise for that map. When you fill the bar, you get a point. When you get a point, you place it and get some kind of benefit from it, so essentially you level up the map. Let’s ignore that for now and just click the Prepare Mission button. That opens up the window to setup your team. On the left side you can set your flask loadout, which you will only have access to much later. On the right you have loadouts for quickly selecting characters that also unlocks later on.

Right now you can’t do much, but click one of the three slots in the middle to select your character (position is irrelevant). If the checkbox for scaling monsters to Max Level is on, you will always get the best possible xp and loot, but there can be times when you want to disable that. For now, keep it on.

Restart mode tells the game how you want to farm and how it should behave when your characters die. Which they will. A lot. With None, your characters die and the combat stops. Done. On Defeat means it will restart only when all characters are dead. Smart Restart will restart the game when a boss has been defeated, if one or more characters are dead at that point. This is the one you want to use right now, so click on that. The last option explains itself. On First Death. One character dies, no matter how far in the process, even if the boss is on 1 HP, restart. No loot. No good. It can be beneficial later on, but for now, Smart Restart. Restart Time is in seconds between each combat. I prefer 2 seconds; you may set it differently if you want. And when you have, click on Begin to…… Begin!

Combat

You have now started fighting and your character will be using the starter Default Skill to attack the enemies. As you can see, your HP slowly creeps up after taking damage and that’s a good thing. That’s why we picked Regen. You can also see that you get some gold and loot. Rightclick on the gear and select Equip. Remember which type of character you picked, so if you see a bow and quiver, don’t try to equip it if you’re a mage. Won’t be good for you! For armour, it is not really a problem. All classes can wear all armour, so don’t worry too much about the type, just the stats. Now, keep in mind that this is an idle game, so there’s really not a lot for you to do while your character is fighting. Except look at gear. And passives. And gold. And stuff like this walkthrough!!!

At some point you will see a green plus symbol on your Default Skill or the (1!) on your character portrait. That means you have passive points to assign. When that happens, click on Equipment to go to that screen, or rightclick the character portrait in the combat area and select where you want to go. You will also notice at the top of your screen the name of the map and the level range. And then the Expertise Level. When it gets the (!) after the expertise level, you now have passive points to spend on that map.

So, click on Mission again and look at the passives.

Mission Expertise

Each map starts off with 14 rounds of “trash” enemies, and 1 final round of a boss, 15 rounds in total. That’s a lot of fighting before getting any good loot! But thankfully, with these passives, you can reduce that to 10 rounds. Pick the top left passive A Greater Threat and you will now only need to do 13 rounds before the boss fight. Get the maximum 5 points in that one as soon as possible.

Any excess points you get while you level up, put them in Inspired Learning for even more experience gains. Fate is the name for “get more XP” in this game. You can respec freely, so when you think you are capable of a challenge, pick some of the other passives. They make the enemies harder, but also provide better loot if you win.

More characters

By now you should have gathered at least 50 Gold Coins. Go to Equipment and click on the Buy Character Slot button to…. Buy another character. Pick a different class to your first, it helps a lot. When you have another 300 gold, make sure you buy the third class so you have a full team. Stop fighting, start a new run and remember to add the new character(s) to your party so you can fight that much faster and die a lot less! Like, a lot a lot! Remember to add health regen to them as well!

Upgrades

If you’ve been paying attention, on your left side a new button has unlocked. Upgrades. Click it. 24 slots, only 1 shown right now, the Scrapper.

Construct it by spending 50 Gold. On the right you can see what each level of each building does (once unlocked), so you know why you’re constructing them and why you definitely want to upgrade them whenever possible. The Scrapper allows you to get rid of excess loot and exchange it for some resources you need to do other stuff. As you can see, the next level of the scrapper costs 100 coins and also some resources. That’s the things you get from scrapping. Now that you’ve done that, you can also build the Blacksmith for 100 gold and some materials. Do that when possible. As for the remaining 22 slots, each of them will unlock either by doing specific content or by reaching a specific level. You will not have to do anything special, all of them unlock as needed naturally. For now, head back to the Combat screen, because you need to spend some time there now!

Scrapping

Your first 50 bag slots may soon be running out. That’s not good! You have two options to help here, one is buying more bags and bag slots, the other is scrapping gear. First one takes gold and some other currencies later on. It will be quite expensive, so it will take time. But click on the + to get a new bag, then rightclick on the bag to unlock more slots for that specific bag. Each holds up to 50 slots.

Scrapping, however, is free. Click on the Scrapper button. You have a few things you can do there and more that unlocks later on, but right now simply rightclick all the gear you do not want to use on your characters and then click on the Scrap button. You will get a window showing the materials received as well as a notification that you learned some recipes. You now have the option to craft your own versions of those specific pieces of gear at the Blacksmith, once it is unlocked. Now click on the Storage button. Here you can see what you’ve received so far from scrapping gear. At first you have a capacity of 25.000 units of each material. The one closest to the limit will be shown, but that number is almost always irrelevant. You can increase the capacity later on. Exit storage, fight on, get more loot, xp and map expertise, stop reading here and come back when you’re level 5 in the A Greater Threat expertise passive

Progression

As you level up, you get access to more mission maps. They have different level ranges, different enemies, different bosses and different loot. While you level your characters, almost always go for whichever map is the highest available. I highly recommend that you stay on each map until you have A Greater Threat 5/5 before moving on. This will help you later on, when you come back to farm gear at max level. Assuming you have that for Woodland already, stop fighting for now and sort through your gear. On the left side of your bag-space, you have some buttons.

Rightclick the bag icon to get access to some extra options, including the Bag Settings. This opens a window that lets you change the icon for that bag as well as sort your gear according to however you set it. This can be very helpful when you have more bags and want to make sure you can easily find things.

The other 3 buttons are a Scrapping button, a Sorting button and a link to the Item Comparator. Click that one and a new window opens up where you can see your characters and compare their gear with the loot in that bag.

You can set some options for gear selection, to help the game pick the best gear for your characters. This is a great help when you want to progress through the maps and levels, because you won’t have to manually compare 50 items with 3 different characters and try to decide which is best for who and why and so on and so forth. I pick Prefer Damage on all my characters and simply click Best Equip All to get it done fast and easily. If you do that too now, you can exit that window and scrap all gear left in your bags. And then you can start a new mission, Graveyard.

Woodland has a default level range of 1-7, but Graveyard is 5-13. That means you can do it now, or you can continue getting okay loot from Woodland. I recommend switching maps as soon as you have expertise level 5 in each of them, to make the most of it. While they’re out fighting, you should head back to the Upgrades and build the Blacksmith, if you haven’t already. That will unlock the Profession Hall that you can build for 1000 gold. Doing so unlocks the Mine, Forest and Farm, 3 buildings you will need to get even more materials faster, so you can craft and upgrade stuff. Each has a pricetag of 2000 gold, so buy them when you can afford them. This will open a new button on the left, the Professions tab. Let’s ignore the Blacksmith button for now and head into Professions.

Professions

This window shows all your available professions, their tools (by default 1 resource gathered per Harvest) and the materials they are farming. As you upgrade their buildings, more types and slots will become available and you can freely choose which material Tier to farm in each slot. Sometimes it can be beneficial to simply farm one of each Tier material, other times you may want to dedicate more slots to one tier and none to others. You decide. When you start looting tools, you can replace the default whites with better ones and get more stuff per Harvest. Later on you will be able to farm faster and get even more per harvest. Right now, go back to Upgrades and, assuming your team has already killed a Graveyard boss, click on the Barracks.

Advanced Combat

I do like those words together, Advanced Combat, it just sounds so fancy. Well, it’s here to help you fight better. For the cost of 400 gold, construct the Barracks to get access to some Character Tactics. If you can afford the other levels, get them as well so that you can autocast your Offensive and Defensive abilities. Head back to the Equipment screen and click on the new Character Tactics button.

In here, you can set your targeting mode for your Default Attack as well as your cooldowns, which will be listed as they unlock. At this stage of the game, Random is fine, you don’t need to change anything. But at endgame, this can make or break your team and the boss they are fighting. There are certain fights where you want to have some characters go for the Strongest enemy (measured by max HP) while others go for the Weakest. Round Robin is an excellent choice for tanks, while Random can be for those that just don’t matter much. Defining who your cooldowns hit can also make a huge difference. Some cooldowns hit one target one time, some hit multiple targets one time and some hit multiple times on the same target. What you pick, when you use them and why, that’s up to you to decide. There is no single choice that is the best in all situations for each skill. When your characters hit level 10, read the next part.

Skill selections 1-50

By now your characters will have unlocked the first 3 Default Attacks, and one Offensive and one Defensive cooldown. Here’s where things start to become interesting. Now the choice of Default Attack matters. While the first ones are OKAY, not all of them are GOOD. They each do things differently from the others and which ones you will end up using at endgame depends entirely on your team composition and the role of the characters. Example, a Mage that wants to be a Debuffer type character now has access to Frostbolt. That skill will reduce the attack speed of the enemy and can later be specced to also stun the target or make it more vulnerable to critical hits. Or both!
At this point, I recommend that your characters use the following setup:

• Warrior – Cleave
• Ranger – Explosive Shot
• Mage – Arcane Explosion

While each of these may not be the strongest hitter, they will hit more than one target and kill things relatively fast. It is a good idea to spec each ability to either hit more targets or do more damage to targets in various ways. If an ability gets a chance to hit multiple times, that’s a good choice as well. Throughout the game, try to experiment a little bit with the other skills that unlock, see if you find something different that feels better for you than what I suggest.

When you get to level 15, the next Offensive ability unlocks. I recommend swapping to the new ones because they’re all quite good at this stage, and keep using this setup until level 50. But at level 20, stop combat and take a break.

Loadouts

At level 20 your characters get a new Default Attack. Sunder, Poison Sting and Frost Strike. None of them are useful at this point, but Frost Strike is interesting as it will soon allow the Mage to start Taunting enemies, effectively becoming the tank of the party. And that’s a couple of levels ahead of the other classes! Sunder will be very useful later in the game and at endgame Poison Sting will be one of the most damaging abilities. But that’s later and right now you should be going into Upgrades to have a look at the Armoury that just unlocked. You should construct it as soon as possible and then head to the Missions again and Prepare a mission, but do not yet start it. Set it up exactly like you have been so far, but this time, look at the empty loadout slot and hit that Save button. Name your loadout whatever you want and then CANCEL the mission preparation. Open up that same mission, now click the Load button and see your party pre-assembled. Now you have much less clicking to do! This is a really nice timesaver! In a few levels, as you unlock Flasks and their loadouts, which can be added to your team loadouts.

Keep fighting until you hit level 30 with your team, so we can talk a little bit about the Tiers of materials.

Material Tiers

When looking at your building upgrade requirements, you’ve most likely seen the next one costing Tier 2 materials and wondered how you got your hands on those. That’s fairly simple, if you paid attention when you were scrapping gear. But how about the next tiers? Simple answer: You level up and do higher level content. Easy peasy. You will get a few pieces of each type before hitting the required levels, but after you level up, you get way more. If you click on the Glossary button, you will be able to find a LOT of information about a LOT of things in the game, like which boss drops what loot, what are the stats of those items and how the heck does this thing work. Click on the top category on the left called Game Mechanics, then on the right select Scrapping. On that page you will find the content level requirements for each tier. That means you will only start getting Tier 3 materials once you hit level 50. And as all building upgrades and many other things in this game requires tier materials, you cannot progress faster than intended through the things. You cannot push for it faster than you can level up. So trust me when I say that all things unlock when they are needed and you should not worry about missing out on anything. Upgrade your buildings when you can and you will get access to everything eventually.

Speaking of upgrades, I assume you by this point have upgraded your 3 profession buildings to Rank 2, the Blacksmith to Rank 5 and the Scrapper to rank 3. Head back to the Equipment screen and click on the Scrapper. You now have a new Auto Scrap Settings button that you should click on.

Auto Scrapping

In this new window, you have the choice to autoscrap items based on various criteria, before they ever hit your bags. This will not only save you a LOT of bagspace, it will also make sure that all loot you get is at least of the quality you want. And with higher quality comes more and better stat options. Each tier of gear comes with a number of stat slots, Uncommon greens have 2 and Mythical reds have 6. You can see a list of item categories and it can be hard to tell which affects what gear, but generally speaking:

Default Items is everything that has a common material type of name. Iron Boots, Cloth Gloves, Rough Tunic. Those are the names you would be seeing right now and they change depending on the material tier they belong to, so they only drop at their specific level intervals. These are also the items found in the Blacksmith crafting menu, which we will get to in a moment.

Special Items is everything that has a special name. Bonecleaver is an axe you may have found by now. Or the Berserker Helm. These items can drop at any level, provided you have access to their drop location and is fighting the enemy that drops the item.

Nemesis/Enchanted/Paragon can be all items, but those items must also have certain modifiers to be put in these categories. If they do, the Default and Special filters do not apply to them. The tooltip will tell you which category they belong in

Unless you have enabled Always Show Item Comparisons in the game settings.

Relics, Gems, Tools and Soul Tools are fairly straightforward. You have most likely not found any of them yet, but you will as soon as you progress far enough through the game.

I set all the Items to Uncommon at this stage, filtering out all the greens, meaning I will only get blue or better gear to drop. As I upgrade the Scrapper, I also change the filters so that I end up scrapping everything Legendary (orange) or below. This has the sad side-effect of making much less gear appear in the bags, so be careful when you change this setting or you may feel that upgrades are few and far apart. But when they do show up, at least they’re almost as good as they can get. Mythical (red) is the best type of normal gear and you want to have that in as many slots as possible, when not using Divine or Unique gear which are almost always better. Relics and tools will follow the same pattern and in combination with the gear filters, that means I get as many materials as possible, as soon as possible, with very little work. I keep my gems at None because there will be other ways to filter out unwanted gems later. Have a look in the Glossary, you might find an interesting Tickbox that can help a bit.

Blacksmith

Here’s a place you will be spending a LOT of time. You can modify your gear in so many ways, make it much more suited to your characters, increase your performance a lot and help you get through the game much easier. All of those options unlock as time goes by, so you won’t be able to do it all right away. And each modification costs resources and you don’t have an infinite amount of those. What you also don’t have is a good set of tools for your professions, so let’s start out by crafting some better ones. Click on Craft Tool and select one of them. Change Item rarity to Epic and move the slider to max level, then have a look at your materials. Can you afford it? If yes, craft two for each profession, unless you already have an epic one equipped.

The stat pool makes it hard to get some that are just perfect for now, so settle for whatever you get and equip them. This was really just to show you how to craft things. You can do the same for gear slots if you feel you are missing a decent upgrade. Later on, this will be a good way to eliminate any weak spots if you get stuck somewhere, but when you reach max level, you will not be crafting your own gear. You will get so much better gear as loot drops and you will be modifying those. You will soon be able to craft your own gems as well and some of the crafted ones are pretty much Best In Slot. Most of your gems will be looted, but some are not and needs to be crafted. That, however, requires you to construct a special building which you do not yet have access to. The only one available right now is the Alchemist’s Hut, and when you have the materials for it, construct it so we can take a look at some flasks.

Flasks

Flasks are special buffs that lasts for entire Mission Loops. That’s from Round 1 and until either your team dies and combat starts over, or the boss dies and you return to Round 1. Each flask requires materials to fill and you can only get those materials through your Professions. That’s why I had you craft some good tools! You need herbs and jewels, not to be confused with the gems for your gear. All the different Quartz types of jewels, that’s for flask. The Flawed Ruby etc, that’s for gems for your gear. Check the Glossary for each item if you are unsure which professions yields it.

The only flask you can craft at this point, is the Healing flask. Go ahead and do that. Now you can add that flask to your Loadouts and get some extra healing in combat.

Each flask can be upgraded in two ways. Capacity and Strength. Capacity is the number of charges available per flask. The more you have, the longer it takes for you to run out. But remember, it takes herbs to refill, so if you use specific flasks a lot, you may need to divert your Farming slots to gather more of those herbs instead of others. Strength is the power of the effect and you can increase that to make it better. Default Healing flask grants you 20% of your Max HP when you use it. Maxed it will grant 40%. So it will heal more for the same cost, making it much more efficient and require fewer herbs to refill, as you will most likely not need to use as many charges per loop. But you will still need a lot, so if only that Harvesting could be faster….

Community Upgrades

And that’s exactly what it can be! But before we get to that, let me warn you that this and the next section will take a lot of gametime to cover, you will be max level before you’re done and it will require a couple of billion credits, so make sure to read ahead and come back here every now and then. Now, head back to Upgrades and upgrade the Profession Hall to tier 2. This unlocks the Community Project. Go farm some more until you can build this one, then come back and read on.

With the CP now built, you can donate your materials for an amount of donation credits, listed in the tooltip for each item. Right now you are pretty much done with Tier 1 materials and almost Tier 2 as well, if you have upgraded your buildings as much as you can, and are just waiting for Tier 3 stuff. Go into your Storage and rightclick in the top left corner on the Cloth Scraps you have there. The donation window will pop up, so move the slider all the way to the right and Donate everything you have. Do the same with the other Tier 1 materials until you have 5000 credits. Donate some Tier 2 if needed. The higher the tier and rarity of a material, the more it is worth.

As you should be getting closer to level 50 at this point and running Frigid Wasteland, you will slowly start getting Tier 3 materials, the ones needed for Rank 2. Upgrade the Mine, Forest and Farm first, change all your slots to Tier 3 and then upgrade Community Project next. With that done, head into your Storage again. On the right you can now see a new box with Community Passives in it. These are permanent, you will be able to get all of them and because of that, there is no respeccing. That makes the order in which you pick them be a little bit important, but nothing gamebreaking. If you want to minmax, this is definitely an opportunity to do so! For those of you that don’t care about minmaxing, just donate your materials and pick the passives in any order you want. For everyone else…

Donate enough materials to get exactly 15000 credits and buy the middle passive, Material Storage

1. You have to buy that first and it will increase your capacity from 50000 to 65000 units. That’s nice. Now, don’t touch it until you have almost everything else! You do NOT want to increase your capacity just yet and there’s a good reason for that. The next rank of the Community Project will allow you to automatically donate your materials as soon as you hit your current capacity for each item, granting you credits passively. You don’t have to do anything! If you increase the cap, it just takes longer for the auto donation to kick in, making the process much slower. Besides, it will take some time before you even need more than 65000 of any item, so don’t worry!

Now donate enough materials to get exactly 10000 credits, but do not touch any of the jewels or herbs throughout this process! Start with any Tier 1s you have left, then Tier 2 and move up through the tiers as you do this. Don’t donate all at once, make sure you only do enough to hit 10k. Then buy one rank of the horseshoe on the left, Donation Credit Gain. Now each material will be worth 1% more than before. Donate enough materials to buy ONE rank of DCG, then buy it. Keep doing that until it is maxed at rank 50. It will take some time, but donate everything you don’t use. It’s fine, you can get it back soon enough. By doing it this way, you will be getting the maximum number of credits out of each resource. This is why you can see donation values in the above screenshots that are different from what you’re getting. If you simply donate everything and then buy the upgrades, you will be losing out on credits.

Once DCG is finished, move down to Faster Gathering and max that one. This will reduce your Harvesting period from 20 seconds to 10 seconds. That will increase your mat gain a lot and that’s what we want from this place!

Next, go right and get an increased chance to find tools with Tool Fortune. While you can craft good ones yourself, they are costy and if you can find them, they are free, which is better. Continue right with Tool Luck, to make sure they are all at least purple quality. Go all the way left and max Double Scrapping, then finish off down by the Double Resources. It may feel like getting DR before DS is better, but because Scrapping yields some useful materials that professions do not provide, it is slightly better. Not by much, because professions also supplies something scrapping does not, but overall, tiny bit of difference in favour of Scrapping.

3 of the 4 corner passives are now available, so max out Luck, Fate and Wealth in that order. Luck to get better loot which translates into more materials for more credits. Fate for more XP and Wealth for more gold. You can always use more gold! And when those three are done, it’s finally time to increase your storage capacity. Buy only what you need to get Fortune to light up, then max that one before finishing all the Material Storages. Fortune determines how often you find a thing; Luck improves the quality of the things you find. Would you have wanted to get it sooner? Yes, you would. But I am lazy and getting credits without any interaction is much better. That’s why I keep a low storage capacity, to get as much stuff auto donated as possible before getting it. For easy reference, here is the order in which you should be unlocking things:

A little pro-tip if you are willing to sacrifice a lot of materials in order to get some of this done faster. It will hurt your progress in other areas quite a bit, so it is entirely up to you if you do it or not, but in the looong run it will pay off. After DCG is maxed, check the requirements for Rank 4 of the Community Project. Donate enough to get it, without using the required materials. Upgrade the building and head into your storage. Now you can set the auto donation threshold for each material, so pick one, any of them and set it to 1, then hit Apply To All Materials. From now on, whenever you get a resource, all units except 1 of that type will be donated for credits. Now you get the credits rolling in passively, before you even hit the storage cap. Downside is, you will be losing the valuable stuff that you might need for upgrading stuff, but if that is a concern, simply set the value to 0 on those specific items you wish to keep. When you are done using this tip, set an item to 0 and apply to all again, then carry on gathering resources as normal.

Gems

At the same time as you got the Community Project upgraded, the Gemcutter’s Cabin became available. This is going to be a dear friend for the rest of the game. You can now enter the Blacksmith and cut some basic gems. This is why I told you not to touch the jewels and herbs! Flasks use herbs and some jewels, the others are used to become gems for your gear. If you donated them, you can’t craft them. Simple as that. When you select a gem to craft, it will say the bonus for that specific gem. Most gems are part of a set, so when you have enough equipped and active, the bonus will activate. You won’t see what the setbonus is until you craft each gem and since you want to do at least one of each for the sake of completion, achievements and stats, I’ll let you figure them all out by yourself. My favourites for endgame are Amber and Amethyst, but getting enough jewels to craft even one full set is going to take some time and luck. And of course, your Professions have to be farming the proper tier. Check the tooltip for each gem jewel you want to use.

In most games with gems and sockets, gems are fitted into gear and when you replace the gear, you replace the gem. In some games the gem is lost, in others it is refunded. In this game, however, gems work differently. Go to Equipment and click on the Gem Sockets tab. You will see 24 slots. If you already have some gear with sockets, you will see that some of the slots are unlocked. If not, it will say 0/24 below. Each socket in a piece of equipped gear will unlock one slot in order, starting from the top left. The slot is not tied to the specific item with sockets, the total amount of sockets available on your gear determines how many are unlocked.

So, let’s say you have crafted 2 Rubies and 2 Opals. You put them in the top row in that order, in the first four slots. You get a helmet with a socket and one slot unlocks. You now have the bonus damage from one Ruby. You get a weapon with 2 sockets and now have 3 slots unlocked. That’s bonus from both Rubies and 1 of the Opals for some HP and Regen. Now you find a much better helmet, but without sockets. You lose one slot and with that, the bonus from the Opal. But because of your sockets on the weapon, you still have the bonus from the Rubies.

Later in the game you will get an option to automatically socket your gear as soon as you equip it and when you get to that point, the order in which your gems are placed becomes irrelevant. But while you’re still not fully socketed, always make sure your most powerful gems (and sets) are the ones unlocked first. Some of the best are looted, some of the best are crafted. For now you only have crafted, so take your pick among them. When you can upgrade the Cabin to have gems drop as loot, make sure you do so. Be aware that getting the perfect stat combinations to drop is most likely going to take you the rest of the game. There are so many potential combinations for the Unique gems that it is impossible to say how long it takes. RNG can be with you, or against you.

Skill selections 50-150

Now that you’re level 50, you have access to all your Default Attacks and cooldowns. You also have access to the third row of passives, with the fourth unlocking at level 75, so let’s take a moment to dive a bit deeper into the things you want to fight with, as they will last you through to endgame. And then you’ll have to change according to what you want to do with each character at that point.

Starting with Warrior, I recommend you change your attack to Sunder. This attack will reduce the enemy armor, making it take more damage. Put your points in Armour Penetration, Exposed Defences and at 75 go with Sweeping Blow. This will make it hit 3 targets, making it much more efficient. Set your Character Tactics to Strongest to make sure it dies faster. Remaining points in whatever feels right for you. I pick Layered Assault.
Swap your Offensive to Dragon’s Roar. At 75 you can make it buff your team instead of just your warrior, so make sure you do that. Also make sure you get Recharge, as it counts whenever an enemy is killed. This makes it possible to cast DR very often, buffing you more and making you kill faster. To kill even faster, go with Faster Attacks (such a simple name, I love it) and for the last few points, I recommend Furious Roar. The two Crit options are good too, so experiment as you see fit.
Your Defensive option depends on how well you believe you can survive, something which I will be covering in the next section. If you feel you need the defense on the warrior, pick Defensive Stance. Imposing Cry can be a team damage buff with Distract, provided your warrior can survive the beating. Otherwise, Ground Slam it is. I use Rupture, Upper Hand, Replenishing Blow and Concussion.

Your Ranger gained access to Barrage at 40 and I recommend you switch to this one, if you haven’t already. Make sure you go with Lightning Barrage and max your Shock Chance. This will apply a debuff to each enemy hit that will make them take more damage. You want that, so Lightning it is. Unfortunately, that locks out Flame Barrage, but that’s fine. Place points into Multishot, Broadside and Focus Fire. Your Character Tactics isn’t very important here, as you will hit all available targets at the same time, but I recommend Weakest.
Your Offensive skill should go back to Blade Flurry. While it does much less damage by itself, compared to the other two, it will be able to buff your damage a lot through Potent Assault and Flurry. Take Invigorate to reduce the cooldown when critting and then, obviously, the two Crits when you hit level 75. You will end up with far more than 100% crit chance at endgame, so the first one is a bit wasted, but we need it for the second one and it should be hitting the Strongest target.
Change your Defensive to Crippling Poison. This is a debuff that will make your target deal less damage and increase your own damage done. Points goes to Greater Crippling Poison for more stacks, Malignant Presence to make the target take more damage and Press the Advantage to make all your characters do more damage when the target has died. The last 5 points are between Endless Poison and Toxic. Both works just fine. Do not take Equilibrium, as it only works when stacks are removed, not when target dies in one hit. In your Character Tactics, make sure you set this one specifically to Weakest, so there’s a chance it will die as fast as possible and grant your team the damage buff.

Your mage should go back to Fireball and spec it with Forking Fire and Cascade. You should also have take Spell Echo for now. But at level 75, you should change some points around. Have only 4 points in Spell Echo. Put one point in Flammability. This will make your Fireballs leave a Damage Over Time effect, Ignite, on each enemy hit. It will also make Fireball take advantage of the DOT stat on gear, making it easier to increase the damage. Put the last 10 points in Electrical Fire and Engulfing Flames. This will make Fireball do more damage to targets affected by Shock, which your ranger provides, and Ignite, which you do yourself. That’s a massive damage buff to Fireball! Your Offensive spell should remain Arcane Torrent and you want to use Extended Torrent. This will make it hit 4 times instead of just 3. With Cascade, that also means an additional chance to hit again, for even more damage. And all those hits are there to reduce the cooldown through Self Sustain. The remaining 5 points should go into Potent Assault, as that will buff your mage a little bit. But when that little bit is a hard hitting fireball, a little is a lot! Stasis works exactly like the Crippling Poison, so spec it similarly. Yes, you will want to have both running, it’s fine. Set it to Strongest, set Arcane Torrent to Strongest and have your Fireball go Weakest. You cannot control the secondary hit, so this way you kill the weak ones with CP fast, while ensuring that Arcane Torrent hits as many times as possible, doing the most damage and granting you the best buffs. And with Stasis on the Strongest, you can spread out Press The Advantage a bit better.

Advanced Blacksmithing

Right around now you have most likely been running into issues with surviving. You probably noticed a shift in difficulty and that’s partly my fault. I told you to scrap gear that could potentially have been useful in combat. But you should be wearing mostly purples or better now, ensuring that you have a lot of attributes to mess with on your gear. So let’s do that!

Head into the Blacksmith again. Locate your mage. Rightclick on a piece of equipped gear to move it over to the empty slot on the right. That’s now the item you want to modify. Improve! If you haven’t really looked in here before, do it now, click the Reroll and Random etc, to see what they do. You can change the attributes on your gear to something different, something better. Future upgrades will unlock a LOT more options, allowing you to basically tailor the gear to be exactly what you want or need. For now, you will have to settle with these 5 options. On your gear should be attributes that are beneficial to your character. As we are now looking at a mage, Ranged Damage is a useless stat. You are using a Magic weapon, so Melee Damage is also pointless to have. If you have an item with either of those stats on, rightclick it, then use Lock Attributes to lock the good attributes. Because you are casting a Fireball doing Fire Damage and leaving a Damage Over Time effect on the target, you want to have Attack Speed, Critical Chance, Critical Damage, Magic Damage, Fire Damage and Damage Over Time, though not all are possible at the same time. Damage and Elemental Damage are also acceptable, but they are not very good when compared to the others, so only pick those if nothing else is available. Lock all those stats, leaving only Melee/Ranged unlocked, as well as any other attribute you do not like on the item. Now click on Reroll Attributes. If you do not like your Defensive attributes, you can reroll All Attributes. I recommend you keep Health Points on all your gear. If you like them, switch to Offensive and click on Craft Equipment.

Keep doing that until you have attributes you think are good for you. Now click on Randomise Attribute Ranks. You have probably noticed that all attributes say x/10 on them. That means they are currently providing a small part of their potential bonus. By increasing that number, you can get a bigger benefit. Future upgrades can make them go up to rank 30. Right now, Randomise is a decent and CHEAP way to get more stats, after you have rerolled to the ones you want. Every time you Craft it, the ranks will shift. Depending on the quality of your gear, the attributes will lock themselves at 5, 6 or 7/10.

Do that for a lot of your gear on your characters and you will have gained quite a boost. Yes, it costs resources, but it’s worth the sacrifice every time you are stuck somewhere and progress is slow. Having the correct attributes on all gear is truly worth it. Don’t overspend, there is no need to minmax every piece of gear every single time you replace one. Until you reach endgame, of course. And now there is nothing left to tell, until you hit level 100. So I suggest you keep at it, level up, enhance your characters as best as you can, do the various missions and prepare for the next step of the journey, Ascension!

Ascendancy Classes

Upon hitting level 100 with your team, stop what you’re doing. You won’t earn any more experience right now, so no point trying. Hit the Equipment screen. You now have a button that tells you to pick your Ascendancy class for each character. This is where you specialize your characters. All classes can choose between a tank spec and two different DPS specs. You can freely swap between them, so it is recommended you give all of them a shot, to see which suits you the most. Each one is leveled up individually, so you are returned to level 100 the first time you change to a new class, but you will keep all levels and experience earned when switching back to previously used classes.

Each class have a passive associated with it, and a relic granting the same bonus. You can use any type of relic and get the bonus listed on that, as well as your passive, but if you use your own class relic, you double your bonus because they are the exact same. A 10% chance to something becomes 20%. 10 stacks to 20 stacks. You get the idea. When you pick your Ascendancy class, you will get two new passive trees to fill out. Ascendancy Passives, which is 100% identical no matter what you pick on any class, and the spec-specific Passives for what you picked.

Warriors have the option to go tank with Warden. It has a passive that makes the entire team take 15% less damage. It has a big focus on using a shield and blocking with it, but it is possible to do that even with a 2-handed weapon. It’s a tank that tanks and maybe it can do some damage as well. The two DPS options are Juggernaut, which is a hybrid tanky-DPS, and Barbarian, a speed-focused Damage Over Time spec. Barbarian really shines in endgame and is one of the best DPS specs, but prior to endgame content enemies die too fast to be worth it when specced for DOT damage through Rend. If you want to get some experience with it, go ahead and pick Barb now, but don’t use Rend until you are much closer to endgame, it will seriously slow you down. Juggernaut is much more straight-forward, just hit them hard and take the beating until they die.

Rangers have Renegade as their tanking spec. This one works with the Stagger mechanics which you can read about in the Glossary. For DPS, you have the Assassin and Marksman. Assassin is really just the ranger equivalent of a Barbarian, so they play out similarly and is just as good at endgame. For content leading up to raids, Marksman is the simpler choice. This is an interesting spec to play, if you want to play around the Focus mechanic. If not, Assassin is the one for you. Just don’t use Poison Sting until later.

Mages have a Battlemage. It sounds like a damage dealer and it sure can be. But it is designed to be a tank and use a lot of Barrier, as indicated by the passive of the class. Regenerate 15% of damage taken as Barrier. For DPS you have two very similar specs, though I would dare to call one a “single-target” spec and the other an “AOE” spec that is also good at single-target. Archmage has a passive called Elemental Blast, a spell that will trigger randomly when you use a skill and it will hit 1 target. Vizier is different. When you use a Direct Attack spell, the passive ability Echo will cause a percentage of that damage to 3 targets. If you use an Area Attack spell, it has a chance to hit your main target for 100% damage. Both passives can proc various effects, but because of the way they work, I consider Archmage the single-target spec and Vizier the AOE spec. Pick what sounds best to you, but if you are using Fireball specced to hit two targets, I will recommend Vizier with a Vizier relic. Fireball is now an Area Attack and will hit your main target and your secondary target for whatever damage it does. When Echo procs, it will hit your main target again for full damage. That’s 3 hits for the price of 2!

Challenges

Now that you’re level 100, you need to do something specific in order to level up further. Picking your Ascendancy class is just the first step. Now you have some Challenges to do. Click on Missions, then View Ascendancy Challenges. Step 1 is to complete Demons Lair at level 100, so go do that. When that’s done, you get the rewards listed and can continue advancing to level 101. Go to Challenge 2. This tells you what you need to do and it involves building a new Upgrade, so go there, do that. Now return to good old Woodland. Prepare a mission and now take a good look at that checkbox that says Scale Monsters to Max Level. Previously it would scale to Max Level of the map. Now it will make all maps scale to the highest level character in the team. And with that comes the option to see some old friends again. And have their loot scale to your level. This includes all gold, xp and gear they can drop and that is a very useful thing later on.

If you have been very very lucky, you have already looted at least one Divine Item. Divines always drop with 10/10 atributes and that alone makes them powerful. In one of my test runs I found a level 33 Divine ring that lasted me until 150. But each item also has a special bonus which makes them really good and being able to get that piece of gear at max level, instead of just a lowlevel version, will change your setup quite a lot at endgame. Without the Map Room, the game would be a lot different at endgame. Now there’s a point in running “old content” again and believe me, you will be running it a lot. Not just for these challenges. Remember to check your current objective from time to time. A lot of the challenges are simply “complete a mission at level x”, but some of them are “complete this specific map at level x”. If you’re running some lowlevel teams at this point, you can now safely stick them in one map and leave them there until they are on the same level as your main team. No more swapping around unless you want to. I like it! You might be wondering why Woodland specifically instead of just any map. For several reasons. 1, it is by far the easiest to level up in, as the enemies have very few nasty abilities. 2, by sticking to this map for a while, you get a lot of Expertise for the map to fill up the Fate points, which grants your teams more XP, making you level up that much faster. 3, the boss holds one of the most awesome Divine melee weapons, Brute’s Pummeler. You might not get it, but it’s there and will be a big help to your warrior if it drops. And 4, this will help your achievement count.

Achievements

Why are they important enough to mention? In most games they’re just a sign that you’ve done something, to show off to other people. But in Lootun, they have a deeper meaning. Each achievement, and each level in an achievement, gives you a permanent Luck, Fortune, Fate or Wealth buff. This makes it easier to get good loot and level up faster and more of the currencies you want! By defeating the Goblin Brute a few hundred times, you’ll be pushing some Luck bonus into the mix and that makes it easier to get better quality gear. You still need Fortune to actually drop the item, but with increased Luck you will get fewer items autoscrapped, which makes it easier to gear up your characters with good gear. Achievements are also very good for checking if you have done something yet or not. If you for some reason have been unfortunate enough to not loot a normal weapon or piece of armour in a tier, you can compare notes in the Glossary, see which ones you are missing and then go craft it in the Blacksmith for some easy stat increases. And speaking of crafting, there are also achievements for doing just that, so that’s really a win-win if you do it!

Enchants

Between levels 100 and 150, not a lot of new and exciting things will be happening. Progress will be slow and it will take time. This is a good thing. Remember, you are playing an idle game and this part prepares you for the next one. You will level up by doing challenges, and you will gather loads of materials to upgrade your buildings, flasks, gear and improve on the various passives. You are approaching max level and with that comes the endgame content. In order to be able to handle that better, enchant recipes will now start dropping. A few things to note:

You will always get them, even if your bags are full.
If they are, your last scrapable item will be scrapped and the scroll will take its place.
You cannot scrap the scrolls, only learn them and they are permanently available in the blacksmith.
They will only drop ONCE, so you won’t wake up to bags full of enchant scrolls and no loot.

Each enchant occupies exactly one slot on one specific type of gear. You can only have glove enchants on gloves, not on boots as well. 2-handed weapons can have 2 enchants at the same time, they can be two different or two of the same, that is your choice. Every other piece of enchantable gear holds only one and you must remove an enchant before you replace it. Most enchants are very good, but very few of them are what I consider Mandatory. One of those is Blessed, which allows you to benefit from Crit Chance above 100%. There is a very noticeable difference in damage done if you check logs before and after applying that enchant to a character with 100+ Crit Chance. Another very good enchant is Thrash, which goes on your weapon and/or offhand item. This gives you a chance to cast your Default Attack again whenever you use a skill. That’s a bonus attack, free of charge and if you are running a good build, that’s a very hard-hitting bonus attack.

One specific type of gem comes with 2 enchants on it. You cannot change them, only use whatever it has when you loot it. But because some enchants are stackable, that means you can have more of the same, for a bigger benefit. Enchants with text written in all white cannot be stacked, but that means you can have two enchants that would normally occupy the same slot and you would normally have to choose between one or the other. With this gem you can have both. But for the enchants that do stack, their stackable bonus is written in green text.

In the case of Thrash, that means you can change the 10% chance to strike again to a 30% chance. One enchant on the gem, two on your weapon/offhand or 2-handed weapon. Now consider this: A slow attack hits hard. If you have 30% chance to hit hard again, do you hit even harder? Yes, you do. You might not proc it constantly, but it is felt when you do. And the other way around, if you are using 2 super fast weapons, like the Brute’s Pummeler, you are hitting very fast but not very hard per hit. That won’t matter much, because you will be proccing the bonus attack so many times that you will still increase your damage by a lot.

Reaching 150

Congratulations, you are now max level and ready to embark on the next part of the journey. A new building has opened up, the Bounty Board, but I recommend you stay away from it for a little bit. Bounty is a new way of fighting enemies and getting different loot than you have so far, so you would be wise to farm the normal missions for some level 150 gear and find missing enchants first. You should also spend the time needed to farm materials for upgrading all the currently available buildings to the highest rank possible. Fortunately, you can do both at the same time, so don’t worry! If you really want to, jump into the Bounty missions, but expect to be slaughtered several times. It’s a step up in difficulty and so will the next things that unlock be. While you are out farming for stuff, I recommend you take each map in turn. Use the Glossary, look at the drops of each boss in order, then go farm that map until you have AT LEAST all enchants listed in Green. That means you have found them. If you also find all the Divine drops, that’s just a bonus. Doing this is good for several things. First off, you get the enchants you haven’t found yet and you’re about to need enchants to improve your gear. Secondly, achievements for various things. They just make it easier to get good loot, so might as well. And third, there’s a good chance you’re actually going to get the type of gear you want for your characters, in a level 150 version, while you’re out farming everything. This will take time, but again I must remind you that you’re playing an idle game. Things are not meant to go fast. If they do, that’s awesome. But patience is a virtue and from now on, all improvement to your character is through tweaking your passive setups a bit and by using the blacksmith to mess with their newly dropped gear, which requires time to farm. Or you could just jump straight into Bounties. Your choice.

If you are lazy but still want to farm some achievements and gear, go to the Endless Spire. It will randomly select any available enemy from all the normal maps and slowly ramp the difficulty. Spire is a map designed to TEST your team, how good it is. Because of that, you will eventually die and start over. You can then start over from level 1, or start a new run and start from a higher level of choice, depending on your progress. Because the game randomly selects your enemy, you can farm more achievements at once (kill this boss so many times, get these items etc), but farming the specific maps for either kills or items, will get it all done faster.
There is no reward for reaching Spire 999, the max level, other than the feeling of being able to do it.

Gear recommendations

The most important recommendation is to actually replace your non-150 gear. Believe me when I say that the benefit of keeping that one low-level item that appears to be REALLY good, is not worth it in the end. Now is also the time to stop using the Item Comparator and start thinking for yourself (he writes in a guide explaining things, oh the irony). If you have multiple teams running, I recommend you focus all your efforts on gearing ONE team for progression and letting the others farm stuff, using the leftovers from the main team. Resources will be needed and you won’t have a lot of them at first, so don’t improve the other teams too much.

Your choice of gear depends entirely on what you want to do with the character and where in the game you are. Different items become available in each type of content and as you progress, you will be replacing your gear. Some builds work really well in certain content and they will need one type of gear, while other builds may shine in different content and require other items. One such example is your Ranger. If you’re currently using Lightning Barrage, that’s awesome for fast farming of normal Missions. You don’t need to hit hard, so you can focus on gear that makes you attack fast. When you hit Raids, you can finally use Poison Sting to dominate the damage meter and for that you need to actually, you know, do damage. So, some pieces of your gear will be replaced to better fit the content you are doing. Fortunately, we have loadouts available at endgame, so you don’t have to manually swap around as much. With that said, there are some items that are kind of good throughout the game, some are even Best In Slot all the way through, simply because of the bonus they come with. As tanks are not really needed prior to raids, my recommendations will be with a DPS focus in mind. A little tip before we start. If you want a LOT less clutter in your bags, go into the glossary and for each section of Weapons, Armour, Accessories and Offhands, click on the green Scrapping button at the top. Green ENABLES autoscrapping, red DISABLES it.

This will autoscrap everything you get in those categories that you have currently discovered. All future items will still drop, you do will not be missing out on something! Now manually find the items listed below and untick the Always Auto Scrap Item box shown earlier. Now this specific item is allowed to drop. This also works for the other things, to remove their drops if you believe you have enough of a particular item. Like when you have a full set of 150 Mythical tools, no need for those to enter your bags again. For the most part, all classes can use the same gear and not really worry too much, so you won’t need to untick a lot of boxes.

Melee weapons
If you for some reason want to go 2-handed weapon at this stage of the game, you should take a look at Final Argument from the Runic Lord. But as it is a Divine weapon, you might have better luck farming Bludger from the Cyclops or Cleaver of the Damned from the Abyss Walker. Both of them have a 5 Offensive, 1 Defensive attribute distribution and that’s good for dps. I do not recommend 2-handed weapons for melee at this stage. Instead, I would farm the Goblin Brute for some Brute’s Pummelers, a Divine fist weapon that attacks super-fast and has a chance to kill non-boss enemies when they go below 10% Max HP. But that one also suffers from Divine droprate issues, so you might have more luck finding some Obsidian swords from the Forgotten Warrior.

Ranged weapons
Don’t use 2-handers here. There are only Guns to choose from and they are not worth it yet. Instead, farm some Sundown Pistols from the Forgotten Ranger if you want to attack super-fast. For hitting a bit harder, you need a bow or crossbow, as well as a quiver. Quiver Of The Deep from Abyss Walker is by far the best, so go get that. I recommend you take the Runic Crossbow from the Runic Lord and Run ic way from him! That Critical Damage bonus is just so good!

Magic Weapons

None of the Staves or Spellblades are really interesting right now, so focus your efforts on finding some good books. The spellbook Guide To The Abyss, from the Forgotten Mage, is a really interesting read. Make sure you also read The Contract “given” to you by the Imp. Those nasty little buggers always try to cause trouble with their contracts, so pay attention before you sign it! It’s listed as a Ward, in the Offhands category.

Accessories

The best amulet at this point is by far the Royal Pendant which drops from both the Dragon Emperor and Dragon Empress. The buff duration is really good and a nice damage boost.
The best Rings are by far the Divine called Ring Of Manipulation, dropping from the Goblin Mage. But with the droprate issues all Divines face, you might want some regular ones and which to pick depends on your needs. If you’re still dying a little bit too much, the Dragon Band can be found from the two lesser dragons Scaleback and Razorwing. If you’re okay on survival, the Hybrid Band is a decent speedboost.

The best Trinket is the Emperor’s Blessing, as it is a damage increase regardless of what you do. Unfortunately, that one is a Nemesis drop and those are few and far apart right now, so if you get it, use it. If not, you need something else and which one depends on your Default Attack type. If you are using Physical attacks, you want to take a look at the Spare Eyestalk from, well, the Eyestalk. Because it’s a spare and you took it. For your elemental attacks, nothing beats the Element Stone at this point.

Helmet

Berserker Helm for all! Orc Brute and Orc Chieftain both wear this, so off with their heads and take their helmet.

Shoulder
Imbued Pauldrons for all! Find a Living Archer for this one. For the mage using Fireball, imbue some Tattered Wings from the Winged Horror, to the Imbued Pauldrons. More on imbuements later.

Chest
For your Lightning Barrage ranger, nothing beats Conduction Plate from the Lord Of Thunder. It’s a Divine, so it is good. But can be hard to get. In that case, everyone could benefit from using Decaying Wrappings from the Mummy. It is a more defensive piece of armor and it is worth using until you get better gear.

Bracers
The Divine bracers Vampiric Brace are super awesome, if you can find them! If not, use the Iridium/Dragonscale/Satin Bracers for some crit damage.

Gloves
Emperor’s Strength are super awesome, but hard to get as they are Nemesis items. Traveller’s Gloves would be my second choice, but they only drop from Magic monsters and that’s too random for me. Fortunately, you can CRAFT some similar gloves, though with a lesser bonus, 3% attack speed instead of 5%, but that will do. Enter the Blacksmith and find the Lead/Heavy/Woven gloves, craft them at Mythical and Level 150. Alternatively, just use the regular Iridium/Dragonscale/Satin Gloves that drop, if you want to save materials.

Belt
Ravagers Cord, only dropping from Rare monsters, would pretty much last you until raids, but it can be hard to find. Dragoncrest Cord from the Dragon Empress is really good for killing bosses, but not trash. So my recommendation is the Living Sash from the Jungle Dragon. Like the chestpiece, this regens HP and should help keep you alive.

Pants
Imbued Tassets for everyone! The damage multiplier is too awesome. Kill the Living Sentry to find them.

Boots
Swift Striders from Rare monsters if you can find them. If not, craft the Gold/Rugged/Silk boots for some weapon-specific damage bonus.

Cloak
Jungle Cape from the Jungle Dragon. The regular Iridium/Dragonscale/Satin cloaks that drop has 1% less speed, so decent alternative.

Check the Glossary for drop locations. If you have not yet found the Jungle Cape, look at the Jungle Dragon instead and see which map that one is in, then go farm that map. Some of the listed enemies are bosses, some are trash mobs, so make sure you look at both entries in the Glossary.

Even More Advanced Blacksmithing

At this point you should have upgraded your Artisan’s Hall to at least rank 5 and hopefully 6. This unlocks the Transmute, Imbue and Imprint options in the Blacksmith, so that’s where we’ll go now and take a look at them. Throughout your gearing process you might have been annoyed at certain pieces having a wrong attribute. Like, if only this one had Ranged instead of Melee or Fire instead of Arcane damage. And why are there so many Defensive or Utility stats on my gear? I want more Offensives! With these 3 new options, you can get the attributes you want, essentially making the gear suit your exact needs.

Transmute Attributes
With this option, you can change Ranged to Melee or Arcane to Fire. you could do the same with Reroll, but that was random, this is giving you the choice to pick what you want. Some attributes cannot be on a piece of gear together, because their combination simply isn’t valid. If your gear has Elemental Damage on it, you will never be able to roll Physical damage as well. If you have Melee or Ranged, you can never find Arcane too. You need to swap attributes around sometimes, to get the combination you want. And not all attributes can be on all items. You will never be able to find Health Regen on a weapon or Block Chance on Bracers. The ? box will tell you exactly which stats can be on your currently selected item. With the exception of Relics, you can transmute as many times as you can afford. You cannot change the TYPE of attribute with Transmute Attributes, for that you need to Imbue. Also note, Relics are limited, as you can only change ONE attribute ONE time and then it’s done, so consider carefully which you want and why.

Imbue Equipment
This one is super awesome! If you’re annoyed about the amount of attributes you do not want on an item, you can in most cases change them. Some slots always come with 3 Offensive and 3 Defensive attributes and nothing can be done about that. Others, like trinkets, have various combinations of Offensive, Defensive and Utility attributes. If you would like to use one item for the bonus it has, for example the 3-3 Imbued Pauldrons, but you would also like to have more Offensive stats, you can imbue the Tattered Wings onto the Pauldrons and turn them into a 4-2 version. You are destroying the Wings in the process, but you will transfer all attributes (and future improvement types) to the Pauldrons and can then benefit from the bonus it has.

You can also go more Defensive if you’re doing tanky things. Just pick the item with a good bonus, then imbue another item with good attribute distribution onto the item you want to keep. And then Transmute the stats to your liking. Unless it’s a Relic, in which case this option won’t work at all. Weapons and offhands can have 5 Offensive attributes, making certain items even better with proper imbuements.

Imprint Attributes
The final option available for now is more of a timesaver than anything else. Let’s say you are running 5 teams of 3 characters each. You want them all to have the exact same attributes on their rings, which are all identical. That’s 30 rings. That’s 30 times messing with Transmute in order to get the right setup. That will take a lot of time. Unless you imprint a ring! First you setup a ring exactly like you want it with the attributes. Then you Store Imprint. This does not destroy the ring! Take the next ring and use Copy Imprint on it. Now it has the same attributes as the first ring. Do that 28 more times and you’re done. Of course, you can do the same with other pieces of gear and the ? box will show you what is currently available for your chosen item.

Now for a little bit of confusing information, but it is important. You can only hold ONE imprint setup per item and if you Store Imprint on an item that has been imbued, the imprint will count as if it was the imbued item. That means, if you have two Hybrid Bands, one imbued with Ring of Manipulation, the other without any imbuements, and you Store Imprint the one with RoM, the imprint will count as RoM. Any ring that either is RoM or is imbued with RoM can now use that imprint. Any ring that is not, cannot. And this one doesn’t work for Relics either.

Bounties

When you feel comfortable, or just willing to give it a go, open the Missions menu and click on Bounties. Here you will find 3 randomly chosen bounties at the top, a Random Bounty button and a Reroll button. If you click on one of the 3 bounties, you will be shown some information on the right side of the screen. In the top you can see the objective of the mission and information that the enemy has been granted some bonus health and damage, as well as a randomly chosen bonus. These are what makes Bounties harder than normal missions, because they only increase in difficulty and strength as you progress. Below that you will find the rewards for that specific mission. You will get everything you see there; you will not have to choose one single item. Some of the items may have a blue triangle in the corner.

Those are items with a new form of enhancement called Paragon. Remember that word from the scrapper settings? Yup, here they come. Normal items have attributes that go up to rank 10. With Paragon, you can increase those attributes to rank 20 and whatever the current rank is, will go up as well when you make it paragon. So if you currently have a 7/10 attribute and you make the item Paragon 1, it will become 8/11, 9/12 at P2 and so on, up to Paragon 10. If you construct and upgrade the newly unlocked Keep, you will be able to craft your own gear into Paragon items. If you ALSO combine it with the ability to craft Nemesis gear from the Castle, you can eventually land on a 30/20 attribute (not a typo!). You will need that! But for now, click on the other two missions, compare rewards and decide which mission you want to do. Be aware that when you Store Bounty, the other two are removed and 3 new missions are randomly chosen. Pick carefully! At this point your priority should be:

• Mission with new Enchant
• Mission with 2 or more Paragon items
• Mission with 1 Paragon Item
• Mission with Mythical item you want
• Any mission not fitting the above criteria.

Store 2 Bounties of your choice, then click on the Prepare button, but do not yet begin it. While the window may look the same, there are some new tickboxes. Queue Next Bounty being the most important right now, as it will allow your team to move on to the next without any further interaction from you. It will also make your team start a Random Bounty whenever you run out of stored missons, so if you want the full Idle experience for this, Random is the way to go. One thing to note is that all Random bounties grant fewer rewards compared to manually selected bounties, so it will take a bit longer to progress, but it is perfectly viable to do it with Randoms only. When you get around to upgrading the Bounty Board, another tickbox appears that will let you automatically claim rewards, but you need to start a new run for that to take effect.

Once the 2 missions are complete, stop your team, claim their rewards and click on the Fame Passives button. You now have 20 Fame to spend, which is a Bounty specific currency that you only get here, only spend here and never have to worry about once you have maxed the passives. You will be able to get all of them, so don’t worry. Take a look at the passives, what they do, what they cost. I suggest you start with Luck, because you want to get better quality gear from your missions. After selecting that, look at the two Bonus boxes. The one on the right is what you pick from the passives. The one on the left is what you get from increasing your Infamy Level. This is what it looks like when maxed:

As you can see by the red bar below, you have moved it a little bit towards level 2 and when you hit that, you get a bigger Infamy Bonus. At the same time, all your Bounty enemies will become stronger, harder to kill, but your missions will also yield better rewards. If you look at Luck again, you will see that it now costs 60 Fame. Every level increases the cost, so at first you will be spreading out your points. But due to being able to freely respec, I suggest you max out Luck whenever possible. So the next 40 points you get, spend them in something else. It does not matter much which you pick, because when you get the next 20 points, you can remove those two and pick the second level of Luck. Keep going like this if you want to, or just fill them out as soon as you can afford them. I suggest you leave Nemesis alone until later, because there’s a reason why it costs so much more. Nemesis monsters are harder. Exit Passives and take a look at your 3 stored bounties. They are exactly the same as before, because they were rolled before you made any changes. Store one and 3 new ones will show up, but this time they will be affected by your passives, in this case with increased item quality. As you progress through the Bounty content, you will slowly be getting better rewards and find the new Pathfinder items. Some of those items will last you a long time and I highly recommend you take a look at the boots. They are going to be among your favourite items for a while.

Another currency you earn by doing Bounties, is Favour. This is used to upgrade all the Bounty related buildings as well as rerolling bounties. I recommend you don’t reroll at all, because there is very little reason to do so. Save it all for upgrading buildings, most importantly the Domain of Agony to continue progressing.

Bounty Gear Recommendations

Not much has changed since the last list, only a select few items:

Pathfinders Tunic with its increased Buff duration will be a very good replacement for your current chestpiece and it will last you a long time. Minor buffs to duration may seem rather boring, but consider that with enough of it, you can make abilities like Dragon’s Roar have 100% uptime.

Pathfinders Belt gives you a percentage of your Max HP whenever you attack a target. If you’re using a slow-attacking 2-handed weapon and this belt, guess what you should replace.

Pathfinders Pants will make you do a LOT more damage, provided you can stay on full HP. If you have a character taunting, a massive amount of barrier or just a lot of selfheals (like from attacking super-fast and getting HP when you hit something), you can benefit greatly from these pants. Be aware that as long as you are missing even 1 HP, you get no benefit whatsoever from the bonus on these pants and in scenarios where you are taking damage constantly, they will be worthless. The Imbued Tassets will overall be better.

Pathfinders Boots. Attack Speed Multiplier. You attack faster. Look at the above two items and laugh like a maniac!

All of these items are exclusive to Bounties and are random drops, so just keep doing missions until you have enough of them.

Agony Missions

By building the Domain of Agony you get access to Agony missions. I hope you’re prepared for this step up in difficulty. Agony missions function very differently from what you’ve done so far. You start off by having access to two different modifiers that you can add to your mission. Depending on which modifier you pick, you get access to different loot. That means YOU are in charge of difficulty and rewards here! Once you have cleared a missionset enough times, you get access to two new modifiers. When you add a second, third etc modifier to a mission, each modifier gets stronger. This ramps up the difficulty quite fast, if you pick the “wrong” ones. Eventually you will want to have tried all modifiers to find all the gear, so you just have to push through.

If you look at the rewards list, you can see something very interesting. As you add or remove modifiers, the reward values change, just like you’d expect from changing difficulty. But look at the last two lines. Soul Tool Reward Chance and Reinforcement Material Amount. Soul Tools are upgraded versions of your regular Tools and you very much would want to have those at Mythical level, so the higher you go with Agony, the better your chance of getting them. Agony “only” scales up to 10, so it is not possible to select all 20 modifiers at once. The new materials are used for making the baseline stats on your gear better through Reinforcement. In the case of weapons, the damage goes up. In the case of armor, the armor, evasion and barrier values go up. They can be increased to Rank 10 in the blacksmith, for a 100% bonus to their original values. I highly recommend you focus on the weapons of your main damage dealer first, for obvious reason.

Starting out, I will recommend your first mission has the Attack Speed modifier. As you can see in the middle of the screen, this will add some bracers and gloves to the reward chest. Some Agony items can be found on any mission, no matter the modifiers. These two are only available when the mission you are running has this specific modifier. And these two are SO good that you definitely want a full set of them on all your characters. More speed, more damage and if you are wearing the Pathfinder belt, more healing! Before you start your mission, take a look at the tickboxes while preparing your team. You now have the option to Infuse your mission, granting you an extra chest from the boss, yielding more loot, at the cost of gold. A lot of gold. If you cannot afford it, don’t do it. If you are a trillionaire with nothing better to spend it on, go ahead and infuse. I don’t recommend it at first. Gold income is not that good yet.

When you reach Agony 4, a new building is available. You need that to unlock the next part of the game, Factions. If you saw the Expedition building become available and figured you’d give it a try, you probably found out that raids are hard and you are in no way ready for even the easiest one right now! So keep climbing the Agony ranks, get some better gear and when you feel ready, start doing Faction missions. I recommend getting to at least Agony 8 before doing the swap.

Agony Gear Recommendations

Quite a few good items come from Agony missions. Here are some of the pieces that require specific modifiers to drop:

• Bracers – Elegant Cuffs
• Gloves – Nature’s Gauntlets
• Amulet – Charm of Aggression (physical)
• Amulet – Charm of the Elements (elemental)
• Cloak – Assassin’s Cape

And a few pieces that can drop without any specific modifier attached:

• Gloves – Occult Gloves
• Belt – Belt of Decay
• Pants – Occult Leggings
• Spell Tome – Cobalt Tome
• Quiver – Elegant Quiver
• Ward – Eldritch Artifact

Some of these items have a VERY low droprate, but they are well worth the wait.

Faction Missions

Constructing and upgrading the War Cap requires a lot of Donation Credits. You thought you were done with those, right? Wrong! Just like with Agony missions, you can Infuse Faction missions for bonus loot, but this time it will cost you Donation Credits. Faction missions are split into four groups of four tiers. Each tier requires more DCs to infuse, so if you think you have a lot, you don’t. There’s a reason I mentioned you would need a few billion credits!

Entering the Factions screen, you will see a representation of the four factions at the top of the screen. Click on one of them, any of them, doesn’t matter which, they all open the same window. This is the Reputation window, where you can see which rewards you get when you reach the next rep level (or just filling the bar when rep is maxed), as well as which bonus skill you get access to and the passives provided by selecting that skill over the other factions. The first two are identical across the board, More Damage and Curse Protection. The last two are different for each faction and skill. Have a look at all four, see what their skill does, then pick the one you want first. Below the passives are some buttons that will make you absolutely love doing Faction missions! Each button upgrades the material yield of the selected items, anywhere in the game. No matter if you do regular missions, bounties, agony, factions or raids, whenever you get this resource, you get the bonus you have applied to it, up to a total of +100%. This will make it VERY easy to upgrade your gear and I am sure that you are currently struggling with getting all the Paragon and Nemesis and Reinforcements you want done. Farm factions for a little while and you will get loads of the most useful materials! Only problem is, each upgrade costs Donation Credits, starting with 1 million. But let’s not get depressed, instead, let’s get fighting!

Go back to the main faction screen and select a Tier 1 mission of your faction choice. My personal favourite is Druidic Council. Both due to the gear that drops in Fallen Circle, but also because the faction skill Nature’s Blessing is a really powerful skill. The others are as well, but this one is a bit better when undergeared. And you most likely are right now. Anyways, pick one, start fighting. And then look at how many rounds you need to fight. Yes, 50 rounds. No, that is not a typo. Yes, 47 rounds with Expedient enchants on all three characters. No, you will probably not survive if you are too undergeared, but hey, you wanted to try it early and I did warn you!

After about 3 full runs, depending on deaths etc, you will have reached the first reputation level with your faction of choice. Stop combat at the end of the run, go to the main screen, click the faction and check your new bonus. Now go to Equipment screen and on each character you have, select your brand new Faction skill. Head into your passives and look at the ones available for your new skill. If you picked Nature’s Blessing, you will see that you have 1 point available and you can pick either Nature’s Strength or Nature’s Protection. You can only pick ONE of them, but you can freely respec between the two. When your next tiers unlock, you get one point each time and you can pick one of the two new available passives. The skill itself will heal you while active, so if you are always on the brink of death, you are now able to survive more easily. It will not mean you cannot die, believe me, you can, but it does make things a lot easier.

Head back to the Factions screen and you can see that Tier 2 is now unlocked. Compare notes between T1 and T2, judge for yourself if you can handle it and start fighting. Or pick another faction and unlock the other new skills. Eventually you will want to have them all available, at max level. A good baseline to judge your gear by at this point, is the Paragon rewards. T1 drops up to P4 and that is where I suggest you have all your gear at before you move on to T3. By the time you get to T4, you should be wearing a full set of P8 gear. Do you need it? No. But it sure helps. And you do want to have P10 gear before you start raiding. If not, you will probably die a lot. Again.

Final Gear Upgrades

As you progress through the factions, you will also be getting the materials needed for Reinforcing your gear. Get as many items as possible to R10, as this will boost your damage output as well as your survivability from all that extra armor, evasion and barrier. And similarly with Nemesis, as you can use the upgraded Fortress to customize your Nemesis rolls to nearly perfection, hitting the 30/20 mentioned earlier. I strongly recommend that you try to make Attack Speed, Critical Chance and Critical Damage your Nemesis stats whenever possible, as they will help you do a lot more damage.

When you get enough Donation Credits to reach rank 4 of the War Camp, make sure you do that. Starting at Tier 3 missions, you will have the chance to loot a new material, one from each faction. The new Bless Equipment option available in the Blacksmith, will allow you to double the bonus on a piece of non-divine gear. Using the Pathfinders Boots as an example, it has a Bonus of +3% Attack Speed Multiplier. Blessing the boots will use ONE unit of material from each of the 4, to boost the bonus by 25%. If you use all 4 types, you get a 100% bonus, making it 6%. But this doesn’t seem like much does, it? No, it doesn’t. At least, not by itself. But think about it. There are a lot of items with an okay bonus that you might think are no longer valuable, because they got replaced by a Divine. Well, what if you could double that bonus, would that make the old item better than the divine? In many cases, yes. Prior to hitting raids, most of your gear will still be Mythical quality, so there are a lot of items that can benefit from full Blessings. If you upgrade your gear to the fullest, it’s almost as if you are wearing twice the gear. Twice the gear, twice the damage, twice the survivability. All of that to prepare you for Raids…

Raids and Uniques

This is it. You’ve reached the endgame. And this is where I will leave you to, almost, figure things out for yourself!

Raids are done by 6 characters instead of 3. That opens up for a lot of class, gear and skill setups to be efficient, so I will not recommend you anything specific. Some raids have mechanics that changes how you should approach the fight. Some Bosses have friends helping them, some have not. Sometimes you need to kill the friends, sometimes you shouldn’t. One encounter is just two Bosses, but there’s still something about that raid which can one-shot you if you are not prepared. There is no single setup that is just awesome for all encounters, so I won’t provide you with one. But there is always a big hint in each raid, if you just take a few moments to pause combat and read the descriptions of the buffs and debuffs, and maybe look in the Glossary a bit. Raids are hard, they are intended to be hard. They will get easier as you get better, but just to show the step up in difficulty, let me compare T4 boss HP

with a Heroic Raid boss HP:

Yup. Good luck if your damage is bad!

In this guide I have focused mostly on a single setup of Sunder, Barrage and Fireball. With raids, many of the other skills are now useful and even performing much better than those. Poison Sting and Rend, the two main DOT skills, are now superior to most other skills straight out of the box. But I’ve also seen Explosive Shot, Chain Lightning, Quick Draw and Arcane Explosion do really well with certain Uniques equipped. And 2-handed weapons are now also really good. The reason I haven’t used them previously is simple. No enemy lives long enough to truly benefit from going that direction and you haven’t had access to the gear required to make these builds work properly. With each raid comes new regular and Divine gear and some of those, combined with a lot of old items, is what will take your dps to new heights. And of course, the Unique items.

Unique items are exactly that, unique. You get one from the first kill of each boss and it will go into the newly made Reliquary, not in your bags. You can never have more than one of each, your characters can never wear more than one at a time, you cannot scrap it, you cannot enchant it, make it paragon, nemesis or reinforce it. The only modification you can do to it, is spend some points in the passives provided by each item. You get a maximum of 4 points and 8 passives to choose from. You need to level up each unique and that is done by wearing that item in combat. Some will be a minor upgrade, others will be a massive gamechanger, both in terms of how much damage you do, but also how you do that damage. Some of these items really open up new builds that were not good before.

When you have killed all bosses on Normal you get access to Heroic mode. They are much harder than their normal versions, as they should be, so expect to die a lot before you adapt by changing your setup. When you finish all Heroic mode raids, you get access to the final and most awesome item enhancement. Nemesis Overload. It is awesome. Enjoy it.

And speaking of enjoying, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I have writing it. If you made it to the end without being confused about things, then I consider that a job well done for both of us. Me for writing things, you for being able to think for yourself. A lot of the information in this walkthrough is available in the game already and you just have to read what’s written in the Glossary or the various Blacksmith options to figure out most of it. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to join the official Lootun Discord. There are many people there that are willing to assist you with any questions you may have regarding the game, should you need it. Doesn’t matter if you think it might be a stupid question, doesn’t matter if you’re totally lost and need help getting a functional setup. As long as you are willing to listen, we are willing to help.