Pure Ranged PM Guide - For less!

[Smidge204]

So I made myself a pure Ranged synthing PM, since my main character is a Gunmaster now, and I decided to start a second character with a pure Striking PM. This guide (http://www.pso-world.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=2580), though, seems sub-optimal when it comes to economics, so I thought I'd offer some tips on getting your PM's production stats up faster and for less money.


First: Ranged, since I've already done it. As I experiment with others I'll write up procedures for them.

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The absolute fastest way to get your Ranged P.Stat up to 100 is a steady diet of PM Bullgrolls. Not many players have 1,250 Omega Acids lying around, so that's not much of an option.

The fastest, most cost effective method that's actually plausible is a steady diet of Freeze or Burn EX traps - 500 of them, to be exact. You can buy the EX traps at any item shop for 600 Meseta each. Total cost? 300,000 Meseta over two and a half days (feedings every 12 hours, remember...)

But there are two problems with this: First, you can only carry 10 EX traps at a time and can't gift wrap them. This means a ten trips per feeding to and from the item shop. Second, 600 Meseta a pop is more expensive than it needs to be.

The solution is to synth them yourself. Boards and materials are available from the Syth shop, and the total cost works out to less than half. The other benefit is you can stockpile the materials in one visit to the shop, and not have to leave your room during feeding - a big time saver!

Procedure (per feeding cycle): This is using Freeze Trap EX but Burn EX traps should work too, substitute Hot Berry for Cold Berry.

Head to the syth shop. Buy 100x Cold Berry (50 Meseta) and 100x Ether Acid (200 Meseta) - split it into two stacks and have one stack gift wrapped. You need 100 of each but can only carry/store 99 otherwise!

Buy 10 Freeze Trap EX boards for 300 Meseta each, and head back to your room.

Optionally, you can buy 50 boards and 10 stacks of mats (two each of 5x99 with gift wrapping) if you have the money, and obviously an empty inventory. You will be five Berries/Acids short, though. Perhaps you can shell out the cash to have them delivered to your room or just make another trip.

Insert the boards into your PM - all of them if you can. Dump the first batch of materials into storage and get to work! Synth, put into inventory, feed to PM, repeat. You should be able to feed it 100 EX traps within a ten minutes or so. Open the presents and refill your stock as needed.

Wait twelve hours or more and repeat the process.

Total cost using this method: 140,000 Meseta (Less than half just buying the traps)

Levels per feeding cycle: 20
Levels per day: 40
Time to complete: 2.5 days

Lots of time saved running back and forth. Materials picked up as drops further reduce the cost, but not by much since you'll only be spending a few days on it. They're not worth farming solely for this purpose unless you're flat broke.
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[desturel]

But there are two problems with this: First, you can only carry 10 EX traps at a time and can't gift wrap them.

If you didn't want to synth or giftwrap them you could just deliver 10 stacks to your common box.

[Dhylec]

Interesting approach. Let's see if others can help improve this mini-guide.

[Smidge204]

If you didn't want to synth or giftwrap them you could just deliver 10 stacks to your common box.

That's an extra 400 Meseta a stack, and you can only do it once per trip to the shop. The total cost just went from 300k to 310k - quite the opposite of my intended goal.
=Smidge=

[desturel]

That's an extra 400 Meseta a stack, and you can only do it once per trip to the shop. The total cost just went from 300k to 310k - quite the opposite of my intended goal.

300 meseta not 400.

It's the easiest way to make the cheapest PM in the game.

You'll find it's much more expensive and time consuming to make any other PM. Not to say that the "make your own EX trap" method is useless, but it's more time consuming than delivering items to your common box.

If money is your main concern, then you should have stocked up on the Fireworks (http://www.pso-world.com/items/psu/10/2509/fireworks__trap_/) or De Ragan's Breath traps when they were out and made the PM then. If speed is your main concern, then delivering the EX traps is the fastest way to complete your task.

If you are a new player to the game, then likely you won't have the money needed to feed your PM every 12 hours so the whole speed thing is a moot point. I can understand wanting to make items as cheap as possible, but you aren't going to get it done in 2.5 days on a limited budget. Likely around a week.

If you are a player that has been around long enough to be able to afford to feed your PM every 12 hours, there is little reason to spend extra time needed to synth the traps. Sell that Junaline and Merculine you aren't using. Sell those Serdote, neutral Lumiass Blau and Blumiers that have been sitting in your shop to the NPC for 50k. You'll find your time better spent doing runs and getting additional money to make up for the extra you spent delivering the items.

This is coming from a person who had to
1) Create a new character.
2) Take the items off of the character.
3) Put the items into the common box.
4) Feed them to the PM.
5) Start over from step 1.

To make his first two PMs. (back then Diga and Foie disks were the best way to make a cheap tech PM other than creating a new neuman character).

To summarize, your method is the cheapest, but not the fastest. It's the middle road option for those who have just enough money, but not really enough money. For those who have the money, there are faster options (feeding Meteor Cannon, Ebrozike, and Fraduke for example).

For those without money, it's going to take you a while either way so just do whatever you find cheapest.

[Smidge204]

No, it's still the faster in terms of game time spent. One trip to the shop. Last I checked you can't gift wrap traps, so you can only send one stack to your common box at a time. You're still running back and forth to the shop ten times a day.

Also your logic is flawed in this statement:


If you are a player that has been around long enough to be able to afford to feed your PM every 12 hours, there is little reason to spend extra time needed to synth the traps.

First, Synthing traps takes zero time: They're ready instantly. It takes all of ten seconds to stuff ten boards into your PM and another ten to load the materials. Second, the difference between 120,000 and 56,000 a day is pretty big for some lower-level characters that might be trying to get a jumpstart on their PM. Even if you're rich, a 53% reduction in cost is worth it especially when it's less effort.

Even if I'm mistaken and you CAN gift-wrap and send multiple stacks to your box, my method is still faster since you are only navigating one set of menus instead of two and running between common box and PM. If you want I'll do a comparison of all the button presses required to nav the menus - I guarantee your method takes more steps.

Fireworks, being only available for a very brief window of time, don't count for much. Money wise it IS a lot cheaper even if you need twice as many (+10 vs +20). But it will also take twice as much work (and time) to shove them down your PM's throat. That's assuming you haven't missed the window of opportunity.
=Smidge=

[Kryslin]

I haven't tried it with traps, but items I've had delivered to my common box don't combine with the same items in the box. I've had 10 single olpads, neptulines and nanopolymers in my box after a few S2 runs...

If this holds true, you should be able to deliver multiple stacks of traps to your common box from the NPC stores. I'll have to give it a try later tonight...

Steve

[GreenArcher]

No, it's still the faster in terms of game time spent. One trip to the shop. Last I checked you can't gift wrap traps, so you can only send one stack to your common box at a time. You're still running back and forth to the shop ten times a day.

Also your logic is flawed in this statement:



First, Synthing traps takes zero time: They're ready instantly. It takes all of ten seconds to stuff ten boards into your PM and another ten to load the materials. Second, the difference between 120,000 and 56,000 a day is pretty big for some lower-level characters that might be trying to get a jumpstart on their PM. Even if you're rich, a 53% reduction in cost is worth it especially when it's less effort.

Even if I'm mistaken and you CAN gift-wrap and send multiple stacks to your box, my method is still faster since you are only navigating one set of menus instead of two and running between common box and PM. If you want I'll do a comparison of all the button presses required to nav the menus - I guarantee your method takes more steps.

Fireworks, being only available for a very brief window of time, don't count for much. Money wise it IS a lot cheaper even if you need twice as many (+10 vs +20). But it will also take twice as much work (and time) to shove them down your PM's throat. That's assuming you haven't missed the window of opportunity.
=Smidge=

Your logic is flawed, you can put as many stacks of an item as can fit in your common box when you deliver them. Buying EX Traps and delivering them to your room is much less effort than synthing the traps.

Also 1000th post :D

[Smidge204]

Not flawed logic, just a bad assumption. Namely, that you couldn't have more than one stack of the same thing in the common box. Apparently you can, and that works in favor of my method as well.

I'm still not convinced it's actually less effort. Let's have a look, then. For both cases we'll start at the appropriate shop. Assumptions include empty character inventory, PM board list, and common box (or at least empty enough). For both methods, you can buy all the required traps or materials/boards in one visit.

For my method, that involves buying 99 berries, 99 acids and delivering them. You do that six times in total, with one of those six buying only 5 of each to make an even 500 total. The last stacks of items do not have to be delivered. You then buy 50 boards and have 18 of them delivered. After that, you are carrying 32 boards and two stacks: 99 each of berries and acids.

Go to your room, dump the two stacks and insert the 32 boards. Go to the P. Machinery Function menu, synth 10 traps, feed 10 traps etc. until you've used up 9 boards. Go to your common box, get 90 berries/acids, refill storage and pump out the last of the traps for that cycle.

Using your method, though, repeat the following steps 49 times:

Buy 10 traps (confirming the buy if you're not a Protrancer) (seven steps each)
Deliver 10 traps (fix steps each)

Buy another 10 traps for your inventory and return to your room. Once there, feed the 10 traps to your PM, back out of those menus, go to the common box to get another 10, and repeat that another 9 times.

When you factor in the time spent backing up menus and confirming trades, I an definitely not convinced it's less effort overall. The bulk of item synth for traps is button mashing (Enter, Down, Enter, Down, Enter, Enter, Enter, Back) where as going to the common box requires backing out of and navigating more menus.

I started to calculate how many button presses it would actually take, but when just buying the materials cost my method ~270 actions and your method needed ~600, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I think, if you feed your PM whole traps from the item shop, you probably value your time as much as your meseta.
=Smidge=

[biggabertha]

I feel so jealous of these approaches...

Back in the day!!! Back in the day!!!


Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!


Nah, this is awesome, I like things like this - just a side note, Those PM feeding stuff's the best/fastest way to get a PM to maximum production level? I have 300 or so lying around...

(Also.. I was one of those guys who was stripping cast parts and newman wands for my PM for two months straight when the game came out...)

[Kumlekar]

Dealing with materials is a pain... I don't know where you get that 10 trips a day number. you can carry 30 EX traps. 100 / 30 = 3.33... I guess your multiplying by 2, but that's still not ten, and you only round up every third time.

As for delivering, I wish I had thought of that.

You're right that 60K per feeding is a tad expensive, but its still cheaper than any other type of partner machine (I'm done striking, ranged and armor, been putting off tech since I don't have the 3mill right now) 300K for a full mag isn't that bad.

[Smidge204]

Dealing with materials is a pain... I don't know where you get that 10 trips a day number. you can carry 30 EX traps.

Y'know, it never occurred to me that you could use all three types of EX traps. A glaring oversight on my part... ^^;

I'm still confident that synthing is easier in terms of number of button presses, and it's obviously much, much cheaper.

Still considering options for the other stats. Definitely more difficult.
=Smidge=

[Kryslin]

Defense is the easy one - Vatvara boots or Kazue Shoes. 2000m each, +24 each feed ( I think).

Tech gets expensive. I used debuff technic disks, and foie when I couldn't afford them. Any found technic weapons also went into the PM.

Melee. Synth 4-6 star weapons. If you know where to hunt, the materials are plentiful. Boomas tend to drop sabers a lot. Pannons in Unsafe Passge A drop a whole lot of [B]Palasra.

Cheapest way for Melee and technics is to keep a character slot open, and make new characters, and strip them of their gear. when the common box is full, feed it to the PM, sell the rest, and repeat. Takes forever, though, to do it this way.

Steve

[Kumlekar]

I wish I had known that about making a character for technics, I already have all four slots filled XD, and I don't want to delete momo. (That Y-data is kinda important, certian people might not like it disappearing =D)

[desturel]

Defense is the easy one - Vatvara boots or Kazue Shoes. 2000m each, +24 each feed ( I think).

I prefer the "raid player shops for Cheap Miku Miko/Cas-Miko outfits and other 12*+ clothing and parts" method. Sure it's a bit more expensive, but if you want the job done "now" it's probably worth it...

[DreXxiN]

Fireworks/De Ragan Breath

[Emgro]

I remember the first pure mind PM I saw. About a week and a half after PC release, and it took six of us most of that week and a half to generate the cash and items for it. Whole lotta Newman rerolling going on.