Do Not Rank Farm

I’ve mentioned in many of my other articles but it is my firm belief that you should not rank farm.

First, defining rank farming

Rank farming is the process of running a dungeon repeatedly (usually Monday dungeon) for the sole purpose of continuously ranking up. This is not to be mistaken with ranking up from running a dungeon you’re farming for other reasons. For example, Nightmare Street Mythical was roughly 48k exp so running it dozens of times to get Grida would likely rank most players. The goal being Grida, this is not rank farming. I am defining rank farming specifically as the goal to reach a higher rank and running high EXP dungeons with no other value to achieve this.

Second, why is it bad

Ranking is a “free” stamina refill. After a certain point you’ll have more than enough team cost for all your teams making it pointless. Depending on the teams you’ve planned for yourself, this is achieved at roughly the rank 250 mark (and this is excluding the +100 cost badge which you get at the start of the game). Rank 250 also has a relatively decent max stamina. You will also get another free roll, guaranteed gold, at rank 250 (first one is at rank 150, second is at rank 250). Cost can slightly impact you once you start going into maniac badges and have 150 cost cards, but I’m assuming if you’re rank 300 or so, this is not a consideration for you.

So like I mentioned, ranking becomes a way to refill stamina for “free” while farming dungeons.

Depending on what period you started and how much you’ve worked to get to a farming setup for specific dungeons you can probably hit the ability to farm rogues, rushes by rank 300 or 400 for most players. With most of the rogues you can infinitely farm until certain ranks. If I remember correctly, Myr is in the mid 400s because she’s the lowest EXP of all the rogues while Zaerog Infinity hits into the 500s for infinite ranking. If you really wanted to farm MP this is the most efficient time to do it. Once you hit the higher ranks like 600+, you will not rank off rogues, and for most rogues you probably won’t even rank on 2 full bars of stamina.

Let’s say you have 325 stamina, it’s 25 stamina per run for 50k exp. You’ll get 650k exp per full bar. That’s not enough to rank you in the higher ranks, not even close. When you do heavy rank farming, you’ll end up in a situation where you might not rank up for days at a time unless you’re running constant Colosseums.

Third, why this has become such a large issue

When Ganesha’s new ultimate evo added EXP bonuses to running him as a leader, a lot of people who had Ganesha started rank farming using Monday dungeon. With enough patience, a player could use Ganesha as a leader (for both teams, coop) with a button or swipe team to chain rankups all the way to rank 800. Right now I’m not even rank 800, I’m rank 725 at the time of writing this post and it is still a stretch for me to rank. A full bar of rogues would net me roughly a quarter to a third of my exp requirement to my next rank depending on which rogue. It takes 19 hours for me to refill my stamina bar. Running only on my natural stamina, it would take me roughly 4 days to rankup from running rogues.

Fourth, the arguments for rank farming

The main argument for rank farming ends up being stone efficiency. When running inefficient dungeons like Tamadras which give 10k exp for 50 stamina, if you plan to stone, that one stone you spend will give you more stamina than if you were a lower rank.

I know for a fact that you will have 300 stamina at rank 567, and 360 stamina at 687 (tried to choose nice even amounts of stamina).

So if you happened to be at rank 567 right now and farmed all the way until 687, you’d get 60 more stamina (1 per 2 ranks roughly) and that means 20% increase in stamina per stone compared to when you are at rank 567.

So to discuss the pros and cons of this argument let’s look at the amount of stamina from refills that you would lose from farming up those 120 ranks.

We can take the average of the start and end stamina and multiply that by the number of ranks to determine how much of that refill stamina you’ve lost.

The bolded numbers signify what’s used in the calculation, I added the text for clarification of what operation I’m doing.

120 ranks * [(360 stamina at 687+300 stamina at 567)/2] = 39600 stamina

That’s 39600 stamina worth of refills from rankups that you passed up.

Let’s check how many times you would have to stone to make it more efficient to rankup for stone / stamina efficiency compared to just using the rankups as they come.

39600 stamina lost / 60 additional stamina per stone = 660 stones

So in the specific example of going from 567 to 687, you would have to spend 660 stones at rank 687 to take advantage of the increased efficiency for having a higher max stamina at rank 687.

At rank 700 you’ll have 366 stamina and 416 at rank 800. Applying the same operations as above give us:

100 ranks * [(366 stamina at 700+416 stamina at 800)/2] = 39100 stamina

This time we only went up 100 ranks. Comparatively to the last example where we went up 120 ranks (20% more from the current example), we have roughly the same amount of stamina lost on refills.

39100 stamina lost / 50 additional stamina per stone = 782 stones

It would cost you a whopping 782 stones to benefit from the increased stamina cap in rank farming compared to simply ranking up naturally as you farm for things that benefit you.

Finally, a more extreme example, if you rank farmed from 400 to 800. I’ll skip the line by line break down for this and just tell you, 632 stones.

The reason this is lower than the previous examples is because the additional stamina per stone increases to 200, distributing the lost stamina on rankup refills a bit better. But 632 stones is no joke.

Fifth, the key takeaways

Don’t farm rankups, instead, farm dungeons that provide a benefit to your box. Whether that be in plus eggs (usually STTD), skillups, monsters, or piis. Most dungeons give moderate EXP so you will rank up, maybe not in a single bar of stamina but in two bars depending on what you’re running.

Do use your experience of a lifetime dungeons. If nothing else, they provide a stone. I usually plan it so that I have 400k exp or less to rank and 30 stamina left before using mine.

Make use of the golden ranks where you can easily chain rankups while farming something that benefits you.

Ranking for “stone efficiency” is in the end, extremely inefficient for most players including myself.