Is MP farming efficient compared to IAPing for rolls?

At first glance this will seem like a poor comparison but once I put down the assumptions it will become a bit more obvious why I chose this route.

Is MP farming efficient?

First off, let’s set down some baseline assumptions.

1. If you’re trying to farm MP as fast as possible, with optimal setups, it takes roughly 2 and a half minutes per run of a rogue while fully focusing (for speed). This ignores the time spent feeding / fusing drops.
2. The rogue in question gives 525 MP per run, 500 for the predra, 25 for the coop bonus. The boss drop of 50 MP is ignored because 1 plus egg is the value of 1/10th of a Star Den run (2.5 stamina) but 50 MP is worth less than 1/10th of the MP of a rogue, therefore we keep the plus egg.
3. You could earn $10/hr simply working.
4. Infinite stamina, no rankups / stone for stamina required.
5. The goal is to reach 750k MP, starting from 0 MP.
6. You are fully capable of working for the purpose of IAPing with some spare cash. (This is important because a lot of people could already be working and not have the spare money for PAD from their job)
7. You can get a job roughly instantly.
8. The average MP per stone is 2.2k in the REM.

Using these assumptions we can build a rough estimate of how long it would take to farm 750k MP, purely in time spent in dungeons.

750000 monster points / 525 monster points per run = 1428.57 runs

We can’t have half a run, so let’s round down (say you were excited about finally hitting 750k and started selling a few boss drops, however inefficient that is). 1428 runs.

One of our assumptions is that a full run including menuing takes two and a half minutes (capable by the most optimal teams nowadays).

1428 runs * 2.5 minutes per run = 3570 minutes total

or 59.5 hours for all 1428 runs.

So we have our time spent purely on PAD if you were to farm solely MP.

Now what about if you spent that time working?

$10 per hour * 59.5 hours = $595 earned working

$595 * (85 stones per pack / $60 per pack) = 843 stones

At $10 per hour, you would get $595 and this translates to 843 stones. This assumes a partial pack, or you could chip in the last $5 yourself to make it a nice, round $600 for exactly 10 packs.

I’ll take a moment to explain the 2.2k MP per stone.

It’s hard to give an exact value of the standard REM given that Gungho changes the rates very often in Godfests (3x, 4x, 5x gfes or pantheons) as well as the number of cards in the REM. With such a large pool of cards to draw from, it can be very inconsistent to apply an average to any small sample of data across various Godfests. Hence, I’m using values from GFE-only / Heroine REMs which have a roughly 80% chance at a 5 star for 15k MP or 20% chance for 50k MP (ignoring the possible 7 star for Heroine which would only further the value of that specific REM for MP, assuming you actually sold the 7 stars).

[(50,000 mp per six star * 20% rate per roll)+(15,000 mp per five star * 80% rate per roll)] / 10 stones per roll = 2.2k per stone

I felt using the MP per roll for these REMs was suitable given they’ve come back every so often in JP and as an NA player, we expect them again at similar intervals.

Now that we have our MP per stone.

843 stones * 2200 MP per stone = 1,854,600 MP

This more than doubles the MP you got in the same time amount of hours spent farming rogues themselves.

This is a rudimentary example that leaves out a lot of pros / cons of both options.

Other considerations:

1. Stamina is not infinite (covered in the next example).
2. You might be in a situation where you can’t work or work more.
3. Jobs are available and relatively easy and quick to start a job for this purpose. This consideration becomes even more exaggerated if someone only needs, say, 50k MP.
4. If you’re saving any of the drops (and the assumption is you’re not selling all your drops on the results screen since that’s terribly inefficient for value) then you’ll have to spend time feeding.
5. You might be choosing a slower pace while doing other things for enjoyment while you farm MP.
6. You might be MP farming while at a job already.

The purpose of this is not to try and convince you to go out, work, then dump all your money on PAD. It’s just to give you some perspective if you hardcore MP grind like some people I’ve met. Whether or not you MP farm is still your choice alone and I hope it’s the most suitable to your situation.

 How much is too much to farm?

This section discusses the idea that MP cards are “farmable” in another perspective from the first post. Both of the sections together should hopefully leave you with the idea that MP monsters are not realistically “farmable”.

The assumptions for this section:

1. You’re rank 568, have 300 stamina, you rank every 20 runs exactly. I won’t be adjusting for max stamina increases in this example.
2. You do not have infinite stamina, your only stamina refills are rankups and natural stamina.
3. Runs are completed instantly. I won’t be accounting for the few minutes that it would take to run a dungeon for a rankup in this.
4. You always run as efficiently as possible (as soon as you have 25 stamina you use it to complete a run).
5. MP per run is again, 525 MP per 25 stamina.
6. Stamina is refilled at 1 per 3 minutes.

Just how long would it take for you to farm a specific amount of MP. I’ll use 50k because that can be multiplied by 6 for a 300k card or by 15 for DAthena (WHO IS NOT IN NA YET).

50,000 MP / 525 MP per run = 95.24 runs

300 stamina per bar / 25 stamina per run = 12 runs per bar

We know that from a full bar we get exactly 12 runs. We still need 8 runs to rank.

8 runs * 25 stamina per run = 200 stamina

200 stamina * 3 minutes per stamina = 600 minutes

600 minutes = 10 hours of waiting

So every rankup we run all 300 stamina and have to spend the next 10 hours of natural stamina to get a rankup. So every 10 hour cycle gives us 20 runs.

95.24 runs for 50k MP / 20 runs per 10 hours = 4.762 cycles

4.762 cycles = 47.62 hours

So we know that to reach 50k MP, it would take us just under 2 days including the refills from rankups. Remember this is assuming a refill every 20 runs. With exp requirements being exponential, as you rankup the number of runs required to rank will increase significantly.

At 2 days per 50k, that gives us 12 days for 300k MP and 30 days of regular farming for 750k (enough for DAthena IF IT EVER COMES OUT).

Now I’m going to use the same example but this time I’m going to leave out the refills from rankups. Since we don’t rankup the calculation is significantly easier. The same 95.24 runs still applies.

95.24 runs for 50k * 25 stamina per run * 3 minutes per stamina = 7143 minutes

7143 minutes / 60 minutes per hour = 119 hours (rounded)

We go from 47.62 to 119 hours for 50k MP when you remove the rankup refills. This is exactly 2.5 times the original value with rankups. This just goes to show how much of a difference a rankup makes when farming MP. At my point in the game I would rank once every 2 days if I spent only my natural stamina on rogues.

With the new value excluding rankups, we get 29.76 days for 300k and 74.41 days for 750k MP.

This means that if you did not remotely regularly rankup from the rogue you were farming, that it would take about a month to “farm” a MP dragon running nothing but rogues with the stamina.

Realistically you’d rankup at some point and you have the occasional experiences of a lifetime to greatly boost your current exp, potentially giving you a refill at the same time.

The Key Takeaways

I do not consider MP farming efficient, and personally I would not spend all my stamina over the course of several weeks to months solely for an MP card.

Given that I’ve seen other games with far longer paths to get to specific cards or outcomes, MP cards can still easily be considered farmable even if it takes you a month to do it. With the free 390k MP announced in North America, MP farming might not be as applicable to you or at the very least, if you’ve decided to hold out for DAthena (WHO IS NOT IN NA NOR IS SHE CONFIRMED FOR NA) you’re more than half way there from the free MP alone, so the task of farming the rest over maybe the course of a few weeks to a month is far less daunting, You may even have the MP saved up from selling Berry Dragons and other troll cards anyway.

In the end, whether you MP farm is up to you.