For Leveling we would recommend doing the main quest, since the Main Quest has increased Exp and Gold. Taking the Board Quest close to a dungeon entrance, if the dungeons offers one, is also a good idea. You should also pick up Side Quests, otherwise you will have to grind dungeons at some point to continue the Main Quest. Keep in mind to clear out your Inventory, every now and then, if you don’t want to run around with a full inventory. Around Level 15 you will receive your Job Change Quest, you should try to complete it first, cause it will speed up your level up progress.
Once you are 40, you shouldn’t have that much gear, from here you have two options. First option would be farming Abyss Dungeons to gear up a bit, this can be done alone or in a Party, a Party makes it a lot faster. Not only will you obtain rare gear pieces and rare plates, you will also obtain codes, suffix and upgrade materials like Ordinary Agates, Ordinary Alteums, Ordinary Diamonds and rare Paculta’s Crystals. Dungeons also drops some gold and most importantly Dimensional Crystal Fragments, which can be used to exchange for Skill Plates at Heraldry Scholars Stan that can be found in the North East of Saint Haven.
The other option would be to straight up do Nests, you can start by doing Cerberus and craft some gear from there or you just go straight for Manticore or Apocalypse Nest, which shouldn’t be too hard to clear, if you know exactly what you are doing.
There are 2 Epic sets for the 40 cap, Apocalypse and Manticore , you choose your set depending on what type of stat your class needs. You can craft those sets at the black smith. Trade > Item Production > Set Equipment
You can upgrade your gear with Suffix. Suffix applies an extra effect and a stat increase on your gear piece, depending on the suffix you choose.You can check out the effect by selecting the suffix and hovering over the weapon at the Blacksmith. To apply suffix on your gear you will need a few materials. Pacultas’s Crystal will be used on all suffixes, no matter what effect you choose. The Crystals have different rarities: Rare, Epic and Unique and those are needed to apply suffix on gear of the corresponding rarity. Rare Crystals are obtainable from Abyss level 40 Abyss Dungeons, Epic Crystals from Nests and Unique are obtainable from Sea Dragon Nest. You can upgrade Rare Pacultas’s Crystals to Epic using Octagonal Water at the Blacksmith. Besides the Crystals you will also need some other materials that drop from Dungeons. You can check what material you need and where they are obtainable at the blacksmith, by just hovering over them. Note all of the Suffix materials are also obtainable from the Chaos Openings(not released yet).
There are 3 different types of Codes: Agate Codes used for Armor, Crystal Codes used for Weapons and Diamond Codes used for Accessoires. Once right clicking the code, you will be able to put in a weapon of the same rarity and apply the Potential (Potentials are different depending on the rarity of the gear piece.). You can do that as much as you want, until you have the potential you want, you can also not apply the potential you rolled, if you prefer the previous role more, you can keep it, by paying a fee, however that’s not recommended, since it’s super expensive. Codes are obtainable from Abyss dungeons and can be purchased by Heraldry Scholars Stan.
A Skill Accessory will increase a selected skill by 1 level, it’s important to know that once a skill reaches level 6 or 11 it gets a huge power spike.
Skill Accessories are a craftable Gear Piece. Depending on what skill you want to level up, you will need either a Sylvie Necklace, Earrings or a Ring and one of the two Types of Skill Fragments. The Sylvie Accessoires are obtainable from Manticore and Apocalypse Hell Mode. (Not out yet.) And the Fragments are obtainable in the Chaos Openings. The Fragment Ambiguous Skills is obtainable from Chaos Opening Kamala and Fragment of Subtle Skills which is obtainable from Chaos Opening Balea(not out yet). You should know that, it doesn’t matter which Accessory you use (e.g Vigor, Tent, Wise, etc) the stats of the Skill Accessory is completely random.
Skill Plates are mainly obtainable from the Heraldry Shop in Saint Haven. Just talk to Heraldry Scholars Stan that can be found in the North East of Saint Haven. You can either buy the Pouches for 150 Fragments and hope you get the Plate you want or save up to buy the crafted Plate of your desire for 1k Fragments. Alternatively, you can PVP and save medals to buy the exact skill crest that you want, but they are a hefty cost of 100 medals each.
Heraldries can be obtained from Dungeons (Normal and (Rare in Abyss)) and Hell Nests like Cerberus Hell and Manticore, Apocalypse Hell mode later on. Normal Nests also have a chance to drop Plates, however the chance is really low.To craft the Plate you will have to talk to Heraldry Scholars Stan and have some spare Agates.