Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds || The Hunt for the Elusive Natrum Earrings

Hey, what's up everyone?

There's a maintenance scheduled from 1-5 p.m. today. Kingdom defense and raids happen every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. so I think that it will be likely postponed and will be re-scheduled same time tomorrow.

Yesterday, I was trying to level up my Rogue to level 40 but it was harder than expected. I thought that by finishing the storyline quests it would be easy, but coping up with the mobs level made me realize that I still need to put grinding in between each quests. It's a different experience leveling up your alternate characters. Because the main already finished the reputation tasks an alt would encounter, the only source of experience would either be the storyline quests or basic grinding.

It's a must to level up your alts because there are certain perks each character unlocks as they power up. The weapon codex in particular is a great way to enhance the overall CP of the account. To accomplish that a player needs to collect weapons (enhance and awaken them) of their alternate characters. One to three stars is pretty easy with a one to two weeks of grinding materials for equipment crafting like recipes, weapon crystals, territe and gold. It's a different story if we talk about 4-star weapons because it would take alot of time and resources to even craft a single piece.

Like weapons, completing the skill collection also empowers the account as a whole. Filling up the exclusive skills for each classes also helps in increasing the overall CP. Of course, the most important thing especially for casual and f2p players are the inventory slots to be unlocked. For each character, 25 slots are unlocked every 20 levels (until level 100). That's an additional 500 slots if you manage to level up all 4 alts to 100. There's also an option to purchase an inventory slot for 100 purification medals but I wouldn't recommend this one as there are lots of other more important uses for such medals.

At the end of the day my Rogue only reached level 33. I estimated that I'll need at least 3-4 hours to raise it to level 40. As there are other things to do I postponed this endeavor for some other time.

In the early days of the game I was still able to get into the top 10% of the familiar arena and managed to gain the resource called Asterite. Like terite, this resource is convertible to real world cash and can be used to purchase some ultra rare items in the game like super rare 4-star light/dark familiar and even armors. Understandably, it's rarer than terite as this resource is only obtainable by achieving high standings in familiar arena and the lava valley event. Like I've said earlier you need to at least achieve top 10% in the familiar arena rankings. I'm not so sure about the lava valley but I think the requirements are almost the same. I wanted to participate in the lava valley as much as possible but the schedule is quite against me. The event is held every Tuesdays and Sundays and it starts at 9:00 p.m. PH time.

Today was a normal day in the familiar arena as I have only won 2 out of my 5 matches. It was not like this but since I'm not very active I missed out some perks that would boost the fighting capabilities of my team. My current team composition is weak against fire but I have no choice since the CP will go down considerably if I swap one familiar. I'm planning to rebuild my team into a pure earth team in the future but I need a the ultra rare Staghorn and lots of terite to start this endeavor.

After the frustrating results of familiar arena I tried my luck running a dungeon in the Dimensional Border. Although I need to complete tasks in all of them I chose to run the Natrum's nest. I already have a tier 2 awakened Natrum earring and I need another one to upgrade it to the next tier. There's a significant improvement in stats of both equipment and familiar when they reached tier 3, 7 and 10 awakenings. I'm also building my main decks leaning to either fire or earth that's why I decided to burn all 5 ticket entries I've accumulated in this dungeon. Sadly, no earring dropped and the drops I've got are some boxes containing random mount accessories and a 5-star fire jelly bean. That's 5 entries. Yesterday, I only ran this dungeon twice and got a skill book so the results are quite saddening.

The World boss Ardor drops lots of good stuff and it respawns every 6 hours. You can enter a number of times every time it spawn but I think that's only applicable within a certain timeframe after the spawn. I always do the Tier 2 because there's always a chance of getting the Crimson Cross gem for a weapon's joker slot. It enhances ATK which is the most preferred stat of any class. I had a few 'Orange' which enhances the DEF stat but I also want to get one of these. There's also a difference in the enhancement stones that drop in Tier 1 and 2 as you can get ES usable to upgrade +11 to +20 equipment in T2. Tier 3 is still inaccessible because you need to be at level 87 to unlock this one.

I guess that's all for toay. I did some field boss runs after but that let's talk about that in other posts.

Thanks you very much for reading and have a great Wednesday.