Original General Dungeon Fighter Thread

Yes, I think I have my class now. It was between Asura and Exorcist, but I chose Exorcist. Now how does the game work and all that jazz?

I suggest you check out the DFO site's media article titled "Learn to love the dungeon system" or something like that (earliest article). It will explain a lot about going through dungeons and whatnot. If you do well on your first day, you should be at around lvl 10-12 by the end.

Here's another thing I typed up for someone else.

Yeah, the equipment stuff was pretty overwhelming for me too xD Some NPCs talk about it and stuff, and I got along fine for a bit.

The official website media section has great tutorial material btw.

 General information

Equipment grade comes in 5 flavors ranging from worst to best:
--Inferior
--Weak
--Ordinary
--Extraordinary
--Superior
The better condition the equipment is, the more stats it generally has (compared to Ordinary), and I heard that it is cheaper to repair them as well. The reverse is true for crappier equipment. Grades do not change after the equipment is generated.

Equipment titles can be in various colors, ranging from worst to best:
Regular
Blue
Purple
Magenta (Pink)
Orange (not in USA DFO)
When you are starting, get whatever you can from dungeons and use them. Regular equipment is usually a worn or old piece of crap of the blue version. For example, Chipped Ceramic Plate as opposed to regular Ceramic Plate. Depending on how advanced you are in the game, you should set your standards to blue equipment only, then purples when you find them. Purple equipment and better have unusually better secondary stats, such as better movement speed, attack speed, hit rate, enhanced skills (yes, you can exceed skill caps with equipment), element resistance, abnormal condition tolerances, regeneration, and more.

(Note: Green equipment can either be blue or purple status or better. If the equipment is sealed, it's purple. Green equipment is simply part of a set that, when all combined together, give additional benefits.)

You can disassemble equipment for material components, mainly cube fragments and elemental crystals. Talk to Loton Maximug for this service. All equipment generates clear cube fragments when disassembled. Blue equipment generates colored cubes (random), purple equipment generates Low Grade Elemental Crystals, and magenta equipment generates Exceptional Grade Elemental Crystals. When disassembling any equipment, there's a small chance that you'll get what I call an "explosion", which results in massive quantities of material components. If you chuck a lvl 35 blue equipment into the disassembly machine and an "explosion" occurs, you might get 35 clear frags and 250 white frags. If on the other hand you don't get that lucky, you'll only end up with 1 white cube fragment instead of 250.

With regular equipment, you should NPC them unless they are better than your current armor. With blue equipment, you can either NPC them or disassemble them for colored cube pieces, the choice is yours. However, there's a few quests down the road that require cubes, and they tend to be pretty steep quotas. Because of this, you could make money by selling cube fragments to other people (especially white because there's a b4stard quest that eats up white cubes like no tomorrow). With purple equipment or better, you should try to sell them to people, although it wouldn't hurt to disassemble a few of them for elemental crystals to use in recipes.

Recipes are very rare, and the reason for this is due to the diversity of options you can add to your finished product (not implemented). It works a lot like Maker skill in MS, except you need the recipe first.

Miscellaneous
Icons with a pot head are usually Legacy items, and they can only be found from breaking pots. The chances of you getting anything good from pots however are very low.
Equipment can be reinforced for special stats. Talk to Kiri to reinforce an equipment This is generally a VERY expensive process, and the cost goes higher depending on the level of the equipment and type. Stats earned from reinforcement tend to be minimal until past +9. Equipment reinforcement bonuses can degrade if the reinforcement fails, and after +8, failure can result in the equipment being destroyed.

 Equipment trends

For your particular class, you should open up the skills window and look for a type of Armor Mastery. If you have such a thing, you should strive to use that specific type of armor whenever you can. In some other cases, equipping an incompatible piece of armor can hinder you instead. You should experiment and see what benefits you and what doesn't. The same can apply for weapons. (my class doesn't have a weapon mastery so I can't tell you much on that part)

Different weapon types are best suited for different subclasses. For example, a Nen Master would use Gauntlets in PvE because they tend to have high magic attack, but in PvP they should use Tonfas instead.

Weaponry tend to have specific stats just for being that type of weapon. For example, Tonfas always come with +3% evasion rate and +2% hit rate (or at least the ones I've seen anyways). Boxing Gloves always come with a +2% stun rate for 2 seconds when attacking. Also, specific types of equipment only appear after level 18 and require specific classes to benefit from them. The ones I'm aware of are Brooms, Boxing Gloves, Beam Swords, and plate armor.

For the record, I haven't found any Magenta equipment so far.

I believe I forgot to mention that you can fix your equipment via various NPCs, the most convenient being Delilah who shows up after every time you clear a dungeon. Just ask to trade, and you should see the option to fix stuff at the bottom.