Manastorm Gold Farming Guide

With this method, we have seen upwards of 1.8k gold per hour with a solid group that knows strategies and does their part. With a full raid contributing and pulling their weight, we expect this number could go a bit higher!

What is manastorm farming, you might ask?

-Manastorm (abbreviated MS) gold farming involves spamming low level manastorms as fast as possible to get as many caches as possible. After many hours of research and testing this, the AVERAGE value of a cache is about 10g each. The goal is to maximize the number of caches you receive per hour to thus increase your profits. Theoretical math puts a decent group at around 1k gph, which isn’t too shabby for just mindless killing dungeon bosses!

-With that being said, this is not a method meant to be pushing the highest MS levels you possibly can, as higher levels take longer time to clear and in turns lowers the number of caches you receive per hour. Your goal is as many levels as possible as fast as possible, and lower level MS is the way to do that. Usually you will want to reset the group around level 60-80, depending on how well your group can handle getting to that point. If it slows down or you hit a hard level before then, you may end up resetting sooner. Just be mindful of your DPS and clear times.

Ideal MS Gold Farming Group

• Solid tank with 20k+ hp and ability to hold aggro, having threat serum helps tremendously here

• 1-2 healers. Grove ranger has proven to be very good in this due to the ability to keep the dot on an add and provide mobile healing, since all of their heals are instant.

• 12-13 DPS – Fill the rest of the raid with DPS. Ideally, you would want each person pulling 15k+ AoE dps and 10k+ ST dps, which is pretty reasonable to achieve with ilvl 110 gear.

Recommended Items to be Efficient

-In order to go faster, there are some useful items that can be purchased from Cogsworth, located near Millhouse in every major city, that will make the process faster. Higher ranks will obviously improve your efficiency, but if you are just starting out, getting the first rank is better than nothing.

• Sprint Serum – Very useful for increasing your run speed to be able to get to the bosses faster.

• Stat Serum – These come in 2 flavors, a 2hour buff and a 15 second buff. Having both gives you a consistent buff as well as a buff that is off GCD that can be incorporated into macros to add an extra buff to burst damage for bosses. There are a few different ones he sells for each stat. Get the one that works for your build (Int, Str, Agi, Spirit)

• Items given at start – Make sure to use the HP pot, escape pot, and if needed, the resurrection pot. These are all given by default to EVERYONE at the start of a manastorm

• Harm Repellant Remedy – Another one sold by Cogsworth, increases your resistances to help a little with some of the AoE damage that some of the mobs and bosses do. Very big for the healers as well are your overall survivability, but not necessary for lower level spamming

Recommended Strategy Starting From Wave One

1. Once you assemble your group, the next step is to get started. Launch the manastorm and immediately start rushing the boss, popping your Sprint Serum and using movement abilities. There are a few zones early on that you need to stop and kill some trash or you will be overwhelmed, but for the most part just SPRINT to the boss.
2. Once you get to the boss, pop BLOODLUST at 100% (on pull), and check to see if it has the « Chaotic Links » buff. Kill mobs as necessary to remove this buff, but once its gone, focus the boss 100% to kill it.
3. Rinse and repeat process until the group falls apart or the pace slows down significantly, then back out of the manastorm, reset, and go again. If your bags are getting full, dont worry as the excess caches will be in your mail box.

[li]MOST IMPORTANTLY– When you go to sell, change your stat priority to strength. This will cause more plate to drop as well as more 2 handed weapons, both of which sell for more gold per item

Tactics for Certain Bosses

-One of the most common bosses you will encounter at low levels is Hydromancer Thespia in a Steamvault variant. She has 3 phases before you fight her. Once everyone is in the boss arena, have EVERYONE stack in the middle. Kill the first mob, then the second wave of 4 mobs. As these mobs die, SOMEONE needs to pop Smoke Bomb. Assuming everyone is stacked, all the ranged mobs that normally don’t move will all group up in the middle making cleaving them down extremely easy.

Adapted from a guide by Hinoko published on db.ascension.gg.