This guide will give you information on how to set up a Chaos run as quickly as possible. This is most helpful if you read it shortly after you start a run, as it will help you avoid many of the time wasting pitfalls that I personally fell into during my first run. This article will explain how to effectively set up the Lords of the Land, which are required for the Grade Shop at the end of the game, and will go into some details of how to handle the early portions of a Chaos run. Since this guide will include information for people just starting out (presumably these people will mostly be veteran Tales players) I will try my best to avoid spoilers entirely.

You have two major goals to accomplish in either your first or second run: level up the Lords of the Land, and buff up Sorey as much as possible. Ideally, before your Chaos run, you'll want each Lord to be level 24. The gap between level 24 and 25 is about twice the gap between 23 and 24, and there are many buffs you can skip out on for your Chaos run, more info on that in a later section.

To do this as effectively as possible, it's also worth mentioning the many do's and don'ts for your first run, as it is extremely easy to waste time and gald on things that will not transfer over to your Chaos run. I will list them as follows:

• DO collect as many stat boosting herbs as you come across. Feed them all to Sorey.
  
• DO keep Mikleo and Alisha on Remedy Preparation as much as possible, since both will sometimes make stat boosting herbs.
  
• DON'T buy any weapons or armor unless you're just doing no damage with a character or getting mowed over. Item drops are plentiful in this game, as are treasures.
  
• DON'T sell any items below the tier of Feldspar. Items below this tier are more efficiently traded as grade for Lords of the Land.
  
• DON'T waste time on fusion. Not only will fused items not carry over into your Chaos run, but fused items are also near worthless to shops and Lords.
  
• DON'T bother with sanctification. One of the skits tells you that Lords accept a "ton of grade" for a sanctified item, where in fact it's only maybe 20% more than the base item. It's way more effective to turn in 11 of said base items.
  
• DON'T trade any junk items you have for gald or grade until this guide tells you to.

There's a reason this section isn't named First or Second Run, this trick can only be initiated in your first run. For whatever reason, the game has been programmed so that if you have never encountered an enemy, it will not appear as a supporting monster in a random battle. (scripted battles such as the first few out of Elysia don't count as random) The scourge of your chaos run will be spellcasters -- you are only fast enough to quell one or two, and it's difficult to take out any of them if you're constantly being bombarded with spells. Spellcasters are easy to identify. Nagas, fairies, ghosts, floating eyes, any humanoid with a staff, and wyverns are all dangerous spellcasters. (or in the Wyvern's case, they spam fire breath)

I don't know if fighting these monsters in the Crucibles will cause them to appear in their respective areas as a support monster. Challenge said crucibles at your own risk.

To help you pick and choose your battles, you need to know the diagonal run trick, which is simply -- run diagonally with your keyboard and you'll run faster. Not sure how long this glitch will last before it's patched (Namco, please don't patch it -- speedrunners will cry), but you can even outrun werewolves with this trick. There's also the door trick -- enemies will despawn if they try to enter a doorway whose door has been opened by the player. Last, but not least, there's Holy Bottles. With the tricks I listed, I never needed to use any, but it's an option nonetheless.

Another thing worth doing is building up Rose's Luring skill. (the reason I recommend using it on Rose is because you'll probably want Dezel using Windstepping) This skill will help you manipulate what support monsters show up in any battle. (i.e. you could enter a battle with a Naga and have it supported by nothing else but Werewolves)

Something I haven't tried, but is worth experimenting -- maybe not importing your monster records between games will reset what can or cannot spawn. If folks let me know if this works or not, I'll update this part of the guide and credit you.

Eventually, the story will put you in Loghrin. You will be asked to do something. Before you turn in this story quest, you will want to pick up as many drop bottles as you can carry. A certain boss battle with a huge buildup (including an anime cutscene) will drop some serious cash, even in your first playthrough. It's a fairly easy boss, but it's a marathon boss, which is perfect for what we're trying to do. Once you fight this boss, don't use the drop bottles yet! Wait until two separate cutscenes happen, and then start using the drop bottles while you whiddle the boss down. Your drop bottles should net you gald in the millions, even without buffs you can get from lords, second run buffs, or buffs from certain inn foods.

You can also repeat this with the optional bosses in the final story dungeons. The first optional boss on the right side might be too difficult on your first run for this method, but the other five are considerably easier. If you use Loghrin Inn's +75% gald for doing 10k damage in a battle ("Deep-Fried Prawns"), along with the double gald bonuses for the Lord and the Grade Shop (second run only), you can get 12-24 million gald with 30 drop bottles. Without the extended benefits, you'll probably get around maybe 2-4 million each with 15 bottles (untested) and 3-6 million with 30 bottles, which isn't half bad.

You can even repeat this with bosses 1, 3, 5, and 6 in the EX dungeon, which are worth even more gald, but I wouldn't recommend bosses 2 and 4 due to their difficulty. Finally, Nao Tomori wrote a guide for farming gald on Steam. If you've exhausted all the bosses and still need gald, that guide is worth reading. (though I'd recommend using my notes for building up the Lords of the Land, since they offer way better gald --> grade conversion rates than Nao Tomori's method)

Using these optional bosses, you will want to spend all your gald between bosses since fast travel eats a harsh percentage of your gald, not a flat amount. You may also want to get the post-game Lord up to at least level 21 before venturing to other regions, so fast travel out of that area is free.

By the way, you'll want to invest that gald in Loghrin -- get that to level 24 first. There are two reasons, first is that it has all the items you want, second is that the gossip glitch won't happen between the save point and the shop. The next section explains how you'll invest it.

This is by far the most mind numbing part of this process -- getting grade via giving consumables to the Lords of the Land. If you're like me, you'll probably make mistakes as you repeat the same processes hundreds of times in a row, per city. Just the mere annoyance of this process may convince you to wait until your second run to do this, since it's a lot faster with an expanded inventory.

Your goal is to get each Lord to level 24. You'll need somewhere around 22750 grade total for a Lord to be at level 24, with level 25 being 30000 grade. To do this, you'll be doing a lot of converting gald to consumables, and consumables to grade. The five I recommend are Apple Gel, Peach Gel, Panacea Bottle, Holy Bottle, and Dark Bottle. I'll also list some others, but also why I don't use them in the handy table at the bottom of this section.


As you can see, the conversion rate for Life Bottle is awful in spite of its low cost. Grape Gel would speed things up, but not enough considering you need around 16 million gald to max everything out including peach gels, about 14.5 million without. The overall conversion with peach gels are about 100 gald:1 grade, or 1%. This does not include fast travel for the towns with awful shop selection.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I mentioned earlier that you'll want to max out Loghrin first, and that's because of its selection and the fact you won't get the gossip glitch -- the one where if you enter menus while gossip is going on (including chatter from party members), the menu navigation keyboard controls break and you have to use your mouse. Hopefully this will eventually get fixed, but it's a serious annoyance during this process.

From here, you'll be simply running back and forth between shop and save point. Press A to purchase all of a single item, which is faster than holding D. Aside from that, run back and forth, back and forth...hundreds of times. It's boring, mind numbing, and I hope you have more entertainment in the background than I did. But it's pretty much necessary. Without an expanded inventory, you'll get 177.60 grade per run, while you'll get 355.20 grade per run if you've expanded your inventory. That's 127 runs tops with a normal inventory, and that's just Loghrin.

It gets worse in that only Loghrin and Gododin have the full inventory, while shops in towns before those have increasingly reduced inventories to the point where Ladylake only has Apple Gels. This will either require you to bus tiny amounts of Apple Gels to and from the shop and the inn (about 1000 times), or for you to fast travel between Ladylake and Gododin to immensely speed things up. This is why earlier, I recommended that you keep all your junk items, as Ladylake is where you'll want to dump them all. (Note that you may want to feed some junk items to your Unnamed equipment, but any others give to Ladylake's Lord) It'll probably get you a few thousand grade, which is a nice boost considering how expensive fast travel is. You can use boons to make fast travel cheaper, and if you got Gododin to level 21, it'll be free one way. (be sure to set this for Ladylake as soon as it gets to level 21 as well) Fast travel with the "half cost" boon will still take around 1/30th of your total gald, so the sooner you get the "travel for free" boon going both ways, the better. You will probably also want to use fast travel for Marlind, which also has a pretty terrible inventory AND the gossip glitch is easy to trigger.

It's worth noting that items that are Feldspar and up are better used selling, since the gald you get converts better as items to grade than simply grade.

There is one more Lord of the Land that can only be acquired after beating the main game. It's inside the EX dungeon, which is in between the last save point and the boss room. You'll be sent to a map and the Lord is just hanging out far to the south of the map, a little to the right of center on your map. Simply talk to him and he becomes the lord, covering the EX dungeon and the final story dungeon. With him unlocked, you can do your final grind by clearing all the monsters between the one shop in the final story dungeon area and the save point on that map, then busing consumables from that shop to the faraway save point. It's also quite mind numbing, but it's necessary.

This whole process takes hours upon hours. It seriously sucks, and it's twice as bad if you lack inventory boost and/or gald boost. But once you get every Lord up to level 24, it's time to do a Chaos run. Don't forget to give any remaining herbs to Sorey before moving onto the Chaos sections. But first, I have to mention the Normin you need.

Normin abuse is crucial for your Chaos run. There are guides out there telling you where the Normin are, but the three you want are pretty easy to find if you fully explore the final dungeons (not the EX dungeon) while using Edna's "Normin for the Win" ability. The Normins you want the most are:

• Priventi: Reduces all incoming damage by 30.
  
• Pennetrayt: No staggering for incoming damage of 40 or less.
  
• Sheeld: +1 iron stance while casting, which is ideally for your spellcasters.

Invalada seems nice at first, but I believe it only applies at the beginning of battles, which could cause enemies to annihilate you if you're too slow and you go all in on Invalada. The final Tier 10 Normin cannot be brought over to your Chaos run, and can only be accessed when the final dungeon unlocks. Don't start your Chaos run until you get these three Normin.

When you do your New Game+, you should have 13100 points. It's honestly easier to list what skills are NOT needed, which are as follows:

• Carry Over Consumable Items: If you want to spend extra time buying up elixirs and such for your Chaos run, that's fine...but they aren't needed before you get normal access to them.
  
• Carry Over Unnamed Equipment: Whether or not you want this is up to you. It's used for the "joke" items with stats that never go up that you get from optional bosses, which in turn are useful for your Chaos run since you can trade unnamed items to Lords of the Land to improve chances for x2's and x3's. (see cb220's guide linked at the bottom for more info) If you use this option, you must equip your unnamed items or they won't carry over.
  
• Treasure Navigation: Frankly, treasure outside of the EX dungeon and maybe the Loghrin area is terrible, compared to what you get from monsters. I don't even use treasure options for my Lords in my chaos run -- only the drop rate boosts for monsters.
  
• Half Style: It halves EXP. Next.
  
• Gald Style: Converts some exp to gald. But by now, you already know how to farm gald with drop bottles -- you don't need this.
  
• Speed Arte Mastering: Pretty optional, since you stop getting artes somewhere in the 70s I believe. But you do technically have enough points left over if you want this one.
  
• Double Grade: Your lords are leveled up enough, you don't need this and you'd have to trade something for this. If you really want it, you'll have to get one of your lords up to level 25.
  
• Double Effect Potential: Doubles status ailments and stuns on everyone. By everyone, it'll probably mean you. It's a nice option for a masochistic challenge, but I don't see the allure.
  
• Double Damage: This is useful for farming grade the old fashioned way -- by killing monsters. It's good to pad your damage records, so if you want it, you'll have enough for this and Speed Arte Mastering.

The remaining options combined will cost you 12635 points, giving you 465 points remaining for whatever else you might want. You'll have to max out more lords to get some of the challenge options.

Your goal is to pretty much rush through to the point where you've unlocked the first Lord of the Land. Once you've done this, you'll see why I recommended that you get Priventi, Pennetrayt, and Sheeld. Not only are these great buffs to have against common monsters, but these buffs are level 10. But before I get into that, you'll need to configure your Lord of the Land. This is the recommended configuration for farming -- fighting the late game bosses will likely require you to respec your gear, but this will get you through the majority of the game with disgusting ease:

• Service of the Normin x2: These are crucial for the Normin abuse I promised.
  
• Hellion Detection: It makes it easier to force dangerous encounters, which allegedly improve the drop rate. (either RNGesus hates me, or this is pretty suspect -- however one of the skits mentions this)
  
• Drop Rate Boost x2: More drops? Why not!
  
• Nimble Feet: It makes choosing your battles much easier. Also, I'm impatient -- and this is really the most "optional" out of all of these, and there's just no decent tradeoff for the 2 point cost.
  
• Tribute from the Defeated: This, along with a similar item from the grade shop, will make farming for fusion items much faster, since both increase drop rates for items you're already wearing.
  
• Unshakeable Resolve: Stuns can be fatal. You don't want some unlucky stun causing your party to wipe.
  
• Gald Boost: You need gald for fusion -- lots of it. Time to start collecting.
  
• Punishment for the Powerful: It's a no brainer, since it's the cheapest of its kind and everything will be higher level than you in Chaos. Alternatively, you could trade this and Nimble Feet for Protection from the Strong, but it will make farming way more time consuming.
  
• Traveler's Repose/Guide/Enlightenment: Free travel. You only need Enlightenment for this, but hey...they're all free.
  
• Sanctification: Again, it's free so it doesn't hurt. Though keep in mind, sanctified items become way more difficult to upgrade, so you probably won't actually use it until after the EX dungeon.

Once you have these options set, you'll want to assign Priventi, Pennetrayt, and Sheeld to the first Lord of the Land, and as you unlock more, configure them all the same way. (you'll have to keep passing each Normin back and forth as you progress through the game, but I digress) Then go out and fight a wolf or a snake. This is what happens:


Chaos Mode causes the level jumps of each of the Normin to double, and it boosts their attack and defense as well, but not their health. Once you kill a few, something remarkable will happen -- they're dropping EX dungeon items such as Adamantine Armor! At first, they'll be able to three shot you, so you'll want to armitize fire (and use a mystic arte if you're in a pinch) until you get powerful enough to take them out in normal form. The third hidden arte combo while holding A or D is a powerful AOE that hits each enemy multiple times and may even drop them. You can advance to this one sooner by sidestepping, which replaces an earlier entry in the combo. (i.e. sidestep-sidestep-A+M1 will always trigger the powerful AOE) It's cheap, but effective, and will even last you through the Loghrin regions.

This part of the game may end up being much harder, if not impossible, if you didn't feed Sorey all your herbs in a previous playthrough. If this is the case, you may need to wait until after Marlind, go back to the wolves and snakes, and try again.

By the time you reach Marlind, you'll have access to pretty much all the top tier gear. By triggering Dangerous Encounters, which are done when you enter a battle with another monster nearby, you'll raise the levels of everything a bit more -- enough to exceed 100. Bors Ruins is a good place to farm endgame equipment for a little, but you won't get anything for Rose or Dezel. Meadow of Triumph is probably the easiest place to farm equipment overall, but it's also pretty terrible for long-term experience gain, and you will eventually get to the point where the wolves and birds around Loghrin are pretty easy to mow down en masse.

The jury's out as to whether or not it's worth farming gear from monsters over level 100 or not. Aside from the aforementioned Rose or Dezel barrier, I'm not exactly sure these levels matter in terms of gear. Apparently, after reading cb220's Double/Triple Skill Mechanics guide on GameFAQs, which is worth reading, levels have nothing to do with x2 or x3 skills. More research/feedback is necessary regarding the importance of levels, and I'll update this paragraph when I reach level 200 "standard" monsters. (not possible until I beat the game)

If you've rigged it so spellcasters never spawn as support monsters, you'll have little problem mowing through monsters with either the Fire or Earth armitizations, which both swing wide and are both fairly easy to use. The Water armitization is easy to use, but you have to line up your enemies first. The wind armitization is not only difficult to use, as well as making you vulnerable in many situations, but many of its attacks are actually void. For quick and simple farming purposes, Fire and Earth are best. It's easy to pick and choose monsters who are weak or neutral to these elements, as there'll be plenty of level 100+ or even 150+ monsters to choose from before the final dungeon.

The reason I recommend armitizing is because Advanced Divinity combines your skills, giving you likely ~300 damage reduction per hit plus maybe another ~400 damage buffer before hits cause you to flinch, which is extremely important for mindless farming. This is assuming that you've been fusing your equipment whenever possible so that all four slots are used. As I mentioned before, you'll almost always want to end a Fire combo with the AOE accessed by pressing A+M1 or D+M1, though Earth varies more on the situation. But don't forget, if you get a spellcaster in as a support monster, take them out first in your normal form. They can still make life pretty miserable in spite of your defense.

It could have been bad luck, but I found farming for Rose's weapons to be the most difficult part of farming entirely. This is unfortunate, because her Shadow Dweller weapon is probably the best item to get as early as possible, since each provides +1 focus on level up. Even when using Rose's Luring skill and targeting monsters that drop short swords, it took three dungeons of killing everything in sight for any dagger to drop -- and then both her ultimate and one weapon beneath it dropped in the same dungeon. You'll want to have her equip two of those ASAP, if anything for the focus bonus on level up. Hopefully RNGesus will bless you more than he blessed me.

The human + seraph crucibles are pretty useful for farming, and their levels are affected by the Normin set for the area, but it might be more time efficient to use these after you beat the game. Sorey's is easier than Rose's, as Rose's is a hellhole of spellcasters. These are also useful for getting character-specific equipment more often.

As far as bosses go, it's pretty embarrassing how easy the bosses will be if you've been farming throughout the game. I'd frequently one shot bosses with Mystic Artes and earn 3000+ grade, with the double grade option from the grade shop. (I had two Lords maxed when I started my Chaos run) The most trouble you'll have with bosses are the bosses that unlock with the final dungeon, EX dungeon, and that one overpowered optional boss in Cambria Caverns.

Once you're comfortable with your survivability wherever you plan to farm in earnest, it's worth considering respeccing somewhat toward offensive buffs such as attack, arte attack, or type damage buffs to speed the process along. Fire type may be best for the Moor next to Loghrin, since I believe nothing there is resistant to fire. It's also decent for the Sorey + Seraph crucible.

Finally, you pretty much will have to respec your equipment again for the late portions of the game, or even certain bosses -- but that's relatively easy to do as even lower level Normin will still provide worthwhile level bumps in the Loghrin area. There are videos of Japanese players abusing type buffs to get Mystic Artes doing six digit damage, as well as abusing the 50th Normin to never die. Remember that you can fuse your equipment to make the slots blue, then fuse in equipment with the desired slots in place of those blue slots if you want to respec.

This section will list details about certain builds, in hopes to find the most overpowered builds possible. It's not very juicy yet, but with feedback from others, we can share how to break the game. At the moment, these notes are very haphazard.

Phoenix Abuse
There are videos out there of Phoenix abuse, but in practice this is somewhat limited. With eight Phoenixes, 5 on Sorey and 3 on Lailah, I was able to get three armatized revives and one unarmatized revive before finally dying. There is definitely more experimentation needed, since Japanese players have figured out better ways to abuse Phoenix and never die.

Fairax
There is a skill called Fairax which can be found on one of Sorey's end-game earrings. (Draupnir) This gives a 20% chance of Fire attacks being quadrupled. With these earrings sanctified, this becomes a 40% chance...and if you can give characters 9 skills on the Fire row, it may become a 60% chance. (needs testing) This can be combined with Aster which, if you're lucky, could net you obscene damage on every 10th hit of a combo. This is probably why Lailah is preferred with Japanese DPS videos, as no other endgame equipment offers this kind of buff.

Spell Spam
Frenzy85 noted that you can knock spellcasting time down to 1/5th of standard length by getting two 11-stacks. This may be best left until you use the joke weapons to improve x2 and x3 drop rates on specific abilities, since otherwise you won't have room for much else -- even armatized.

Minimizing Flinching
Supposedly (according to Frenzy85) a 12-stack will avoid flinching so long as your HP is above 70%. Haven't gotten this one yet myself.

Known Skill Caps

• Stat buffs (column 1) at least 18 stacks. However, stats on a character cap at 2000.
  
• Need information for caps for columns 2-6
  
• Lindwer, which is important for a certain difficult post-game battle, caps at 75% or 5 stacks. The other nine "enemy type" buffs probably cap around similar values. (if they didn't, you'd be invincible versus a class of monster)
  
• The five elemental buffs (column 9) each cap at 100% or 10 stacks.
  
• Need information for caps for column 10
  
• The skill which lowers mystic arte costs (Axcell), which is on the Irminsul earring or can be earned with a 7-stack, caps at 1 for normal form mystic artes and 2 for armatized mystic artes.

Item Limits
It seems that there's a limit to the number of overall weapon/armor items in your inventory, which is probably in the ballpark of 500. There seems to be no limit to the number of copies of an individual item in your inventory. (i.e. you can have 100+ Zero Impact Vests...which I use on Sorey since they drop like candy)

It also seems that stats on a character cap at 2000.

Notes on Fusion

• Once an item is sanctified, the stats will only go up one tick when you fuse it with another sanctified item. Because of this, you should wait until it's +99 to fuse it.
  
• Items with two stats cap each stat at 500. Items with one stat caps that stat at 1000.
  
• Sanctification has no negative impact on drop rate buffs for items that you have equipped.

As you probably guessed from much of the guide, I'm not the most skilled Tales player in the world...in fact this is the first Tales game where I've actually committed to try and master it. The goal of this guide was to state a cheap and easy route to Chaos in as few playthroughs as possible, but as you might expect, the true challenge begins around where I'm at -- the final dungeons. All the gear in the world can't prepare you for some of the horrors within, and while I might update this guide in the future with late game strategies (or make a spinoff guide that allows spoilers), a full and earnest guide on that subject would be best left to more skilled players than I. Hopefully this guide will set up the foundation for said demigods of gaming to get to the ultimate challenges as quickly as possible.

The text of this guide and the Paint .NET table (plus temporary copyright image) are copyright 2015 sarysa, other images are copyright Namco Bandai. My contributions may be used for non-commercial purposes as long as they are attributed to me and a link is provided to this guide. (i.e. as a footnote)

Information gathered from elsewhere:

• Frenzy85 added some info for the Builds section, as well as how to port over Unnamed equipment.
  
• I referred to cb220's guide regarding x2 and x3, but didn't directly quote any text: http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/740217-tales-of-zestiria/faqs/71495
  
• I also mentioned Nao Tomori's Endgame Gald Farming Guide + Grade Farming, although I came up with my own independent method for grade farming, their gald farming guide is worth looking at: http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=541512173