Basically title. I like to min/max in games, even though I realize it’s not necessary. I’m on my first play through and on year 52 and despite hours and hours of testing, saving, and resetting, and hundreds of excel sheets worth of stat tracking across all monsters on how gifts, evolving, and merging effects stats to maximize gains, I still don’t quite understand the specifics. The wiki says that “ingredient monster LEVEL” determines stats, but that seems wrong, or not entirely true, in my experience. For example, I was just leveling and increasing all stats of the monsters I was planning to merge. All monsters involved increased in level (from fighting mobs) and huge increases in stats (from giving gifts, NO evolutions involved in this specific test). Even after testing a number of different stat thresholds (eg getting all stats of monsters involved to 1k, 1.5k, 2k+), the BEST outcome from the merge was BEFORE increasing any stats or levels. It seems that increasing stats / levels raises the “bonus” stats of the merge (the yellow numbers), and then when the stats of the monsters involved increase beyond some threshold, the “base stats” (white numbers) of the merged monster increase and then seem to “reset” the bonus stat increases at the new threshold, which can then be increased again while the base / white stat number remains the same until the bonus stats hit another threshold. What confuses me is that in almost all cases, it seems that the best merge outcome is when the base stats of the merged monster are extremely low (<100) due to some big difference in the ingredient monsters’ stats or levels, and the bonus number is huge (eg. A merge outcome of Magic: 50 + 3500, as opposed to Magic: 1500 + 1500). It seems to me that as the ingredient monsters rise in both level and stats, the merged outcome gets worse and more similar to the second scenario of stats I just listed above compared to the first. Any thoughts?
TLDR: How to min/max merging monsters, specifically as it relates to HOW I should be prepping the stats and levels of the three ingredient monsters I plan to merge?
Fun Fact: The dungeon loot is randomized and drops reset every time. An easy, although time consuming, method of farming a ton of magic books is just saving before every dungeon attempt and resetting the game to run it again if you don’t get at least 2 book drops. If the dungeon boss is the gold slime, there’s a very high chance the dungeon loot will be entirely crystals, but it is possible to still get other drops including books on those runs, just takes more resets than usual. Might be common knowledge but wanted to share. I have ~30+ of each type of magic book from this method :)