Pentagram Quest

The Pentagram Quest (pents) is the bread and butter of Astonia, it is the place you will visit the most and you generally spend most of your time here outside of doing quests and random dungeons (rds)

With the recent changes to pent system, you now get experience instantly upon touching a pent and the experience has been increase considerably since the original version. With this change in mind, it does not make sense to push your characters limits to fight higher level demons for more experience, As 95% of the experience you will gain comes from touching the pent itself, you should consider fighting demons that are up to -5 of your own level, to make it easier and faster to move through the section, hence touching more pents and awarding you with more experience over time.

There are currently 4 Pentagram zones, that increase in difficulty as your character levels up.

Earth Pents - Level 7-38 Demons (Health Bar & Mana Bar only)

Fire Pents - Level 39-70 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar and Bless)

Ice Pents - Level 71-102 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar, Bless and Magic Shield Bar)

Hell pents - Level 103-118 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar, Bless and and Magic Shield Bar)

The most important stat that you will need to focus on for penting is Immunity, This stat increases your resistance to spells cast on you, reducing their damage, When in a PvE scenario, Once your immunity is a set amount over the NPCs attacking spell mod (fire/frz/lf) the demons will no longer cast spells on you. Trying to pent in Astonia with low immunity is a challenge at lower levels but impossible at high level, due to all demons stats scaling the higher level you go, they have more mana, and deal more spell damage which will just overcome your characters health pool.

Over the years a rough guide as to how much immunity you need is about 3x Demon level. I doubt anyone has actually calculated the exact amount of immunity need for all levels of Pents but you should know that the final level 118 demons require your character to have 335 immunity, to stop them casting spells.

Along with Pents being the main way of obtaining experience, Penting also offers up a good way of obtaining random gear drops from killing demons, Along with demon stones (Earth stone, Fire stone, Ice stone, Hell stone)

Demon stones have a couple of different uses.

1 - Gold - Sell to a NPC trader, If you hand the stones to a Master trader, or just raise your Bartering skill to 220 mod or 120 + Master Trader and sell the stone to an NPC trader, They sell for the following values - Earth Stone 60g, Fire stone 120g, Ice Stone 200g, Hell Stone 280g

2 - Handing to Reskin - The first stone of each type, can be handed to Reskin the bartender in the Cameron start zone for a significantly higher gold value than just selling. There is a minimum level requirement to hand in each one (Earth Stone - lv10, Fire stone - lv30, Ice stone - lv60, Hell Stone - lv80)

3 - Rodney Warped World (RWW) keys - You can hand stones over to the assistant in the lobby of RWW in exchange for the keys required to go through the green doors in RWW.

4 - Alchemy - Stones can be added to potions, to enhance their powers

Building your character for Pents

If your goal to pent as efficiently as you can, you should be focusing on certain stats to increase your performance against demons. When you first start the game and you ask for advice, people will tell you to focus on Swd/att/par/imm or Lf/ms/imm/pul , while this is good advice at lower level, there comes a point about the lv50-60 range, that you can generally raise more stats per level and once you have a max gear set made for yourself, You will be over-capped on those main stats against the demons you are currently fighting.

Astonia works on an Offense Value VS Defence Value mechanic, once your Off value is a certain amount above the enemies def value, its capped, it doesn't make a difference if you add another 100 off value, you are still going to do the same damage. So instead you want to focus on stats that will increase your performance, such as Weapon Value (actual damage per hit from your weapon) and speed skill (making sure you are at your highest Speed break) along with making sure your Surround hit is capped.

If you are a mage the best way to build is to not pump too much experience into defences as you will find you don't need as much as you think and instead you will want to raise your LF or Fire & mainly the Pulse stats as high as you can, increasing the damage you deal to the demons you are fighting. Mages really slow down when they Enter Ice & Hell pents, as demons gain the Magic Shield bar and use their mana bar to heal it up, its at this point you will want to really pump exp into your pulse mod, and practice manually casting pulse, before they start to heal, to begin with I would suggest raising Freeze as well, to help slow them down from healing to give you more time to cast pulse.