Pentagram Quest

The Pentagram Quest, commonly called Pents, is an area where players touch small pentagrams on the floor, spawning demons to kill.

For some, It becomes the focal point of game-play for their leveling.

Changes to Pents in Resurgence

Recent modifications to the pent system have significantly altered the gameplay dynamics. Players now instantly gain experience upon touching a pent, and the experience gained has substantially increased compared to the original Old World. Given these changes, most of your experience is now derived from touching the pent itself instead of killing demons. The optimal strategy involves penting at up to -5 levels of your own, facilitating more frequent pent touches for increased experience gains.

Pentagram Zones

There are four Pentagram zones, each increasing in difficulty. Level's 7-54 can be found in Aston, 55-118 in Bran.

1. Earth Pents - Level 7-38 Demons (Health Bar & Mana Bar only)
2. Fire Pents - Level 39-70 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar, and Bless)
3. Ice Pents - Level 71-102 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar, Bless, and Magic Shield Bar)
4. Hell Pents - Level 103-118 Demons (Health Bar, Mana Bar, Bless, and Magic Shield Bar)

Benefits of Penting

Apart from experience, penting offers an avenue for obtaining random gear drops from demon kills and demon stones (Earth, Fire, Ice, and Hell stones).

• Demon Stones Uses:
  1. Gold: Sell to an NPC trader or hand to a Master trader for increased value.
  2. Reskin Exchange: Handing the first stone of each type to Reskin in the Cameron start zone for higher gold value.
  3. Rodney Warped World (RWW) Keys: Exchange stones for keys required to open green doors in RWW.
  4. Alchemy: Add stones to potions to enhance their powers.

Stone	Trader Price	Reskin lvl
Earth	60	10
Fire	120	30
Ice	200	60
Hell	280	80

Building Your Character for Pents

If your goal is to pent as efficiently as possible, your build should maximize where you spend your experience to be as good for what you are doing as possible. Get your immunity to a point where the demons in the level you want to pent no longer cast spells, raise your defenses through the methods for your class (weapon skills, parry, magic shield) to the point the damage feels manageable and sustainable and then dump into your offense. For mages a good starting point is to make it so that demons in earth and fire pents die from 1 lf and an autopulse, for warriors and seyans a good idea at this levels is to be able to kill demons fast enough with your att/surround hit to be able to leave the pile and keep pressing pents.

Remember: Killing demons is NOT where you get your exp, pressing pents is. Killing demons is just a byproduct of wanting to press more pents.

Caveats and Special Cases:

Astonia works on an Offense Value VS Defence Value mechanic; once your offense value is a certain amount above the enemy def value, it is 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 (ensuring you are at your highest Speed break) along with ensuring your Surround hit is capped.

Key Stat for Penting: Immunity

In a PvE scenario, maintaining immunity at a specific level above the NPCs' attacking spell mod (fire/frz/lf) prevents demons from casting spells on you at all. Penting in Astonia is challenging with low immunity at lower levels and becomes impossible at higher levels due to scaling demon stats. A general guide suggests maintaining immunity at approximately three times the demon level, with the final level 118 demons requiring roughly 335 immunity to prevent spell casting.

Common Penting Tactics

Regular Methods

Earth Pents

One of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself is find an area with a high density of pentagrams. The less time you spend moving from one pent to another the more pents you touch.

While there are many of these areas, common ones include the large room at the end of level 14-15 pents, and the large rooms at the end of 38 pents.

One of the other ways people frequently power level through earth pents is by having a higher level mage stand in one of the area dense with pents and spam Lightning Flash, this lets the lower level run around and just hit pents at top speed. This is a very solid strategy and can quickly level an alt from 9-30+ in a short amount of time.

Fire Pents

While you can absolutely still employee a high level mage to clear for you, as your own character gets more speed, you'll often find that staying on one character and simply running from pent to pent provides the best exp. All of the same things from earth pents apply, pent density, pents being worth more than demons, etc.

Ice and Hell Pents

At this level demons gain a magic shield. This significantly slows down penting for everyone. Mages typically invest in freeze, and will often freeze demons as they run from pent to pent until they are eventually caught. At that point mages use lightning flash, and lightning ball, to quickly lower the hp of frozen demons and manually pulse to finish them off and keep moving. Seyans and Warriors often heavily invest in surround hit at this point to be able to clear demons faster.

Uncommon Methods

The methods used here are uncommon and best used and tested by those with a more intricate knowledge of how the games work. They might be aptly named high-risk high-reward, or non-standard builds that let you pent in a different way.

Thief-Penting

An uncommon method of penting used in large by Ceri is thief-penting. This involves a character build that invests heavily in stealth, the thief profession, and lots of pots for end so you never accidentally run out. It allows you to pent well above your level, ignore all demons, and just rapidly touch pents.

Upsides: allows some really rapid leveling, especially at lower levels.

Downsides: If you come out of stealth and thief, you are probably dead. Additionally, it requires an investment into a skill and profession not often used in the game. This makes it harder for you to go do content other than penting until you level up your other skills around it.

Builds for thief penting: Ceri posted multiple builds for this at various levels as well as various stealth "breaks" you need to be able to do it. Available at this page: Thief Penting