Arie’s Guide to Guns and More
The sole purpose of this guide is to offer an easy option for shooting guns really hard and really
efficiently. Your alignment is entirely up to you
Base Expertise
The base build looks like this at 26k points (level 90).
C2 Shot, C7 Rapid(13 shots), C2 Curative, C1 Destruction, C4 Support, C5 Curse, C3 Gun
Knowledge, C1 Magic Control, C1 Bless.
IMO I would prioritize unlocking chains first and put off pumping rapid for later levels.
Attribute Points are distributed as 89 speed, X int, 30 luck at minimum. X is however much you
need to get 140 int, but this build is really mana hungry at first so more is better. Excess points
can go into luck/vitality depending on preference. Magic is useless for the most part, please
don’t put your points in it b/c it is a trap. Magic Bullet scales 1.0 lng-r + 0.5 spell. 2 points of
magic get you 1 spell, which is half a point towards MB. It would take you 4 points of magic to
get any benefit. At 99 magic you have spent nearly half of your total attribute points for a grand
total of 24 stat towards Magic Bullet. Int/Luck/Vit are much better substats, and it is much easier
to just get actual +Spell stat on gear.
Outside of Rapid(Class 7), all of the expertise for this build can be done by trading reports to
Thoth, if you don’t know what that means check the Expertise page on the wiki. We waste less
time grinding and less CP on incenses. This build gives us 2.5 Magic Bullet, 2.5
Enhancement, 3.0 Curse of the Wretched, and 7.0 Rapid. These expertises enable us to solo
nearly anything in the game given the right amount of gearing and skill. The expertise cap can
extend upwards of 70k points if you have nothing better to do, but our build is already pretty
much perfect so anything on top is just gravy, baby.
Our gear has very little pursuit chance in the end game ,so we make up for this by adding C9
Pursuit with the next 9k points after 26k, letting us easily cap pursuit chance with expertise
alone. The gear spreadsheet explains where we get our power from
You can add Lord of Armor later if you want, but it is kind of unnecessary between Pulse of
Armor and Jailer Whips. The only upside is being easily immune to reflect, because the bosses
that kill you late game won’t care about damage reduction.
Skills and How to Use Them
Curse of the Wretched gives us two very important skills, Erosion Hex and Bullet Hex.
Erosion Hex
is very weak early on, but as you improve your gear the damage will eventually be enough to
clear rooms and potentially boss with. Before you reach that point please don’t ever use it
unless you have invested in +ailment chance from easy-to-get soul stones like Mothman,
Yomotsu-Shikome, or Catoblepas. Casting it without a decent ailment chance or big damage
will just drag every mob in the room to you for the easiest death of your gaming career. Erosion
hex only scales with Skill Power(explained later), Support, % Support Damage, Nerve
Affinity(capped at 100), % Shot Damage, and Limit Break Power. Scaling it will be slow and
painful but well worth it once you can start farming with it.
Bullet Hex
Is what we use to ensure our rapid damage is capped or at least respectable versus high
hp/resist bosses. It does no damage but applies a debuff that literally doubles our lng-r based
damage on a single enemy until the duration is up or the enemy is knocked back. A lot of
bosses can’t be knocked back so the debuff will last the full duration on a lot of them. It should
be said that some bosses, like Demi-fiend and Satan, are immune to the debuff, but they are
rare. It has a 100% land rate, a very long range, and is decently spammable with some
cooldown. Having Class 3 COTW also gives you Slash Hex and Spell Hex, which are useful if
you are being carried and want to help out or are in a party and the enemy is immune to your
damage but not your friend’s.
Enhancement gives us a huge boost to damage / survivability if we have been putting points
into Intelligence. Even disregarding the scaling, we will need a bit of MP and MP
Regen/consumables to consistently use these skills, and you are gonna want to use these skills.
Pulse of Assault
is possibly the largest damage boost available in the game because of how the damage formula
works. There is pretty much no where else to get enhance boost except here and it goes up to
70% as your Int increases.You won’t always need this to cap damage, especially if you are
hitting weakpoints, but you will be glad you have it when you have to fight bosses with damage
reduction or high resists. Even early on this lets you be more useful to your party in dungeons.It
has to be said that this doesn’t affect Erosion Hex.
Pulse of Solid
Is great for making you feel like a tank and letting you take hits from bosses that you wouldn’t be
able to survive otherwise. It also scales up to 70% and is great both solo and in party play. I
would generally try to keep this up from room-to-room when running with a party as it's a great
way to ensure that your friends and their demons don’t get one-shot by an unlucky crit. You can
have both Pulse of Assault and Pulse of Solid up at the same time so be sure to cast both when
facing a boss.
Pulse of Armor
Is a godsend for everyone who is tired of getting knocked back or stunned out of their skills.
This lets you stand in a boss’s face and rapid them until they are full of bullet-holes. There is a
downside though, if you have this buff active and your Pulse of Solid wears off there is a big
chance you will die if the mobs swarm you. Nulling knockback/stun means they get to gang up
on you just like you and your friends can gang up on bosses. This buff isn’t AOE, but you can
cast it on allies or demons if you want.
-kaja buffs
You get these from support magic and if you don’t use them, especially early on, you are just
making the game harder for yourself. They stack 4 times each and even late game they make a
big difference. +32 lng-r +32 spell +60 crit are the totals you get from using tarukaja,makakaja,
and sukukaja. That’s nothing to scoff at and all they cost is the time it takes to cast them.
Magic Bullet gives us Arm Snipe, which is really the only reason we have MB in the first place.
Arm Snipe
Is one of the longest range skills in the game, which means you don’t have to be anywhere near
the enemy to kill them. Its affinity is determined by your weapon’s affinity, which lets us be pretty
versatile despite having a pretty low MB class. It is very easy to just throw an elemental soul
stone on a gun to hit weakpoints early on, and late game you are going to want a few guns
anyways. Early game, you can use its range to lure enemies away from large groups or just
straight up pick them off from afar. This skill makes the game a lot safer by keeping you out of
aggro range of a ton of enemies. It retains its usefulness throughout the game, but obviously
there are better skills to use for bossing.
Rapid gives us 13 Shots to Hell and Viper Scope
Viper Scope
Is an odd skill that doesn’t really shine solo but works well if you ever want to form a full gunner
party for killing bosses in record time. It has a chance to apply a debuff that lowers enemy
resistance to handguns/rifles/shotguns (affinities). The debuff stacks 3 times and is a pretty big
damage boost, but viper scope shoots pretty slowly for a rapid skill and the range feels awkward
paired with the slow speed. Funnily enough, the best application is probably not for yourself but
for your demon if you are playing an actual enhancer and have the room for class 3 rapid.
13 Shots / Heavy Sonic Trigger
Is what we use to send bosses to hell. There is really nothing more to say than it destroys. It
also has enough skill stacks to allow a sort of pseudo aoe if you can click fast enough between
enemies as the shots come out or have tab targeting set up. The culmination of these skills is to
use all the tools available to boost your rapid damage out of this world and hit the damage cap
with every shot. You kaja buff, pulse, bullet hex, maybe viper scope a few times, and then mash
this skill until the enemy is dead.
Gear and How to Choose It
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing gear, but the end goal rarely changes. We
want to achieve the highest damage-per-hit for Arm Snipe and highest DPS for 13 Shots;
however, new players can’t jump right in and start spending thousands of CP the first day. I will
present a few low-budget options good for players just starting out fresh so they can do more
than leech while saving up 350 CP for a set that won’t make them any stronger because they
are still 1000 CP off of SI’ing it. A complete end game set is thousands of CP and hundreds of
millions(reaching over a billion) of macca, so let’s start small and work our way up.
It should be noted that all my characters are male so most gear sets will be intended for
males, but this only affects a few slots. The performance between male and female gear
sets is about the same, so choose whichever gender you want.
Also note that if an item’s price / location isn’t listed then it came out of the same Data Ticket as
an item sharing a similar name, which does have the price / location listed.It is also possible that
the item has carried over the previous gear tier so check there as well, though I’ll probably say if
that’s the case.
Click me for a spreadsheet on gear. This is repeated so you don’t miss it
Click me for a spreadsheet on gear. This is repeated so you don’t miss it
Click me for a spreadsheet on gear. This is repeated so you don’t miss it
Click me for a spreadsheet on gear. This is repeated so you don’t miss it
CLICK ABOVE HERE FOR THE GEAR BUILDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pre-Act 16 & Wildcat Options
Before gaining access to WILDCAT, you are going to need a bit of -incantation and cooldown
for gameplay to feel smooth. I am going to keep the expenses as low as possible and only list
pieces on the spreadsheet that are essential to early/mid gameplay or that are
recyclable/reusable. No CP is really wasted if these items enable you to farm without people
holding your hand.
The “set” here is done before 400 cp, but you can get it down even further AND squeeze more
damage out by getting SI crystals from destiny or buying them with macca from other players.
Post-Act 16
CP Gain comes a lot easier after you unlock Celu Tower and WILDCAT, and we don’t need
incantation / cooldown on gear anymore, letting us enjoy smooth gameplay and more flexibility
in gearing along with more damage.
We can afford to drop a lot of cooldown/incant on our gear because we can now leech a few
wildcat runs to acquire PC PASSIVES on our demon. These fill skill slots on your demon in
exchange for giving you HP reduction/MP reduction/Cooldown/Incant depending on which you
choose.
This is also a good time to talk about digitalize because some of our gear is going to have stats
gated behind having it active. The short and skinny of it is go give 10 magnetite pressers to
Shiho in the Babel Cathedral to unlock Novice Digitalize. You can then carry around a bunch of
low tier demons with you and digitalize before boss fights to get the most out of the set you are
using at this point(Purple Label). The damage boost is huge and you can coast on it for a long
time until enemies begin to have too much crit defense for you to get through.
The “set” here is around 1k CP, which includes quite a few items carried over from the Pre-Act
16 gear and also includes items that will carry over to the “final” gear we are working towards.
Late Game
At late game our ideal gear set would give us 100% LB Chance 100% TA 100% Pursuit and
100% Crit Correction, but it is kind of difficult to balance all of these so sometimes we have to
choose which to prioritize. The gear I have chosen prioritizes Crit Correction over other stats,
which makes sense if you think about it. You can’t Limit Break if you don’t crit, and the drop in
damage from not Limit Breaking is more than the drop in damage from Pursuit or TA not
proccing, especially if the enemy has high resists because then our non crit won’t even reach
9999. With expertise we honestly never struggle to get pursuit chance; however, pursuit power
is a little trickier. I think of the two potential late game gear sets in my spreadsheet, Soul Linker
is more realistic for 99% of players, because True Jailer kind of feels “bad” if you don’t have a
Nirvana+3 ring and an insane digi demon. You lose 3k LB Cap and 5% CC but gain the ability to
easily cap TA Chance and can also potentially still reach 100% crit chance down the line.
Later Game
:)
Demons and How to Build Them
Player Damagers in IMAGINE don’t need their demons to do any damage, they are just meant
to support. This means that players that are Gunners/Mages/Melees tend to favor demons that
heal well like Hathor, Kikuri-Hime, and Vivian, but there are also demons with features that can
boost our stats just by being summoned. Most of them are variant demons that have some
special title. There are Lucky Demons, Joyful Demons, Confidant Demons, Open-Minded
Demons, Intelligent Demons, and probably even more that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Out of those types, Lucky Demons are probably the most commonly used and a Lucky Hua Po
or Titania or Angel are all good choices for support demons. They give +10 summoner Luck
before mitama and +30 summoner Luck after mitama. That’s a pretty nice boost because Luck
is universally useful regardless of what your character is, but there are some other demons that
give even better boost. If you start out with a Lucky demon you are eventually going to want to
move up to one of these unless you intend to use a lucky demon for farming(luck increases
enemy drop rates).
Musical Festival High Pixie gives +10 to party Vit/Int/Luck before mitama and +20 after mitama.
She is 250 CP in the Demon Shop and you will normally see her on Luck boosting alts instead
of on main characters because the next two demons offer better combat stats.
Holy Night Angel / Christmas Eve Angel gives +10 crit, +10% LB Chance, +10% LB power to
summon before mitama and becomes tankier from stats and a % magic null feature after
mitama. She is also 250 CP in the Demon Shop and is a really popular option.
Black Maria can heal pretty well before mitama, but after mitama she gives +2000 LB Cap and
+30% Fire/Ice/Elec affinity to summoner. You can’t buy her from the COMP Shop, you have to
get her plugin and and fuse her. The LB Cap makes her best-in-slot for player damagers, which
is kind of sad because late game gear/builds can already look similar as it is.
Since we are focusing our demon entirely on supporting/boosting us, most of our demon force
slots will give us stats rather than our demon. Some examples are the Banana/Cucumber
Dsouls from Saien in the docks, Oyamatsumi Dsoul from Masakado Normal, Dominion from the
Ziotite exchange with Azura in Nakano Camp, and Quetzalcoatl Dsoul(pricey) from the same
exchange. A list of Dsouls can be found here. We are mainly interested in the ones that specify
that they give stats “to summoner”.
I briefly mentioned this before but, we cover our Incantation and Cooldown with PC passives on
our demon. After you finish Act 16 and the Brother&Sister quest from Setsu, you can do demon-
only runs in specific dungeons that award SOUL POINTS. You use these soul points to add
skills to your demons, and we are mainly interested in a heal or revive and as many PC
passives as are neccessary to cap Cooldown and Incantation independent of whether or not we
have any on our gear. Speed gives a tiny bit of cooldown/incant every 10 points so we need
less than other classes to cap outside of digi. I have one incantation passive and 2 cooldown
passives.
