This guide is written by Xpiher and taken from https://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?393379-Guide-A-New-Players-Efficiency-Guide-to-PvP-viability

First thing a new player must know is the mentor system. The mentor system is AV's way of trying to encourage veteran players to help new players level. While the mentor and apprentice are online at the same time, the mentor will receive free prowess every time the apprentice receives prowess with activities such as mob skills and mob feat completion rewarding more prowess to the mentor. This continues until the apprentice "graduates" by reaching 40,000 prowess. The reason its important for the new players to use this feature right away is that many mentors will give new players detailed advice on how to play the game, they usually supply the apprentice with basic gear, and often time will help the apprentice complete feats. Sometimes, this even leads to being invited to a clan!

The second thing a new player needs to know is how to spend prowess. The order to spend prowess in is buying skills, leveling stats stats, purchasing boosters, and then finally leveling skills. The reason for this basic order (more on that later) of leveling is that this is the order of power for you character. Before we get into more detail we need to talk about some basic things. First, the game has a diminishing return effect on prowess farming that doesn't affect feats. Once you get past a certain level of prowess (30k-50k depending on the action) will start to give you less and less prowess to the point where prowess per action: mob kills, harvesting, crafting individual items, etc, becomes useless. Second, investment into skills and stats have increasing prowess cost per point invested.

Lets talk about what this means before going into more hard details. Viable status does not mean you'll be able to go toe to toe with a veteran player: they understand the game more than you and are probably more skilled at playing the game than you. What viable status means is that the point where the majority of the losses you incur will be because of bad play, not because of your character. It means being able to hold your own, character power wise, in a group and actually helping out. Do not misunderstand, there will be some situations where, once you hit viable status that you will lose because your character was weaker. However, you'll still be able to win against players with much more prowess than you because after a certain point more prowess doesn't grant additional character power anymore, just additional play style options to chose from.

THIS IS AN EFFICIENCY GUIDE. Its designed to get someone to "viable status" as quickly as possible. Like most games, getting there the quickest isn't the most fun. If you can't be bothered following everything in this guide (the afk trawling, leaving mob feats incomplete, etc) you can still "just play the game" and get to PvP viable status relatively quick (quicker than it takes to get there in other mmoRPGs). Simply remove the trawling and incomplete feat sections from the guide and use the rest: crafting, stacking repeatable feats with standard feats, and the scumling dungeon. If you play super casually (less than 10hrs a week), you should still be able to reach the viable point within 2 months of playing. The difference is that you may want to do some low impact activities while you can't devote your full attention to the game such as harvesting. Harvesting will not only give your resources, but it will give you easy prowess and slowly work your way to completing the harvesting feats which give huge amounts of prowess once completed. Remember, the more prowess you have, the more builds you'll have unlocked, and the more builds you have unlocked the better you can adapt to balance changes (without spending money) or help your team by filling in.

To skip the rush to end game section of this guide visit Prowess Gaining through normal play[forums.darkfallonline.com]

Note, the spoiler contains information that is now outdated. I will update this guide with an a "rush to the end" mob farming and other tricks that still work.

There are two accepted methods to efficientlygaining prowess. I'm sad to report that both are boring and tedious. Luckily, they are fairly quick. These methods are farm the same feat mob until you have killed 179 of a certain mob and then move on to the next mob, and afk trawling. As mentioned above, diminishing returns (DR) do not affect prowess gained from feats, but if you complete a bunch of feats you'll trigger DR much quicker than just slaying mobs. The reason for this is that the master slayer feats give the most prowess chunks. Therefore, if you leave your "master mob slayer" feat at 149 and move onto a the next mob you'll gain more prowess per kill, maximizing your prowess gain potential while still gaining enough prowess to purchase your initial skills.

Now the trawling. Trawling is the highest prowess pay out in the beginning of the game and it can be largely done afk in any safe zone. If you don't care about actually "playing" the game and just want to get out and PvP as quickly as possible this is your best method. However, trawlers are expensive for a new player to obtain. The going rate on the market (auction house system) right now for a trawler is ~10k (assuming you can find a seller). So how is a new player to make that much money in as little time as possible? Easy! Repeatable feats.

A couple of months ago AV added a much requested feature to the game repeatable feats. Repeatable feats give both prowess and items based on mob difficulty and time investment. There are some that are designed to be done in a party, some that are designed to be completed solo (daily), and some that are designed to take the course of a few days/week to complete (weekly). You can access this menu by pressing "J" on your key board or the feat icon while in GUI mode (pressing escape by default). As a new player, you can only realistically do the easiest one, but even these give good rewards.

Now about getting the money for that trawler. As a new player you can easily complete the scumling dungeon repeatable feat with just some beginning level warrior gear (metal armor and 2 weapon). This will give you a total of 500 gold, 30 of each basic (iron, leather, cloth, and wood) refined material, and 31 prowess for approximately an hour (2 tops as a BRAND new player) worth of farming. Now, you can either convert this first patch into some more basic gear (not recommend) or you can sell it on the market (AH) right away and earn some quick (day or two tops) cold hard cash! The going rate on basic refined materials, on the North American sever, is: Iron 100gc per, Cloth 70gc per, Leather ~75gc per, and Wood ~55gc per. This means, if you convert the materials you just gained into gold by selling it on the AH, you just gained ~9000gc. Just completing this daily feat one additional time should net you 19k which is plenty to buy your first trawler or give you enough resources to get a couple of newbie gear bags made.

Once you have have enough power to take on higher ranked repeatable feats it is highly advisable to focus on those WHILE also completing your normal feats as this maximizes your time since you'll be completing 2 or more feats at once. For example, there is a repeatable feat for villains and terrors and there is also a standard feat for ice elemental. There are two type of ice elementals less (villains) and greater (terrors). If you focus on completing the Ice elemental feat completely during the week you should also complete your repeatable villain feat granting you an additional 737 prowess.

As a player who is looking to get into PvP play as quickly as possible it is imperative that you spend your prowess right unless you don't mind spending ~5$ on a respec. The first thing you should do is watch some PvP videos of the best PvPers of the game and try to find a build you like and imitate it by buying all the skills, leveling the appropriate stats, and buying the appropriate boosters. Some builds can be found in the Theory Crafting section of the forums which detail how to spec for the builds. Use it.

If you don't want to use other people's builds and like coming up with your own then you need to know what stats affects stats have. Below is the run down

• Str = Weapon damage, warrior skills, HP
  
• Dex = weapon attack speed (minor), bow and dagger damage, skirmisher skill, and stamina
  
• Int = Staff damage, elementalist skills, and manna regeneration
  
• Wisdom = Total Manna, common skills, and primalist skills

Now, the typical build at end game is all stats leveled to 100, 4 boosters (usually mixed between 2), and all skills used leveled to 100. However, as stated above this isn't required to be viable because many skills become "good enough" at various levels. Some skills, like evade and stampede, are useful without spending and prowess in them. However, the general rule of thumb is 75. Your primary stat on the other hand needs to be leveled to 100 for maximum effectiveness of your build. It doesn't have to be done right away, you can get away with some build having your primary stat leveled to only 90 if you take 3 booster, but you won't reach maximum damage potential/skill efficiency if you do this. Below is the typical cost for a standard viable (not max) hybrid build minus skill leveling cost which various depending on skills slotted.

Use Diana Swift's Build Calculator[forums.darkfallonline.com] to make putting together a build a breeze!

• Avg price of a full set of skills (8 common + 1 ultimate) = ~5000
  
• Primary stat 100 = ~18200
  
• Primary stat booster x2 = 400
  
• Secondary Booster x 2 = 1200
  
• 3rd booster = 800 (not necessary but may allow a 2nd build to be opened up)
  
• Secondary Stat to 90 = ~12000
  
• Remaining stats to 50 - 70 = ~3720 - ~9600
  
• Transfers (Heal self, HP -> MP, Stam -> HP, and MP-> Stam) to 75 = ~1800
  
• Total = ~43,120 - ~49,000

Note - for a non-hybrid build, the cost goes down substantially as you don't need a second stat to 90, only 70. A more "pure" class (class consisting of skills of mostly 1 school and mostly 1 weapon type) can be as low as ~35000

• Look for a build you like to play
  
• Do the scumling repeatable dungeon 2x
  
• Sell the materials gained from the scumling dungeon on the AH and buy a trawler
  
• Trawl in any body of water in a safe zone. Remember that any body of water that connects in the same grid square counts as a single node - this may no longer be efficient use of time. Guide will be updated in a week tops (traveling)
  
• Buy the skills in your build
  
• Trawl, afk harvest, or craft while completing PvE feats. For maximum efficiency, leave the master level (150 mob feat) incomplete until you have surpassed 30k prowess. To further increase your prowess gain, combine weekly repeatable feats with standard feats.
  

Harvesting
When you first start the game, harvesting is largely an AFK activity and very low impact. By low impact I mean you don't really have to pay attention to the game while you do it so you can focus on other things. Its a great way to supplement your active play time with additional prowess gains as well as basic material gains which you can then turn into prowess by crafting.

Crafting Feats
Crafting feats are another great source of prowess especially if you have reach the point of diminishing returns. I did not include it in the initial guide because I don't consider it very efficient when first starting out because of the high cost of completing each feat. However, you can begin working on your crafting feats as a new player by making your own armor when starting off by using the materials you gain in by completing the scumling dungeon feats as each armor type (and most armor sets) has feats for completing a whole set, 100 pieces, and 500 pieces of armor that reward pretty good prowess.

This guide is written by Xpiher taken from https://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?393379-Guide-A-New-Players-Efficiency-Guide-to-PvP-viability&p=6314276&viewfull=1#post6314276

The first post was designed as a maximum efficiency post. As many people quickly pointed out, the process detailed above post can be considered boring/tedious. I tried to make it clear that a new player who "just wants to play" and doesn't care about maxing out as quickly as possible can still use the majority of the guide as a basic gauge. However, some things could use additional explanation. Consider this second half, combined with some of the things explained above, as the way to level efficiently during normal play, not the quickest way to get to PvP ready, but still more efficient than going in blind.

As stated above, you can get a viable build of pretty much any type by 50,000 prowess. However, the above guide made no mention of how to spend your prowess because it assumed the players reading it would spend the prowess in bulk. Here, we look at how to spend prowess as you gain it to be more efficient at monster fighting. But, before you go into spending prowess on stats or skill, the first thing you need to do is unlock your character's build. The question you need to answer when unlocking your first build is do you want to use it both now and later while playing something you like, or do you want to have a build that is extremely efficient at PvE but may not be as efficient at PvP. For normal play, I recommend using a build that you'll actually enjoy playing. Think of the kind of play style you choose in other games and the classic paradigm of mage, warrior, archer, healer, or hybird and go from there. If instead you want a build that will be efficient at farming for now and then don't mind spending money to respec later then you should use a fast kill PvE build. Below are two build examples of what are two examples of efficient solo PvE builds

Community Standard - Note this build works GREAT late game as well for farming materials from stronger mobs
Spoiler

Gear: Heavy Armor with Daggers/Bow assigned to dexterity with dexterity leveled as high as possible

• Vamp Strike
  
• Invigoration
  
• Flurry
  
• Exploit Weakness
  
• Reinforce
  
• Evade
  
• Stampead
  
• Healing Blast
  
• Barrage

Xpiher's "I can't AIM" PvE farming build. Note - This is less efficient, but easier to play IMO
Spoiler

Gear: Heavy armor and 2h Weapon assigned to str and str leveled as much as possible.

• Power Attack
  
• Vamp Strike
  
• Maelstrom
  
• Battle Rage
  
• Bandage. The original build has healing blast but as a leveling build bandage may have more bang for your buck
  
• Reinforced
  
• Invigorate
  
• Stampede
  
• Stoic Defense
  

If you do not want to go with an extremely PvE efficient route there are still a couple things you need to satisfy with a build that you enjoy in order to be efficient. They are the ability to heal your self, the ability to do burst and dps damage, and the ability to create distance between yourself and the enemy. Every good build, whether used for PvE or PvP will have these things in them in some way for maximum effectiveness and utility. This is why you'll see a lot of builds run invigorate, healing blast, a range spell or bow, and at least evade. Your build is your choice, but if you don't meet these basic requirements you'll needlessly increase the time it takes you to level with no benefits.

Now that you have your build unlocked, its time to spend prowess. The first thing to remember when spending prowess is that is that as you level a skill or a stat the cost goes up. As Mycke eloquently puts it -

Quote Originally Posted by Mycke View Post

The key to building a toon is understanding that all skills and stats are linear progression but have exponential costs. To get a skill from 1-50 costs about 12% of what it costs to get to 100 but gives 50% of the bonuses. Raising a weapon skill from 80-100 will cost almost as much as getting from 1-80, but only adds 1 point of damage.

New players need to understand they want to raise skill and stats in incremental steps and not just max things out.
This holds true for stats as well and is the reason. As you can see in the first half of the post, leveling a single stat to 50 costs ~3,750 prowess while leveling a stat completely to 100 costs 18,200 prowess. You still need to level your build's primary stat to 100 eventually, but you can get more benefit early on by leveling by slowly leveling up your primary stat while also unlocking boosters. Case in point, your first booster purchased will cost 200 prowess and your second booster will cost another 200 prowess; however, leveling your stat by the same 20 point will cost xxxx amount of prowess. This is why its important to buy your primary set (2 of the same type) of boosters as soon as possible. With this purchase, you'll be able to wear better gear thus doing more damage, taking less damage, while also improving your primary skills over all effectiveness for very low prowess investment.

The second thing you must understand as a new player is the order of where your overall character's power comes from. That order, from highest to lowest, is: your build's primary attribute/stat, gear (because stats are a prerequisite), transfers, build's secondary stat, remaining stats, skills that have increased magnitude affect, finally skills that do not have increased magnitude for leveling them. You can view the list of skills and their affects here

The final thing you should know is that most mobs can be farmed in using superior weapon and r40 armor (plate level), especially when in a group.

Recommended Prowess spending order

• Buy your damage and self healing skills first, starting with the lowest prowess cost ones and ending with the ultimate. The reason for this is that its hard to kill mobs quickly if you are dying all the time or slowly kill the monsters. The Ultimate, in many cases, can wait until after you've leveled your primary stats but may be helpful earlier on. You can buy your escape skill last unless you are having problems farming without them.
  
• Buy 2 levels of your build's primary attribute/stat
  
• Level your primary stat incrementally, rule of thumb 10 points each buying cycle until you get to 50 in your primary stat. When combined with your booster this will allow you to wear the highest non-mastery gear for your class/gear set up i.e. plate and use seletine weapons.
  
• Level your transfer skills to 50. This will increase your survivability against stronger monsters.
  
• Level your magnitude skills at your leisure to 50. 10 points at a time is a good idea.
  
• Level everything else at your leisure, but remember that leveling gets more expensive i.e. leveling a stat to 70 costs 9600 prowess while the remaining 30 points costs 8600.

Let me state this upfront - there are a lot of feats that are simply not really worth completing. The time investment to prowess pay off simply isn't worth doing compared to other actions in the game. The problem is that many of these feats are the very beginning intro feats. This is why the first half of the guide focused on trawling because the prowess/hr is higher than the prowess/hr for competing the intro feats. This second half of the guide is mainly focused on "playing the game" as opposed to rushing to end game. There are still efficient ways to do this and knowing which mobs are worth farming and which ones are not worth farming is key.

Secondly, when ever you are out mob farming always and I repeat ALWAYS take a skinning knife with you. All mobs skin for various materials and most of those materials have a gathering feat associated with them. Furthermore, many of these materials are useful to either you or veteran players which also means free money. If you don't take a skinning knife with you, you are needlessly slowing down your progress in everything.

Now, remember in the first half of the guide I mentioned repeatable feats and how they synergize well with standard feats? Well its not only that they synergize well, but they also serve as a way to break up boredom and work as a prowess gaining multiplier. Lets look at a basic example The elemental family has 5 fairly easily completed feats associated with them: Ice, Fire, Earth, and Air elementals all have their own feat and elementals in general have another feat. While working on these feats, you will also work on completing your weekly fiend feat and your overall fiend feat(s). Once you complete your first kill 30 feat with any of the elemental types you'll also be 1/3 of the way done with your weekly feat. You can then move onto another elemental type to break up the monotony of killing the same mob over and over again, if its set in, by moving onto another elemental type and continue completing your weekly fiend feat!

With the above example in mind (and its just one example mind you) we can now group "worthwhile" feats together for maximum efficiency by using the repeatable feats as a basic guide. Below is a brief (for now) list of worthwhile feats. Many of these can be done solo once you have enough prowess/gear.

Note 1: Until you have explored most of the in game map, you cannot reliably use the in game search function to find monsters to fight. Until you have the map explored, you can use either the yourmom or http://www.darkfallunholywars.info/world-map/ maps to find the location of monsters you wish to farm.

Note 2: The mobs listed below are grouped by difficulty from easiest to hardest. If a kill number is listed next to the grouping, that indicates there is a weekly feat associated with the difficulty. When I state "xxx pp that is the total amount of prowess given for all corresponding feats. Not all worthwhile feats and monsters are listed here. This is still a work in progress

Mobs Worth Farming
Creep

• Scumling Guard - Only worth farming because of the Daily Feat (20 prowess + basic materials). Counts as Scumling Exterminator (85pp)
  

Freak: Kill 140 weekly

• Gnoll Tribesman - Easy to kill with all damage types, Various locations on the map, grouped with stronger mobs, and good drops. 382 prowess total
  
• Swamp Hags - Hag feat (1628 prowess), drops linseed
  
• Bone Knight - Counts as skeleton (85 prowess) and drops soulless cyan pigments. Best farmed with Grave shots at the same spawn
  
• Scumling Queen - only worth farming because of the daily feat (11 prowess + basic material)
  
• Bandit Thug - Lots of mobs, multiple location on the map, spawns have mixed difficulty, and drop Globules of Greed and salvage. 182pp CAUTION - veterans farm them as well

Beast: Kill 120 weekly

• Ogre Bully - Counts as Giant Feller for feat (713pp), drop Linseed, and ogreish green pigments
  
• Grave Shot - Counts as skeleton (85pp) and drops quick lime
  
• Cave Trolls - Good for groups, Dungeon (video), and Daily Feat (Kill 25). 793pp

Fiend: Kill 100 weekly

• Gungrocs - Easy to kill and decent drops. 1628pp
  
• Arctic Bear - Easy to kill, some spawns are grouped with Ice elementals. 1628pp
  
• Lesser Fire Elemental - Counts as Elemental Distributor (1673p) and Fire elemental Distributor (1628pp)
  
• Lesser Earth Elemental - Counts as Elemental Distributor (1673pp) and Earth elemental Distributor (1628pp)
  
• Lesser Air Elemental - Counts as Elemental Distributor (1673pp) and Air elemental Distributor (1628pp)

Villain: Kill 80 weekly

• Hill Giant Slugger - Counts as Hill Giant Feller (3318pp) and Giant Feller (713pp) feats. Drops are great. CAUTION - veterans farm them as well
  
• Lesser Ice Elemental - Counts as Elemental Distributor (1673pp) and Ice elemental Distributor (1628pp)
  
• Cave Troll Warrior - Good for groups, dungeon, and Daily Feat (kill 5); 2027pp

One thing you should not do is focus, or rather pay much attention to the "big feats" such as gathering and mob level feats outside of repeatable. These are designed to be completed over time and not right away. The prowess for completing them is fantastic, but if you pay attention or actively work to complete them you are more likely to burn out. VIEW THEM AS A BONUS.

As stated above, most monsters in the game can be farmed using superior level weapons and rank 40 (plate level) equipment. The material cost of making the equipment can be see here[darkfallinfo.com]. Since I've been using plate level gear as the "standard" the cost for a set of plate and a single superior great sword is: 550 Gold, 144 Iron Ingot, and 46 Leather, and 2 wood. You shouldn't need this level of gear until you start to kill villain level monsters. Starting out, the lowest level of gear should suffice which is a set of chain armor, 2h sword, and a bow/staff depending on archetype (warrior/archer = bow, primarlist/mage = staff). You can make this gear yourself easily by doing the scumling dungeon repeatable feats. A single completion of the scumling feats can make 1 sets of chain armor and 7 great swords. Typically, armor lasts longer than weapons so this should be enough to start off with for awhile. Some monsters, like skeletons, will drop useable gear as well if you don't want to craft anything.

If you want stronger armor earlier than the basic gear listed above you can use the new crafting ordering system to have other players craft the gear for you with your materials. I only recommend doing this if you completely abhor crafting as crafting basic gear for yourself gives prowess. To use the new crafting order system simply go to the crafting station, press F to interact, open the crafting type you want, then select the thing you want crafted. From there you'll see two halfs: the top half is crafting things yourself, the bottom is to have others craft for you. Use the second half to put orders in, but you must have the materials physically on you. The best place to do this is Sanguine.