After going to El Nath and talking to Arec, you’ll be told to visit the dark
lord, who’ll tell you to fight his other
self in the swamps. The entrance
starts in dangerous croko II, climb all the vines to the
very top-left and you’ll
hit the monkey swamp maps at the top of one of them. The door of dimension
should be in plain view at the top of the second monkey swamp map (enter the
huts to change maps). Not the third map, the second, which I find strange.
You’ll pass through a crystal-lined cave with gargoyles everywhere and
emerge in a small arena, containing the dark lord’s other self who doesn’t
look too intimidating, even though he has a gold identity, something that
doesn’t even exist.

First thing you should know is that he only ever
attacks directly using avenger,
a move that conjures a huge throwing star which he’ll then whip at you,
though he does the usual touch damage that all enemies inflict.
He has a physical attack and defence booster which you should watch out for,
it makes his avenger do just a little over 1000 damage so keep an eye on him,
and if things are too rough use the tauromacis/balrog
fighting method of standing on him all
the time so that you only get the weaker touch damage inflicted.
You can’t keep him from jacking up his stats,
he’ll do it as and when he feels like it.
He also knows how to weaken you, negating your jump
which throws a spanner in haste.
If you feel vulnerable without haste then by all means put some perfect
medicine/tonics on a hotkey,
it’s not a bad idea (thought not as essential as it is for you guys
who have to fight
Grendel/Hines).

After he takes a little damage he’ll start summoning tauromacis to help him out.
Probably best not to ask where those come from.
At level 70 they shouldn’t be too much of a threat,
but watch your HP and remember that their thunder will leisurely deal 800 or
so damage to you,
though you should be keeping at least 1100 at all times to make sure that
avenger doesn’t ruin your day.

Besides his stat boosters, weakening and summons though, it’s a pretty basic
fight, shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Heck, i finished him and 2 macis
in 60 seconds. Beat that, RAWR =D.

I didn’t try stealing from him to see if he dropped the item you’re supposed to
retrieve, though I imagine that’d work, but where would the fun be in it?

I have heard that if you let the proof thing he drops dissolve on the ground
you can go back in there and fight him, but I’m not going to test that.
Even if I could any more, I wouldn’t.

—
3rd job skills and their uses
BB3RDSKI
—

|Band of thieves|
-50 mp at max
Your first mob skill and it’s a very welcome one. At max level
it’ll summon 5 people who will attack enemies around you at a moderate range.
Characters summoned are chosen at random from a very large man with a metal
plated
headband who claps at enemies, a stereotypical ninja who slashes enemies, a
guy in blue who punches them, a pink/purple haired woman who casts some
mutated version of m.claw on herself that hits them and a guy in a helmet
with a trident who seems to stand there and do very little.

The guy with the trident and the woman don’t resemble legendary thieves
particularly, but heigh-ho, maybe they got lost on the way to a mage or
warrior’s skill, unless it’s a cultural thing from Wizet’s country.
Thieves only works if you hit an enemy, so if you stand between two monsters
but YOUR hit doesn’t connect with anything the other guys won’t show, but
you’ll lose the MP. You should also know that when you use thieves the
attack is centred on you, not the enemy you hit, which is deceptive at
times.

Try to focus on your position before you strike or assume that thieves has a
better range to your rear than ahead of you, that helped me a lot at first.
Band of thieves WILL hit enemies that are higher or lower than you are, but
not if they have too much of an altitude difference. It’s hard to explain the
range of it, so try it for yourself.

Due to MP costs, thieves should not ever be used on single enemies, it’s not
good for that, anyway, just doublestab them unless you’re a banditsin. What
you really want is a group of 3 or more enemies to make the most of each
attack, as we’re not swimming in MP or recovery skills. Very few enemies
appear without a mob, so that’s not normally an issue, unless they’re
absolute TANKS for the level that most people hunt them at (tauros not
withstanding, but they have mobbable cold eyes).

|Pickpocket|
-50 mp at max
When you turn this on, it’s active, so it behaves like haste in that you
need to keep refreshing it, but it starts with a very reasonable time limit
so it’s easy to experiment with. With this active, any enemy you hit with any
attack will have a slight chance of dropping a small amount of money (when
you first get this skill, you be getting less than 10 mesos per drop with
some skills), though this does not appear to subtract from the enemy’s normal
meso drop. These stolen mesos can not be collected by your pet and I don’t
think other people can pick them up until the pickup timer that most things
are subject to runs out, so you’ll have to grab them manually, which is a bit
of a waste considering how much comes out. The main use for pickpocket,
however, is to set up meso explosions, it gives you a lot of ammo to work
with, and since meso explosion’s damage starts out quite high for small
amounts of cash but gradually raises at a slower rate with larger amounts, a
few short sharp shocks are a good thing.

Pickpocket works well with savage blow. Even though the hits of savage
don’t do much damage, each one can potentially generate some cash, so you
have a good chance with every savage of a couple of coins popping at least.
It’s probably better to just fight like you normally would, since if you use
thieves in mobs with this on, you’ll get a nice spread of higher amounts,
but it’d be pointless to do that to single targets. If you want to savage to
set up piles for enemies to hit, though, then go for it, do whatever seems
best at the time.

It’s not immensely practical without explosion at a high level, and when you
first use it, it’s not advisable to hunt anything too powerful for a few
minutes, as you’re likely to either be distracted by the fountain of cash or
to think you’ve gotten a rare from everything for 5 minutes after having gone
so long without seeing bronze mmesos in your regular training days.

—
Meso explosion
—
-30 mp at max

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one. To be honest, I plugged a point
into it since it’d been pretty much over a year since I put up a skill just
because it looked fun to try. Not because of that now infamous screenshot at
El Nath, but because I just fancied making a few explosions.

It takes any number of mesos that have been dropped for whatever reason (you
dropped them, an opponent dropped them, pickpocket dropped them), and
basically blows them up. Not sure how mesos explodes like that, but it’s
never adequately explained. These explosions damage monsters, the higher the
skill level is, the higher mastery it is and the more cash you can pop, up to
a very respectable 20.

Just oughtta point out, the mesos you can blow up HAVE to have been made by
yourself, either by your kill or your drop in one way or another, if you’re
at a high mob area and someone bursts in, dragon roars and runs, you won’t be
able to blow that cash up, although you can grab it in a while.
The more cash you blow up, the more damage you do, either by sheer mass of
meso drops or sheer value of drops. I gather that the maximum drop of 50k
does healthy damage to most anything you’d care to mention, but I’m not a fan
of destroying that much money, personally, except for in emergencies.
Far as I can tell, you start out doing a fair amount of potential damage,
even from small drops (I think I’m doing around 200 at least with explosion on
a 10 drop with a 96/+5 dragon tail), and it slowly increases with the value of
the drop (grim phantom watch drops do about 2k, I think, and 50k bags do maybe
20k). Just don’t expect it to shoot up exponentially or anything.
It’s not too practical until you get a good level of pickpocket to back it
up and you max it, same as most things, but it’s better than some
alternatives.

I wouldn’t max both skills out until you’ve cleared guard, thieves and
assaulter, though, it’s way better to have something practical, especially
when 1 level of experimentation can cost you around 3 day’s work.

—
Chakra
-27 mp at max
—
This is odd. Really odd. You have to stand still when you use this, though
don’t need to have your guard down like dropping something or talking to your
pet, you fire charka off and all manner of havoc breaks out around you as
you’re encased in a ring full of blue circles which gradually fill up to
become red. When they turn red, charka finishes and you’re healed.
The description’s a little misleading, seems that you don’t take additional
damage for the entire skill, just while the circles are still at all blue,
when the gauge starts filling you go back to taking normal damage, and if
you’re hit for double damage, your charka is interrupted, seems fair.
Chakra is to us a less efficient heal. It takes rather a long time to bust
one out (roughly a second) and it’s not the kind of thing you want to use in
a mob or in front of something large, so ideally you’ll want to clear your
ledge or jump to a safe spot before using it. It also only works below 50%
health, so that double damage pinches all the more when it can easily put you
to critical health or flat out kill you.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of this. For the amount of time it takes to
use it, and for what it does, it’s a bit slow and you need to get too
specific a set of circumstances before you can use it. It’s all well and
good thinking you’ll clear the enemies off this ledge, then use it, but
something else might spawn, you might get hit more than usual and have to use
a potion, putting you over 50%, it’s… not unreliable, you just need to be
careful to the point of slowing down your training, which isn’t a good thing.
Chakra is nice for hunting really low level mobs, though, as it makes
training pretty much completely free (and that’s at level 3), so if you fight
cold eyes or something, or you’re doing a quest then you’ll save a lot of
unagi room and cash. It does stack with endure, so its 1 reason why i
maxed endure.
Moreover, it is fire and forget. Chakra, done move along and continue killing.

—
Meso guard
-35 mp at max
—
Turn it on and a little ring covers your character. From now on, you’ll only
take 50% damage from ANYTHING, though if you look at your skill’s
level, you’ll see that a certain amount is being deducted from your cash
reserves. This money is taken from the half damage you just took, I think,
so if you took say 1000 damage and guard took 90% from your mesos, the 1000
would be halved to 500, the guard would take away 450 mesos from your
inventory, if I’m right.
Not too shabby, really.

Guard does not work in the way the skill describes, you don’t charge up mesos
in any way, though I do believe you used to, but they patched that out. What
happens now is that it just runs on a timer and sucks cash from you until
that timer runs out or you run out of cash, making things pound on you again.
Guard has a bit of a bug in it, purely a visual thing, but if you get hit with
magic, you’ll be shown the full damage, but you won’t TAKE the full damage,
you’ll still take half and be charged for it. I’ve tested this out a bit on
grim phantom watch, and the fact that they couldn’t lay me out in 2 hits
indicated that the magic was being deflected.
Probably the best feature of guard though is the way it reduces half of
anything that hits you. You can now hunt crimson balrogs, but for the love
of Mike, make sure you have at LEAST 2000 hp, their lightning is something
else, I swear…

Though this subtracts money from you, I believe it’s cheaper in the long
run. As you level it, it takes less and less money from you, and even if it
took 100%, you take, for example, 500 damage and meso loss from a 1k hit, so
it works out evenly. If you use it, you’ll probably notice you’re drawing
less raw cash fro your runs, but your runs will become much longer and if
you work out how much you’d have spent on buying more unagi,
travelling/getting hit while travelling and the time gained, it’s not a bad
tradeoff
A side note, I’ve done a little testing, and meso guard does NOT do anything
to damage taken from hazardous terrain. Turn it on and jump into lava, it
won’t make you take any less damage and it won’t subtract cash. I can only
assume that the same applies to things like thorns and jump quest obstacles.
Meso guard definitely does not do anything about El Nath’s cold damage,
either, and I’m pretty certain that if you fall from a high distance, you’ll
still have 30 damage (or whatever amount) blown through your shins, as
normal. Same with poison damage, too. Having said that, those things don’t
hurt too badly, with the possible exception of poison and cold damage over
extended periods, so this is still fantastically useful.