This guide is intended for new and returning players of the warrior role, especially those who want to make PvE progress on their own -- starting with 0 gold, no power-leveling, no free handouts, and no spending real money.

This guide aims to help you go from level 0 to level 229, or Heavenly Immortal 1 (HI1). It's still 26 levels under the current level cap (255, or Reincarnated Soul 3/RS3), but I still want to write some kind of guide. (Why? Well, I got to HI1 and stopped playing.)

Following this guide, you should also be able to get strong items and a good way to farm gold. Good items in this game generally cost millions of gold, and you'll have a way to farm millions of gold per minute, on average. And the highest levels of the game are not doable without strong items.

As a friendly disclaimer, warrior is often considered the worst least good class out of the four available. (actually, I guess Vagabonds are the worst, right?) However, it's certainly a simple class to understand. To complete certain challenges at higher levels and endgame, you will need more items than other classes. You might consider creating a hybrid instead so you have access to Chi Kung damage -- I'm not sure if you need to take some points out of Str/Dex and save them for Wis requirements for bracers, to be honest.

Anyway, this is mainly a Warrior guide :) I wish this guide existed when I started playing. And that's why I'm writing it now -- all the tips and things I've learned on my own, are still fresh in my mind. I want to help you navigate the game better because many aspects are not explained well, if at all.

This guide was written right after building a HI1 character in RedFox's Tao server. Patch 324, November 2022. If the patch number is pretty close, or if the date you're reading this is pretty close, well, probably not much has changed.

First, I want to give some background and show you my HI1 warrior. This way, I hope to give you a rough idea of what to expect in your own experience of building a character.


I've played this game on and off since closed beta (2006-2007ish). My highest level character was 112 (FC4) under Acclaim after 2nd role came out, though -- so I'm really new to the higher levels of the game. I just kept lurking in the trading hub (Hefei), farming defense trinkets, and making alts.

I used to be in Jasmine as "TNT" (HD healer). If you know me, hi!

I also put money into this game under Acclaim, and personally I didn't want to do that again with Redfox. So this time, I played without premium, without item mall, etc.

In October 2022, I started this game again in RF Tao with a fresh account, and reached 229 during the Thanksgiving event at the end of November 2022. So I went from 0-229 in a couple of months, with plenty of gold for my level. However, I took advantage of a lot of 2x and 3x experience/drop events during the weekends, and used the boatload of free experience/drop cards you get from events, daily logins, and quests. Overall, on my other Steam account for 9D, Steam says I played for about 140 hours, mostly grinding or farming gold. Leftover time was for clan quests and, well, lurking in Hefei.


Here is my main, a Heavenly Demon warrior:

She has a couple of buffs, but overall her items and stats are good for that level. And no, I'm not a woman IRL. Historically, female items have been cheaper in 9D, so I made a female character.

The temporary buffs are:

• The blue thing: +5 Dex (crappy hermit buff lol)
  
• The first female portrait/square icon: +30000 hp and +20% attack speed (Fall event buff)
  
• The second icon: +40 all stats, +20% attack speed, +10% recast/cooldown reduction, +100% movement speed (GM buffed the server with this)

"Golden Wind Smasher" comes from the Loulan Golden Castle (LLGC) dungeon. Passes are available at the Nameless Wanderer NPC in Loulan (this is not a low level map). Some explanation here: https://forums.playredfox.com/index.php?threads/the-golden-castle.189/ You can ignore the parts about needing a team -- I cleared it without a team, you just need good gear.

The yellow numbers after the 5 base stats are my elixir bonuses. Frankly, elixirs don't matter too much these days. You will be able to farm those easily. I'd suggest using them when you can, but don't fret if you don't get the max possible bonus for an elixir level.

YYBS resists are all >100. I don't have a solid source, but I hear each point is like 1% -- if you have 100% you have enough resistance. Many items give you >100 easily.

The attack speed and move speed caps are +100% and +125% respectively. It'll be easy to max move speed later.

It's probably also worth mentioning the base stats. This char has 390 Str, 390 Dex, 95 Ess, and 34 Con. I originally built Ess because I lacked Vital Energy (VE) at a lower level. If I made a new char I'd dump those Ess points into Con instead. You will get plenty of Ess from items that give +X to all attributes.

Finally, I'd like to mention how these stats compare to the current challenges and ways of leveling. She can do short School of Rising Sun (SRS) red runs efficiently, killing 2 bosses and relogging within about 7-8 mins per run -- she does have to use 1-2 medium life potions though, but good thing they're plentiful drops from other dungeons. SRS Red is common for people to level up to 244ish (IS4), so it's good that she can handle that challenge. Cave of the Conqueror Red is not a challenge, although she could benefit from having a saber with an AoE skill on it to clear waves faster.

Her damage is pretty lackluster when it comes to Extreme dungeon runs, but she doesn't have a problem with defense or HP. Her damage is better when it comes to Kunlun grinding/farming of non-red mobs. On the other hand, LLGC Red is too challenging for her in terms of both damage and defense -- especially because she has no Repel bracer, or other source of CK damage. I'm told this is also pretty common.

Alright, I'll wrap up this section by explaining my hotbar skills and my items.

My hotbar:

• Two actives, the basic clan and the 2nd role active for warriors;
  
• The warrior's AoE (area of effect) skill;
  
• Two buffs- the warrior's weapon damage buff and the Cave of the Conqueror poison resistance buff. The latter can be found as loot, called [Tome] Antidote of Cave;
  
• Two finisher skills, which each have your warrior run and attack an enemy;
  
• Basic role steps;
  
• Advanced meditation for the clan, which you can find from dungeon drops or on the market for a few million gold;
  
• Advanced lightfoot for the clan, same as meditation but may cost 10mil.

Items:

• Extreme Valley of Hell (VoH) weapon. Created by farming and crafting stuff from Extreme Death Valley (DV) and VoH dungeons. Has 4 ornaments which each give 6% attack speed and 5% cooldown reduction. Overall +24% atk speed. I bought the orns for several million gold each in Hefei.
  
• Reaper weapon (not upgraded with blue stones). Has 4 death valley high orns (decent drop rate in Superior DV) which boost your max dmg. You can get this weapon via the Create menu (80% chance of success) using uncommon boss drops from Wild Tower (WT) and Mansion of Silver Coins (SCM).
  
• 4 Halloween bags. Each gives crit damage, bonus exp, and storage space. Found in Halloween event or purchase for a couple million.
  
• Blue Dragon Banner Excellence (Ex): Crit damage and weapon damage. Market.
  
• Ring of Nine-Tailed Fox 3 (Fox 3): Attack speed and damage. Market.
  
• Top Hat of Black Witch Goku 3 (Goku 3): Weapon damage and flat damage. Market.
  
• Bead of Silver Tiger Ex: Crit damage, VE leech. Market.
  
• Flag of Emptiness (Flag 3): Crit dmg + weapon dmg. Market.
  
• 4 "bead plates": Golden Castle, Black Temple, Vault of Death, and School of Rising Sun (SRS). Commonly sold for millions or up to 15 million gold, but you could farm those dungeons -- it takes a long time though.. The first two give a small amount of leech, the others give damage and atk speed. The set bonuses include stats and damage. Each plate gives +8% more exp, so a full set is nice. (Don't get all 8 plates though.)
  
• Not pictured here, but also have DV and VoH plates I can swap to if needed. If you add one plate, the 5-piece set bonus gives +8000 defense -- necessary for my SRS Red dungeon grinding. Each plate on its own adds to HP or VE.
  
• +8 Ancient Moonlight clothes: Market for at least 10-20 mil gold each. Total cost would then be 50-100 mil. Also have high VoH orns that give 30 con and 2k defense each, and two orns per piece of equipment (2x5 = 10 overall).
  
• Summer Coast Guard deco: Big boost to many things. Slotted with 4 high VoH orns. Found on market for several tens of millions of gold.
  
• Seowang Level 4 set (two white items). Market for tens or maybe over 100 million gold. Excellent boosts to exp/drop rate.

You should do the following in Bamboo Village:

• Level up a bit. Put your points into Str or Dex.
  
• Do the main Bamboo quests, including the one where you defeat Zhang Zhong, Mountain Uprooter. The important quests will let you learn a basic meditation (med), basic lightfoot (LF), and receive a set of Young Dragon Statues. Once you finish those, you can keep leveling or proceed to your clanbase. If I recall, the important quests are: chi breathing, delivering lunch with your LF, getting a training weapon, collecting scratchbacks for the clinic, meeting the NPCs who describe their functions (around the clinic), and defeating Zhang Zhong. Aside from scratchbacks, you don't have to do the one that has you collect grass/herbs near the snakes, or collect stuff from stumps near bandits, for example.
  
• Craft your Young Dragon weapon. Go to the Resource menu (press F11 > Resource, or open the Living menu > Resource tab). Under your clanbase of choice -- let's say Mount Yanmo if you want to use sabers -- you can use a Young Dragon statue to exchange for a Young Dragon saber. Don't click Trade All, that's bad. But anyway, this weapon will last you for a very long time -- you will get more statues much later via the main quest, then go back to F11 menus and exchange for even better weapons with an NPC in your clanbase (Jade Dragon, True Dragon, etc). You should be able to use these Dragon weapons until you get your Superior Death Valley (or Valley of Hell) weapon, which will come much later.
  
• Learn an active skill and smash for your weapon/clan of choice. For example, if you want to use sabers, learn the Basic Saber Attack skill. It doesn't hurt to learn more and train them, if you change your mind.

A couple notes before you head to your clanbase. First, your current LF skill is very good, even better than your basic clan lightfoot (I think). If you get an opportunity to learn your clan's basic LF skill, don't do it -- just wait until you get an advanced LF tome for your clan later in the game. Then come back, learn and train the basic clan LF skill.

Next, about your choice of clan. I'm not sure whether they are all that different nowadays -- there are small clan-specific buffs, different clan weapons have a little more damage than others, some clan bases (looking at Mount Yanmo and Zixia Dong) are way better suited for grinding and moving to quests than others. I think you can pick whichever you like the most. However, there is a benefit I've seen to going as a white clan in Tao-- they seem to win all the BvW (Black vs. White Clan) wars, which result in buffs, items, and a chance to get the "Killer of True General Wei" epithet.

Lastly, consider which clans are the most and least popular -- this will affect how easy or hard it will be, to find items for your class on the market later on. There are a lot of sabers (HD) and swords (WT) for sale in Hefei, but maybe not too many wheels (SF) or staffs (LoB).

This part is pretty straightforward as well. Do the quests to join the clan, learn some basic clan skills (***not the basic lightfoot***), level up a bit, and choose your first role.

Before Your First Role

The quests to join should hopefully be pretty easy (especially because of the Young Dragon weapon and whatever event buffs are going around). You should get some clan contribution points, and go to the basic skill trainer for your clan. This person has a few interesting things to note:

• They teach skills such as the basic clan actives and meditation. ***Again, I recommend you to not get the clan lightfoot yet.***
  
• This person is normally who you'd go to, to get a Young Dragon weapon. Now that you don't even need to be in the same map, you should hopefully have received this when you were in Bamboo Village. (if not, no worries.)
  
• This person sells blue manuals that boost your skill exp by x2. It's good to buy a few of these, especially since you will come across "Practical Manuals" during your time -- crafting these two types of manuals together will give you a better manual that gives x3 instead.
  
• This person also sells some statues (Jade Dragon, True Dragon, etc). You will automatically get one of each statue later during the main quest, which you can exchange (along with your current Dragon weapon) to get a better weapon using the F11 menu. I recommend just waiting and not buying anything.

Look, I know this is a warrior guide, but this is a pretty significant choice. In today's meta, the warrior is probably the "least good" class, even though it's easy to play. It's recommended to make either a hybrid ("Holist" or hyb) or nuker (also known as "Chi Kung Artist") for your first character, basically because of their AoE skills at higher levels and their effectiveness at inflicting Chi Kung (CK) damage. These two classes each have at least 3 AoEs, while warriors only have 1 -- but you could make up for it by equipping a weapon with an AoE skill built into it. The AoE is very helpful for dealing with large groups, like in many dungeons.

The CK damage is massively important later in the game, where warriors and pure melee builds fall off. The game mostly (aside from Yin-Yang-Body-Soul or YYBS damage, less important in PvE) is about physical damage and CK damage. When you eventually get to certain areas such as SRS and Loulan Golden Castle (LLGC or LLD), monsters will appear with a very high physical defense. You could whack them for a long time with a physical weapon, or throw some CK damage at them. There are also monsters, like bosses, that are way easier to whack with a physical weapon -- therefore, it is common for CK users to simply equip a physical weapon and use basic actives to attack. That's one reason why it's important to learn those basic active skills (or if you are a hybrid, you can learn the 2nd role active skill for more damage).

Warriors can get around this by equipping weapons with CK skills built into them, for example Dusk Kylin bracers (single target CK) or Repel bracers (AoE CK). By the time I stopped playing, I was using pure melee damage, so feel free to take all of this with a grain of salt.

Hybrids will also have bonus sustain (i.e. healing and such) at lower levels, when you don't have items that give you tens of thousands of HP and VE for free. Nukers, on the other hand, will have shields and buffs specifically for CK effectiveness.

If the clan master asks if you want to redistribute your Chi, say yes. There are some notes below on what stats you want for a warrior. There is also a Hefei quest ("Pill of Baek Munrang") to let you respec your stats. And I believe when you attain 2nd role, you will have a chance to respec, since the stat caps increase from 250 to 390.

Finally, remember that if you don't like the role you've chosen, if you go back before Five Dragons 1 (level 61) you can change to another role by following a Road to Enlightenment (RTE) quest on the clanbase map. This can also be used to respec your stats and keep the same role. I think you keep your learned skills and their skill levels as well, if you do this.


There are a few options here. Dragon weapons don't have stat requirements, so you should generally choose some way to distribute your points between Str, Con, and Dex. At higher levels, particularly level 130 (Crimson Snake 10), you will need about 210 Str and Dex, then roughly 240 of each stat at level 175 (Hermit 7) in order to wield good weapons for those levels.

If you feel comfortable with your HP, you can ignore Con and split everything between Str and Dex. According to recent forum posts, it looks like Con adds about 60 HP and 8 defense for warriors these days, while Str adds 5 damage and 4 def. During the time I played, there was a constant 30k HP buff going, so I never felt the need to add Con until I capped both Str and Dex. Your mileage may vary.

Aside from Con, you could try to split the points evenly between Str and Dex, ensuring decent damage and defense while keeping your attack rate reasonable. Or you could focus on one stat over the other. At low levels (i.e. before CS 10), if you have problems with damage and survivability, I'd focus on Str and put only the minimum points needed into Dex. Focus on non-red mobs. On the other hand, if you don't have those problems at all, I'd suggest focusing on Dex and putting minimal points into Str, so you can properly wield that shiny CS10 weapon (it's a huge power spike actually). Higher Dex will help you farm red mobs for higher experience -- particularly for a later point in this guide where you'll be farming level 225+ Kunlun mobs, when you're only 160ish. (Yes, that's a very real way to level fast, and we'll be doing it.) But aside from that extreme example, you'll receive more exp from orange and red monsters (30% and 50%, respectively, I think?), and a little extra (10%) from yellows.


Once you pick your role, go learn some skills from your role trainer and head out. Try to note down any interesting skills you want to pick up later. In many cases, it will be a very long time (maybe even 2nd role) until you can learn the skills you want from that trainer. It might help to learn a basic active for your role, but it will cost 25 VE per use. You probably will not use it for a while -- in fact, you can probably make it to 2nd role and get that active instead without ever using this one!

Your actives should be maxed over time without you needing to use manuals (but it's good to boost them up to Cheng 5 for the full moveset). In addition, it would be a good idea to get your meditation and steps up to cheng 10 -- med so you can learn the advanced med later, and steps so you can get the full damage and defense boost. But the steps carry a heavy VE cost. Remember -- you need the clan basic med for the advanced med, but you can also use the role med for a small damage boost.

Let's continue to Zhengzhou/Shi Zhang, shall we?

Here we go -- grinding part 1. This map will take you up to level 46 or so. You can mostly just follow the main road through the 3 villages -- fighting bandits, tarantulas, or leopards, then red foxes, bears, etc. all the way up to the exit to Jinan/Datong.

The quests on most maps, are mostly trash in terms of experience and items, so you can focus on fighting mobs. Feel free to do them for the story aspect, though.


You might see mobs like this guy which give a lot more exp than usual:

You will sometimes find quest mobs that give a boatload of exp. You can find a few of these in other maps like Jinan/Datong, or Nanchang/Hangzhou as well. Most quest mobs don't give tons of exp though, just a special few. Here are the ones I know about:

• ZZ: Giant Serpent (snake): between Central Passage + Longmen Cavern), Dark Sky Ghost (wolf) south of Wuan
  
• SZ: White Spirit Ring Master - Tarantula area
  
• Jinan: Ghost Spirit Monkey (Lightning disciple)- west of ZZ exit, Sandstorm Crazy Cavalry (Bloodthief Raider) near other Raiders
  
• DT: Ghost Spirit Squad Leader (Master), Conference (Evil Shadows guy next to Bloody Shadows). Yes, his English name is actually Conference.
  
• HZ: Tremendous Spirit Swordsman (wolf rider near Green Jade Villa), Black Tiger (just a tiger) - can be found in a large area around Wild Tower (WT) entrance
  
• NC: Demonic Power Defense (Deva King) - can be found near the bottom village and around Silver Coin Mansion (SCM) entrance.

Also, some mobs drop quest items -- I don't remember if the exp is amazing or not, but it's there. For one, Dian Cang Madmen can drop this. Because of the heavy travel between Hefei, SZ/ZZ and your clanbase, it might not be worth the time.


Try to go to a drapery and buy a 2- or 3-pocket shirt + pants -- you'll get some extra def out of it, plus you can use the pockets to store helpful accessories. You won't find too many accessories yet until you do dungeons (or peek into the Hefei marketplace).

Try to save up enough money to go to the courier NPCs and buy a stash contract. Ideally, the most slots you can get.

You can discard or sell most drops you find, to NPCs (or use these items for Clan Contribution). You will get plenty of Golden Threads, Pieces of Steel, Pieces of Bloody Orb, and Flowstones later. You might also see monster-specific drops like Blue Cotton Cloth, or Buddhist Beads. Those used to be for collection quests, which no longer matter -- they give some elixirs, but it turns out it's very easy to get elixirs from dungeons and simple grinding later. Plus, elixirs don't matter much these days, honestly. Same advice applies to the collection quests like the Fans of Black Tortoise/White Tiger, wines, general statues, etc -- their collection rewards are trash, and you should just NPC all of the collectibles for gold. (Remember Zanpakutou's Money Making Guide from over a decade ago? Well, times have changed.)

You may see some relics like [Good] Holy Stone of Iron, or [Bad] Twin Dragon Bracelet of Fire, etc. Generally these accessories have a stat requirement, and give you some boosts once you equip them. Don't be tempted to use your stat points to meet these requirements -- these relics are not very good. They don't even sell to NPCs for that much money. Since you're a Warrior though, it may be wise to save 2 sets of the five bad karma Five Dragons relics -- not to equip, but you may be able to exchange them for some nice accessories later, which are focused on damage and critical hit damage. (Chi Kung users would want to save 2 sets of the five good karma relics, for Chi Kung damage relics. Why BK versus GK? I dunno what they were thinking when they designed this collection...)

Save Purple Jades you find for crafting.

If you see a "Pass of Life and Death", pick it up. Don't NPC it. Same for the Superior Pass of Life and Death -- you will need a set of 3 passes to be able to run the dungeon in this map, called Choice of Fate or just the Death Valley dungeon. You can purchase them from an NPC right outside the dungeon as well, but they're a bit expensive for where you're at in the game. More about this dungeon in a second.


Gratz! You can move on to Jinan or Datong, depending on your clan. But before you go, I'd like to explain a couple of interesting reasons that you should come back to this map soon.

Bosses

First is the boss mobs on this map. There are four of them, ranging from Raising Light to Five Dragons, and each one drops a green item that gives you a Road to Fate (RTF) quest. Each quest gives quite a lot of experience when you turn it in to the storyteller NPC in Hefei.

My advice is, return to this map and clear out the bosses when you are at least FD1, then save the quests to turn in later. You can find the bosses' locations by searching online -- there are plenty of sources that will show you the map and the boss names.

The reason for waiting is that, at a low enough level, you might waste the quest experience -- if it takes you over 100% that remaining exp is discarded and not applied to the next level. Also, you can use this quest exp to get past levels you're having trouble with. For example, you'll see mob exp slow down a lot in Jinan/DT, so if you get tired of shredding Blind Demons near the Valley of Hell, you can turn in some RTF quests. Be careful with saving these quests though, since you can only have about 19 or 20 active quests at most.


You can find this dungeon on the map in the bottom-right corner. This is where you can use those Passes of Life and Death, if you found any. Otherwise you can buy some from the NPC (165k per pass, I think? and you need 3.) The Superior pass is intended for a much higher level -- don't use those, but you should hold on to them for later. Finally, you can also use both these types of passes on the ZZ/SZ dungeon as well as the one in Jinan/DT, so it may be wise to save some for later.

The normal Pass runs are doable when you are low to mid FD. You can do this dungeon alone, and there are quite a few guides and videos on what the dungeon looks like, and how to beat it.

The most important item you can receive from this dungeon is a weapon ornament. Depending on the grade (low/medium/high) you will get a certain amount of max damage and critical hit chance. Getting these CoF orns will be a huge power spike for you -- you can put 3 ornaments on your Dragon weapon, and all of a sudden you will hit criticals on most attacks, with much higher base damage than before.

In the normal Pass runs, you will mostly find Low ornaments, and occasionally some Mid ornaments. I'd save a few mids for later, especially if you don't have a True Dragon weapon yet. Even lows will make a big difference in your damage once you bind them to your weapon.

Other than that, the CoF dungeon can give you "Crying for Death" clothes, which are a nice set of clothes with some damage and HP/VE leech if you manage to complete the whole set. There are Life/Vital pills and Bloody Hermit Herbs, which are both nice to sell.

You may find some X Rank War Spirit accessories -- generally these can be sold to NPCs, but some of them are good -- for example, I think the ring boosts your crit chance a little. The X Rank clothing isn't as good as the other clothes you'll find.

If you find [Epic] clothes for your gender, save them. You cannot NPC them or store them, which sucks, but that set will be very good once you're leveled enough to wear them.

You may find more dungeon passes -- hold on to those!

Finally, IIRC the only other drop worth mentioning is the elixirs from chests. Again, elixirs don't matter too much in today's meta, but you could use them for a small boost -- or NPC them now and farm them again later :) Your call.

Round 2. Tired yet? Here's another mostly straightforward map, same as ZZ and SZ -- Just run through the corridor, fight, and level up. This map can get you to around level 79 or 80 (Sun and Moon 7 or 8).

This section is kinda light, so I'll use the rest to talk about Road to Dragon (RTD) quests and advanced tomes. If you have a few million gold by now, you could also check out the "Hefei" section later in the guide.


Remember to take advantage of any special exp mobs that you find. Once you level up enough, also remember to come back and take care of the bosses earlier in the map. The earliest boss of this map should be somewhere in the Five Dragons level range, while the highest are in Golden Blossoms -- you'll come back for those guys later around level 90.

In general, you will be able to get boss quests and exp for bosses in ZZ/SZ, Jinan/DT, Nanchang(NC) and Hangzhou(HZ), Cave of the Conqueror (CC or CoC) and Liaodong (LD). I guess they simply stopped after LD. It used to be the case that you would get a hard debuff when trying to attack bosses more than 24 levels below your level, but I think they removed that -- you can go and pick up these boss kills later if you forget.

You'll notice there's a dungeon in this map, just like ZZ/SZ. This one, called VoH or Valley of Hell, takes Passes of Life and Death, and mostly differs from CoF in that it gives you wardrobe ornaments for Con/Defense and Crying Yama clothes (which are a bit better than the CoF set). Those wardrobe ornaments won't necessarily be great yet, but will be a lifesaver much later when dungeon mobs (and Kunlun mobs too, I think) start hitting hard. I believe the right level to do this dungeon is around low to mid Golden Blossoms, so again you'll have to complete this later.

Similar to Purple Jades last map, save the Red Jades you find. They are a crafting item, and are easier to farm now than later when you're higher level.


Eventually you will have to do these RTD quests assigned by your clan. You'll get some nice items (Dragon Statues, exp boosts, free courier passes, manuals, gold, among others) and get your 2nd role, so you can learn advanced skills like finishers and AoEs. It's not a bad idea to start now, since the exp is good. In fact, it's so good that it's a good idea just to save the quests for now and turn them in later, so you don't waste exp. Anyway, I thought it would be worth mentioning in a paragraph.


It's worth knowing that your clan basic med and lightfoot both suck, compared to the advanced skills you can learn from tomes. These are mainly dropped in dungeons that you haven't visited yet (Silver/Gold Coin Mansions, Wild Tower, and Beast Tower), but you could also buy the tomes for your clan from the Hefei marketplace. In Hefei, you could either visit the Auctioneer NPC and make a purchase directly, or be lucky enough to find a stand that sells tomes. Either way, in Tao the LF tome generally costs up to 10 million gold and the med could be around 5 million. Once you buy the LF tome (or get it as a rare drop), you can go back and learn that clan basic LF, to train it up to 10 and finally learn the advanced LF. The advanced LF should be much faster than whatever you have been using so far, once you train it enough.

If you realized I mentioned the advanced med and LF but didn't mention the advanced steps, nice catch! The advanced steps suck these days. Don't bother buying them from the market. As a matter of principle, I NPC whatever steps tomes I get.

You can access this map from Bloody Plain from Hefei or ZZ/SZ. Make sure to have a Poison Antidote buff from the Hermit when you enter the Cave, located in the center of the Plain.

First of all, this is a weird map. It's still mostly a corridor, but it spans several floors. The levels go all the way up to Floral Crown (109+) if I recall, but we don't want to go that far -- Nanchang (NC) and Hangzhou (HZ) offer better experience starting around level 90. Not to mention you don't need a buff for them. If you grind here, I recommend getting to 90ish and heading to NC/HZ.

Personally, I mostly skipped this map due to RTF and RTD quest experience. I went in and killed the bosses once I was high enough level, to earn their RTF quests. Every boss up until Dark Sword on the 4th floor of the Cave, has an RTF quest associated with them. General Wei has nothing (he doesn't even drop anything good anymore).

If you grind here, make sure to keep an eye on your anti-poison buff. It'd be great if you got the [Tome] Antidote of Cave as a drop earlier, otherwise remember to leave when you're running out of time. Some quests give herbs that stave off the poison, but it used to be the case that chests outside the Cave dropped these herbs (not anymore I think).

One other reason the Cave is cool, is that it contains the Cave of the Conqueror Dungeon (CCD, but people really just call it CC or CoC). This is a great little dungeon to farm weapon drops and dungeon passes for gold later on, especially when a drop event is going on -- however, for best results, you want to be at least level 200 I believe, and use Red passes from the merchant outside the dungeon entrance. This is a great farming method for you to use later on.

That's it for this section. I could go on about old history, like Vicious Fist camping/farming, or karma plate chests, or masked PKers, or Blood Essence drops, or choosing whether to farm CC for drops versus NC/HZ for experience, or 3rd floor gambling, or how a 0.2% HP leech trinket used to sell for like 1 billion gold in Hefei. But for now, I'm gonna focus on giving you helpful information for 9Dragons in 2022.

Since we're going through Hefei at this point, this seems like a good time to talk about the market, and some cheap items that would help you a lot. While you're in Hefei, you can go to the General Store and Mo Tailan, and refine your Dragon weapon to +2 using the Sleeping and Crouching Dragon bloods at the store. It should not fail refinement and break.

First, I'd like to introduce you to...


This nice lady is located at the coordinates (209, 159) in Hefei next to Wan Daye. Here you can list items you want to sell to other players (but you will pay a small fee before it will list the item!), and search for items in the auctioneer system. Don't get confused -- the items in other player's stands are completely separate from this. You should check both if you're really looking for an item.


Speaking of cheap items that would help you a lot, the "GCM deco" pictured above is a pretty good start. It also has a couple slots, and you could put VoH orns in there if you want -- you ought to get a 4-slot deco and fill that with mid to high VoH ornaments.

Before I forget, a gentle reminder that these are Tao prices. Might be different based on what server you're playing.


The item above is not cheap compared to a 1-million gold deco, but it's worth mentioning. Amazing stats for the price, but don't buy a Rising Bead of Kylin to complete the set -- 1000 defense is not worth it in this case. Also, note that the weapon damage only will make a difference once you get your Superior weapon around level 130 -- it won't do much for you right now. (Weapon Damage % only applies to the base damage, not even to the bonus damage from refining a weapon. So I've heard, anyway.)

It's also worth mentioning this Flag of Chaos is referred to as "Flag 1". There is also a Flag 3 that people prefer, called Flag of Emptiness:


But it costs a lot more (usually I see 100 million gold or higher) and the stats are not much higher. I'd recommend buying a Flag 1 eventually, but wait for a while before trading your Flag 1 for a Flag 3. You can't wear both at the same time.


This one, the Bead of Frosted Full Moon, costs a whopping 10-15 million gold generally. However, it is great for the movement speed and HP leech. If your crit rate is not 100% already, this will improve that as well. This has saved me a couple of times in the past, but I moved on to better relics since then.


I like the Blue Dragon Banner (Excellence) a lot. Great stats for around 5 million gold.

I don't have pics for these, but you can get items called Inner Clothes (or Inner Pants) of Warrior Spirit -- these are a very rare drop in SCM/GCM dungeons, and they generally give you a critical damage boost along with some flat damage, which is nice. You'd equip them in the 2 trigram slots next to your clothes. You could alternatively trade for them in the F11 menu, by using a full set of bad karma FD relics, along with 100 Vault of Death beads, _per item_ -- so 200 beads. That will take some time to farm. Occasionally these get sold in Hefei for 1 to 10 or 20 million, depending on how the seller is feeling that day. I like them, but it's probably better just to get the Seowang set (see way below).

Note that you can also find tomes for med and LF at the Auctioneer as well as the player stands around the Hefei square. I've already mentioned those, so won't blather on about it anymore.

One thing I will blather on about, though, is the Bead Plates such as this one:


These plates are generally good for their individual stats, but great for their set bonuses. There are several plates I want to mention, instead of screenshotting each one. Also note each one has a 8% experience boost when equipped.

• Death Valley: 3500 HP
  
• Valley of Hell: 3500 VE
  
• Vault of Death: 3500 physical damage
  
• Vault of Double Dragons: 3500 Chi Kung damage (we don't care about this plate)
  
• School of Rising Sun: 15% Attack Speed
  
• Icy Palace: 20% cooldown reduction (we don't care about this one, either)
  
• Black Temple: 1% HP leech
  
• Golden Castle: 1% VE leech

Pretty good stats on most of these plates. They really shine as a set, and I found that they were essential to some higher level dungeons, such as red runs of the School of Rising Sun dungeon -- just because of the 8000 defense bonus from 5 plates. You can also equip a sixth plate for an 8000 damage bonus, but I find having a sixth plate still isn't as good as having one of my good relics in that slot.

Anyway: DV, VoH, BT, and GC plates are pretty cheap, around millions each, but Vault of Death and SRS are around 10-20 million. Still, they're a great investment. Later on, you will be looking at items that are tens of millions, or a hundred million -- I'm going to list some here, in case I forget later:

• Summer deco -- 4 slot with amazing stats. 40 million gold
  
• Clothing sets -- You'll see some Ancient Moonlights and [[Dark] Ghost] Blood Sorcerer clothes with 2-4 slots per piece. These might be 20 million to 100-200 million per piece. The 4 slots are unbelievably helpful when it comes to putting VoH orns in there. When you get 4 slot clothing, you may be able to swap out your bead plates and replace them with some real damage relics.
  
• Seowang Level 4 set -- There is a Robe and a Trinket which give large (about 80%) boosts to exp and drop rate, some critical damage bonus, and a decent HP boost. Some leech too, if I recall correctly. I've seen everywhere from 50 to 150 million. These go into the Trigram or "Belonging Items" slots.
  
• Top Hat of Black Witch Goku 3, Ring of Nine-Tailed Fox 3, Demonized Orb 3 -- These are Kunlun relics. Really freaking strong, except the Orb is maybe not so good for warriors honestly. Prices vary wildly, but could be 80 to 120 million each.
  
• Flag 3 - 100 million gold (see above)
  
• Bead of Silver Tiger (Excellence) - I got mine for 80 million. Similar to Demonized Orb 3, kind of not the best item for warriors but it's still a good boost for damage, especially if you don't need defense from bead plates.
  
• Sealed Bead (Excellence) - These are not gear items -- they go for 20 million a pop, and are part of adding Options to your equipment. They give you a chance for the best options like 7% crit damage (seems small, but there are many option slots per relic. So 5 options means up to 35% more crit damage).
  
• Not in Hefei, but you can buy the 9th relic slot for 100mil at level 220.

Finally, there are definitely relics on the market that look good to a new player, which are only a million or so. They're cheap, and the bonuses are big, so they're good, right? Be careful. In particular, there are some modifiers that don't do much for PvE warriors:

• Physical Damage increased by X%. There are other good mods like Weapon Damage % increases, and crit damage % increases -- but this only increases your damage from your Strength stat. Nothing to do with your weapon. So even if this X is big, you won't get much out of this stat. Damage increases by a flat amount, like 3500 from the Vault of Death plate, are still OK since they are a flat amount.
  
• % Crit Defense. I have no good source for this, it's not explained anywhere, but I believe this only applies to PvP.
  
• YYBS damage- does not factor into crits.

Well, I'm done talking about items for now. Let's get back to work, shall we?

We're level 90ish, and we want to get to around 120 here. Let's talk strategy.


Let's start with bosses. Funny enough, they made some changes in the past where they scaled the enemies up, except for the bosses. At GB6, or level 90, the first boss - Little Giant - should be white to you, but the first normal enemies like Red Wolves and Hawkeyes should be red or orange to you. Anyway, you can clear the bosses a little more aggressively in this map.

There are multiple corridors technically, at least in Hangzhou (HZ) but be careful not to run into the hard enemies -- Azure Hawks, Scarlet Peacocks, Red Bears, Goldsteel/Goldfist/Goldplates, etc. Back in the Good Old Days, these guys ruled the Tunnel of Death next to the northeastern-most village in HZ. Anyways, they are higher level, and they can hit hard -- or they used to, anyway.

Remember to take advantage of the high-exp mobs, turn in RTFs as needed, and you can relax and do some RTDs at this point. You can certainly do some VoH runs to get the Yama clothes, maybe some Epic Yama clothes, and some defense ornaments for later. (It just hit me, actually, if you don't have a HP buff, maybe the Con bonus from those ornaments would be really helpful. Guess that's something you could do.)

I still don't think the quests on this map are very good, if I recall, but you're welcome to try them to see if the exp is worth it. Honestly, the grinding can be boring here, unless you have a lot of RTFs and RTDs.

On a more cheerful note, let's talk about the dungeons of Nanchang and Hangzhou.


That's right, The Dungeons of Nanchang and Hangzhou. The lower difficulty one is the Vault of Death -- Mansion of Silver Coins (SCM) in NC, and Wild Tower in HZ. The higher difficulty one is the Vault of Double Dragons -- Mansion of Gold Coins (GCM) in HZ, and Beast Tower in NC.

I'm not sure exactly what levels these dungeons are intended for, let alone the levels for each pass -- but the important part is I think you can run green WT/SCM easily later on, by the time we get to about Little Master or LM levels. I will hopefully remember to mention this later. The green runs tend to be a great way to farm some early gold, since the mobs and chests will drop more dungeon passes, tomes (yes, even your clan's advanced tomes, sometimes), and herbs that sell for 10k+ to NPCs. You may also find Inner Clothes as a drop if you're lucky. The bosses in SCM/WT can hit hard, or bleed for a lot, so you may need some life pills from DV or VoH if you still have them.

In particular, you can find blue items called Reaper Journals from the final bosses of the WT and SCM dungeons. If you get 20, you can craft (with an 80% success rate) an item called a Reaper weapon. It has good base stats, but you can only use it without penalties around level 175. It's still pretty good though, until you get Extreme weapons. You can also upgrade it with blue splendor stones, but that's quite expensive for us. Note that the Reaper journals don't always drop from those bosses, so in order to maximize the value of your dungeon passes you could try playing during a 2x/3x drop event, and/or use a drop boost card just for the boss. 20 Reaper journals means at least 10 runs.

Eventually, you may also find Superior Vault of Death passes. I don't think these are very good honestly, and the same goes for Superior GCM/BT -- I didn't get many rewards from them. Just focus on plain old SCM or WT passes.

Let's also talk about GCM and BT. Unlike the previous dungeons you've played so far, these are unique maps. But they do share the same theme, i.e. find and defeat certain quest enemies, then go to the main room, slay enough enemies to trigger the main bosses to show up, then defeat those and escape.

GCM and BT can drop a lot of the same things that SCM and WT can, if I recall. (and it's longer, so I recommend just doing SCM/WT... but anyways) The main selling point of GCM these days, is that red runs were generally an effective way to level up for a long time. These days, I think Superior CoF/VoH, Kunlun, and SRS Red are better ways to level -- we'll discuss those shortly.

Finally, you may know this, but regardless of your clan you can go to both NC and HZ. Just be careful not to get hit by the opposite clan guards -- if you have reflect damage on, it will count as you hitting the guards, and you will get hit with a huge debuff for five minutes.

OK. Now that we're done talking about the dungeons you ironically can't clear yet, and now that you're level 120ish, let's move to Liaodong.

This section will be a mixed bag. We'll grind in Liaodong for a bit, then go back and start working on the Superior Choice of Fate and Superior Valley of Hell dungeons. By the time this is over, hopefully you could be up to Little Master (LM) level, or 157+.


This will sound like a bit of a broken record -- remember to fight bosses and finish any remaining RTD quests you have. Just like NC/HZ, these bosses are still lower level, so they range from FC2 to CS10 -- go beat them up once you're ready, and get the RTF quests from them. It turns out that the minibosses like Sky Storm (early map), Roaring Storm (middle of the map, maybe close to the beach?), and Divine Storm (by the boat) also have RTF quests, so you can pick those up too.

Our goal in LD is to get to a high enough level where we can comfortably grind in the Superior CoF dungeon, back in ZZ/SZ. Remember that place? It will give us amazing experience and, along with VoH, will take us to LM levels. Plus we'll get amazing gear out of those dungeon runs.

I must say I'm not 100% sure about the best level to stop grinding in LD. I believe the superior CoF enemies start at level 140, so you could try level 135, or Golden Lotus 3 (GL3). This way you won't get as bad of a damage debuff as if you fought something 6 levels higher, but will still get way more experience. If your gear is really good, feel free to try even earlier.

Likewise, the superior VoH enemies start at level 150. You could move there once the CoF exp slows down too much.

OK, enough teasing -- let's talk about this dungeon.


Oh man, this dungeon is cool. It plays very similarly to regular CoF. Make sure, though, that you break the rocks and skeletons to the right of the final boss -- these rocks can have Superior Journals in them.

You can use a Journal in F11 to get a Superior weapon for your class. This thing, as you'll notice, has a huge base damage and quite a high stat requirement. You can't refine it, but you have 4 slots to fill with ornaments. I recommend mids, or highs if you can find them, from CoF.

You may also get multiple journals -- don't sell them to NPCs. What I recommend is this: use F11 to turn them into Superior weapons, and then sell those to NPCs. You're now looking at 900k per journal, instead of 162k by just selling each journal individually. This is a great reason to run superior CoF over and over again -- great exp and gold.

You'll also be able to farm your Epic Crying for Death clothing, which should give you better bonuses than what you had before. Alternatively, you can farm Epic Crying Yama in Superior VoH -- but that dungeon will not drop journals for you. So you might lose money with each run.

With the Superior CoF and VoH runs, you'll start getting Death Valley Helictite and Valley of Hell Helictite, which is a nice crafting item for later.


This is both similar to normal VoH, and superior CoF. Notice that the rocks and skeletons are now on the left side of the boss room, and don't drop any journals. So this dungeon is overall less profitable than CoF, in a way. I still recommend farming your Epic Crying Yama set here, and upgrading your Superior DV weapon to a Superior VoH weapon (I don't remember if it's 100% chance of success on that "upgrade", so be very careful not to lose your superior weapon.)

In my experience, I believe I stopped farming this dungeon around LM4 or LM6. You may choose to take some extra time to farm gold in Superior CoF runs, and purchase some nice accessories in Hefei.

If you want to farm money and buy stuff in Hefei, you can do superior CoF for journal weapons, or you could alternatively try green SCM/WT runs (I remembered to mention this!!). These runs can net you quite a lot of gold from dungeon passes in particular. I haven't timed or calculated it myself, so if you have an opinion feel free to let me know which dungeons are more efficient for your gold mining.

As a final note before I close out this section on the superior dungeons, take a minute to explore the Resource and Create menus for ZZ/SZ and Jinan/DT. There is some really nice gear there, which requires a lot of farming. The auras and extreme items will be farmable at 220+ once you go to the Extreme dungeons. Don't craft highs or excellence orns though -- those have a chance of failure. Just farm highs. If you see other craftable things that look nice, which I've not listed here, it might be nice to farm for those or come back later. (The VoH bags are certainly cool, at 2k defense per bag.)

Either way, next stop -- Kunlun.

We're going to jump from Little Master (157+) to Heaven's Gate 4 (220) in one map. It'll still take time, but let me just say that it beats the hell out of the other maps when you're a solo player spending $0. Liaodong, North Sea Icy Palace (Icy), Tibet? All of them are worse than what we've faced so far.

There is also red GCM, which I kept dying to. So I skipped that here. Same with red SRS, which I also could not survive until I had 47000 defense and some life potions.


Really, this could be summarized in one video, uploaded by this guy named Dark Alan:


You should do what he did, except don't get PKed I suppose :)

I'll explain what he did, in case the video is down for whatever reason. At around (598, 581) on the map, to the right of the Lost Camp, there is a long stretch where you can fight mobs named Evil Spirit Hound. These are actually pretty great mobs for a few different reasons: they seem to have lower hp or defense than others on the map, the area is kind of secluded, and they are level 228ish. I find you get high experience until you hit about 220 (if I recall) before the experience severely drops off. (so I don't know if maybe they implemented some Level+8 rule about calculating experience, or whatever.)

Even though you're lower level, you hopefully have good equipment and the Superior dungeon equipment at this point, and can do some decent damage to them while not dying. If you have trouble, you can use red pills found in the earlier dungeons. Players also sell stacks of these pills in Hefei if you're lazy, but unfortunately these players are sometimes too lazy to give you a fair price...

These mobs take a while to kill, but you should hopefully get a boatload of exp per mob -- especially if there's an event going on, and/or you are using some exp cards you've earned. The exp will still gradually slow down, but I believe it should still beat Tibet experience, or Icy experience, or whatever.


This time is a bit of a long stretch, so I wanted to pitch in ideas you could try while you're progressing to HG4.

One idea is you could go grab some good epithets. The epis for clearing SCM/GCM/SRS/Icy dungeon are very similar, so you could clear those. Eventually it would be good to get the LLGC epithet (which offers some crit and weapon damage) but that one is hard for warriors without enough damage accessories.

You can keep farming money in Superior CoF or green GCM. Arguably an even better alternative, once you are level 200 or so*, is the Cave of the Conqueror dungeon, specifically Red passes. Here you will have many waves of enemies to clear; these drop a lot of junk, but mainly you will find SRS dungeon passes, medium life pills, and weapons. I'd sell the green/purple SRS as well as the weapons, but keep the SRS red passes and the life pills for later. Here's a good video on CC Red with other solid advice:


*I'm not sure about level 200 being the best cutoff -- maybe you could do this even earlier? The dungeon may very well spawn 200 level mobs in on you though, so be careful and don't die. The CC red passes aren't cheap, anyways.

Once you are farming tens of millions of gold, it might be time to go check out Hefei again. I listed a bunch of interesting items in the "Hefei" section of the guide, so I'd recommend checking that out again. You may want to get Ancient Moonlight 2-slotted clothes to survive SRS Red (using con/def ornaments from VoH). Later on you may want to upgrade those to 4-slotted clothes (much more expensive in the Hefei market, believe me) so that you don't even have to think about SRS red with your extra 20k defense, on top of your last clothes set.

That's about it, honestly -- grind in Kunlun, and farm money and buy items so you can grind faster in Kunlun. When you're HG4, it's time to switch maps.

At this point, our Kunlun grind is gonna be pretty slow, even for an event. What's next? I'll present a few different avenues for you.


Nah, I'd prefer the other options first.


Now this is a fun option :) You might accidentally buy trash/not the best items if you're not aware of it though, like the Bead of Golden Dragon, Beads of Silver Tiger normal, or Beads of Double Smasher. Best of luck in your research.


This sounds pretty exciting, right? You get a daily set of 3 Extreme passes from the storyteller NPC in Hefei via a Heroic (purple) quest. It'll be like doing the Superior dungeons again, right?

Well, on the plus side, the Extreme dungeons will lead you to better gear. You will be able to get your Extreme DV and Extreme VoH weapon (see earlier in the guide, my char has one). You'll also be able to farm more Helictite and Auras, which are used in crafting some nice gear. The monsters also give quite a bit of experience, more than the other options from what I can tell.

The bad part is, these monsters have a lot of HP and defense. It takes forever to do this dungeon, even with the "good" equipment we've been using so far. I'm not quite sure what the best answer is here. I think with good gear you should be able to solo this dungeon early on, but it will take a long time -- you probably shouldn't have to worry about your defense, as much as you will be lacking in DPS.


Aside from the Extreme dungeons, this used to be the common method of leveling, especially up until Immortal Spirit 4ish (IS4, or level 244). Players will do short or full runs depending on how fast they can defeat the bosses and supporting enemies -- if the doors or Ayakashi enemies take too long to kill, for example, you would probably be better off slaying Saburo and Genji, then relogging to exit the dungeon.

Hopefully you saved some SRS Red passes along with medium life pills from your CC Red runs -- you will need them both. If you want to clear this dungeon without getting slaughtered, I suggest at least 47000 defense. For me, this mostly comes from my clothes (2 slots each in 5 pieces of clothing, with 2000 def in each slot) as well as the bonus from 5 bead plates (8000 def).

**EDIT 02/12/2023**: I briefly looked at this dungeon again -- 47000 defense seems to be enough around level 229, but at level 220 with over 47k def, it still seems way too hard, even with spamming medium life potions from your hotbar. Sorry I was wrong on that. I think there is a certain level you need, and it's higher than 220. I don't know what that exact level is, but feel free to chime in if you know. For one alternative grinding option, there is extreme CoF/VoH; be mindful that VoH may be more efficient for your passes, XP-wise, but mobs will be higher level. There is also crappy Kunlun xp, or even red GCM (not sure how good/bad it is). You can buy red GCM passes at the NPCs near the dungeon entrance in HZ. Regardless, to make this part of your grind easier, try to wear clothes/relics that boost XP, play during XP events, and pop some of the XP cards you may have been saving. Once you get to a certain level you should be able to do SRS Red reliably, at least the first couple of bosses.

Whichever option you choose, should eventually take you to HI1. "Big gratz" as we used to say :)

If you are HI1 now, congratulations! I hope this guide helped and didn't confuse you too much, and maybe even bigger congrats are in order for making it through the walls of text in this guide.

If you're still in the mood for 9D, there is still more stuff to do. There are 26 more levels until you hit the cap, and there is plenty of good and bad gear to buy. You could also engage with the community via hero bands and M&D. You could level up enough and gear up enough to beat LLGC Red (which is apparently a faster grind?) or improve your SRS Red short runs into full runs. There is also Hainan, and I don't know a lot about Qingdao but it seems interesting. WT/HD clan dungeons. Infinite dungeon. And so on...

If I kept on playing, I'd be looking at the following goals:

• Goku 6s
  
• Fox 6s
  
• 4slot clothes, so I can fill them with VoH orns.
  
• Possibly some CK weapons like a Repel bracer.
  
• Maybe buy a saber with an AoE skill on it. The 2nd role warrior AoE is very weird.
  
• Fill up my items with good options using Sealed Bead (Excellence), hopefully 7% crit damage.
  
• Better weapon ornaments such as SRS damage/balance.
  
• VoH bags from Resource menu.
  
• Better belonging items (What is "Mirisa" and is it affordable?)
  
• Get 2 more accessory slots using Jades from SRS Red (very rare drop?)
  
• Superior or experience pet
  
• Plenty of other strong relics.
  
• Try progressing further with the event content. A lot of this stuff might be accessible at lower levels, but it takes a higher level and stronger gear to make real progress. For example, even with my HI1 character's build, I died pretty easily in the Fall Festival event, when some Jiangshi and Moonblade Kids hit me in the event dungeon.

I'm going to wrap up this guide with some tips & tricks I picked up during my time. If you notice any mistakes in this guide, or have feedback, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Thank you for reading, and happy gaming!

Here are some things that apply not just to warriors, but to every character:

• Keep in mind the max external wounds you can receive is capped at 30000. If you have a high HP pool, you don't have to spam EW pills -- you can possibly just leave it as-is.
  
• There is a UI button for your daily/cumulative events, or stamps, right underneath the map. If you click this button while using your LF, you will immediately stop the LF with no cooldown. This is really useful when you feel like your LF is broken, and you'd normally have to release Alt and start the LF cooldown -- you can simply hit the stamp button, release Alt, close the menu, and start the LF again with no cooldown.
  
• If you need to be Impervious, you can always return to the Character Select screen then re-enter the game. Helpful when you find yourself in a dangerous place.
  
• As a melee character, if you're using one active skill, you probably know that once it runs twice then the cooldown will be longer than usual (same with the 3rd, 4th, etc.) Try this instead: when you use your 1st active, and it uses all 3 of the first set of moves (fast cooldown), before the 2nd set gets to the 3rd move (ie on the 1st or 2nd move), use your keyboard (or click) to quickly select a different active on your skill bar. This will avoid any cooldowns and you will roughly be attacking at the same rate as before, just with the new active. You can repeat the process to flip back to your first active and avoid those long cooldowns between active skills. Alternatively, you can use smashes, but those have their own super-long cooldowns in general. Anyway, this is why I have two actives on my hotbar -- not because I'm worried about VE use, but because I want to keep attacking.
  
• If you use your meditate skill and double-click an adjacent NPC at the exact right time, you can meditate AND talk to an NPC at the same time. It saves you a bit of time when you want to heal and also do some business with an NPC. This and some of the other tricks here, have been in the game forever, as far as I know.

Now, here are some warrior finisher tricks -- a couple maybe obvious ones, and a non-obvious one:

• The finisher skills will bring you closer to enemies. However, at least for Heavenly Demon (not sure if this applies to all clans), the Saber of Lightning will stop some distance away from the mob you want to hit. If you see two mobs in a row, you can use Lightning on the mob that's farther from you, so that you can end up closer to the mob closer to you, and start whittling him down faster. Then deal with the other mob soon afterwards. This makes fighting a little more efficient.
  
• In CC Red dungeon, make sure you use that kind of finisher on the Cavity Press statues -- ie, the finisher where you stop very far away from your target. This way I don't think you'll be hit by the Cavity Press attack, but you'll still destroy it.
  
• If you're about to use your finisher on something by accident, you can cancel it by clicking furiously on the ground IIRC (basically deselecting it and trying to move away).
  
• In the CoF and VoH dungeons, you may know you can tell if there's a poison pillar by hovering your cursor over the steps, approximately where the pillar would be behind the steps. Your cursor will turn into a hand icon to indicate you can gather or attack it. Now, if you go to the base of the steps (with a pillar at the top of the steps), target the pillar, and find the right angle behind the wall (sometimes it's on the left, or right side of the doorway leading up to the pillar... you may keep getting "Line of sight is blocked" messages until you find the right angle) you can use a finisher to get stuck on the wall between you and the pillar, but still destroy the pillar in one shot. This means you don't have to walk or LF up the ramp to hit the pillar. In other words, you could use a finisher to climb up the ramp and hit the pillar, but in this case you're putting a wall between yourself and the pillar. The wall stops you, but you still do the damage and (hopefully) destroy the pillar.

I'm ashamed to say I can't think of any more cool tricks, after playing this game literally forever, but I hope these were a fun read :)

I can tell you about fun bugs they fixed a long time ago, though, but these were around for years; from being able to quick swap to clothing you are too low level to wear (imagine if we could wear HG clothes at any level today), to the fact the 1st boss in Jinan/Datong had no name and was completely blank for years -- our community affectionately dubbed him "Fan Guy" -- or the defense nuke only working for LoB before they fixed it (and later removed the spell -- rest in peace, def nuke).

I'd like to take a section to acknowledge prior work, like links I've seen in the past that helped me quite a bit to understand 9D's new systems.

One guide is here: https://forums.playredfox.com/index.php?threads/9dragons-awaken-beginners-guide.48413/ This was a huge inspiration for me to write my own guide, and I ended up covering a lot of the same stuff this person did. I'm thankful for BirdbrainX/Hanabi's work on this.

Particularly I want to highlight some things in this link, which I didn't cover the same way but think are really helpful tips. Other aspects seem outdated, unfortunately (for example, the Superior clothes of DV and VoH aren't amazing compared to the dungeon clothing that has come out since then).

• Daily and monthly login bonuses are important -- the rewards are quite nice. I got quite a few xp and drop cards this way.
  
• The tutorials on Hero Bands and Master & Disciple look good to me -- I haven't done either one for many years though. Personally, though, I'd hesitate to ask them for donations and tomes and stuff.
  
• Starting out, you should buy two bags from the drapery to expand your inventory. Yep, that was a very simple tip I forgot :)
  
• Make sure to collect Beads and Jades (for example Hell Beads, or Orange Jade of Rising Sun) from the dungeons, these are used in crafting quite often.