Rappelz: A New Player's Guide

Ok, time to go over the part that confused me the most when I first started playing: Job Level and Points.

Definition: Job Level is the level that your job is at. [Huh?]

Definition: Job Points are points that you can either:
a). Learn/Increase the level of your skills with or;
b). Increase your Job Level with. 

Now, as you earn EXP, you earn JP with it. At the skills menu, you can spend your JP on either Job levels or skills. Here is the portion of the skills menu you concern yourself with if you want to job-level up.

 All you need to do is press the big "JLv UP" Button when it lights up. It'll light up when you have enough JP to make the level-up. The requirements are listed in the box next to the big button. For me, I need 82,000 JP to get to Jlvl 21. Here's what it looks like:

Now right below it is a place you can alter the level of your skills with. Why would you do that? Well, lower level skills tend to waste less MP and if you're a mage and all your MP runs out... well, you can't cast any more skills. Sometimes it's just better. 

Another reason would be that you don't want monsters attacking you. Picture this:
You're a cleric and monsters are attacking your friend and the rest of your party. Of course, you'd want to heal him but if you use level 10 heal, the monsters will come at you for some reason. So... you use level 1 heal. Problem solved: The monsters continue attacking your friend and your friend now has more HP.

Now I'll introduce you to the huge map portion of the skills. 

 This is pretty much what you see when you first open the skills menu as a beginner. This is a skill tree. The arrows show what you need to get at better skills, usually at the bottom. 

To learn a skill, you have to have enough JP to satisfy the requirement. I'll show you my first job skills.

 Now these are my first Job skills. As you can see, some of them are maxed. The little fraction at the bottom shows the current level out of the max levels. As the skills go on, you'll start to require some things from the previous skill to move on. What does that mean? Well, at the VERY bottom, are 3 skills. From left to right, they are Corruption, Fire Storm, and Splash Thunder. You can't learn Corruption to begin with, you first have to learn MP Corpse Drain, the skill right above it. And you can't learn MP Corpse Drain until you learn HP Corpse Drain. Get the pattern? Each arrow shows where you can go from learning that one skill.

However, you aren't able to learn these skills right away just by having JP. Oh, no. You need to have the correct Jlvl. The skills at the bottom-most portion are Jlvl 40 skills, the highest Jlvl (Excluding Jlvl 50, the OB jlvl. Will be explained in the OverBreeding section though. =D). You need to have Jlvl 40 in order to even unlock those skills. Just having enough JP won't satisfy it. That is why you need to up Jlvl some times to unlock new skills.

Remember how, earlier, I was at Jlvl 20? Well, how in heck did I get Jvl 40 skills if I'm only Jlvl 20? Well, Jlvl resets once you get your 2nd job. Here are my 2nd Job skills. You'll find that the tree is way more convoluted.

As you can see, some of the skills are darkened and some of them are full-colored with a blue frame around the skill. Also, there is an up arrow right below it. That means you're allowed to increase the level of that skill.  The skills that have pictures but are still darkened are unable to be increased at the moment because I don't have enough JP to increase them. If you refer to the top, you'll see that I have only 34,601 JP. Well, that isn't enough to increase Abetting Nightmares which currently requires 121, 000 JP as shown in this picture.

 As you can see, it's currently at level 5. To get it to level 6, I'd need 121,000 JP. Meanwhile, my Strength of Darkness is at level 6. To get it to level 7, I'd need 137,000 JP in addition to being Jlvl 30. 

The skills with question marks on them mean that I haven't unlocked them yet. When I do have enough Jlvl to unlock them, I still need to make it level 1 in order for a picture to show up. An easy way to see the skills is as follows:

1st Row of skills: Jlvl 1
2nd Row of skills: Jlvl 5
3rd Row of skills: Jlvl 10
4th Row of skills: Jlvl 15

and so on untill you reach the 9th row, Jlvl 40. 

Here is what hovering over one of the Jlvl 35 skills looks like. You'll see that it requires a pre-requisite skill, Corpse Mine.

**Note** This is just the skill tree for a Dark Magician and a Warlock. Skill trees for other jobs look different.  

Active Vs. Passive
Active skills are skills that you can cast. You can drag active skills from your skill tree straight onto your hotkeys to cast them. Passive skills are skills that increase your innate ability. For example, the skill in the uppermost left corner of my 1st and 2nd job skill trees is Magician Weapon Mastery. Basically, it increases my P.atk when I wield a dirk or a staff. This is done automatically so I don't have to cast it in order to get the P.atk boost. Passive skills usually increase your stats in order to make your character better, passively.

Skill cards are important if you seek to increase the power of your skills. Skill cards do different things depending on what kind of a card it is. For example, if it's a skill card for an attack, maybe it'd increase the damage. If it's an attack spell that is meant to debuff, it may increase the debuff effect. If it's a buff, it may increase the buff's power and duration.

Skill cards are red in color and when you hover over them, you get something that looks kind of like:

This little box details exactly what your card does and what it will do if you decide to upgrade it again. Obviously, a card is better if it's upgraded. Here's a comparison between a Mind Crisis +1 and a Mind Crisis +2.

 Now there are a few things that skill cards can do:

1. Reduce MP cost.
2. Accuracy Correction (Makes it more likely to hit I suppose?)
3. Increase Summoned Lasting Effect Level (Meaning that if it were a debuff sort of attack, it'd make it stronger. Or in the case that it is a buff, it'd make the buff stronger.)
4. Increase Duration of Summoned Lasting Effect Level (Makes it last longer.)
5. Decrease Casting Delay (I actually don't know what this is...)
6. Decrease Cooldown time.

Now obviously, you want a higher level skill card so that your skill is pretty awesome. But how do you do that? You have to enchant it using a skill cube. 

You need TWO +1 Cards in order to make a +2. Makes sense doesn't it? Yea well, you'll need TWO +2 Cards to make +3. Then, you'll need TWO +3 to make +4. So on and so forth. So in order to make a +3, you'll need a total of 4 +1s. But know this: skill cubes aren't guaranteed to succeed or anything so you might end up losing both your skill cards as well as your skill cubes. 

So to upgrade a skill card, all you need to do is put two of the same cards in the combination window with a Cube-Skill and confirm. If it works, you get a new card. If it fails, you've just lost your cards and the cube.

Jp is used to increase either:
A. Your Job level, which is necessary to unlock certain skills.
B. The skill level, which is the level your skill is at.

You can use the skills menu to change the level of your skills that you're using. You can also use it to upgrade your skills or just see what your skills are. 

Skill cards make for better skills. Use skill cubes and two of the same cards to upgrade in Combination window.