Best Technique for Figurine Leveling?

Zyphora

What is the best technique for figurine leveling?

Do any or all of the different tradeskill enhancements make any notable difference? Are they worth acquiring? Toweling rack, sparkleberry, minicloak, et cetera.

Is it better to toss 50 figurines into the ring at the same time, or level them in batches of 10 at a time and then toss the higher-level survivors into a final battle?

Thank you!

Xenthos

1) The most important tool for the cost-effective leveling of figurines is either:
a. Be a tinkerer, or
b. Buy toweling stations.

There is a tinkerer skill which "repairs" some damage to a figurine after a match.  This can make it absurdly cost-effective to level up figurines, because the longer a figurine lasts, the fewer it will take.

Toweling stations are the non-tinkerer "equivalent" (they are nowhere near as effective, but they can drastically reduce the quantity of figurines required too).  Toweling stations last a random amount of bouts, so you will need a stockpile handy (or to be an artisan to make more on-demand).

2) Figurines level faster when they are fighting higher level figurines.
This fact is essential for efficient leveling.
Here's a great tactic: Keep a level 10 figurine, a level 20 figurine, and a level 30 figurine in your shop for leveling purposes (create them with the following steps).  This will drastically reduce your leveling time.

Now, do the following:
Put two figurines in the ring together.  To get it started, you can dress one of the figurines (whichever one you want to level up) in some gear so as to assure that it will win and level up more rapidly- if you don't do this, you can sometimes spend 10+ minutes waiting for one of them to get enough of an edge to outlevel the other so that it wins consistently.

With toweling stations, the one that wins should be level 8-9 or so by the time it kills the first figurine you pit it against.

Throw a second figurine into the ring and run it again.  Your first figurine should get to level 13+ by the time the second one is destroyed.

Toss your level 10 into the ring (if you do not have one yet, make one using the above steps).  Your main figurine should crush the level 10 and keep leveling up.  *IMPORTANT*  Once your level 10 falls down to level 3/2, stop fighting it.  Pull your main figurine out and level up the second figurine again until it's back up to level 10 (feeding it a level 1).  Keep doing this until your main figurine is level 25 or so.

Once your main figurine is 25, feed it the level 20.  Once the level 20 hits 10ish, level it back up to 20.  Keep on going until your main figurine hits 35 or so.

Feed your main figurine your level 30 figurine.  This should pretty much level it from 35-40 in one go.

This is, obviously, more complicated than doing a battle royale, but it's also much more cost effective (takes far, far fewer figurines).

Edit: As a note, you can feed your level 35 figurine tons of level 1's to get it to 40, or one higher level figurine; trying to level other figurines off of level 1's is extraordinarily cost ineffective.  You can even just put two level 1's together and feed the victor to your main level until it falls back down to level 1, and you'll still likely get more than if you just fed 2 level 1's to the main figurine.  Try to avoid battling level 1's at all for leveling purposes, except when just starting out the process or when starting a new "feeder" figurine.

Karlach

The above also will not spam the bejeezus out of your screen with text.

Ultimately a battle royale is effortless and you can set up triggers to run the whole thing, but as Xen said, it's far more expensive than having a preset method where you can level using a handful of figurines (and has the added benefit of being reusable to level other figurines with.) Ultimately it comes down to time and effort, and how many 40s you're wanting to do.


Edit: As to tradeskills that do armour/poison/sparkleberries, they're only really worth it if one figurine already has all the esteem on it before you decided to level it up. I packed 50 sparkleberry into one figurine I wanted to level because I'd already put a few hundred thousand esteem on it, threw some mini armour sets and levelled it to about 10 just in 1v1s before throwing it into a giant battle royale scenario. It only used half the sparkleberry in the end. The miniature gear doesn't seem to be that impressive, and dipping it in crotamine was cheap and time efficient compared, but if you can spare the sparkleberries, that's certainly worth the time.

Karlach

I did a 100 figurine battle royal till only one survived.

It was slightly overkill, not by much though.

Zyphora

Thank you both! This has been immensely educational.

Nayl

Agreed, always wondered, but never got around to trying it. So, as such... Many thanks to all.