Soul Ascetic is the most no-bullshit allowed class — once you reach the peak of your potential, all you do is walk around and press one key. Now, the process to get there is full of pain. This guide is designed to cut some of that pain and provide clear instructions on gearing up.

Before I give you any details, I want to go over the topics I won’t cover, those being:

• Leveling
• Grading and Refining

The reason I won’t cover these two topics is because they’ve already been handled in other guides. If you are under Level 250, refer to those guides first.

Now that you have become a Soul Ascetic and have some stats and 4th Job Skills at your disposal, let’s explain how to use all that power.

Considering this class is designed for magic damage, you want to get as much INT and DEX as possible to improve your casting. After that, get VIT for survivability, LUK to help with extra damage and avoiding debuffs, and lastly STR for carrying weight.

Here is an example stat spread:

When it comes to Traits, the focus is always CON and SPL. Then, you can split the rest based on what your gear can offer — getting some WIS and STA is always good.

Here is an example trait spread:

Soul Ascetic requires way too many skills, and what you get naturally may not be enough for all the things you want. While I will show all the skills I’ve got, I’ll also mention the ones you should focus on.

Taekwon Skills

From your Taekwon Skills, the most important are:

• Mild Wind — changes your Soul Ascetic skills’ element (flexibility for different monsters).
• Leap — provides great mobility.

Soul Linker Skills

Soul Linker skills are kinda weird. I never got to understand them fully — I just know Kaizel revives you and your spouse if you marry someone in-game, or any adopted baby class.

Other than that, your bread and butter for leveling this class is Estun → Esma.

Soul Reaper Skills

I hate Soul Reaper — every time I had to level this job, I asked to be leeched. Soul Reaper sucks hard. However, the skills we want from here are:

• Kaute — recover SP by sacrificing HP
• Shadow, Falcon, Fairy, and Golem Souls — buffs for you or others (Note: These don’t work if you have a GTB Card equipped.)
• Soul Collect — lets you collect Souls, needed for almost all other skills
• Curse Explosion — main leveling skill (if you must level manually)

Soul Ascetic Skills

Here, we want all the skills if possible. But to begin with, focus on:

• Talisman of Magician — buff for more damage
• Talisman of Protection — works like Renovatio; restores HP periodically
• Talisman of Five Elements — increases damage
• Soul of Heaven and Earth — super OP buff that also refills all SP by sacrificing AP

For damage skills, level all the animal Talisman skills and also Talisman of Four Bearing God and Circle of Directions and Elementals.

To maximize your damage:

• Cast all Talismans from left to right
• Then cast Circle of Directions and Elementals
• This activates the Blessing of Four Directions buff, enhancing Talisman of Four Bearing God (a great AoE skill early on)

Note: If you are using Golden Thief Bug Card, this buff won’t activate.

At this point, you should be running the Grace Set, so now we want to improve that with some nicer stuff.

Slot	Item	Card	Notes
Headgear (Top)	+11 Race Cap or +11 Garden of Eden	Plaga Card	Race Cap can be enchanted with INT via Arina. Garden of Eden is easy to obtain at Riggs and can reach +11 with a refine ticket for 100% Magic Penetration.
Headgear (Middle)	New Wave Sunglasses	Plagarion Card	Best in Slot (BiS) Middle Headgear.
Headgear (Low)	Ghost Fire		Best in Slot (BiS) Low Headgear – Grants MATK per 18 WIS.
Armor	Grace Curse Robe	Sandman Card	Necessary for farming your next armor set.
Weapon	Dimensions Soul Rod or Dimensions Soul Stick or Soul Liberator	Deadsera Card or Copo Card or Mutated White Knight Card	Dimensions weapons are common and often free. Soul Liberator can be crafted at Weaponrye (@hub). Copo is easily farmable; Mutated White Knight is from EDDA Challenge instance.
Shield	Mad Bunny or any other shield	Mutated Khalitzburg or Golden Thief Bug	Mad Bunny is great early on; no need to upgrade to LT yet. Be cautious with GTB, as it blocks some buffs.
Garment	Grace Magic Manteau	Purple Pitaya Card	Purple Pitaya is BiS unless you obtain Himmelmez Card (very rare and expensive).
Boots	Grace Magic Boots	Icewind Card or Nightmare Verit Card	Icewind combos with Copo. Nightmare Verit is excellent for general magic damage.
Accessory (Right)	Grace Magic Ring	Bear Bug Card	Bear Bug is BiS for neutral damage, useful when not using elemental attacks.
Accessory (Left)	Noblesse Ring or Perverse Demon Mask or Overdrive Rampage	Ash Hopper Card	Ash Hopper is BiS. Perverse Demon Mask gives early penetration; Overdrive Rampage is ultimate BiS.

With this gear setup, you can go ahead and start doing your Episode Quests — aim for Episode 20, or find someone who has it done, fake being their friend and ask them to craft stuff for you 😏. If you manage either option, start farming for the Glacier Set, so you will be farming at:

Dungeon → Issgard Dungeon → Snake God’s Warmth 2

Here is what you will need to loot:

• Divine Cat Whiskers ×1950
• Snow Flower Stone ×600
• Shining Snow Flower Heartstone ×150
• Brilliant Snow Flower Manastone ×50
• Neutralized Magical Source Stone ×125
• Encroached Magical Source Stone ×125

💡 Tip: Also autoloot the Etel Dust here — it will come in handy later.

With these materials in hand, go to Pipiring inside Ice Castle:

/navi icas_in 165/64

You will need to craft the following armor pieces and apply these enchants:

Armor Piece	Enchant
Glacier Robe	Glacier Flower Meow Power (SPL & WIS) / (Mage) / (Grand Mage)
Glacier Muffler	Glacier Flower Meow Power (Physical Defense) / (Caster) / (Powerful)
Glacier Shoes	Glacier Flower Meow Power (Fixed Casting) / (Magical Force) / (Spell Buster)
Glacier Necklace	Glacier Flower Meow Power (INT) / (Spell) / (Magical Power)
Glacier Earring	Glacier Flower Meow Power (Speed) / (Spell) / (Magical Power)

Your next farming spot is Niflheim Dungeon 1 for 500 Ruby of Grudge, which we will use to craft a Furious Crown (Soul Ascetic) – this will be our temporary and optional Top Headgear while we farm to buy materials for the Time Dimensions Crown (TDC).

After all of this farming, your gear will be looking like this:

Slot	Item	Card	Notes
Headgear (Top)	Furious Crown (Soul Ascetic) or +11 Garden of Eden	Plaga Card	Furious Crown (Soul Ascetic) is a great option for this stage; Garden of Eden remains a strong alternative.
Headgear (Middle)	New Wave Sunglasses	Plagarion Card	Best in Slot (BiS) Middle Headgear.
Headgear (Low)	Ghost Fire		Best in Slot (BiS) Low Headgear – grants MATK per 18 WIS.
Armor	Glacier Robe	Two Eyes Dollocaris Card	Temporary setup. Sandman Card is no longer required unless you plan to farm other areas.
Weapon	Dimensions Soul Rod or Dimensions Soul Stick or Soul Liberator	Deadsera Card or Copo Card or Mutated White Knight Card	Same weapon choices as before; Dimensions weapons are common and affordable.
Shield	Mad Bunny or Mad Bunny - LT	Mutated Khalitzburg or Golden Thief Bug	Mad Bunny LT is attainable now; its crafting materials drop in maps you’ll soon access.
Garment	Glacier Muffler	Purple Pitaya Card	Solid upgrade from Grace Manteau.
Boots	Glacier Shoes	Icewind Card or Nightmare Verit Card	Icewind synergizes with Copo; Nightmare Verit boosts general MATK.
Accessory (Right)	Glacier Necklace	Bear Bug Card	Bear Bug remains the best neutral damage card.
Accessory (Left)	Overdrive Rampage or Glacier Earring	Ash Hopper Card	Glacier Earring provides extra FCT if needed. With +11 Furious Crown and enchanted boots, you’ll have 2 seconds FCT, which is quite significant.

Right now, getting Shadow Gear is a great idea — and the best part is that you can obtain the Best in Slot (BiS) set right now from Umbra at @hub.

Recommended Shadow Set:

• Four Bearing God Shadow Armor & Four Bearing God Shadow Shoes
• Talisman of White Black Shadow Earring & Talisman of White Black Shadow Pendant
• Master Shadow Weapon & Master Shadow Shield

At this point, farming is all you will do, as we want to start refining and grading. You can find the best farming spots in the Item Upgrading Guide on this wiki.

Basically, you want to replace some of your current items and try to get everything to at least Grade C or B, so here is what we want to achieve next:

With this equipment, we can now farm higher-level areas. Your next goal is to farm at Varmundt Death Rune to obtain materials for Death Rune Manteau and Death Rune Robe.

These two can be crafted at @hub by talking to NPC Beta, who is located on the right. You will enchant your armor with her and reroll enchants using NPC Alpha, located right next to Beta.

• Varmundt Rune Pauldron ×1
• Varmundt Rune Armor ×1
• Death Rune ×100
• Varmeal Tickets ×600
• Death Essence ×100
• Armor Upgrade Stone Superior ×300

💡 Tip: The Armor Upgrade Stones may be harder to obtain, so consider buying them from other players.

Once you’ve obtained and upgraded these armors, your setup should look like this:

Now our next upgrade are going to be related to Constellation Tower, we want to get Nebula of Spell and Star Seal, there are also some place-holder gear that we can use before getting to the Star Seal particularly.

A place holder accessory before Star Seal is the Temple Rune Ring which you can get from farming on Varmundt Temple which you can get to from the Special Warper, you will need to farm the following items

Varmundt Rune Ring x1 Temple Rune x50 Temple Essence x50 Varmeal Ticket x300 Accessory Upgrade Stone Superior ×300

With this on you can get the Nebula of Spell and Star Seal, I won’t go into the details of how to get it, you can ask around, and I will update this guide once a guide for Constellation Tower is released.

Something that you can do is buy or try to farm some of the materilas to enchant your TD Crown by going to Unknown Blue Hole and doing the daily mission.

Your next gear set will be looking like this:

• Greater White Knight
• White Knight

After you have this gear you are pretty much done, but there are some other gears that I would consider true endgame gear, here are some of them.

All the above gear can be self-farmed, but to push your build further, consider:

• CoL Autumn Cape & Accessory: Great with Nebula Armor; tough to enchant but excellent performance. Only outclassed by *Royal Geffen Cape* (Overdrive Rampage is often stronger though).
• Royal Geffen Cape: Replace a weapon card with *Dracula*. If using *Copo*, switch it for *Dracula* and use *Nightmare Verit* on boots.
• Astrologer Boots: Get with SPL enchants — great combo with Nebula Armor.
• Engraved Soul Purification Rune Robe: Comparable to Nebula when paired with Chapter 1 boots and accessory.
• Dimensions Boots & Accessory: From Chapter 1 content. Hard to get, but outstanding when combined with Engraved Rune Robe.
• Himmelmez Card Best card for Neutral-elemental damage (≈20b zeny).