Well..so far my Water, Air and Shadow have worked pretty well.
The Water is great because not is its attack power good but the Ice Sphere really is a great asset
but like you said a Light is a great asset as well.

Earth is nice but Shadow also has a move that causes Taunted too...it's so hard to decide because I want my pet to be able to heal themselves some as they fight this way much of my healing attention will be on the fighter.

I used to have my Water as a tank too but I found that it worked far better to have it as a support so it can attack AND cast Ice Shield, Ice Sphere and Surge without worrying about being attacked.

Either I can try to find and buy a higher ranking pet, waste money on Ex orbs to bring lower level pets up so I can train them or just keep wasting my time trying to rank up my party and be imprisoned in Lost Grove until the cows come home to roost.

Well, technically we are all imprisoned in LG so at least you have company. :-P

If you are doing well with what you have, I'd just stick with it until you unlock the temple. It is easier to level and rank in the temple. Water is incredibly good at keeping lowbies alive as they level in the temple, no need to bother with exp orbs. You'll be grinding there a lot to get what you need for gear.

Edit: Embrace the grinding purgatory that is LG

Well I just constructed the Light Temple and embarked on my first task of getting tier 3 materials.

I hope it is worth the money I wasted I mean..'spent'....

Next will have to be the BlackSmith so I can get better gear.

Yeah, I'm working on getting the supplies to get the training grounds to rank 5. Looking forward to the increased passive bonus, not looking forward to paying 1 mil gold for the privilege. Hopefully it's worth it. Lol

Training Grounds...maybe I should have done that first...but I really need to get better equipment soon but geez it is so expensive! Yikes.

Nope, Blacksmith is definitely a must. I did that asap. Trading post for the ent flasks and training grounds for both the passive buff and the buffs you can activate. Everything else gets to wait in the back of the line.

Yeah..I should have done the Blacksmith first but I didn't have enough stuff..instead I wasted it on the Light Temple.

Well..I don't need too much more for the Smithy so onwards I go!!!

some thoughts on barracks:

Temple of Light: kind of average until you can unlock tier 5, which you need to have progressed to the temple to do, since before then it can only revive pets (which you can leave the grove and use the cheap non-lg draughts to do) and the buff you can get starting at tier3 is just really not worth it until it gets divine intervention (the tier5 addition) (once you CAN get that, hoo boy, love that divine intervention, very useful)

Trading post: Very useful since you can then use broken traps and empty bottles to purchase actual traps and healing items, which is a great way to save gold since buying them for gold would get very expensive very fast. Ent flasks that become available later are also very useful for bosses you struggle with.

Training Grounds: The buffs are VERY useful. Even if you don't have any specific buff active it still passive-buffs your pets.

Tracker hut: Absolutely not worth it until caves at the earliest (that's when you can do the Rare hunt and Epic hunt, which let you find a sylesti with a minimum blue-star rarity, or minimum purple-star rarity.)

Blacksmith: Has no upgrades, it's just one-and-done to unlock. Not the most vital early on, since you can beat all the early bosses reasonably with just plain unranked Vinethorn, but later on pretty vital. Big matter of weighing worth of upgrading lower tier equips vs waiting to get the ability to make (/ buying off the broker) higher rarity gear and upgrading that, since equips need to be at +3 to overtake the next rarity up's base level

Portal: It's just useful to be able to zipzoop rather than have to trudge through the entire forest to get to the cave/temple



Man, I didn't even really think about ranks- it's been ages since I used an unranked pet for LG, but yes, ranks absolutely make a huge difference in how good a pet is/ how easy they feel to use.
I tell you, swapping from a ranked team to an unranked one is just. Oof.
You come to expect certain things from the pets that unranked ones just,,, can't really do yet.
(for example, light's Beam only has a 50% chance of healing until rank 3, and fairy light goes from single-target to 2-target to all-target in addition to getting stronger, which means it goes from, say, an equivalent of doing 2000 healing per use at rank1 if the pet has 1k magic damage to 9000 per use at rank5 when against thee enemies)

Thank You. This is very useful information to have. I wish I had just waited until I could get the Training Grounds because I don't think I have any buffs.

As for Ranks..My Light pet isn't even at Rank 2 really while my Water is on his way to Rank 3 and my Air is on his way to Rank 4 and the nice thing was I bought him on the market so I got REALLY lucky to have a good fighter.

If I can get the Training Grounds built then I can start building up my other pets too as back-up.
I avoided the Lost Grove for a while because it is so tedious but now that my party is at 70 - 71 it is easier and my team does well as it is too.

I guess I am a bit impatient because I want to get through a battle as soon as I can without getting pummeled which is why I am favoring strength to get me thru. My Light pet is doing ok but with my Shadow tank doing Vampiric Strike when it gets down a bit this means my Light can focus on the fighter but Ice Barrier and Ice Sphere do well to get in some hits while healing too.

I guess there is no single way to do all this.