Disgaea 4 Complete+ – Early Game Tips

Main tip: if you’re having trouble, there’s no shame in grinding a few levels out on earlier maps.

Tips for Early Game

As far as general tips, my main tip would be to keep your party somewhat smaller and try not to overlap weapon types. Too many characters will dilute your exp gains, and you’ll end up with either a team full of meh strength guys or a couple strongish guys and a bunch of weaklings.

The advantage of sticking to 1 character per weapon type like this is that it both keeps your exp concentrated, yet allows for variation in tactics.

Once you unlock reincarnation, a good tactic to snowball out of control is to reincarnate your story characters every few chapters and then catch them back up in levels. The mana cost to reincarnate doubles every time for generic units, but remains 100 forever for uniques.

In the end, stats are far more important than raw levels, so just a few extra points at lvl1 will snowball into a difference of several levels worth of stats later on.

Adding to the advice to reincarnate story/unique characters: they also gain an increase of +5% to all aptitudes on the first 5 reincarnations (regardless of stored levels or anything really), allowing em to gain far better stats from equipped gear faster than generic classes can

On that note: buying more advanced gear whenever you can afford it is gonna be more worthwhile initially than going through item world to improve it. Weapons tend to be more improtant than accessories aswell in my experience.

Also, a good rule of thumb for equipping your characters in the early game is to have 1 slot dedicated to armor, 1 slot dedicated to shoes (+MV is extremely powerful in this series) and the last slot to cover some deficiency. For example, I’ll give my lady fighter a spear and the best orb I have, since spear techs have rather high SP costs, and the high RES will make her beefy against magic attacks. Sure, orbs sound like a mage-centric item, but female mages have reduced MP cost on spells and therefore don’t need the SP, and higher base RES, so I’d rather give them a muscle-type item in that slot (at least early on) to give them enough HP to not disintigrate when someone sneezes on them. Later game, this slot will generally just be an emblem type item on every character, but early on that little bit helps.

My final piece of advice is that until you hit the end game and are stacking super hard on damage, putting points into a stat the class has poor aptitude in goes far. Your mage will get bonus % scaling on their weapon INT, which will probably outshine a couple points in INT, but any DEF from equipment will suffer a steep penalty. This penalty does not apply to base stats, so it’s a good way to balance a character’s stats in the early-to-mid game. Or in other words: you get more bang for your buck when you invest your bonus points into a low aptitude% stat.