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As expected in The First Descendant, the meat of the game lies on the Descendants or character classes (and their weapons). If you want to see them at their best and to have fun, you need these Descendants and their weapons to be at their maximum level. It just so happens that certain activities in The First Descendant can help you level up faster. So I’m going to point you to the best XP farm in The First Descendant.
Run Defense Missions
[Updated on July 3, 2024 – Revised the guide to reflect full 1.0 release changes]
You’ve encountered this before in the tutorial and main missions. Defense in The Descendant involves defending a device for 90 seconds or so. This will introduce several waves of enemies coming at you and the defense objective. As for the location Strile Land (Deception Transmitter) is still one of the prime spots.
This way, you don’t have to move and search for targets. The downside is that the mission might fail if you neglect to protect the defense objective (and it is rather fragile). Hence, it helps if you have other players present to help you.
You can keep repeating Resource Defense missions indefinitely until you finally reach Level 40 on your currently-equipped weapons or Descendants. That’s the max level. After that, you can take other under-leveled or un-leveled Descendants and weapons and repeat the same thing.
If you get tired of running these missions over and over again, we have alternatives, thankfully.
XP Farm Alternatives
There are times when Resource Defense missions can fail, especially if you have Level 1 weapons or Descendants and are playing solo.
In such cases, I recommend safer mission types like Void Intercept Battle (Normal) which you can access from Seneca. These are boss fights with varying levels and you can do it repeatedly in a pre-organized public group.
It gives less experience but you can earn other rewards such as Descendant crafting parts. Moreover, it’s easier to do this with a squad of other players compared to Resource Defense nodes whose multiplayer availability is at the mercy of nearby players.
If you already have Level 40 Descendants and are just leveling up the weapons, you can then choose Void Intercept Battle (Hard) or higher-level bosses in the normal variant to speed up the leveling process and increase the XP reward.