Are you having a hard time building a strong mercenary team? We’ll be getting new mercenaries with the next update to ROVU tonight, so now is a good time to learn about it. The system is pretty new to Ragnarok Online : Valkyrie Uprising, so I wanted to share with you a (very) basic guide to your new mercenaries!

Your mercenary starts out at level one. You take it into a single dungeon stage with you, but the mercenary doesn’t level. Don’t fret. That’s because it gains EXP by having other mercenaries sacrificed to level it in your mercenary menu.

“…Okay, great! But why is it not leveling as fast as I want when I feed it some mercenaries?”
Not all mercenaries are equal in terms of how much EXP they give out! Porings, King Porings, and Angelings are really terrible mercenaries to fight with, right? That’s because they are intended to be mercenary ‘food’ for your better mercs. Keep the EXP a mercenary gives out in mind when building that dream team.

Understanding your mercenary’s basic potential is also important to building a team worth keeping. How can you tell what mercenaries to keep and which ones to use as leveling ‘food’? Check the color of the frame around your new draw!

The potential of your mercenary will be indicated by the frame color.
Color flow goes as such: White > Green > Orange > Purple.
White has the lowest stat potential and Purple has the highest.

So what does S and SS on certain mercenaries mean?  Special and Super Special? Yeah, kinda. It means those mercenaries have a boost in stats over it’s standard version. If you come across a purple S merc, level it! Also brag. Brag a lot, because that isn’t common.

What do you do when you’ve reached max on a mercenary but draw something with better potential? Hold on to that max level merc and use it for compounding! Compounding allows you to do things like level your mercenary’s special skill or improve it’s class.

“So why should I level Mercenaries at all? I can still play ROVU without doing so, right?”
Mercenaries are just an addition to the many things you can do in ROVU. PvP allows you to face off against random players and earn some prizes, which is fun. Yeah you might loose a lot in the beginning, but that only makes the wins more exciting when you have them!
Mercenaries aren’t only good for the PvP battle aspects, either. Take them into single dungeons you struggled with before. Use them to help you level a new character! I’m playing as an acolyte and sometimes it’s slow going in the field. I gained 10+ levels in a short time just playing in single dungeons with my mercenaries acting as tanks. I’m finding single dungeons are more fun with them tagging along to help you with crowds of enemies.

Best of luck building a cool team!