I feel like it's worth mentioning that the most effective way of upgrading equipment is by combining two pieces you don't want to one fodder of level 9-10 and use 10 of these fodders to upgrade a piece you want to keep.
IGN: Rupturez
ID: 618437322
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Yah; it's amazing. You get double the normal exp for half the cost! And it doesn't even take 2000 coins to level up a +10 Accessory (any accessory actually) up to half its maximum level. And I don't know if anyone's noticed, but those +10s actually give a lot of stats..........seriously.
That Lv.1 +10 Warrior Ring that gives you 1000 extra attack? That's the equivalent of giving a 5* Knight an extra 30 Lv.ups in their attack stat! Then, spend a little less than 2000 coins to boost that ring up to Lv.20 and now it gives an extra 15 Lv.ups on top of that, a +45 Lv.ups worth of attack stats. +10 Lv.1 Earrings will give an extra +5 Lv.ups worth.
The +10 Lv.1 Bracelet gives +25 Lv.ups and the +10 Lv.1 Necklace a +10 Lv.ups worth in a 5* Knight's defense stats.........buuuuut, the value of this stat isn't anywhere as easy to judge its value, like the Attack stat. Provided that the information on the wiki isn't wrong and the stats of all the pests listed in there are correct, figuring out the value of Defense isn't nearly as easy as adding together 1 + 1.
In a very short summary of the tests I ran, all the way up to Stage 12-5, you can negate all damage taken if your Defense more than doubles the value of the pest's Attack stat. However, it only takes a fraction of your Defense to the Pests' Attack power to reduce their damage by 50% (about 25% Def < Atk). Fortunately for us, all pests appear to only have 75-Defense, so there's no chance of them pulling that BS on us.
Here's a few noteworthy statistics that relate to the value of Defense:
Yeah rings are AMAZING. From personal experience they have the lowest droprate of all equipment too. Rolling +10 rings is pretty hard.
IGN: Rupturez
ID: 618437322
DMM Server.
I like Bracelets as well as it is the only one that boosts DEF the most. Really useful to keep my girls alive longer.
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For the time being, my pumpkin equipment goes to my stat-weak, one-slotted non-event girls.
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I Gave my Event Ring to Hanamomo cause she only has 1 slot and her atk is already so high that an extra 400 is not useful but that extra 5-600 defence is a god send.
I have found that defence actually plays a big roll now and my teams with 3-3.5k defence with equipment take so little damage it's almost funny.
Actually, you should be upgrading non-10s, with the assumption they'll be used as fodder for +10s or special equipment. Just don't upgrade fodder more than once.
A level 9 fodder is worth double the xp of a level 1. For bronze equipment like a Defense Bracelet, feeding one lv1 into another will create a lv10(lv11 for a critical success). Using that lv10 as fodder will give more xp than using two lv1s for the same total cost. You can max a Defense Bracelet or Defense Necklace by feeding it 7 lv10s + 1 Lv11 for a total cost of 16 pieces of fodder and 2880 coins(+1 fodder and 180 coins if you didn't get any critical success and use 8 lv10s).