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[Ra1den]

It may be because I'm so time starved these days, but I find nothing more satisfying in gaming now than using tricks to automatically progress in games, without any sort of cheats.

An example is the FFXII Negalmuur(or whatever) leveling trick that would get you to max level simply by setting up your gambits properly and leaving your PS2 on long enough.

I figured out one for Terraria that you can use right after starting the game. Just head over to the corruption(crimson wont work), put a couple blocks around you, and start swinging an auto-swing weapon like a hammer. You'll need to put something on your mouse that is heavy enough to keep it pressed down. The Eater of Souls enemies will come after you, and have a low chance of dropping ancient shadow armor pieces. So after enough of these have been killed, you'll have a full set of some great armor, saving you TONS of time scavenging for crummy materials. So. Satisfying.

It can be tricky to get the blocks around you in such a way that you can still hit enemies while being safe from them, but some trial and error will do it.

What are your favorite tricks, GAF?

 

[kadotsu]

I love the FFX Don Tonberry + Ally + Triple AP + Triple Overdrive + Overdrive->AP strat.

 

[Raide]

Going back a few years...or more


8x8 Levelling for skills in Ultima Online.

 

[Hasemo]

Bravely Second allows you to get from lv 50-60 (was a while ago, not sure) to 99 by setting a team of summoners/black mages, setting auto battle and clicking only to get to the next battle in the chain (a new system introduced in the sequel). I think getting to the maximum level took me an hour or two.

 

[Wibblewozzer]

The most notable one for me is the raft ride in Final Fantasy VI. I never actually did it but that was the first time that I can recall being able to do auto-leveling safely.

To be slightly more specific without looking it up after you leave the Returner's Hideout and you're on the raft with Banon you need to set the options so the cursor stays on the last selected option and you can have everyone on attack except for Banon who uses his healing ability. There's a spot where the raft will loop if you select the wrong direction so once that's set and you have a controller with auto it'll just keep selecting to loop and all the battles your team just attacks through while Banon uses his team-healing ability on his turn.

So yeah, that one.

 

[AlphaDragoon]

I'm using one right now. Auto leveling Vocations in Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen by going to a certain post game area and letting your pawns beat up the infinitely spawning mobs while you sit on a wall free from danger. The mobs are weak and have no chance of killing your pawns so you can literally watch TV or use the internet while they work for you.

 

[Ra1den]

Bravely Second allows you to get from lv 50-60 (was a while ago, not sure) to 99 by setting a team of summoners/black mages, setting auto battle and clicking only to get to the next battle in the chain (a new system introduced in the sequel). I think getting to the maximum level took me an hour or two.

HOLY SHIT. I'm going to be all over this.

 

[Genryu]

I'm using one right now. Auto leveling Vocations in Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen by going to a certain post game area and letting your pawns beat up the infinitely spawning mobs while you sit on a wall free from danger. The mobs are weak and have no chance of killing your pawns so you can literally watch TV or use the internet while they work for you.

Ah man, I was about to post this one. Especially if you have the ring or armor that gives you a boost to your vocation experience gain.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

It's not automatic, but Mergo's Loft: Middle with three moon runes.

Get one million blood echoes in about half an hour.

 

[How About No]

The most notable one for me is the raft ride in Final Fantasy VI. I never actually did it but that was the first time that I can recall being able to do auto-leveling safely.

To be slightly more specific without looking it up after you leave the Returner's Hideout and you're on the raft with Banon you need to set the options so the cursor stays on the last selected option and you can have everyone on attack except for Banon who uses his healing ability. There's a spot where the raft will loop if you select the wrong direction so once that's set and you have a controller with auto it'll just keep selecting to loop and all the battles your team just attacks through while Banon uses his team-healing ability on his turn.

So yeah, that one.

Yep. This is the only one that I know about, and I think the official strategy guide even endorsed it.

 

[tiggerkiddo]

Star Ocean 2 and trying to get the Eternal Sphere before Disc 2, made the game stupidly easy after that.

Star Ocean 3 and grinding out the Boots of Prowess (?) to the best...you could make your characters into some monsters, nothing would challenge you on normal difficulty, not even the optional bosses.

 

[patapuf]

Missingo in Pokemon Red/blue.

 

[The Lamonster]

I remember jumping everywhere I went in Oblivion, if that counts.

 

[Bowlie]

At one point in Tales of the Abyss, you can buy food from Engeve (a farm town) and sell at a higher price in Keterburg or Baticul (cities that can't produce their own food), thus giving you 99999...9 gald in an hour or so.

The opposite also works: you can buy silverware and weapons from these cities, especially silverware from Keterburg, and sell at a waaay higher price in Engeve.

I always loved this little detail!

 

[Tye The Czar]

Ankheg Farming in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. You went into a cave of Ankhegs without talking to the elf outside it on the right, allowing you to take as many of their heads as you can carry to the blacksmith in Nashkel(?). Just make sure to sell one at a time while having the other party members carrying them.

 

[Hyoukokun]

In Etrian Odyssey 3, it's possible to abuse the RNG to instant-kill one of the optional ocean bosses (you get an AI companion that has an instant-death attack, and if you prep the RNG properly the attack will always land). It's endlessly repeatable, netting you a bunch of experience and gold each time. The post-game would be a far more miserable, grind-y experience without this trick.

 

[OmnipotentO]

Dinosaurs in FF6.

 

[Salty Catfish]

The only one of these I ever actually did was making Steiner in FF9 overpowered as fuck during the one area where he and Beatrix team up. There's infinite enemies and they're all fairly weak so you can just rubberband the X button and walk away for a while.

 

[Junahu]

Grinding Class levels in the Final Fantasy 3 remake. Toad everyone in the party, put them in the back row, equip them with double shields, and go auto-attack the weakest enemy in the game. Not only will this build up any class effortlessly, but it also grinds exp for the characters' left and right hand proficiency (a hidden stat that provides an insane boost to melee damage).

 

[Jacksinthe]

Oblivion: Max Sneak

Cloud Temple - hit the bedroom where everyone sleeps. Enable crouch. Auto-Walk forward in a corner with a macro or just tape your analog stick UP.

Walk away.

Come back an hour or two later to have your sneak maxed.

 

[-hadouken]

Having the Escudo earn credits in Gran Turismo 3

We'd set acceleration to the analogue stick and use a rubber band to keep it maxed. It'd then lap and win the long Super Speedway events (bouncing off walls) without any input from the player. Raised a lot of cash without doing the tedious grinding.

 

[davidwhangchoi]

spamming ammo on resident evil 5 w a friend: grabbing it then exiting a board, unload into inventory, go back and do it over again!

 

[Zafir]

There's that one in the Bionis' Leg in Xenoblade Chronicles where there's a high level creature that you can just knock off the cliff with Melia.

In Xenoblade Chronicles X it gets much easier in that you just need the Skells and you can kill higher level creatures with. There's even a so called 'strong' enemy called Joker who, as the name suggests, is a joke, and you can grind classes super easy with.

 

[AuthenticM]

 

[Morning19]

I remember in WoW TBC, back when you had to level your weapon skills. There was a NPC in Shadowmoon Valley who would not aggro, because he was in a permanent "cast" status. Anyways you could go up to him, and start swinging, leave, go watch some tv shows, get something to eat, then come back and boom, maxed weapon skills.

 

[Inquisitive_Ghost]

In the original P4, you can head down to Magatsu Inaba with only Yu and a Null/Reflect Phys Persona and find yourself the King variant enemy in B2, I think, let him summon a couple enemies, and then just set it to autobattle and walk away. Easy levels.

 

[Gren]

Not really the same thing, but the most similar instance I can recall is in Mega Man 9, using Jewel Satellite to farm bolts/lives/weapon energy from the 1-shot peons in Plug Man's stage. I literally set it & forget [sic] it.

 

[WooHooAlex]

Easy! FFXII phoenix down leveling exploit.

God I love that game. WE NEED A REMASTER!

 

[Despera]

I felt kinda smart when I figured out a way to set gambits in FFXII so I'd auto-level while sleeping.

Turns out almost everyone and their mother had figured out their own gambit trick. The system was easily exploitable.

 

[cj_iwakura]

Digital Devil Saga, the Titania Hallway in the sewers.

They basically call for reinforcements, meaning you can get lots of XP real fast, which is essential if you're even thinking about taking on the optional boss(es).

 

[NBtoaster]

Dark Souls 1, aggroing all the enemies in the forest then running beside a cliff and watching them fall off.

 

[Semajer]

I made a way in Tales of Symphonia on the Gamecube, but you need a turbo controller. Enemies can respawn in Symphonia, but not often in the same place, and they can roam around and never hit you if you're stationary. In the bonus dungeon Niflheim, they always respawn in the same place, so you can stand there, set the characters to AI, and then leave the turbo controller on to end the results screen. I left this on for days at a time.

Spoiler

Gamecube did crash once though.

Can do something similar in Tales of Graces f too, but you just need to hold the button down to end the results screen, no need for turbo. Leaving it on for too long lags the hell of the non-battle sections though.

 

[Mephala]

There was an mmo I played a bit back in the day. You set up a "family" and create a 3 member party. You controlled 1 while the other two followed and can be given commands.

Find decent mob spot. Hold position. Guard leader. Loot area. It was made for AFK grinding. There were a few clever ideas in it shame the game itself was a bit average.

There was a nice grind spot in Cabal Online where a soloable dungeon had a gauntlet area with a lot of buffalos spawning and you could sit there grinding 60-95 or so pretty easily if you have lifesteal weapons. You can get in at 40 or 45 and have an ally help you hit 55 or so where you can then solo yourself.

Dragons Dogma had the area in Gran Soren post dragon where you can set up 3 ranger or sorcerer pawns and AFK letting them mow down infinite spawning guards.

Glyph eating with high defense and hp regen in Order of Ecclesia was pretty interesting too. Needed to find a way to keep the Up button held though.

Suikoden 2 max level glitch was hilarious and unnecessary but somewhat satisfying as well.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

Mario RPG: The way the save system in this game worked is that saving at a save point made a kind of checkpoint, and if you died after saving you would return to that checkpoint keeping all the EXP and gold you earned since you saved, and it would keep doing this until you reset the SNES. There is a dungeon around midway through where you can buy a star (which automatically kills any enemies you encounter just by walking into them on the map) immediately followed by several rooms densely packed with enemies. All of this is immediately after a save point, so it was very easy to save, buy a star, clear all the enemies without any actual fighting, then die and return to the save point with all the EXP and money earned. Then you could buy the star again and do it all over.

Suikoden II: The map in this game is divided by border crossings, with gates usually being closed until the story moves into a new area of the map. There is a gate early on in the game that is supposed to be closed, but the devs didn't actually set it as a static object, so you could just push on it and move the entire gate aside and keep going to a late game area. The enemies are super hard, but if you treat it like a boss battle you can usually just take down a group with a few people surviving. Because of the way leveling in it works, just beating one or two groups of enemies is enough to bring everyone up to the level where they would normally be when you actually get to that area 20-ish hours later. You can also recruit a couple of very strong characters out of sequence while you're there.

 

[Card Boy]

All the Yakuza games have a easy money trick where you drop all your money on Blackjack in Purgatory but save at the Cage Fighting arena before doing so (which is next door). If you win save, if you lose load game.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

There was an mmo I played a bit back in the day. You set up a "family" and create a 3 member party. You controlled 1 while the other two followed and can be given commands.

Find decent mob spot. Hold position. Guard leader. Loot area. It was made for AFK grinding. There were a few clever ideas in it shame the game itself was a bit average

Probably Granado Espada. I was surprised to see it pop up on Steam recently! The game was pretty junk but it had good music.

 

[RodrigoDorta]

Fallout 1 - put at least 90 skill points on gambling, go to the big cassino hold 1 and 5 on the keyboard for 20 minutes. No more money problems

 

[jett]

The most notable one for me is the raft ride in Final Fantasy VI. I never actually did it but that was the first time that I can recall being able to do auto-leveling safely.

To be slightly more specific without looking it up after you leave the Returner's Hideout and you're on the raft with Banon you need to set the options so the cursor stays on the last selected option and you can have everyone on attack except for Banon who uses his healing ability. There's a spot where the raft will loop if you select the wrong direction so once that's set and you have a controller with auto it'll just keep selecting to loop and all the battles your team just attacks through while Banon uses his team-healing ability on his turn.

So yeah, that one.

The Lete River trick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMbpwVoXH9Q

I actually did that one back in the day, I finally put my Super Advantage controller to good use. I think I only did it for a couple of hours, I don't remember breaking the game or anything. I do remember Locke being grossly underleveled for a while lol. I also don't remember how I found out about it, was early days of the interwebs for me. Might have done it on a third or fourth run.

 

[lazygecko]

I remember in WoW TBC, back when you had to level your weapon skills. There was a NPC in Shadowmoon Valley who would not aggro, because he was in a permanent "cast" status. Anyways you could go up to him, and start swinging, leave, go watch some tv shows, get something to eat, then come back and boom, maxed weapon skills.

It also worked on the demon boss in Shadow Labyrinth if you ignore killing all the orc warlocks who bind him.

WoW has had numerous interesting ways of leveling quickly throughout its life. Some are "fixed" while new ones occasionally popped up. Before they did the whole normalization of stats and stat scaling across levels in patch 6.0, I was actually able to solo through all of Blackrock Depths with my level 53 protection paladin. Since I was gaining levels pretty rapidly this enabled me to go further and further into the dungeon and had probably gained 5-6 levels or so by the time I soloed the last boss.

In Mists of Pandaria I also finished the last 4 levels or so with my mage by getting over to Timeless Isle and did some good old fashioned AoE grinding on the clusters of weaker lvl90 mobs there.

 

[BatDan]

Kingdom Hearts II (vanilla) Pride Rock trick. Get Magnega, the Gull Wing Keyblade, go to Pride Lands, get down to quarter health, go to the top of Pride Rock and spam Magnega until all the Rapid Thrusters are dead. They dropped MP orbs to make spamming easier. Sadly this trick was altered in Final Mix as the Rapid Thrusters dropped HP instead of MP.

 

[Warnen]

Crushbone belts in Everquest. Get a few sacs and get yo level 10 fast on an alt (back when it was time consuming to level in an mmo). Gnollfangs and deathfist belts worked too.

 

[TheYanger]

Blue Dragon had that spell that let you just walk into mobs to kill them if they were weaker than you. Not a 'trick' but extremely satisfying.

 

[RecRoulette]

Having the Escudo earn credits in Gran Turismo 3

We'd set acceleration to the analogue stick and use a rubber band to keep it maxed. It'd then lap and win the long Super Speedway events (bouncing off walls) without any input from the player. Raised a lot of cash without doing the tedious grinding.

Yes! This is what I came to post.

 

[pauloshinobi]

Final Fantasy 6: Vanish + Doom on the Dinosaur Island.


Bravely Default: Put the whole enemy party to sleep and use Nightmare.

Pokémon gen 1: just beat elite 4 over and over again.

 

[whiteninja]

Guardian Legend on the nes. You can position yourself so the first boss cant hit your ship but you can still destroy the projectiles it fires. Leave something heavy on the controller and get a high score. At certain points your max health will go up so it's kinda like leveling up. Unfortunately if it gets too high the game freezes (I left it running for a week I think)

 

[Hasemo]

HOLY SHIT. I'm going to be all over this.

The secret is to do it in a location where all (most) enemies are weak to one element, so you can basically 1 hit kill them. If I remember correctly, I used electricity in

Spoiler

the clock tower/dungeon(?)

.

 

[CrashPrime]

Gran Turismo 3. God Damn.

Get a Suzuki Escudo
All upgrades
Turn off ASM and TCS
150-Mile Super Speed Way Endurance
Automatic Transmission
Make the "Accelerator" the right analog stick turning left instead of the X button
Go and enter the race
Wrap a rubber band around both of the analog sticks (so they are towards each other)

That sumbitch will turn into the outside wall, and ride the wall for the entire race. Go outside for awhile, when you get back you will have won the race and an F1 car.

 

[bobawesome]

It's not automatic, but Mergo's Loft: Middle with three moon runes.

Get one million blood echoes in about half an hour.

Yep. Now that there's nothing left to do in the game I just like grinding there occasionally.

 

[Falchion]

In Skyrim when you go to the monetary at the Throat of the World, you can go into stealth mode and hit the monks in the back. They won't retaliate or die so you can max out stealth, one handed, and two handed very quickly.

 

[davidwhangchoi]

if you did that too many time you died (lose lives).