IdleMMO Combat Leveling Guide

Combat in IdleMMO is two actions, not one. First you hunt to find a group of enemies, then you battle the stack you found. Most slow combat levelling comes from getting one of those two steps wrong: short hunts that leave you with a handful of enemies, or battles against enemies that are either too easy to give real XP or too hard to clear without running out of food. This guide covers both, using the official wiki's rules and the enemy list from our cached game data.

Step one: hunting

You can only hunt enemies at or below your combat level. How many you find per second depends on your Hunting Mastery and Movement Speed, by the wiki's formula: 0.03 enemies per second times (1 + normalised level + normalised Movement Speed). Both terms run from 0 to 1, so a high-level character with good Movement Speed finds up to three times as many enemies per second as a fresh one. Pets and equipment can raise Movement Speed.

Hunting Mastery also sets how long you can hunt in one go, capped by your idle time (a main character with membership can hunt up to 8 hours). Found enemies slowly flee: 10% every 4 hours at Hunting Mastery 1, falling to 2.5% at Mastery 100. So a long hunt followed promptly by a long battle is the efficient pattern. If you cancel a hunt you keep rewards for the time spent, and a restarted hunt stacks new enemies on the old ones.

Don't skip Power Hunting: a 2-5 minute bonus that runs alongside a normal hunt with extra enemies to click, on a 12-hour cooldown (10 for members).

Step two: battling

A battle takes up to 6 enemies from your stack and runs until you clear them, run out of effective health, or hit your idle limit. Food adds to effective health (100 HP plus 20 food at 10 HP each is 300), and unused food returns if you stop early. Each enemy takes at least 3 seconds. The battle screen shows your hit chance, damage per hit, damage taken per hit and hits needed per enemy, which is all you need to judge whether an enemy is worth farming.

Stances decide which stat grows

You pick a stance when the battle starts:

• Balanced: XP split evenly over Strength, Defence, Speed and Dexterity (remainders are lost: 25 XP gives 6 to each).
• Offensive: Strength only (Attack Power, 2.4 per level).
• Defensive: Defence only (Protection).
• Agile: Speed only (Agility, which lowers the enemy's hit chance).
• Dexterous: Dexterity only (Accuracy, your hit chance).

Your Combat level gets the full XP regardless, so the stance is purely about stats. Use a single-stat stance to fix whichever stat is holding you back. If the battle screen shows you missing a lot, train Dexterity; if you are eating too much food, Defence or Speed. Balanced loses a little XP to rounding and grows nothing quickly.

The enemy ladder

One enemy per ten-level band from our cached combat data: the highest-XP enemy you can reach in that band. XP is base Combat XP per kill; health is the enemy's HP.

Base XP climbs steadily with level, from 3 per Rabbit at level 1 to around 50-60 for level 100 enemies in our cached data, while the 3-second minimum per enemy stays the same. That is why moving up the ladder as soon as you can beat the next enemy cleanly matters: the XP per kill grows faster than the time per kill. The Combat calculator ranks every enemy by XP per hour at your level.

Other XP sources

• Dungeons give Combat XP alongside Dungeoneering XP on every run. From our cached data, Whispering Catacombs (level 60) pays about 2,200 Combat XP per hour of running and The Nexus about 5,700. Chained, that is idle combat XP with recipe drops attached. See the dungeon guide.
• World bosses pay a lump of XP per fight: 800 for Isadora up to 12,000 for Thal'guth. Worth timing your logins for; see the world boss guide.
• Guild raids give Combat XP and Guild Mastery XP to everyone who finishes, and the Armoury's Trebuchet (+10% Combat XP) and Battering Ram (+10 XP per enemy) stack with them. See the guild strategy guide.

Enemy scaling from Combat 80

From Combat 80 to 99 you can toggle enemy scaling up to your own level; from 100 a slider scales enemies up to level 150. Scaled enemies give XP at the selected level and add a Magic Find bonus of up to +40%, depending on the gap between the enemy's base level and the scaled level. That makes a favourite low-level farming spot useful again late game. The wiki marks scaling as experimental, so expect it to change. Slayer contracts at Combat 80+ use the same scaling; see the Slayer guide.

Boosts worth stacking

Effects add together, and they only apply to actions that start after you gain them. Before a long battle: an XP potion if you have one, an XP Guidance Scroll if a friend writes them, Armoury items if your guild has them, and any Conquest ruler bonus your guild holds. Membership adds +15% XP on actions that support XP boosts.

A routine that works

1. Start a long hunt in the location with the best enemy you can beat cleanly.
2. Accept Slayer contracts for enemies there before battling.
3. Battle with enough food for the whole stack and a single-stat stance for your weakest stat.
4. Move up the ladder when the next enemy no longer drains your food.

Frequently asked questions