One of the challenges that new players in DA face is how to best level (enhance) their cards. After a good amount of experimentation, I think I’ve found the most efficient way to approach it, but I’d be willing to hear from others if you think your approach is better.

Preparing

The first step is to make as much room in your card case as possible. It is a pain to have to stop grinding material cards because your case has filled up. Having extra “junk” cards in your case will make the multi-select option in the enhance screen more of a pain. Move any cards you want to keep into your Storage Container.

If everything doesn’t fit into your Storage, put the Normal+ or lower cards in there first. It will make the enhancement process much simpler. Also, if you happen to have any Normal or Normal+ cards that you are keeping in your main Card Case for some reason, do yourself a favor and enhance them once with something cheap. That will automatically exclude them from the multi-select enhancement pool.

Where to Grind

I’ve analyzed the various areas and chapters in the game, and I strongly believe that the best place to grind for materials is the Palace Corridor – Chapter 1. All of the loot drops there are Normal+ cards, the cost to advance is fairly low (4 action points) and the drop rate on potions is high enough that if you have a decent AP pool, you can probably grind there until you get too bored.

Note, this is also a good place to grind for orison (gold) when you’re early in the game and money is an issue. Since you can sell every Normal+ card for 954 orison, you can quickly fill your coffers with cash you need for enhancing and evolving the cards in your deck.

Step 1 – Gathering Cards

Basically, just keep gathering loot cards until you fill your card case. If you run out of AP, greet your friends, pop a recovery potion, etc. until you fill up your deck. You will have several Hecate Effy, Tyr Banded Armguards, and Tyr Scale Skirt cards to use for enhancing.

Which Cards to Use

After quite a bit of testing, it seems that character cards are by far the most efficient to use in leveling the cards you want to keep. So for this process, you’ll be using the Hecate Effy cards to level your gear.

You may be wondering why we didn’t just sell all the Tyr armor that we don’t want if this is the case. The reason is that using a level 1 Hecate Effy card is not NEARLY as effective as using one what has been pre-leveled herself.

Step 2 – Level up Effy

Here are some step-by-step instructions for what I do with each of my Hecate Effy cards…

1. Go to your Card List and filter it so that you only see the Hecate character cards. I sort them by lowest level first
2. Select one of your level 1 Hecate Effy cards to Enhance (make sure you’re using the Multiple Enhance mode)
3. On the Material Card screen, change the filter to display All Arm armor at Normal+ or Lower rarity
4. Use the Check all displayed link and enhance Effy with 10 arm pieces
5. Click on the Change Target Card button and pick the next level 1 Hecate Effy and repeat
6. Once you’ve used all the arm armor you have, change to waist armor
7. If you have some junk chest armor, you can use that as well
8. Once I’ve used all my armor, I’ll switch to using Character cards until I don’t have any junk Normal+ or lower cards left in my card case

IMPORTANT: Please notice that I only enhance each Hecate Effy card once. Doing so with 10 Normal+ armor bits should bring her to level 25. You could keep going until you max her out, but doing so requires a lot more armor. You start to quickly see diminishing returns. To be honest, you could probably get by with less than 10 armor pieces per Effy, but since it is so much faster to just click on “Check all displayed” and I can easily replenish my stock of materials, it isn’t worth the extra time to me.

Step 3 – Enhance your main card

The final part of the process is pretty simple as well…

1. Go back to your card case and find the card that you want to level up.
2. Choose to enhance that card
3. You’ll need to have the Enhance Material screen set to the single enhance mode. This may mean that temporarily you have to change the filters to something like All Rare Characters or something to get the link that lets you change the mode.
4. Change the filter to Hecate Character Normal+
5. You should see your leveled up Hecate Effy cards there
6. Choose one to use as the enhancement material and level up your main card
7. Repeat until you max the card or run out of Effy’s

Analysis

At first I was using the Hecate and Tyr cards in their level 1 form. A full case was leveling my Super Rare+ character cards between 2 and 4 levels at a time. When I changed to this method, I could take an SR+ character from level 1 to level 45 in about 3 or 4 rounds of grinding material. MUCH much faster!