The following tips only concern the Labyrinth of Chaos and the Trials of Chaos which are Paradox's endgame. If you're struggling with the main game, please consult the Useful Battle Strategies page or the Companion Tier List.
If you're looking for new characters to complement your LoC team or wondering who the community considers to be the best, feel free to check the LoC Tier List.
Getting Started/Trials of Chaos
The first thing that you will need once you decide to delve into Paradox's endgame is to get both job XP and LoC gears. While you can jump into LoC right away, it is advised to instead play the Trials of Chaos first. That's because ToC will allow you to not only get a great amount of job xp at the end but also get LoC gears that you can target farm.
For example: The "Recursion Caverns" ToC will allow you to target farm Swords, Spears, Fists and Axes gears.
This is important because you will able to save a lot of time by directly farming what you need instead of just leaving it to RNG.
-If you're looking to do a 'No LoC Gear' challenge, skip the ToC.
-Level 5 ToC is the equivalent of floor 300–350 in terms of difficulty and loot. Your RP value will be at 7000+ (Max amount of RP is 20000). Gears that will drop in level 5 will be around +15 and rare rolls such as haste or 2-hit deflectors start dropping at level 5. You have a small chance to run into Platinum chests that will contain Legendary LoC gears too.
-Level 5 ToC will also award you with a whooping 1 000 job XP at the end. This is an excellent way to get job levels and prepare your team. You also get 500 affection for each of your 12 characters, and now that this stats carries over between saves, it can make acquiring companion accessories easy in the next game.
-In ToC, you get +50 RP everytime you go down one floor and +10 RP for every monsters you kill. The chance for monsters to drop LoC gear isn't that great so they aren't worth it unless you need base xp. If you're just looking for loot, just ignore the monsters and go for chests.
The reasoning is quite simple: If it takes you 10 minutes to finish one ToC by killing every monsters but 3 minutes to finish it while just going for chests and dodging monsters, you will get way more loot with the latter.
-The optimal way to farm ToC is to get gears for one character who will one shot the mobs and bosses and then farm gears for other characters that way.
Est is famous for being the best ToC/Early LoC carry. Equip her with sextoys found in Oblivion Desert. If you don't want to use her later on, you can reuse her gears on another character with a pleasure build.
-Infinite Chaos ToC is a great way to farm gems if you need them, however due to how harsh the RNG is (if you're looking for a specific gem), it is advised not to. Also, the rarest gems (such as auto 2-hit deflector gems) won't drop at level 5.
-Unless you're struggling, it is advised not to upgrade your equipment. Upgrading gears will increase your stats by a percentage based on the stats the item had when you looted it. This will not affect your rolls. The best gears you will get will be +18 at best meaning that it's impossible for them to compete with gears that drop at 16000 RP (+28 and higher). What you can do however is to keep them to use as fodder for upgrading gears you will find once you hit floor 600+ in LoC.
-Superbosses does not appear in ToC and are exclusive to LoC.
If you want to go further for better loot and higher difficulty, it's time to delve into LoC.
Delving into the Labyrinth of Chaos
There are a few differences between ToC and LoC. The most important one is that you can now skip floors. Once you reach floor 101, you can now skip to floor 101 whenever you start LoC. Those floors are called 'checkpoints'. The checkpoint floors are floors 101, 201, 301, 401 and 601. Reaching the checkpoint floors should be your first goal.
Every 10 floors, you will be able to save, talk to the blacksmith and talk to a merchant.
Another big difference is that you now get 10 RP for each floor you go through and 1 RP for each monster defeated.
Also, superbosses will appear every 100 floor (Except for the first one who appear on floor 75).
-If you did ToC level 5 before, the loot that you get will be worse than on ToC level 5 until you reach floor 300. It is advised to just ignore monsters and chests to get to 300 ASAP. Superbosses shouldn't be a problem for you for now.
-The scaling of Monsters' stats isn't that important before floor 300 and you will generally get way higher stats than them through LoC gears. From floor 300 onwards however, monsters stats will increase exponentially (Until floor 4 000 000 where you can't progress further).
-RP's max value is currently 20000. The fastest way to reach it in the normal LoC is to start at floor 601 where you will have 16000 RP and keep rushing while ignoring monster. Once at this value, you will get gear with a level ranging from +31 to +33. The only way to improve your gears afterwards is by looking for better base gears or upgrading the ones you already have. Legendary gears show up in red chests more often. Monsters however very rarely drop legendary gears so it's recommended to ignore them here too. Last, the drop rate remains inferior to what one gets in the Carnage Labyrinth.
-Once you get 20000 RP, every additional RP you get becomes UP (or Usagi Points). Talking to White Rabbit after killing a boss will allow you to get certain rewards. Generally, the most used ones will be Legendary Armor/Weapon gachas (to get 5 random legendary gears), Collab gears with LoC rolls (For collab characters) and Gem Gachas (10 random gems). The former is important for getting some key gears like Omega Adeptas for Aqua Pentagon characters or Testament for Gravity Pleasure build.
-The farther you go, the more important optimizing your team and strategies becomes. Feel free to consult the LoC Tier List or the Useful Battle Strategies page for more informations on both.
-Keep the items that give more than 500% in job or base XP in case you need to switch to some characters that you haven't leveled yet. They will be very useful in the Colosseum too in order to farm base and job xp even faster than in ToC.
-If you're just interested in non-LoC loot and don't want the difficulty to increase, stick with floor 600–700.
If you go deeper and reach a point where you can't act first anymore and no matter what you do, monsters always one shot you, you're transitionning into what is called "Deep LoC."
Deep LoC
Deep LoC is the moment when the stats of monsters become so high, it becomes impossible to act first by getting your AGI as high as possible, and every attack hits you for dozens of millions of damage making it impossible for you to tank them.
Deep LoC isn't played the same way as Early LoC, and generally focus on mechanics or strats that aren't dependent on stats.
-Monsters become far more dangerous as you can't oneshot them anymore. That makes them lethal and you now have to watch out for status ailments.
-Strategies for sweepers against monsters consist of using Status Ailments + Predation, Gravity Pleasure or just using your DPS to take care of them. Generally, a mix of all of them.
-The only stat that matter is whatever your DPS are using to inflict damage. Make sure to optimize their gears and gems. Sweepers and support stats shouldn't matter that much. While monsters are dangerous, the biggest threats are still Bosses and Superbosses.
-The only way to act first is to either have haste as a trait or find Haste rolls on LoC Gears. As the latter is gated by RNG, it is advised to have some characters with haste in their trait.
-Stacking defensive layers such as deflectors, Immunity, Endure, Evasion, etc. is vital to surviving in Deep LoC. A character can't deal damage if they are dead and they lose all their buffs. They will also require one action to revive them and even more to rebuff them.
-Remember to save often. A game over means that you either have to load your last save and lose all the loot you found after that save or keeping the loot but having to restart from floor 601.
-If you want to experience deep LoC early on, you can play ToC level 5 without LoC gears to get an idea of its difficulty.
-Deep LoC players are rare. That means that there most likely are still a lot of strats that are unexplored. Feel free to experiment and share what you found.