Experience & Mana

Part of any RPG is improving your characters, and the most basic way to do so is by leveling up. This is entry-level knowledge for most players, but as with the rest of its gameplay, Disgaea D2 has its own unique spin on the concept.

EXP

Unless this is your first RPG (... in which case you’re probably very confused right now; you jumped into the deep end of the pool on this one), you probably get how this works. By defeating enemies, your characters earn experience points, which are consistently abbreviated throughout Disgaea D2 as “EXP.” With enough EXP, a character advances to the next level, up until the hard cap of level 9,999. This even applies to enemy units, which earn EXP if they score a killing blow against the members of your team.

Small sums of EXP are also awarded for healing other units and surviving enemy attacks, but the bulk of the EXP that a unit earns will be what they get for taking down enemies in the field. This means that support characters such as Clerics, Priests, and Shamans will often lag a few levels behind the combat-capable members of your team.

You can get around this gap in several ways. As noted in previous sections, Team-Up Attacks and tower attacks that kill an opponent award EXP and Mana equally to every participant. (Combo Attacks, on the other hand, do not.) If you habitually send your support crew to hang out in the squares next to your main combatants, there’s a good chance they’ll kick in on Team-Ups and reap the rewards. You can also form a tower out of your levelers with a single high-level damage-dealer as its base and use it to destroy monsters for a stage or two.

Another useful option is to teach your support crew a few attack spells by apprenticing them to Witches or Magicians. Since they’re usually using Staves and thus have a decent INT score, a Cleric or Priest can inflict respectable damage with offensive spells such as Star. If you let them snipe kills from time to time, it can go a long way toward keeping them up to par.

Treasure chests also sometimes drop sums of EXP (don’t ask how that works because we don’t know), and EXP often appears as a reward on the Bonus meter. Again, these are unreliable methods, but it’s worth keeping in mind to keep your backfield players up to date. When you can, let your healers crack open chests, and make sure they’re on the field when you clear a stage so that they can scoop up those Bonus rewards.

Finally, you can also level a powerful monster like an Evil Dragon to serve as a mount for your support crew, which is roughly equivalent to letting them drive an Abrams tank for a while. It doesn’t matter how inept your characters are in a fight; if they’re on dragonback, they’re officially a badass.

Levels

Every level that a character earns in Disgaea is worth a number of points in HP, SP, ATK, INT, HIT, DEF, RES and SPD that are determined by his or her job and rank. That amount is further multiplied by the character’s base stats, as touched upon in the section on Character Creation.

For generic characters, promoting them to a higher rank does provide them with better stat growth in the future, but does not retroactively grant them the extra stat points per level. You can sign a character up for training at the Demon’s Dojo to provide a 5% to 20% bonus to any stats gained by leveling.

If you want a character to lose a level or two for some reason but don’t want to pony up for Reincarnation, there’s one way to do so: Demon Buns. These rare, consumable items can be earned as rewards from the Bonus meter, and using one instantly removes one level from the character that it’s used on. Doing so in the Items screen while you’re in Laharl’s Castle is a neutral activity, but if you have one character use Demon Buns on another during a fight, it’ll cause a Likability hit.

Mana

Finally, Mana is a sort of spiritual currency that’s used to propose bills in the Dark Assembly. Many of the methods by which you improve your character, including Reincarnation and promotion, require you to spend large amounts of Mana.

A character gains a flat sum of Mana whenever he or she lands a killing blow on another unit. The amount of Mana earned is determined by the enemy’s level and job much like EXP or HL is. You can also find or buy Mana Potions in the Item World, which provide their user with an instant dose of Mana that’s permanent until it’s spent, but you’ll get most of your Mana through the direct application of violence. As with EXP, it helps if you occasionally feed your less combat-focused characters a couple of easy kills to keep their Mana supplies high.

Note that you cannot transfer Mana from one unit to another by having your characters kill each other. Friendly fire will earn your characters small amounts of Mana based on your dead allies’ levels (see the sidebar), but it won’t touch any Mana that your dead allies had previously earned. The only real effect of this is hurt feelings and lost Likability. In fact, the fact that I even thought to check to see if that would work makes me feel vaguely psychotic. Let’s move on.

You can apply a bonus to the amount of Mana that you earn per kill through the Cheat Shop. Another option is to create a Sea Angel with the Fortune Song Evility, who will grant your characters a flat 20% bonus to any Mana they earn as long as she’s present on the map.

When one enemy unit accidentally kills another, the unit receives Mana just as you would. You can then kill that enemy unit to receive both the Mana it just got and its own inherent Mana supply. Since enemy units have a real problem throughout the game with friendly fire, this happens a lot, but none of the Mana is “wasted.”