Battledome Training With Neocash

     We’d all love a super buff BD pet, but anyone who has used the training schools knows it is a tough, slow slog. Reaching maximum strength and defence takes seemingly infinite costly codestones and years of dedicated training. Certain stats-boosting NP items can save time, but the exorbitant cost is usually either not worth it or simply impractical for the everyday Neopian. However, if you have real-life money to spare on Neocash, you can supplement in-school training with fortune cookies available from Noda in the NC Mall. Here, we’ll discuss the NC fortune cookies which can aid battledome training: Faerie Quest, Training, and Lab Ray Cookies. You can obtain these in the NC Mall or from other players by trading NC items. The cookies can only be used on your main account, and you only can activate one of each type at a time.

     (Quick aside: Fortune cookies are not the only way to use NC for training - there are also some tradeable NC cakes/cupcakes which boost various stats. However, they are not available in the mall, so you need to trade for them from other players. They are generally valued at around 2-3 Gift Box Capsules each, so training with them can get very expensive very quickly!)

          FAERIE QUEST FORTUNE COOKIES (FQC/FQFC)

     Cost in Mall: 100NC

     Opening an FQC grants you one faerie quest per day for 9 days. A random faerie will ask you for an item and once you bring it to her, you are rewarded depending on the faerie’s type:

     Fire: +3 strength

     Water: +3 defence

     Dark: +3 hit points

     Air: +3 movement

     Light: +2 levels

     Earth: +3 strength or defence or movement

     Soup: +2 in any TWO of the other stats

     Battle faerie: +3 strength and +3 defence and +3 hit points

     Faerie queen: +2 levels and +5 hit points and +5 strength

     Space faerie: +5 levels

     Grey faerie: reward from any of the other faeries (including fountain faerie)

     It is also possible to get a fountain faerie quest, which allows you to paint a pet almost any colour at the Rainbow Fountain. The only faerie you can't get directly through an FQC is Delina the NC crafting faerie. However, you may get her on a refresh if you use the Refreshed Quest Request (RQR) obelisk boon.

     Because the faerie you get each day is random, some luck is involved. For example, it is possible to get a string of air faerie quests, but her reward (speed) has no current function in the Battledome. There are also some faeries whose reward you can't predict (eg soup faerie, grey faerie). This can be particularly irksome if you are only seeking to train some stats but not others, such as if you don’t want to be bumped up into the next Training School payment bracket by levelling up too much. In these cases, you may opt to stick to in-school training for the time being. In these instances, the RQR boon can be incredibly helpful - it gives you the chance to “reroll” any faerie quests and be given a different one instead. This decreases the likelihood of a quest whose rewards you don’t want. Even without the boon, you do have some control though - you can choose which pet gets the rewards since stats are awarded to your active pet.

     Over the nine days, each cookie will mostly likely grant you around 30 stat points, if not more. You still need to pay to complete the faerie quests, but compared to the cost of codestones, it’s a pittance. At just 100NC per cookie, I consider these an absolute bargain and the first choice for anyone wishing to supplement training school sessions with NC. If you snag them during the week-long sale in March, you can even get some for 50NC each!

     In the long term, FQCs raise your stats approximately evenly, so you can use the training schools while using the cookies without worrying about messing up your stats distribution.

     Bonus tip: you can open up the Shop Wizard in a separate tab before accepting the quest - that makes it super easy to find the requested item!.

          TRAINING FORTUNE COOKIES

     Cost in Mall: 125NC

     When opened, the Training Fortune Cookie reduces the length of your pets’ training session times by between 30% and 75%. The effect lasts for 5 days, applies to all the pets on your account, and works across all three trainings schools (Swashbuckling Academy, Mystery Island Training School, and Secret Ninja Training School). Each time you start a new training session, you will get a pop-up telling you the percentage your time has been discounted. Your new time remaining will be displayed on the Status page. Please note that you still need to pay the full cost of training in codestones or dubloons.

     Training cookies can be very helpful if you are trying to speed train to level 250, or if you have reached long training times - those 24-hour sessions are painful! However, if your pets’ training sessions are short then this cookie might not be worth it. You get the best value by minimising empty time between sessions. Short training sessions require you to check Neopets frequently so that you can re-enroll in a new course as soon as the previous one ends. If you can’t do this, you may want to wait until your training sessions are longer before spending the money on Training Cookies.

     Each session has a newly generated random discount, so it can be a little annoying to account for the different time lengths of each session - you might want to set some alarms to remember!

          LAB RAY FORTUNE COOKIES

     Cost in Mall: 125NC

     If you already have access to the Secret Laboratory Ray, opening a Lab Ray Cookie will grant you between 1 and 3 extra zaps per day for 7 days - that’s up to four zaps per day! (If you have not already collected all 9 Secret Laboratory Map Pieces, you cannot use this cookie.) Unlike the previous two cookies, which are usually used on pets being that are trained evenly, this cookie is for pets which are primarily being lab-trained anyway. You can zap and train at the same time but you have to be careful about it - over time, the lab ray tends to increase your endurance by a lot, increase your strength by a moderate amount, your defence by a small amount if at all, and actually decrease your pet’s level over time. Most people find simultaneous zapping and school-training a nightmare, so I would personally advise you not to do that!

     Getting your lab-zapped pets to stats which are high enough to be worthwhile takes a very, very long time, so this cookie can speed things up considerably! The downsides are that the number of extra zaps you are awarded stays the same for the whole 7 days, so there is a lot of variability in how much value you get from one cookie. And of course, it comes with all the risks of zapping your pets - possible changes in species or colour, decreased stats, or uneven stats.

          CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

     NC items don’t really give you anything that you can’t achieve by other means - you can certainly train up your BD pets without them and indeed, many people do - but they can save you time (and morale!). If you are serious about training up a battle pet and you can afford it, believe the Fortune Cookies can be well worth it.