Choi's Prerenewbie Guide to Renewal
New to renewal and feeling overwhelmed? Same, tbh, but here's some information that I thought was helpful starting out. A lot of this information uses Yvonne's Guide which is a very helpful resource.
Preface
My guild and I come from a prerenewal server and had very limited knowledge about Renewal, so I had created this guide to help them but decided to share with anyone interested. The purpose of this guide is to hopefully help people who are new to renewal and should be used as a supplement to the other guides! Please feel free to reach out to me (IGN: Choi or Tokki) for any questions or feedback!
Starting out and Leveling
Most of the leveling is done through Main Board Quests that you can get at Main Office and Eden Board Quests that you can get at Eden
The Job Changer can be found at @go main at the top left. Get to Base Level 10 and Job Level 10, and talk with the Job Changer to change to your first class. Additionally, in the Top Right of Main, talk to the Daily Instance Board.
Eden Quests and Paradise Gear: Eden Quests are a great way to level during your early levels. Go to @go Eden and talk with Lime Evenor to join the Eden Group and accept the applicable board quests there. In Eden, enter the top right portal and talk with Lucy and Lothaire in the room on the right to get your Paradise Gear and Paradise Shadow Gear.
Poring Village: After you receive your Paradise gear, go and complete the Poring Village Instance. Once completed you can go back to the Daily Instance Board @go main to get some additional experience. You should be job level 50 by now and can change to your next class at main. After that, go back to Eden and you can get some additional items from Labraham in the Paradise Equipment room.
Eden Quests to level 99: Now, you should move forward with completing Eden Quests. In the Eden Room, talk to the job boards applicable to your level range, to receive the quests. These quests are repeatable, so you can do the same quest repeatedly. The quests that I most often do are: Glast Heim Monastery, Turtle Dungeon, Ice Dungeon 1, Moscovia Dungeon 3, and Louyang Field 1.
Rebirth: Once you get to level 99 or close to level 99, do the quest again, but do not turn in the experience rewards. Instead, finish the quest and rebirth, level up to job level 10, and job change. Now, go and turn in your quest. This should jump you to a high level and job level 50, so you can change into your 2-2 Class. Do Eden quests again until you get to your third class.
Level 100+ Illusion Dungeons: After you get to Base Level 100, you will be able to do Illusion Dungeons by going to Warper -> Illusion. For some Illusion dungeons, there is an npc there that will give you quests and rewards. Otherwise, you can talk to the Daily Quest Board at the bottom right of @go Main. Once you kill 100 mobs in an illusion dungeon, you can go back to the npc to get experience and do it again!
For more direction on where to level, you can check out Yvonne's Leveling Guide.
As a note, there's no rush to get to Level 260. I would say that the main threshold for leveling should be 240. At that point, you can use most gear and access most instances/dungeons. I recommend at that point that you just carry on living, and you will get to 260 before you even realize it!
Traits and Damage Classes
As part of Renewal, Traits have been added for Fourth Classes that provide additional bonuses to your stats. You will see that some of your Fourth Class skills scale with your specific traits. For example, Soul Vulcan Strike benefits from SPL for the scaling and the additional S.Matk you get from SPL.
Skill Damage is separated into Physical Melee, Physical Ranged, and Magical. You will see a lot of gear and equipment are separated in this way (e.g. 
Mutating White Knight Card (27384) , 
Empathize Card (300270) , 
Nebula Armor of Power [1] (450169) ). You can see your skill's damage type under "Type" in your skill description. However, I would break it out into five types:
- Magical
- Ranged Physical
- Ranged Physical Crit
- Melee Physical
- Melee Physical Crit
Similar to 
Sharp Shooting, many physical skills in Renewal are able to critically strike. As such, I would organize the damage types in this way, as the gear required for these damage types will be fairly similar across classes.
Gear Progression OR How I Think About Gear
Yvonne's Guide has a very helpful Gear Progression Table. I have copied it here with some updates. In this table, when you click on the links to the specific gears, it will give you information on the applicable equipment and its related instances, quests, and mobs.
At level 100, you can talk with Labraham and Louis to get Advanced Paradise Gear. These gear will require 
Old Pick (7318) , 
Blue Hair (1034) , and 
Elastic Band (7200) . Once you get these, you will be at Stage 1 in her Gear Progression Table.
For the most part, the equipment in renewal requires specific currencies that can be received from instances, quests, or mob kills. For example:
Instances: 
Celine's Ribbon [1] (18849) requires 
Bloody Coin (7642) to be created. Bloody Coins can be received when completing the Instance "Horror Toy Factory" and can be dropped from mobs within that Instance.
Quests: Grace Equipment requires 
Unknown Parts (25669) and 
Cor Core (25723) . In order to access the map that allows you to exchange these currencies for Grace Equipment, you need to complete the 17.1 episode quest. The quests involved in this will provide you with a good amount of that currency. Mobs in areas and dungeons related to 17.1 will provide you with the currency as well.
Mob Drops: Certain equipment can be received from mobs. Illusion dungeons are a great example of this. Another example is Rudus Dungeon 4. Within that dungeon, all mobs have a low chance of dropping 
Battle Processor (410016) , 
Battle Processor [1] (410017) , 
Cor Core Booster (410091) , 
Cor Core Booster [1] (410092) , and 
CD in Mouth (420003) .
When deciding which gear to farm, I look through the different equipment options starting from Stage 2 and upwards and compare them to my Eden Paradise gear to consider the effort required to get there. The Eden Paradise gear starting out is already pretty good overall. So for example, when looking at Armor, I reviewed the Grace Armor, Automatic Armor, and Celine's Dress, and decided that it wasn't an improvement enough to replace my Eden Paradise Armor. Instead, I skipped to the Stage 4 armor Gray Wolf Armor.
I did this for each slot of my gear and then decided to work on the earliest stage gear that I decided I would use. So: I decided I wanted the Grace Footgear, Gray Wolf Armor, and Illusion Silver Guard. Instead of working on the Stage 4 Gray Wolf Armor, I started on the Stage 2 Grace Footgear and Illusion Silver Guard. I also prioritized the Middle and Lower Headgear of Cor Core Booster + CD in mouth as I didn't have an Eden Paradise equivalent, so it was an easy boost in gear.
It may be tempting to try to skip to Stage 4 and Stage 5, but I do recommend switching where necessary, as it helps clear instances and dungeons significantly.
The Grace Equipment may be a good place to start if you're looking to upgrade your Paradise gear!
Episode Quests
Certain gear and maps require episode quests to be completed. Completing the episode quests gives you access to the maps and gives you a lot of the relevant currencies. This is a good route to take to move forward with gear progression.
17.2, 18, and 19 require the prior episode quests to be completed.
- 17.1 Illusion is needed for Grace Equipment
- 17.2 Sage Legacy is needed for Automatic Equipment
- 18 Direction of Prayer is needed for Gray Wolf Equipment
- 19 Issgard Land of Snow Flowers is needed for Snow Flower and Glacier Equipment
Clear Tickets can also be bought for Cash points. Episodes 15, 16, and 17.1 don't have any requirements. 17.2, 18, and 19 require at least 1 character among your master account to have completed this quest.
Refining Gear
Now that you have these gears, you may be looking to refine them. Refining in Renewal is very important as cards and gears will have special bonuses at specific refinement levels or at specific intervals of refinement!
Refining in Renewal is a bit different, as there are a lot of upgrade boxes and upgrade items. Some equipment have special ways to refine them to a higher level without any of the risks of refining it to that level. So while leveling to 4 is safe for a weapon but anything above that has a risk of breaking when you refine them, items exist that will jump you to the higher refine level without that risk.
One item you may have found while leveling in the Illusion Dungeons is its related Refinement Box. These Refinement boxes will refine an item from a specific list of items that is stated on the box description, and refine it safely but randomly from +4 to +7-10. For example, the 
Labyrinth Refinement Box (100423) can be used to +7 to +10 any illusion equipment from the Illusion of Labyrinth.
Additionally, gears related to instances or quests will often have an item that can be bought with currency to upgrade the item to a specific value. For example, Cor (Part of Episode 17.1), has an npc that will sell you 
Grace Refine Ticket (100130) which can be used to upgrade the Grace Equipment.
Renewal also added Safe to Refine Tickets that can be used for any level 1 armor or level 4 or below weapon! Safe to Refine Tickets can be made with Red Hugo in the top left corner of Para. These tickets can be created using Exchange Hammers that can be bought from the npc that will get a +X refined gear and exchange it for a X-1 Safe to Refine Ticket. So, if you have a +9 armor you can use an 
+9 Lv1 Armor Refine Ticket Exchange Hammer (50005) to get a 
Safe to +8 Armor Certificate (6233) . You can also exchange multiple of the same level Safe to Refine Ticket to get a higher refine level Ticket through Red Hugo. These tickets can go up to +12.
One thing to keep in mind is that these tickets cannot be used for level 5 weapons and level 2 armors. However, most of those gear have equivalent boxes that can be used (e.g. 
Dim Glacier Reinforcement Device (101637) , 
Varmundt Armor Refine Hammer (101307) , 
MVP Equip Refine (50052) ).
The Refinement boxes and Safe To Refine Tickets work well together. A great way to farm Safe to Refine Tickets is by farming Illusion Dungeons for their Illusion Gear and Refinement boxes and turning those in to get the Safe to Refine Tickets. A popular Illusion for this is Illusion of Underwater Floor 2.
With this in mind, you should think about which refine level you would like your gear to be. Though it was a thing in Prerenewal to have gear and cards have more effects at different refinements (
Antique Firelock Card (4160) , 
Parade Hat [1] (5468) , etc.), it is significantly more common in Renewal. Most gear and the majority of cards you will find will have bonuses at specific refinement levels (Additional X at Refine Level +Y), at specific intervals (Additional X for each Y Refine Levels) or both!
For example, The 
Gray Wolf Robe [1] (450178) gives a flat Matk + 130. However, it also gives Matk +15 for each 2 Refine Levels and decreases Variable Casting Time by 15% at Refine Level +7. As such, for this armor, you would want to refine it to +8 so you can take advantage of the Variable Casting Time Reduction at +7 while also having it at an interval of 2 for the Matk.
Note: Some enchantments give bonuses at specific refine levels as well. However, this will be covered in the next section.
Enchantments
Pre-renewal had enchanting in the form of +1 - +3 stats on specific armors. However, Enchanting in renewal is a lot more powerful. In some cases, a significant portion of the equipment's power comes from the enchantments making a deceptively weak item incredibly strong (e.g. Dim Glacier/Glacier weapons).
Enchantment is the process of adding additional bonuses like stats, healing effectiveness, and more to equipment. This process is done through NPCs related to that specific equipment through the use of their applicable currencies, similar to how gear can be bought.
Generally, you can add random enchantments for the equipment for a specific amount of currency or add a specific enchantment you would like for a greater amount of that currency. In some cases, you will have to add an enchantment on the equipment and upgrade that enchantment to get a stronger version of it.
A good way to dip your toes into enchanting is by enchanting your illusion gear with the Illusion Enchanter in Prontera. By now, you should have a decent amount of 
Illusion Stone (25271) and Illusion Gear from leveling in the Illusion Dungeons. These Illusion Stones can be used with the NPC to roll enchants on your weapons, armors, and accessories. Additionally, you will see that Illusion Weapons often have additional lines with extra effects (e.g. +X damage to X Type Monsters). These can be rerolled as well.
If you're currently using any Illusion Gear, go ahead and try some enchanting if you have illusion stones just sitting in storage!
Some enchantments, like the Gray Wolf Armor mentioned in the previous section, also have special bonuses at specific refinement levels or at specific intervals of refinement. The Gray Wolf Enchantments have extra bonuses at +7, +9, and +11, so take a look at the enchantments when working on refining.
Lastly, Fashion Points that you've been collecting in game let you buy Costume Enchant Boxes. These boxes give Enchant Stones that can be enchanted onto your costumes for a lot of additional power. The list of Enchant Stones and their % drops can be found here: Costume_Enchants_(Fashion_Points)#Enchant_Stones
Shadow Gears
If you talked with Lucy in the Paradise Equipment room in Eden, you should have the Paradise Shadow Equipment. Shadow Equipment is additional equipment that is equipped in your Costume Equipment for the Armor, Weapon, Shield, Shoes, and Accessories that provide additional benefits but no cosmetic effects.
You can talk with Lucy to buy Advanced Shadow Gear (230 
Eden Coin (25223) for the whole set) or rent it for 3 days (20 Eden Coin (25223) ). The regular Paradise Shadow Equipment is already pretty good, but the Advanced Shadow Gear will provide around double the stats with the whole set. Eden Coins can be farmed by doing the level 100+ Eden missions.
Better Shadow Gear can be found in the Main Office basement (bottom right of the main office). The Shadow Gear can give a large amount of benefits like an increase in specific skill damage, increased stats, increased movement speed, armor/magic resist Pen, and more! Generally, each piece of the Shadow Gear will need 80x 
Shadow (50033) , 5x MvP Item, and 15x 
Shadowdecon (25729) . Shadows are obtained through 
Shadow Crate (50034) which you can get from killing MVPs or by trading with Rayja in the basement for 5 Shadowdecon (25729) .
Generally, the best Shadow Gear will require related Thump Boxes that will require an amount of specific Shadow items at a specific Refine Rate to create one piece of that Shadow Gear. For example, the Almighty Shadow Accessories, which provide +1 All Basic Stats per Refine Level, uses the 
Status Shadow Thump Box (23247) which requires 5 +7 of any of the Power, Vital, Intelligence, Dexterous, and Lucky Shadow gear to create one random piece of the Almighty Shadow Accessories. Thankfully, they can be exchanged for the other piece with Rajya using the 
Shadow Exchange Ticket (1000854) if you get the piece you don't need.
Shadow Gear has benefits in the specific combos, but not all combos are all pieces of the shadow gear, so you can mix and match the shadow gear as you'd like (e.g. Full Tempest Armor and Shoes with the Almighty Accessories). One set of Combo Gear I might recommend is the Master Class Combo, which provides strong benefits for any damage-dealing class (and will often be BIS for certain classes).
All Shadow gear including accessories can be upgraded! A 
Shadow 9 Refine Hammer (23926) for Shadow gear can be bought for 150 Shadow (50033) and 150 Shadowdecon (25729) or they can be refined with the regular refiner.
Lastly, for those of you interested in upgrading your Shadow Gear, I recommend going through the Endless Tower and Endless Cellar instances as they provide a great way to farm shadow crates!
Grade Enhancing
Now your gear is starting to come along and you have a lot of zeny and don't know what to do with it. Well do I have a great solution for you!
Grade Enhancing is a new mechanic in Renewal that allows you to enhance your equips (from Ungraded -> D -> C -> B -> A) to strengthen your Level 5 Weapons and Level 2 Armors in two ways: increasing the ATK & MATK refine bonus given from refining and providing additional Grade Bonuses that are unique to the specific equipment and/or its enchants. Generally, the Grade Bonus is the biggest bonus and will provide grades for each increased Grade.
A great example of this is the 
Moan of Corruption [1] (470204) that gives Matk +5% and SPL +5 at Grade D, 1s Fixed Casting Time Reduction at Grade C, S.Matk +7 at Grade B, and SPL +8 per 2 Refine Levels at Grade A. In the case of the Moan of Corruption, it might not be worthwhile to start using it until you get it to Grade C.
Grade Enhancing is one of the most expensive mechanics in Renewal as it requires specific materials for the grading process and a specific refine level, often requiring you to go past the safe refine level and requiring 
Blacksmith's Blessing (6635) to go about it without the risk of destruction. Grading itself also has a chance of success, but there is an option to make sure that it won't get destroyed at the cost of 5x the material. 
Blessed Etel Dust (1000337) can be used, but I do not recommend using these, as the cost of the required Blacksmith's Blessing (6635) is often significantly more than the cost of the materials to grade.
A common and great place to start Grade Enhancing is with the dim glacier weapon as it is the BIS weapon for most classes. Due to the cost-effectiveness of the Dim Glacier Reinforcement Device (101637) , it is significantly easier to get it to the refinement level for the desired enchantment.
| Process | Required Refine | Required Materials | Base Success Chance | Failure Penalty |
| No Grade → Grade D | +9 | 1x  Etel Aquamarine (1000325) 175.000 Zeny |
+9: 20% +10: 30% +11: 70% |
Equipment Destroyed |
| No Grade → Grade D | +9 | 5x Etel Aquamarine (1000325) 875.000 Zeny |
+9: 20% +10: 30% +11: 70% |
- |
| Grade D → Grade C | +10 | 1x  Etel Topaz (1000326) 175.000 Zeny |
+10: 30% +11: 60% |
Equipment Destroyed |
| Grade D → Grade C | +10 | 5x Etel Topaz (1000326) 875.000 Zeny |
+10: 30% +11: 60% |
- |
| Grade C → Grade B | +11 | 1x  Etel Amethyst (1000327) 175.000 Zeny |
50% | Equipment Destroyed |
| Grade C → Grade B | +11 | 5x Etel Amethyst (1000327) 875.000 Zeny |
50% | - |
| Grade B → Grade A | +11 | 2x  Etel Amber (1000328) 175.000 Zeny |
40% | Equipment Destroyed |
| Grade B → Grade A | +11 | 10x Etel Amber (1000328) 875.000 Zeny |
40% | - |