I was wondering. When is the point that you feel it's worth it to train your level up to 250 to start training at the ninja training school instead of the island training. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
 
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I think it's something most people plan out from the start, since it's a long, expensive, task to complete.

 

Since you can only reach the Training School once you've reached level250, I hope most people realize that's the next step before they reach 8 codestones at the Academy. Might be a huge shock to think you're finished training only to realize there is more lol

I'm still trying to reach level 250 myself. I'm around less then halfway there.

The best way to do it is once you have your pet with 300 Hp / 200 Str / 200 Def & level 100, you start the jump to the ninja school. At 5 normal stones vs 1 red one the price/time is much better with the latter.

I voted 7 codestones, but I actually was at the 8-stone level before I leveled (about 12 levels), but that was DURING the Obelisk War. I think any lower than that is not a good thing. It's people speed-leveling from the low levels, sometimes as low as level 1, up to 250, that drives the price of the red stones higher and HIGHER. Meanwhile, with fewer people needing the regular stones, that drives their prices lower and lower. Eventually, you may start seeing regular codestone prices fall to that of the now uber-cheap Dubloons. There NEEDS to be a balance! Now, I don't usually sell codestones in my shop. Maybe now and then if I need a some quick NP. But not often. At some point, if everyone starts to speed level, it will be cheaper to MAKE a red stone, by visiting the volcano and "sacrificing" 10 randomly selected regular stones to make a random red one. Which will shoot up the prices on regular stones and push the red stone prices ever HIGHER. That's why I save my regular codestones.

Seriously, it's not good for the economy of buying, selling and trading codestones, and it will make training in the red stone range a bigger, more expensive pain than it already is.

 

Right now, 4 out of the 6 red codestones are all above 22,000np each. While those prices HAVE come down over the last couple of months, MORE people speed training will send the prices back over the 30k-40k marks like they were when speed-leveling first became a "thing".

 

There ARE also other ways to train that are usually cheaper than a red stone, or multi-regular stone courses though. Aside from Random Faerie Quests, or using Faerie Quest Cookies which cost NC, I totally recommend Kitchen Quests on Mystery Island. You may complete 10 of these on-site quests per day. That's possibly up to 10 stat points. Singular, but they can go to any stat. Level, HP, Str, Def, or Agility. Still, if you budget yourself to say, 5k total cost per quest, because some of the item prizes are pretty weak, stat-wise you can do pretty well there!

 

One more thing, where's the FUN, in leveling up and still being too weak to basically battle for all the time it would take to get up to the red stone range? I mean, sure you could go after the weakest opponents in the BD, but is that really "Fun"? Part of learning to battle is increasing your stats, and going up measurably, so you can gain experience in HOW to battle. I personally, enjoyed being under-powered when fighting. Doing budget battling and still emerging from a long-shot fight victorious! Now that gives a real rush and sense of accomplishment, because it was an uphill battle. Placing my pet's stats and my battle planning against the opponent.

 

Once again, and you can find my posts about this topic going back to the Obelisk War, I maintain that the higher you can go with REGULAR codestone training, the better for everyone, including every person training their pet(s). Because it keeps prices on BOTH types of stones from going out of control again.

As I don't do much battling I'm going to stick with the Mystery Island School until I can't go any further. I don't pay anything for my codestones anyways. I use the ones I get from dailies, random events and battledome prizes to pay for my courses. When I start getting close to maxing at the academy I'll start building a stash of red codestones.

I would go with five or six.  I voted for six.  A big part of it for me is the amount of time it takes to train also increases with the number of codestones.  I started planning at five, because I liked being able to sometimes train twice a day.  At the time, I didn't have a regular neopets schedule, so I would sometimes not be able to train at all some days once I got to seven or eight codestones.

I would go with five or six.  I voted for six.  A big part of it for me is the amount of time it takes to train also increases with the number of codestones.  I started planning at five, because I liked being able to sometimes train twice a day.  At the time, I didn't have a regular neopets schedule, so I would sometimes not be able to train at all some days once I got to seven or eight codestones.

 

Depending on the need for quicker than normal training, such as if there was another war plot going on, I can see not liking the time it takes to train in the 7 or 8 codestone range. However, if someone training uses NC, there are Training Fortune Cookies, these cookies "reduce the length of a course from anywhere between 30% to 75% for 5 consecutive days". So every time you train, the time is cut by a random percent between 30% and 75%. Not too shabby if you need to do a lot of training in a hurry. And as I said in my post there are alternate ways of training to supplement traditional training. All of which can be found in the TDN BP's articles section, under the heading of Training.

http://battlepedia.thedailyneopets.com/index.php/articles/index/

 

It does include info on speed leveling to the red stone level also. Just pointing out there are some good alternatives. ;)

It's interesting to see how people pick a fairly high number of codestones before deciding. I guess availability and ease plays a huge part in it as well.

 

Good poll :D

I wish I could have planned better. I am training my lab rat and the Hp's are so high, I have to keep training level. Rigt now I'm at 7 code stones. I haven't really bought any because I horde them when I get them in the battle dome. 

@  Aquamentis12    - I wasn't aware of that about the Kitchen Quests, thank you very much for the info! 

 

I don't recall where I was when I started :( 

@  Aquamentis12    - I wasn't aware of that about the Kitchen Quests, thank you very much for the info! 

 

I don't recall where I was when I started :(

 

You're very welcome Venus! Remember to give yourself a certain cut-off point in what you are willing to spend on a Kitchen Quest. Because sometimes you get items that may or may not be worth much, and sometimes, you get a small amount of NP, I've never had that amount to more than 1k though. Which is why I recommend around a 5k spending cap per Kitchen Quest. If your income is vast, you can certainly spend more if you want to. You can complete 10 site-quests like this a day. So if you want to finish 10 Kitchen Quests, avoid Snow Faerie quests on Terror Mountain. I'm not certain if Edna's Quests count too, I almost never do her quests, so I don't know. The quest counter resets at Midnight NST. KQs can be a good way to supplement your training. Best of luck! :)

I wasn't aware of the kitchen quests either. I've tried it though, and haven't got very favorable results yet. I think it's quite time consuming as well, since I'm at the moment only playing my dailies. I don't have too much time to spend online at the moment.

 

What I find interesting about this post is that people vote for quite a high amount of codestones, since if I do the math, it's economical to do it earlier. I'm at the moment at four codestones and haven't changed yet, even though I've collected quite an amount of red codestones already. I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm still sticking by it even though, I feel it would probably be cheaper to go for the red codestones.

Is there any chance we could reopen this thread? My pet is currently in training and I know there are some red stones around the 13k whereas I keep getting slammed for some 20k ordinary stones at the Academy. Is 4/5 stones still the best time to start up-training to the Secret Ninja School?

Time is not so much of an issue for me, I'm more so trying to keep my expenditure at a minimum.

Sho is only about 9-10k.  Mag is about 13k.  The other reds are 30-40k each.  Eo is 20k+ now, but the other browns are 3-8k, I think.  Keep in mind that with a war supposedly coming in November, you may not reach the level and start training strength/defence again before that starts.  On the other hand, the level 200 warlocks rage is a second round of freezing, so that's SUPER useful.

The red codestones have gone up in price lately, because of the upcoming war.  They may or may not go back down by the time you get to the ninja school.

I think it would be much better to do it earlier. Red just seems more economical.