Stuck at 30k combat power? It's not one queue, it's three, and each has its own gold-free first pick

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Update 9/14: two rows moved on 9/9 (update log 3541097). 遙遠的星辰印章 left the 魔物討伐證明 shop at 9/9 06:00 — the seal route is now the 野外首領 hard difficulty special loot from 9/14 (星辰印章), and the proof now buys 大塊肉 (100, once per account per week). Enchant is live on Taiwan with the replace/0–2 extras rules; 增幅 is still Korea-only.

⚠️ The display combat-power formula below is Korean community measurement, not official (two sources disagree on the sub-stat weight — shown as both, not averaged). Content combat-power thresholds are Korean community values; Taiwan has not published its own recommended-CP figures for any raid or dungeon. Everything else — the seal stat lines, the rune wear bonus — is stated with its own source.

The number everyone answers by reading a screenshot

“I’m at X combat power, what am I missing?” is one of this community’s most-asked, least-answered questions — usually met with a stranger squinting at a stats screenshot and guessing. The better approach: convert every major source to its actual combat-power value and read the table yourself.

The display formula itself (Korean community measurement, not official; two independently measured versions disagree on the sub-stat weight, so both are kept rather than averaged):

CP = Attack + Defence/2 + HP/4 + 0.3×(sub-stats, excluding bonus HP) + rune-grade bonus

Read the formula and the priority order falls out of it: anything that adds attack directly is worth twice a defence point and four times an HP point — that’s the entire reason “gear your weapon slot first” is universal advice. A second consequence: a rune adds a flat combat-power bonus just for being worn, scaled by grade and star (legendary ★6 starts at 250, +5% per enhancement level) — pushing a single rune from +0 to +10 adds roughly half again to that bonus alone, visible on the stat screen the moment you enhance it.

Three details worth clearing up while the formula is in view:

• Base attack/defence has nothing to do with an item’s colour. The colour comes from the imprinted rune; the item’s own base stat is a fixed range set by item level — a plain white-tier item can roll a top-tier base. Don’t discard a high-base item for the wrong colour; Performance Improvement can move the base stat off it and the rune’s enhancement level stays intact.
• Enchant amplification stays with the slot. The first amplification raises a flat-attack line from +100 to +110 and adds a random sub-stat; the second pushes it to +120 — and even if you later overwrite the enchant scroll itself, the amplification level is kept. It’s a long-term investment in the equipment slot, not in that specific scroll.
• Skill level doesn’t feed combat power. This game has no skill-point system; skill power comes entirely from runes and gear stat lines — “grinding skill levels” for a bigger number isn’t a real lever here.

Where the board’s order goes wrong

The community-consensus order (rune enhancement → seals → gear enhancement → titles → fashion → gems) isn’t wrong on direction — it’s wrong on structure. It queues gold-spend, Trace-spend, and ticket-spend items in the same line, when they don’t compete for the same resource at all:

• The gold line (rune enhancement, gear enhancement, enchanting): these fight each other for the same currency, so this is the only line that needs an internal order — rune enhancement’s +5%-per-level wear bonus, which never resets on failure, is the gold line’s #1 pick.
• The Trace line (class level, level-up cards, titles): spends only Spirit’s Traces. #1 pick is the “Versatile” title at cumulative class level 675 — roughly 0.026 combat power per Trace spent, zero gold, the highest per-unit efficiency on the entire table (full route in the title-priority guide, not yet translated into English — the Traditional Chinese original has the complete argument).
• The ticket line (seals, dice): spent on Monster Bounty Tokens and event tickets. Seals fill a slot, not a piece of gear — the bonus survives every future gear swap, permanently. The weapon-slot Star Seal alone is +300 attack — the single largest one-time free attack bonus in the game.

The seal line has a real, verified upgrade path worth knowing about: Star Seal (Season 0, TW-live) gives weapon +300 attack / emblem +10% / necklace +150 attack / rings +50 defence each / armour +100 defence each. Blue Moon Seal (Korea Season 1, confirmed reachable on TW) replaces it at weapon +500 attack (+200 over Star Seal alone) plus two bonus stat lines, emblem +11%, necklace +250, rings +80, armour +180. Red Moon Seal (Korea Season 2, not yet TW-live) adds all stats +40 on first use, +5 per repeat up to +60 — from a field boss Taiwan doesn’t have yet. The three tiers must be filled in order, and because a seal bonus is permanent once slotted, this line compounds every season it stays available — which is exactly why it’s the ticket line’s #1 pick, not an afterthought.

The three lines only compete for one thing: your play time. So the right read isn’t “finish line 1, then line 2” — it’s keep each line’s #1 pick moving at the same time.

The three things almost every stuck-at-30k account is missing

Cross-referencing hundreds of “why am I stuck” screenshots against the table above, the gap is almost always one of the same three:

1. Runes upgraded for rarity, never enhanced. Fusion money went toward a prettier star rating while the wear bonus sat at +0. The board consensus — stop fusing once a slot reaches legendary (orange), redirect that gold to enhancement — is correct, but the reasoning is season-dependent (rules change around a season changeover), covered separately.
2. Seal slots left empty. The most common pattern: weapon slotted, necklace and emblem empty. This line costs no gold at all — it’s pure “hasn’t gone to redeem it yet.”
3. Cumulative class level 675 unclaimed. A free 412.5 combat power sits unclaimed on a lot of accounts well past 35,000 CP, because it isn’t inside any “equipment” screen a player thinks to check.

What free, low-spend, and monthly-pass players do differently

• Free-to-play: the board’s own measured ceiling — weapon +15, armour all +9, one seal slot short, an epic pet, full legendary runes, cumulative 675 — lands at 29,000; a second, slightly different free build (all +10, weapon +14, runes maxed) lands at 27,000. Both are player-measured, not theoretical — 30k is genuinely reachable free, and the route is exactly the three #1 picks above. Skip fashion and gems entirely below that line.
• Small spender: monthly bundles and dice-roll material packs first, then consider one fashion set (roughly +50 combat power per piece, plus a charm stat that doesn’t show on this table).
• Monthly-pass and above: a pet’s one-time epic→legendary promotion (+450 to +500) is the single largest lump-sum gain any purchase buys; enchant amplification and the gem line only start mattering from here.

One check that applies at every spending tier: weapon proficiency link. A secondary weapon’s proficiency bonus applies even while your main weapon is equipped — the bonus reads off both weapons’ attack/rune-attack gaps at 40% each, so a cheap secondary weapon adds free output to your main. Rule of thumb from community measurement: keep the secondary one enhancement stage behind the main through +11–+14, then push it to +15 once the main clears +15–+17. This slot is empty on almost every stuck screenshot, and it’s frequently the actual gap behind “same combat power, losing anyway.”

Combat power isn’t strength — know when to stop chasing it

Two things are true simultaneously: combat power is the best single progress ruler this game gives you, and it’s a display formula, not damage output. Korea demonstrated both at once in August 2026 — the operator’s own combat-power guide got mocked by players for recommending stat-inflating picks, and the leaderboard briefly displayed a rank-1 combat power of 370,000 (a display bug; genuine top-end sits around 100,000). Taiwan’s board has its own live example from the same month: a Dancer at 22,000 out-damaged a Priest at 26,000 in the same run — a party screening by raw combat power is often screening out the player who can actually clear the fight.

The practical stopping rule: once a content gate is cleared, stop pushing raw CP for that gate. Gates are measured against “recommended combat power” figures (e.g. Wraith Tower floor 19 sits around 21,110 — a Korean community value; Taiwan hasn’t published its own number for it) — past the gate, the next thousand combat power is worth less than fixing a gem reforge tag or a skill remodel choice. Below the gate, the reverse holds: difficulty scales are punishing at low CP, so fix the number before touching technique. A Hard-difficulty raid’s boss HP runs at triple a normal clear’s baseline by board measurement — the encounter is designed around you arriving with the gate’s stat line already met, and no amount of skillful play closes a gap that size alone.

Written in English from Taiwan’s 62 sourced combat-power entries, the display formula, the rune wear bonus, and the content gates, alongside this site’s Traditional Chinese original. The full 62-row source table and the priority calculator live at /en/cpsources/ and /en/cp/; a gap-to-next-gate diagnostic is at /en/gap/.