[Coda]

I'm trying to figure out why you're having so much trouble, ml. I feel like I'm missing some factor that would explain why I was doing better than you were when I was at that level. It sounds like your combo skill is good enough so it doesn't seem to be a question of your ability as a player, and I didn't pull the REM very often at all when I was at your rank so it's unlikely to be a question of IAP-related game advantages. (Actually you appear to be ahead of me in that regard.)

Yes, current descends ought to give you trouble because they keep gradually increasing the difficulty level of them (but the drops are correspondingly that much stronger). I just don't feel like that explains your troubles advancing in the normal and technical dungeons; I didn't hit the wall there until around Ocean of Heaven (and then another wall at Starlight Sanctuary) on the normal path and Hill of Iris's Rainbow on the technical path.

Maybe part of the problem is that they don't run the easier descends often enough anymore because the advanced players whine about not getting challenging content. Same with the Pal Egg Machine -- it used to be a useful source of early-to-mid-game monsters like Echidna, Succubus, and Vampire, but now it's been overhauled to cost more pal points and it doesn't drop teamworthy monsters anymore except during the "rare monster" carnival. And monsters that might be useful (Siegfried, Cu Chulainn, DQ Hera) are relegated to normal dungeons that you have to have already beaten Starlight Sanctuary to get -- when they'd be helpful to get you through them in the first place.

I guess my advice would be to aggressively farm weekend dungeon for coins so you can run the cheap coin dungeons, since that seems to be where a lot of the mid-tier monsters have ended up.