There is no "quick" way other than paying real money. You just have to grind.

"heat up your gear to craft it to the next level, that's the longest part in the crafting process."

If you're free-to-play, then the longest part of the crafting process is saving up the crowns to buy the CE needed to carry out the higher-star upgrades. The second-longest part is delving again and again to depth 23 or depth 13, to find the recipes you need. You can avoid this part by buying recipes from other players, but then you pay a premium, unless they're good friends. So build up a network of friends, and politely ask them to shop for you by mail, when they are at depth 23 or depth 13.

Yes, you want to farm the most lucrative parts of the Clockworks, which are generally Firestorm Citadel (and the rest of Stratum 6), Royal Jelly Palace (and the rest of Stratum 4), and any stratum with a lot of arenas.

You might find my guides useful, particularly the general Equipment Guide, although the Sword Guide is better. Although everyone is too polite to say it, you're going to want to ditch your Defender, Spur, and probably Cutter.

Yea brady, the crowns take forever >.>

By the time that i finish heating up some 4* items, i'm already looking at which equipment i'm going to upgrade next. And then grind for it.

Heat can either be very long or very short. I got my salamander from lvl 0 to lvl 10 in 2 days just now. The easiest way is to join some randoms and get allot of revives. Don't be a complete nub if you do that though, I've seen people blow each other up for heat. I already have lvl 10 five star gear, so I was letting them get more crowns in firestorm cidadel, wheras I got more heat. Fair trade.

Crowns can take a while, since you need them for buying the recipie and getting CE if you're a free player. Grinding bosses and lockdown or blast network make it go by faster. Grinding bosses is self explanatory, just go into the gate and play the levels over and over for money. Lockdown and blast network are a bit trickier.

If your in teir two, you can ussualy make a good bit of money selling items from basil. All items start from teir two items or lower, so teir three players have to either go back and play easy levels, or buy recipies from teir two knights. There's lots of teir three players to sell too, and not as many teir two players to compete with.

If you do lockdown, you'll want either one, three, or five star gear. Save for things like the crystal bomb that don't go past four star, using any four or two or zero star items makes you easier to kill. To break even on matches alone, you need to win 5 out of 7 matches. That's not really logical though, so you have to rely on the coins to make money. Say you win 1/2 of your matches. That means you get 3 coins every 2 matches and 280 crowns, but you spend 400 crowns. So you lose a total of 120 crowns for three krogmo coins. 120 divided by 3 is 40. So for 40 crowns you can make 1 krogmo coin if your an average player.

Mod calibrators cost 75 coins. 40 times 75 is 3000. So a mod calibrator costs 3k crowns to make. However in the auction house, you can sell them for 10k. 10k minus 3k is 7k. That means you make 7000 crowns for each mod calibrator you sell, and you don't need any energy.

Enamarock costs 10 coins. 10 times 40 is four hundered crowns. They sell for 1400 crowns on the auction house, so you make 1k crowns for each enamarock you sell. If you sell 7 enamarocks, that costs 70 coins, and makes 7k crowns. That's as much profit as a mod calibrator, but you save 5 coins.

The second most important thing is choosing the right gear. Wolver is a good call, but spurs and normal-damage-only weapons aren't much use in the gates. Chroma is a great peice to use, becuase it's very effective on the royal jelly levels, and is also can be used on firestorm cidadel well at only four star instead of five. Plus you don't need to craft a two star peice since it starts at three star. The only problem with it is the fact that it's not as good in lockdown, since the slime damage bonus is useless.

The most important thing is to save your money! Don't spend it all on random things that you think you'll level up, buy only what you need, and only work on one item for each armor or weapon slot at a time. You never know when you'll suddenly need a bunch of money. I saved up one hundred thoudand crowns, even though I wanted to burn it, and suddenly I see a chroma mask with max curse! Luckly I had enough money to buy it. I'm in the process of making it into arcane salamander.

In summary, the most important things are to grind levels, sell recipies, sell krogmo items, get a chroma suit or mask to make into a salamander item, and save your money up. If I were you, I'd get a chroma mask instead of pure wolver, get the plate sheild instead of defender, and keep the nightblade and the wolver coat. Nightblades destroy players in teir two lockdown.

@Orangeo that's some good advices, except some things :
- use numbers instead of spelling them please. Seriously, that makes the part about profit unreadable (especially for non-native speakers).
- advising Chroma is bad. Instead, you should use a role-specific armor. Their bonus is universal, contrary to chroma which is only against slimes. And for swordsman and bomber gear, both have an option for fire resist at 5*, plus a bonus which is actually useful in FSC.
- the plate shield is good, but for general use, owlite is often better because there is a lot of elemental (puppies are the most frequent type of turrets, and you find mechaknights and lumbers in a LOT of places), and elemental is also generally more dangerous than others damage type (with the notable exception of devilites, but plate doesn't do much better).

Allowing low skill players to play FSC or any T3 with suboptimal armour is akin to lowering unbind costs and letting them buy 5* gear and go kamikaze in said tiers. And by making monster specific armour means you need to spend more in the long haul to get other sets that are useful against multiple monsters in different environments.

General sets are decent, but as you said, T2 players farm jelly depths for crowns. Thus, making a piercing defence set set such as gunslinger and wolver allows the player to deal more damage to everything in rjp, not just jellies.

Most of the time, players in 3* can run rjp profitably enough to have 3 weapon slots a month. Why limit your armour if you can have 3 weapons that cover everything? Monster specific sets only cover that monster. Why not a global increase in asi or damage so you can use the three weapons to deal with any monster you'll encounter?

VPS is a viable shield, no doubt about that. Its just that owlite covers a broader status effect. Yes, it is more useful than owlite in fsc, but outside of fsc, owlite is better. If you get hit with fire through your shield, you take damage. Thats all. But if you are shocked, your shield gets dropped whenever the status happens. As opposed to being able to shield while suffering fire, preventing other enemies hitting you.

I honestly find it takes me longer to heat stuff up than farm the money. Doin' JK pays for itself and then some; the money comes form that steadily enough, but unless you're spamming FSC (which I doubt the OP is doing, considering..) heat just takes bloody forever to get a set of 4* stuff to +10. And below that then...well it's cheap enough as well.
Idk, maybe that just comes down to where you go?

@Fradow (i think):
Family armours can be good, but it is dependant on your playstyle and class.
As a bomber, I have a D.Viru set for RJP, which gives all my bombs *and* my sword VH slime damage (which is 90% of RJP mobs), whereas class specific armour can't do that. It also (the most important bit) gives relevant defence values and often relevant resistances.
I also have a fiend set, for extra damage on fiends, and status resists from them (again, that applies to bombs *and* swords) as well as giving me the relevant defence, whereas my bomber armour gives my bombs max, but my swords nothing, and also lets them absolutely chew through my defence.

The main point is if you use different weapons. Family bonuses apply to all weapons, whereas class specific armours can potentially make half your loadouts lax.
Also depends how much trouble you have with them. If you absolutely mince through them, the defence won't matter to you much.

Well idk then QQ

S'been a while since I've had to stop and actually compare having no cr/ce to having a 4*+0 set, so to actually compare I'm just going from memory. After I finish my current set I should have pretty much hee haw left, so when I'm making my next set after that I'll definitely compare it then. There's enough people slapping me down here that I'm either very wrong, or doing somethin' very, very right...and I doubt that's the case, 'cuz I suck D:

Darkbrady, I cannot imagine how heat could be the limiting factor for you, unless you are dying a huge amount and losing all your heat.

Yes, RJP can "pay for itself", but you need to make a huge amount of money for a 5* item, not just break even. Even with an arena before it, and selling the boss tokens, I don't think you're going to make more than about 6k for the stratum (the total is higher if you include stratum 3, but it's FAR less efficient in both time and energy).

The upgrade from 4* to 5* costs 100 mist + 700 CE (*65cr/ce >= 45k at current market prices), plus a 5k craft fee, plus a 25k recipe (more on AH), plus a 5* material that you'll likely pay ~3k for. That's at least 78k, or around 13 RJP runs on mist (nearly double that running on CE, since replacing the CE will eat half your profit).

Heating a single 4* item to level 10 does NOT take 13 RJP runs, especially if you start the stratum with an arena. Not anywhere remotely close. Probably more like 4, if you neither die nor revive anyone else (though I've never felt the need to measure it exactly, so that may be slightly off).

Maybe you were heating an entire set of 4* items at once, and that could have taken you longer than making enough money to upgrade ONE of them to 5*. Or maybe you did this a super long time ago; I've heard that way back in the day, crafting costs were much lower and CE was much cheaper and RJP gave higher payouts. But at present, grinding crowns easily takes several times as long as grinding heat.

might be wrong or unusual

"Unusual"
/sniffle

I reckon the main factor that's throwing me off is [Antistone did say this, actually] that I usually only upgrade 1/2 parts at any given time, but I'm regularly heating 4/5 parts per run (I like to make the most of my runs and get as much as possible heated up while I'm gettin' cash, yo) and comparing the time it ultimately gets to heat up that 4* (alongside multiple others) to the time it takes to farm the money to upgrade only the one.

Cannae mind the last time I just sat and heated up 1/2 parts alone, but like I said; I will make a point of doing it and comparing it to financial costs, as to not create this ruckus again xD

It's just a mentality thing; i'm rarely in an actual rush to level something specific up, so just do my regular runs and let everything heat up. That way, when I do need/decide to level up [whatever], the odds are that it'll already be halfway there, whereas if I lvl'd up one thing at a time, I might need/want something lvl'd suddenly that I haven't touched, and have it at only +1. Just what I prefer, is all :)

ANOTHER.

NECROMANCER.

IS.

HERE.

People have this strange notion. They think the happiness is at the goal, but when they reach that goal, they want some other goal. All the while not enjoying getting there, and not enjoying their goal, since it is quickly replaced by another one which they have not reached.
It is usually the case, people rusing through a game is usually the first to leave that game.