Just started in royals, have pretty much nothing but NX from voting and some clean equips/atk WG that were gifted. Is it even worth it to level my thief with no established funds for int gear and with mostly just normal play and use the HP quest or should I play something else until I can build a washing setup and just wash from where it is now at a later point?
Just play the game. Ignore everyone telling you HP-Washing is required. It is not. Since you will deal no damage when doing HP-Washing you kinda have to leech as well. My rule of thumb is that washing a non-warrior with less than 150 Base INT is just not worth the burden. HP-Washing to some significant enough amount in combination with leeching to lvl ~135 has a minor price tag of about 6-12b meso. If you think that is a lot of meso that you'd rather spend on playing the game. Please, just go play the game instead. My lvl 160 NL has 4 base int. No INT equips and has 10k HP. I did the repeatable hp-quests like 20 times in total, rest is from gear and other quests. (such as Olaf's Assignments) If you make it your priority to get a Zhelm at lvl 50. Together with other random All-Stat gear you'll find yourself at some amount of INT regardless, allowing you to do some minor washing without any investment. Yes, you could buy INT gear and switch it on at 99.99% exp, level up. The gains will be marginal but if that's how you want to play the game. By all means, go for it. imo it's not worth the effort or the cost. Check out the many posts about alternative ways to gain HP. This Forum has at least 1 guide about anything you can do in this game. Welcome and glhf on the grind !
I have several friends who play NL and got into 18x-200 without washing. They did Reuel to get to 9k5 Elinia HP quest to get 1k Olaf for another 1k5 Wash some extra MP (relatively low cost) and get to around 13-14kHP They can run Horntail just fine, imo washing is not worth/needed for newcomers.
I have 25.5k HP on my NL without any washing. You really should focus on playing rather than washing on your first char in my opinion.
