Disgaea – Meaning of People Shown in Green in the Hospital

edit I just realized that the rest of what I wrote only applies as you go much deeper into the game and you are just starting out.

Early on, the only way to get experience is to grind some levels. If the monsters don't give too much experience, throw some of them and combine them before finishing them off with your main character (Laharl) so he levels up faster. Try to save up your money and boost your customer rankings a bit and then pass a few 'more expensive items' bills to buy a good weapon to facilitate this. Bribe senators with really cheap stuff to assist in that area.

General early on tips:

• Use only a few units so they gain more experience and weapon skills.
• Toss enemies together to make them tougher, but not so tough that they wipe your party.
• Make ample use of the geo squares if its available, a lot of the early on levels is very obvious how you should position your units to gain the maximum benefit.
• Save up the money to buy better items once you pass a few 'more expensive items' bills.
• Don't make too many pupils, though a mage and cleric is handy. Laharl and Etna should be used to kill most of the enemies.
• Don't be afraid to replay some of the levels to gain more experience.

Late game stuff:

There are only two ways to gain experience in Disgaea:

1. Deal the finishing blow OR be a part of a team attack that kills a unit.
2. Gain it as experience reward at the end of a map.

Method 1:

I've found the best way to level up characters is through team attacks when paired up with a really strong ally. There are several ways to bump up the chances of a team attack:

• Pupils are more likely to perform a team attack with their teacher.
• Units using the same weapon type will gain a bonus chance to team attack.

Instead of grinding the lower levels, you can quickly boost a character to 100+ or more by having them join an attack on a high level enemy, once they're past the hump, they can start doing their own killing by giving them an exceptional weapon (like a level 100 Yoshi).

Another thing you can try is to combine all the enemies on maps with all invincibility squares (map 5-3 is perfect for this), and slowly wittle the high level enemy down.

Method 2:

This mostly works on item world levels due to ease of geo chaining. Find a map with a lot of +xp bonus (high end item worlds can give up to 100-250k or more experience as xp reward, if there's a few of them your character can easily earn 1 million experience at the end of the level).

Make sure you always have a scout that can geo change in your party when visiting an item world. This way, you can either a) do two geo chains by completing one, then using geo chain to create more colors, or b) do a geo chain on a map with no geo squares.

Find a map with lots of experience boost bonuses, then finish all enemies except one, then bring out all your low level characters, and then proceed to beat the level, they'll all gain the bonus experience.

Final Tips

Don't forget to equip statistician items on your low level character. Even though the max bonus per stack is 300, you can equip multiple stacks of them on one character for a LOT of experience boost.

Disgaea is a game involving a LOT OF grinding. If this isn't up your alley, then I'd suggest sticking to just a bare minimum number of characters rather than spreading out the experience, that way they'll always be rather over leveled and make the game much easier.

Story Characters are great to migrate the first 5 times because you get a 5% aptitude bonus for all stats the first 5 times; aptitude % means you gain that much of your equipment's stats as a %. So after 5 transmigrations you get 25% more out of all equipment for that character!

However, transmigrating shouldn't be done lightly unless you can very easily level your characters. You'll have to level your characters over again and gain enough mana for them to transmigrate again.

The main reason for transmigrating to Genius is because of the Inheritance Rate. Inheritance rate is how much of your Skill and Weapon experience you lose when you transmigrate. If you have 1000 Ax Skill and transmigrate with 50% inheritance rate, you now have 500 Ax Skill. Since there is no easy way to grind Weapon Level or Skill Level, losing skill level really hurts. Doing it early on can be good if you're sure you can get the mana/levels back in reasonable time.

If you can't easily get enough mana to migrate your character as a Genius, don't transmigrate yet. Disgaea is not about grinding, it's about grinding intelligently. You're too early in the game to worry about this from what I can tell.

Ability points don't stack in the way you describe; you always get 10 for genius, and you get a set amount of points extra for that character based on their total level.