Not too long ago I was introduced to the idea of leveling up soul crystals as a means of making some decent money in order to afford upcoming armor needs (such as avadon for my SE). A clannie told me a good area to do this at was by the Devastated Castle on the doom servants (which I now know work up to level 8 and that's it). In my initial attempts to do this I did everything correctly since it was my SH doing all the damage and doing the soul capturing: get mob down to less than 50% (enough so the mob never rises above 50% or you have to beat the snot out of them until they're barely alive), do the soul capture, then kill the mob. The problem was it rarely ever worked. I lost a dozen, or so, crystals trying to get them past level 2. Then I tried going to doom knights and troopers. A different clannie told me he spent all of a day there and got...oh I don't know how many....3 or 4 crystals all the way to level 10. So...I moved there, died a few times, but tried to get things going. Never got anything in either area above level 6. I was kind of ticked in trying to figure it all out, examining the guide I found over and over, scanning the error messages, etc.
At this point I was introduced to a variety of theories which vaguely reminded me of everyone having their own special cure for the common cold. One person suggested trying to level the crystals to level 7 and then putting them aside and starting all over again. Then when you ran out of fresh crystals to use you started all over again with the level 7s and tried to get them up. Theory WAS that he believed you can level crystals up too fast...which I find kind of odd and hard to believe (then again I've seen some wierd stuff that is hard to explain). I was also introduced to the idea that I wasn't in the right level bracket to do all this...though the doom servants were 2 shot deals and the trooper and knight were 3 and 4, respectively. So...we aren't exactly talking hard core struggles here. Then I formed a theory on my own...and it seems a bit more plausible...but I'd like to compare notes or gather thoughts.
One area the guide said was perfect for leveling up crystals was the forest of mirrors...up to level 5. I seemed to be true. Oh sure...I lost the occasional crystal to this, that, or the other, but I never felt like they were getting destroyed like they were over near DC. Then, once I got all the crystals (that survived) up to level 5 I took them over and did the whole Evil Dead thing and swallowed the dark servants' souls for a while. I now have nine or ten level 8 crystals (which I'm not sure how much they go for). Later I'll do what I can to promote them to level 10 and see how much I can get for them as well. The theory I have formed is this (as odd as it may sound): You can't force big souls into little containers. Here I had these level 0 crystals and I was trying to force souls that could level crystals up to 8 in there immediately. I thought it would explain why they were breaking all the time. Also...the rate on crystals going from level 0 to level 5 in FoM was phenomenol to me (after skipping straight to the last few mobs on their evolution list. Then, after taking all these level 5 crystals back over to the doom servants they seemed to accept them more easily. I suffered a few losses of crystals...but it was nothing like just going straight over there to the doom servants and trying to start from scratch.
Is there an established order to how soul crystals should be created? Is level a factor (other than difficulty) in trying to do all this? Is it possible to level a crystal "too quickly"? I think not on that last one because sometimes one of my crystals would gain 3 levels in as much as 4 or 5 kills.
I'm just trying to find out the most efficient way of going about the whole process...unless I've found it already.