How can I level fast?

The key to leveling fast is to simply make the most efficient use of your time when NOT playing. Sounds counterintuitive, but let me explain.

To level up requires gaining experience, which you can do via 1) jobs or 2) fighting. At any given moment you have a limited amount of energy available for jobs and stamina for fighting. This is your energy bank and stamina bank. As soon as you log in and start playing, those banks start draining.

However, though they are limited right now, they will fill back up gradually over time until they are full. Once they are full, they stay there waiting for you to use them up again.

One part of leveling fast is you actively sitting at the keyboard, doing jobs, fights and robberies. However the other part is making sure that when you're NOT playing that your banks are filling themselves up. Energy and stamina are worthless. They do nothing to make your character stronger or higher level... until you turn them into experience & levels.

Let me tell you a story of high adventure...

Your Magical Wallet of Riches

Let's say that I gave you a magical wallet, one that will always have $10 in it -- if you spend any money from the wallet, you'll find a $1 has magically appeared every minute until it's full at $10 again! Don't ask where I got it and if a troll who has a wallet-sized chunk taken out of his left buttock asks about me, you've never heard of me. I then throw down a ninja smoke bomb and vanish down an alleyway.

You sit stunned for a few moments, wondering whether you should stage and intervention for me. But you decide $10 is $10 and you could use a free wallet so, there's no harm in keeping it. Can my story be true though? Will this wallet really give you money? Though rightly skeptical, you decide that if you hang onto that $10 that's in the wallet, you'll never know if the wallet is magic, plus if it really IS magic, the magic wallet is not going to generate any more money unless you spend some. Besides, when you think about it, having $10 is worthless unless you can trade for something that's WORTH $10; otherwise it's just fancy paper with a number on it. So you decide what the heck, you'll venture spending $1 on a Slurpee; you now have $9 and a Slurpee. Even if this wallet is a bunch of horse-hockey, at least you've got a refreshing Slurpee and $9.

60 seconds later, your magic wallet makes a soft "cha-ching" noise from your pocket. After you've reigned in your twitchy bladder and collected yourself, you look inside, and see that WOW! The wallet really has magicked up a dollar because it saw that there was less than $10 in there. You only had $9. Now you have $10 again, plus a Slurpee! Whoa! Excitedly, you take your Slurpee and your magic wallet that's got $10 in it again over to the mall and purchase a $10 t-shirt. You have a Slurpee, a T-shirt and an empty magic wallet... but you sit patiently outside Starbucks listening to your wallet go "cha-ching" every minute for 10 minutes. You could get used to this! Now you've got a Slurpee, T-shirt and $10 again! This wallet is awesome! You can keep buying things that cost up to $10 and you will be progressively getting richer every time -- you're turning an unending supply of $1 bills from the magic wallet into items you own, increasing the amount of stuff you own. You're getting richer $1 every minute, as long as you keep that wallet under $10! The only thing that is required from you is to wait a little bit, and then spend what you have so the wallet can work its magic.

After a few hours of wandering around the mall making shopping stops every 10 minutes or so, you've got a Slurpee, a t-shirt, some socks, a used videogame, a book, a calendar and some Cinnabon. You're sitting in the food court waiting 10 mintues for your wallet refill when a magical pleather gnome appears out of nowhere and tells you that he collects store receipts and if you'll give him all your receipts he'll make your wallet hold $50 instead of just $10.

You are liking this since receipts are pretty useless, so you hand them over and the gnome sneezes some kind of blue dust all over you and your Cinnabon and then vanishes right as you feel a weird pop coming from your wallet pocket. You open your wallet and sure enough it looks bigger and more pleathery, and there's a $50 in there! Now you can go to the shoe store and pick up some shoes to go with your socks & t-shirt, and then maybe the department store for some pants, if you and the wallet have enough time before the mall closes. You might even go have a nice $50 dinner... you'll have a good 50 minues before your wallet is full again, so there's no rush! Life is looking good for you.

Energy and stamina are the same thing as magical wallet money. The game itself is your magic wallet. Your character isn't any stronger for having energy and stamina, just like you aren't enjoying $10 worth of stuff by merely clutching a $10 bill -- you get stronger by SPENDING that energy and stamina and turning it into experience, just like turning that $10  into stuff you own/use/enjoy.

The supply of energy and stamina will never run out; you will always get more of it so long as you've got room in your bank to hold it. Your smartest move is to make sure your bank isn't full! Spend it as often as you can, and have a big enough wallet for the times when you can't spend it all right away! Keep your bank from being full and you are constantly raking in "the dough" in the form of Energy or Stamina that can be turned into "bunches of stuff" which is experience.

So how do you make the most of this situation?

1. Use up all your stamina and energy whenever you sit down to play.
   1. This includes using your Energy pack wisely by timing it so you use it when you're completely of energy and generally less than halfway to level.
   2. When you have a decent bit of stamina left but you are about to level, find the job that requires the most energy and gives the most experience; you'll lose the leftover energy, but the experience that takes you past leveling will still apply towards the new level you're on.
2. Try to play often so you're constantly draining off the energy/stamina you've received
   1. When you level up, your energy gets refilled. If you use up the last of your energy on the job that levels you up, you're efficiently using that free 100% refill. This is a lot more likely to occur if you're able to play a few times over the course of the day
   2. Stamina recharges pretty fast and you probably don't have more than 20 or so. This means you can be completely stamina'd up to fight every 20 minutes or so. Averaging 2 experience per successful fight/robbery will add up if you can use it up throughout the day.
   3. I'm not saying get obsessed with playing all day at the expense of your real life, or worse, your job! My suggestion is that if you find yourself doing a quick Facebook check, you might want to take just minute to open up Mafia Wars and quickly drain off your available experience & stamina.
   4. There's nothing wrong with NOT checking Mafia Wars often or even every day; play it how you want to play it. But this is a guide about leveling fast, so I've got to point out that part of that is playing often. :)
3. Put enough skill points into energy so that you will:
   1. Have enough energy to tackle jobs on the higher job tiers where a single job will cost you 50+ experience each time
   2. Have a big enough energy bank so that when you sit down to play the next time, your bank is still filling up. (In a perfect world, your bank would fill up the moment you sat down so you maximized your downtime while also maximizing the amount of playtime clicky-clicky fun you can have too, but in reality some days you're going to play often and other days you'll be too busy to check it more than once, if at all.)
4. Put enough skill points into stamina, health, attack & defense so that you will:
   1. Be able to fight as much as you want
   2. Win your fights (and survive/fend off attacks, if that's important to you)

All of these points are highly subjective. How you choose to allocate skill points is going to depend on your playstyle:

• How often can you play? 
  • If you can only play once a day, you definitely want to sock points away in energy as often as possible to compensate for the fact that you have a lot of downime (i.e. time that your bank should be recharging.) If you feel like you sit down to play and you've run out of jobs you can do too soon, then it's time to boost your energy bank, especially if you're logging in to a full bank every day.
  • If you play throughout the day, several times a day or say twice a day, then you might decide to have an energy bank just big enough to recharge while you're sleeping and at work. Again, if you feel like you don't get enough clicky-clicky time when you log in to play and/or your energy bank tends to be full when you pull up Mafia Wars, you might think about fattening up your energy bank with some skill points.
  • Regardless of how much you can play, be sure to keep ahead of the ever-increasing amount of experience required to level up.  No matter what, you will eventually reach a point where gaining a single level takes a whole lot longer.
• Do you enjoy fighting? 
  • if not, then instead of getting stamina (which is twice as expensive as the other skills), you can focus on your energy, defense, health or any combination you think will make you a happier and tougher mobster
  • If you like fighting a lot, then pump your stamina up to whatever feels good so you can fight/rob however many times you want when you sit down
    • You'll also want to put points into attack, defense and health so you can win those fights. How much you put in will depend on what you think will make you a stronger character.
    • Remember that stamina costs 2 skill points, which is twice as much as the other ones and also requires attack and defense be increase so you can actually gain something by using stamina to fight/rob. You are sacrificing a bit more when you pump stamina. I personally don't know what I'd do with more than 15-20 stamina but it's a personal choice, just understand how much the overall cost is when making your decisions.
    • Also remember that you only get 1 to 3 experience points fight (so essentially per stamina point.)
  • At higher levels, where the amount of experience required becomes significantly higher, stamina, attack and defense typically become more important to players since provoking people into hitlisting you (called riding the hitlist) is a very effective way to gain experience. Given that the game is called Mafia Wars and not Mafia Peace, don't forget that the intended goal is to become the most badass mobster around, not necessarily just the highest level that happens to be a pushover in fights.

That being said, there is no right or wrong way to allocate skill points, and there is no right or wrong way to level up. Just realize that you can't have a character that has high energy, high attack & defense, high stamina and high health unless you're willing to drop a lot of cash on Godfather points. If you're like me and want to wring out as much as you can for free, then finding the most efficient balance of skill points to match your playstyle is the way to go.

Remember:

• There will always be someone higher level than you.
• There will always be someone better equipped than you.
• There will always be someone with better stats than you.
• There will always be someone with better luck than you.
• There will always be someone with more time to play than you.

BUT!

• There will always be someone lower level than you!
• There will always be someone worse equipped than you!
• There will always be someone with worse stats than you!
• There will always be someone having worse luck!
• There will always be someone who has less time to play than you!

Enjoy yourself and enjoy your successes; look at your losses and mistakes as guidelines of where you want to improve, then work on it!

The absolute fastest way to level would be to find what job gives the most experience for the energy required, and then you'd set a timer to let you know when your energy was aout to fill up and whenver it went off, you'd plop down at the keyboard and do that one job over and over. You'd put all your skill points into energy so when you slept or showered or went ot the dentist, you'd be storing up precious energy so you could catch up once you got home. Once you got high enough, your energy bank would be huge so you'd go longer and longer waiting for your timer to go off so you could play. That would be the absolute max. way to level, barring also purchasing Godfather points by the bushel.

That would make for pretty horrible gameplay, since you'd miss out on other job tiers, mastery, collections, loot, fighting, robbing, hitlisting and everything else that defines Mafia Wars as the game that it is. You could get to level 1000 and have to win fights through luck because you'd have no attack or defense, hardly and health and no dropped loot since you only ever plugged away at the most efficient job available. Sounds horribly tedious and pointless, like spending all your magic wallet money on individual items at the dollar store so you could claim to be the richest person in the world in $1 crap merchandise. Not really that glamorous a lifestyle even if you are sitting on a mountain of $1 million worth of crappy coloring books, off brand pork rinds, plastic toys and Chinese AAA batteries.

So don't get hung up about 100% optimizing your leveling or your character. Do what makes YOU happy. As long as you keep at it and enjoy playing, you're succeeding. :)