There are many different paths to start in CE, but most beginner guides recommend either Arson or Farm Robbery as the early-game job. Arson can be used to directly gain rep whereas Farm Robbery provides items which can be sold on the market. With the money, cocaine and points/refills can be bought to provide energy for additional attacks.

While many reasons for one or the other job have been given already, I have not seen any analysis based on data yet. That's why I decided to make a small calculator in Excel which can calculate the daily rep gain based on various factors.

If you wanna play around with the calculator yourself, feel free to copy the sheet here.

It's important to note that all market prices may vary, so the results may change with the market. These are the price values I used: Cocain - 500k, Points - 45k (from the npc), Fertilizer - 20k, Agave - 60k, Coca - 40k.

Now, let's get to the results:

My first calculation used no premium bonus, 12 hours of daily playtime, 100 rep per target and no prestiges. With Arson, you can expect about 4.7k rep/day on average, while making no profit. Farm Robbery will get you 5.5k rep/day with a profit of about 1.6mil.

Next, I used no premium, 6 hours playtime, 70 rep and no prestiges, so a very early-game setup. Arson was able to make 2.2k rep with no profit, Farm Robbery made 2.6k rep with no profit.

My last calculation used premium, 15 hours of playtime, 200 rep and max prestiges on both jobs. Arson was able to make 20k rep with no profit and Farm Robbery made 14.5k rep, but with 10.2mil profit.

And just for reference, Intimidation made 3.9k, 1.7k and 15.5k rep in each scenario.

To sum up, it appears that Farm Robbery is the clear winner for early-game rep grind, but Arson will be better in the later game. These were just a few example setups, so I encourage you to use the calculator and find out what job is optimal for you.

All the results should be taken with a grain of salt, as they don't account for success rate, prestiging speed, availability within your playtime or Personal Favor drop rate. But you should still get a good idea of what daily rep gain you can expect under given circumstances. I personally started with Arson and I will probably stick with it as I can't always use my energy optimally.

I'm sure there are people who can infer the perfect strategy from the data and make all kinds of fancy charts, but I am not very good at statistics or data science, so I'll leave that part to others. Here are some not so fancy charts instead:

I might've gotten some of the base job values for the more advanced jobs wrong, please let me know if you have better averages. Same thing if I made any other mistakes.

Farm Robbery for bulk fert is amazing 👍👍

Been saying this to Diablo on so many occasions, I gave up. He rather listen to the few loud attention seeking brain farts on discord. 

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