Beginners Tips and Tricks
By NoahIvaldi.
Overall
Don’t let anxiety control you. This is supposed to be fun. There aren’t many decisions that you can’t take back. If you can beat a The Fool’s Journey stage with one star, you can keep pushing and learning and always come back for the other stars later without spending any endurance. You can always inspect a battle and back out without spending any endurance at all, and even if you start a battle and quit, you get refunded all but one endurance. There shouldn’t be much stress, and even less if you just take a moment to research. Take advantage of the resources that have been made for you, take a breath, and have a fun time.
There are just a few fields in which you should do your research, rather than feel it out:
- Your choices of on which banners to spend your hope luxites will be defining moments. The vast majority of your luxite should go to pulling good, versatile, fun characters that will let you clear more content and play the game without feeling hamstrung. You can still afford to spend some chasing after your fan favorites, just with realistic expectations.
- Character skill choices can’t be reset. Which skills you choose at rank-ups should be determined by the correct build to use the character to its fullest, as shown in the build resources. Check on others’ input on a char before building. We do get a resource called “castalia” that allows additional skill purchases, but it’s very rare.
- Most weapons are pretty plentiful, but trinkets are often difficult to acquire in sufficient quantities, and the upgrade resources that go into both are always stretched thinly. Mind the guides before you go fusing, breaking down, or leveling gear.
- Other resources are generally plentiful enough, but if you are wasteful with tarot whispers (levelling bad ones, not levelling good ones, so on), you can deplete your essence and gold pretty badly.
- Engravings in particular are a terrible RNG grind, and you should read the guide on them before you proceed.
Click and read everything. Missing daily, weekly, and monthly quests is a surefire way to hinder your resource income drastically. The game expects you to go around collecting all the handouts and info that it gives. Orange stars indicate new stuff. Always check your orange stars and whatever you don’t recognize.
Click and read everything. All units have info windows that can show all abilities and all buffs/debuffs currently active on them. Red text in a description can be clicked. Doing so opens additional tooltips explaining the highlighted effect.
Manage resources intelligently. You don’t have to level and rank-up everyone. You don’t usually have to rank up low-rarity units past the point of getting their last relevant skill.
Read the character guides. Their decisions are made with math- and experience-driven rationale. If you are considering deviating from them or unsure of which gear you can use to make the best out of a poor situation. Never rely on in-game chat. Don’t go with your gut; go with your math. You’ll have more fun if you make good decisions and are rewarded for them than if you take blind pot shots and beat your head against a wall.
You don’t have to use common EXP to level your units up to the maximum if you can get away with less. They accrue EXP both by participating in combat too. If you use common EXP to level them to the max, the in-battle EXP is completely wasted.
Don’t use canned octopus sweeps regularly. Characters used in normal sweeps aren’t locked out of usage; they’re just locked out of additional sweeps for a few hours. They get char EXP and bond EXP for doing so. This is especially noteworthy for tarot risiduals and weapon trials, as they allow a full cast of 5 for sweeps, so sweeping is just as efficient as manually running.
Grinding / Time Management
The optimal grinding method is to push all Crossing Worlds to the greatest difficulties that you can accomplish with first clears, then repeat all of them at their highest levels once/day for optimal resource income. If you’re about to hit a new stage of dailies, don’t spend your extra rewards on your current level; hit the new stage for a first clear, then do that one again for the extra rewards.
Only the Tarot Risidual daily is ever worth skipping (until you have a great surplus of rank-up medals), and only under the condition that you’re too weak to complete a high enough stage to get legendary tarot whispers. Look up videos for strategies, and you can see how this should only apply to you before about lv30.
Memory Retrieval should generally be performed with 3 units, or even just 2 if you’re so low-level that your highest stage gives fewer than 7 shards. It’s better to focus-upgrade some useful SSR units than spread the stars around slowly.
Grind the Tower of Conquest to the top once, and then you just have to beat 9-5 from then on for optimal rewards.
Once you reach Radiant tier in Clash, you only need to do that mode once/day for some hope luxite, or you can keep doing it thrice/day if you’re short on activity points. The free tarot whisper that can come from Clash can be great too, so keep an eye out for those quick and easy wins!
Defense for Clash gives you virtually nothing! It is good etiquette to set intentionally easy defenses! Lv1 units, especially melee units, surrounded by stockades/banners (+ natural walls) are great for allowing people to quickly and easily get their missions done. Banners enhance their stats, but not meaningfully if they’re all low-level units without gear, and banners break more easily than stockades. We’re all playing such a time-consuming game. Just be considerate and let others climb for loot.
How do you spend excess endurance? Assuming that you’ve done all the event and TFJ levels that you can, it basically goes radiant forging to lv50, more radiant forging/common EXP to 55, and star trials/radiant forging thereafter. See the FAQ.
Combat Understanding
Facing is determined by your last taken action or movement. It can not be adjusted manually (which is actually a good thing for the flow of the game, given mobile controls). Make your decisions carefully. Exposing your back to an enemy may sound like an effective means of baiting an attack, but since the AI tends to go for someone within range even if they can only attack head-on and deal pitiful damage, this is rarely a tactic worth employing.
Think of everything in terms of range and radius, and from there, evaluate priorities. You have to bunch units together to take advantage of your positive effects (e.g. a radius of 3 around Flag-Waving Gloria for her aura’s buff, with a range of Gloria’s potential movement … a radius of [global] for Gloria’s stationary flag’s buff, with no range increment considered because of its [global] radius … a radius of 3 around Gloria for Longinus – Brilliance to buff allies, with a range of Gloria’s potential movement … a radius of 6 for a Clash banner’s aura, with a range of the static position in which you established that banner … a radius of 3 around Maitha for the healing and buffs of Come On, Everybody!, with a range of Maitha’s potential movement …), yet you also want to stay out of all the radii of all enemy attacks, with ranges of their potential movements plus the individual attacks’ ranges.
You can’t accomplish everything. You have to enter danger zones. You can’t always buff/heal your whole party at once. People have to spread out to accomplish separate goals and avoid losing to AOE attacks. You just have to accept the fact that there are good decisions and bad ones, and that your decisions weigh on your ability to mitigate downsides and maximize upsides within reason. The point is that this is a give-and-take game, so you should learn every detail, but not sweat every detail. There’s a difference.
Think of everything in terms of action economy. Getting to enemies sooner or making them take a turn without being able to reach you (MOV, move again, SPD, range …) is major. Hitting more enemies per turn (Strike Back, Alert, AOE, extra turn …) is major. Hitting a little harder is not a big deal. Hitting hard enough to defeat an enemy sooner, depriving them of a turn to hit back, is a big deal.
Tactics can be gamechangers, but they are secondary; your units and their functions are primary. Tactics’ ranges are calculated from all current allies’ positions. You may be tempted to spread your units apart to be able to spread your Tactics wide, but it’s often more important to keep allies within radii of auras, AOE buffs, and AOE heals, only spreading apart when enemy AOE attacks are too severe.
Speaking of tactics, learn how to get a lot of tactics points (TP) quickly. Enhance the talents for TP as high priorities, and click on the little info button on the tactics equip page to see what actions will get you a bunch of extra points.
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