...Coming in off just the Fate/Zero anime and the beginning of Fate/Stay Night - staggered in headfirst on Netflix awhile back and fell in love with Arturia in a serious way - and getting increasingly confused in here. :p But hi cool people! ^_^
!!! what's your friendcode? i got a bunch of max-levelled guys, you can borrow them as you please. also the next event is the Fate/zero fixit fic thing starting next week.
Dunno, I will check and tell you JOYFUL SCREAMING Pls. I've got like, the extremely basic stuff down But other than that, halp
HOKAY SO A Secret: You do not actually need to run a team of all gold Servants to be good at the game! Many many people will fight endgame bosses with bronze or silver Servants just to prove a point. And it's a good idea to put some time and energy into yours anyways, because the game rewards having a wide variety of servants and if you can have a low-cost Servant on your team, that leaves you more leeway with your team composition. Of those - it is really really hard to go wrong with any Servants from the original VN! Medea is a great caster, because her first skill can let her charge her noble phantasm to 100 percent at level 4, and it recharges itself after use. So you can just spam single-target damage with her for a good 3, 4 turns! The Assassins are also a good choice! Sasaki Kojiro and Hassan of the Cursed Arm are lightweight critical star generating machines, and Hassan gets a three-hit (not three turn - it lasts until someone attacks him three times, whether that takes 1 turn or 15 turns) evade skill later on, which is GREAT. And Cu Chulainn can be straight up unkillable - it is a GREAT idea to level him and keep him in your back row, he can be the difference between finishing a boss fight or losing 3 command seals and has been the last man standing for me MANY times. speaking of people you want in your back row - she is not AS essential now, but your Shielder is your friend and she is very very helpful in the lategame when she becomes the queen of defense she was always meant to be. plus she has a cost of 0, making her very helpful if you want to have a team with many gold servants! as a new player you are entitled to one free Super Rare (four star) servant! I went with EMIYA and he has not let me down ever. Heracles is also good, though like many Berserkers he has the issue of 'if you take your eyes off him for 2 turns he loses 80% of his health and takes forever to build up his noble phantasm' (he still hits like a truck though. who needs a noble phantasm. three buster cards is a noble phantasm.) but really, this is a game where you are trying to get JPGs of anime people. you go with your heart! (though if your heart tells you Stheno, Atalanta, or d'Eon, you are going to have to put together pretty specific teams to bolster them and they are going to be very circumstantially useful. you can still use them! but it might take more planning and thinking out.) it is a good idea to gather mana prisms. Those are those green cubes that can be exchanged at Da Vinci's shop for stuff! the best way to get them is to farm the 30 AP Ember Gathering quest in Chaldea Gate. That will give you about 9 silver exp cards, each of which can be traded for 1 green cube. These can be exchanged for special craft essences, summoning tickets, EXP cards, and ATK and HP increase cards. It is a good idea to build Bond Points with your Servants! Bond Points can be acquired by keeping a Servant on your team and running quests with them. The first five bond levels will mostly give you more character information and sometimes unlock upgrade quests, but once you get past level 5 bond, you start getting rewards like energy-refill Apples and Quartz. Plus one of the endgame bosses is literally fought with the power of friendship, here represented by 'if you have a strong Bond with your servant, they will do more damage.' To increase Bond Point gathering, you can equip/find a support equipped with the Heroic Spirit Portrait craft essences, or (in a few months) the Chaldea Lunchtime craft essence (five iterations of which will be available for 1000 mana prisms apiece. this is why it's a good idea to gather mana prisms.) since you are on the America server, you have an advantage over the Japanese one - you can look ahead to when Servants are released and plan accordingly! if you especially want X Servant, you can check the events list to see when that one will become available, for how long, when they are easier to summon, all that good stuff! and you will have ~2 years to plan if that's your inclination. ....that's the general advice off the top of my head. do you want anything in particular?
Okay so, first of all, how do I get my freebie, second of all I just realized I don't actually know how to level people up. I have a cu, so I'll shove him in the party
OK so, you know the little pull-up menu you use to get to the summon and the party setup screens? The second button from the left there should be labelled Synthesis and it has all the level up options. Servant levelling is the first option on top. Tap the big grey box on the left to open your list of Servants, pick out whichever one you want, then click on the rows of little grey boxes on the upper right, then select up to 20 cards to feed to that Servant, whether that's EXP cards, ATK and HP up cards (the little rabbity-looking ones), or other Servants. ATK and HP up cards can only be used on the Servant of their respective classes (unless they are all-class cards), and EXP cards will give bonus EXP if used on a Servant of their class. Servants don't give extras either way. Also on the Synthesis menu are the Skill levelling screen, ascension (used to raise a Servant's level cap once you max them out), Noble Phantasm levelling (basically works the same as EXP levelling, but you can only combine a servant with another version of itself, and only one at a time. You can do this five times and then they're maxed out), Craft Essence leveling (same as the Servant one, except the only way to raise a CE's level cap is to combine it with another version of itself), and Palingenesis (where after you raise a Servant to the absolute highest level it can get, 4th ascension max level, you can give it a Holy Grail. you only get a few holy grails in the entire game, so either choose very carefully based on long term strategy and team comp and growth curves, or you can just give them to your favorites because you love them and want to give them the best.) I think the Freebie servant is in Da Vinci's shop. You can get that through the pull-up menu as well! It is just to the right of the summon screen. I think it should be in Event Item exchange? The first one on top.
Also, re: farming: EXP cards can be farmed through the Ember Gathering quests in Chaldea Gate, the daily quests. One day there'll be Sabers and Riders, then Archers and Casters, then Lancers and Assassins, then back to Sabers and Riders. On Sundays every type is available. The 30 AP ember gathering node is very useful if you want mana prisms - silver EXP cards can be exchanged for mana prisms in the shop. Gold EXP cards can also be exchanged, but they only give you one prism, same as silver EXPs, so it's best to save those for actually levelling Servants. You can also get EXP cards through the gacha/summon (though the type is random, of course), and Da Vinci's shop and the event exchange shops usually have some gold EXP cards (the events also have silver cards.) Stat upgrade cards cannot be farmed. You can only get them either through the gacha, through Da Vinci's shop, or through the event shops. Farming materials - those being gems, monuments, and various materials - can be farmed! fategrandorder.wikia.com has maps of all the regions, with lists of what can be found there, and nowadays every quest has a little info-box that says what you've gathered from that node before. The training field daily quests also have materials specific to whichever class' day it is. QP - this gets really important later on. You earn QP by completing quests, but by the lategame significant upgrades'll cost a LOT of it. and you'll need to farm specifically for them. luckily the last set of Daily Quests is door farming, which is specifically and exclusively QP grinding. By completing the daily quests, you can also get mana prisms. Also! Master Missions. There's a list of 7 mini-missions on your homescreen. Complete those (by gathering different materials, fighting different enemies, or completing different things) and you get quartz fragments. You get 2 fragments per mission, and 7 fragments = 1 full quartz, exchangeable at Da Vinci's shop.
You need to pass Fuyuki to participate in the fate zero event by the way. There's a free Irisviel servant if you complete it, plus copies of her. She's one of the better supports in the game, a dedicated healer.
Since Zero event is coming up I remembered that all of this still happened Meanwhile the 'fight yourself, but the Final Pam, whose team is exclusively Arturias and welfare servants' event Riyo wrote gets enthusiastic approval. Sometimes this franchise can be so wonderful.
I got out of fuyuki and now I'm in "wyvern and zombie apocalypse, also Marie antionette is here with a pillow for a hat" hell That makes me happy
Ok so do you have a Hassan or a Sasaki? Either one will be invaluable in wyvern hell - this is where sasaki earned his Dragonslayer name. Single target noble phantasm with extra damage against Riders, speedy NP charge, and a personal evade are very helpful!
Got a sasaki, I was doing pretty well and then I ran into the phantom of the opera. He beat me up, so I gotta try that again
Man I forgot that Rashomon event switched to only having 1 day to get through each middle bar of Ibaraki's health. At least now there's 5 days to work at it. And next is the Journey to the West event! So that's fun.
