Disclaimer: This is a beginner's guide. I am not an expert, I will never be an expert. In fact, there are some very basic aspects of this game I am still learning about. However:
I will assume that you know all the tutorial mechanics such as the jan-ken-pon/rock-paper-scissors nature of the game, how leader skills work, team cost, the friend system, etc.
Despite being for beginners, this guide is made with the end game in mind. Why? Because you can screw up raising your characters very badly. You can fix that mistake by raising another unit, but raising units is a very time consuming process that takes days to weeks. Hopefully you get it right the first time, and to do that, you have to plan from the start.
Disclaimer 2: I only play the JP version of this game, which has been out for 2 years. There are some mechanics that have not yet come out in the global version that are here in the JP version.
I. The Team
The team is all-important. In the end game, there are very few units that can solo a hard dungeon, and there's a 99% chance that you won't have one of them. The concept of roles is very important.
Tank: Probably the most important role in the team. In many hard dungeons, there are swarms of enemies. There's no way you can kill all of them before they take out your squishy units one by one. You need something to stand in the way or draw hits. Sometimes it is even easier to have two tanks! Any weapon can be a tank, depending on the specific character (some characters have bad defense growth even as defense type). In later hard mode dungeons, there are enemies that ignore some part of your defense. The only defense against those units is a good offense. (or an extremely rare super high evasion tank)
Attackers: All units that do significant enough damage to kill an enemy in one or two hits. This is very important because even grunt units can do fatal damage in one or two rounds. The best solution is to wipe out as many attackers as possible in the first salvo.
Boss killer: A subcategory of attacker. Possibly the second most important role in the team. In many end game dungeons, there is a unit that is so powerful, if you are unlucky, it can destroy even your tank in one round. In fact, there are some units that have preemptive strike when their health falls below 40-60%, meaning that even if you initiate the attack, they attack first! What's the solution? To kill it in one round, before preemptive strike is enabled.
Ranged attackers: Just another subcategory of attacker. These guys are important to whittle down a dangerous boss unit before you sweep in for the kill with one of your melee units. Only really useful if your boss killer unit can't finish the job in one turn. There are not a lot of ranged boss killer units (Halloween version Bashousen comes to mind).
Healer: In some situations, you will fight a war of attrition, and it is useful to have a bulky healer. I find for the most part, a healer is unnecessary and healing potions do the job just fine. The exception is some dungeons have units that poison (do percentage damage per round), which obviously does significant damage to your tanks no matter what defense they have. The good thing about a healer is it only has to be a staff unit. That means it can serve a tank role as well! Staff units make great tanks because you will find that many enemy AIs will attack staff units preferentially. There are some units that provide passive healing by healing all units around it a small amount at the beginning of every turn. I am not referring to those units, who often have other roles to play.
Sacrifice unit: In the beginning, you will not have enough team cost, or you will just plain not have enough good units. It is useful to have one crap unit that will draw one hit away from your squishies. Just make sure to unequip its weapon so you don't have to fix it later! Sometimes the sacrifice unit is a unit with a useful leader skill that you just haven't had time or resources to raise.
The takeaway message: Have at least one tank and two heavy duty attackers. Choose how to raise your units based on the roles you expect have filled in your team.
II. Stats, stat typing, and what they mean for roles in your team
A. Resultant stats (final score determined by your base stats and your equipment and leader skills)
HP: Average HP of a 5 star level 80 unit is 75-100, depending on typing, of course. HP is actually not a very important stat unless your unit is Sita, who can get like 130 HP. If you are not a tank, then you will probably die in 1-3 hits, no matter what your typing.
Physical and magical attack: You want at least 70 to be considered a decent attacker.
Physical attack = unit strength + weapon physical attack + weapon proficiency (I'm not sure what weapon proficiency is, but I think it is related to the letter rank. It is usually a fairly small number, ranging from 1 to 4)
Magical attack = unit magic + weapon magical attack + weapon proficiency
Damage = attack - enemy defense
Physical and magical defense: In the early hard mode dungeons, most heavy hitting enemies are physical types, so physical defense is the most important stat for your tank.
Physical defense = unit guard + shield physical defense
Magical defense = unit spirit + shield magical defense
Accuracy: The most important stat for practically any unit except staff units, who are not expected to hit anything at all. You should aim for even tanks to have high accuracy. There are some units that have naturally poor accuracy, but it is made up for by their skills (for example, if your unit is attacked, accuracy increases by 32 through a passive skill). You are aiming for 200 accuracy, which corresponds to an agility in the low 70s.
Accuracy = 1.5 * agility + 0.5 * luck + weapon accuracy
Chance to hit = accuracy - enemy evasion
Critical chance: Not much to say here. Determined by your agility, your weapon. Modified by the enemy's luck.
Crit chance = 0.5 * agility + weapon crit chance - enemy luck
Evasion: In hard dungeons, I would not rely on evasion at all. High evasion units typically have low defense, so even if they have 90% chance of evading attack, all it takes is one hit. Also, hard mode dungeon enemies tend to have very high accuracy.
Evasion = 1.5 * speed + 0.5 * luck
Power: A semi-useless stat that gauges the overall power of your unit. I don't know the formula. Anything above 450 seems to be very good. Keep in mind, however, that this number also includes irrelevant stats, such as magic for a unit that only uses physical attacks.
B. Base stats (your unit stats modified by leader skills)
Strength: Eighty is a decent number for attack power types, but it oftentimes goes up to 90 or 100 for some units. Agility type units can aim for 70-80 as a good number. Defense types have shit strength growth. A good number for them is about 60-65.
Magic: Determines your magical attack power. Early on, most hard dungeons are full of physical attackers, meaning they tend to have low or mediocre magical defense. You can take advantage of this for attacker roles.
Guard: You are aiming for 70-80 on your tanks. Keep in mind that if you are not intending for a unit to be a tank, guard and spirit are not that useful.
Spirit: Tends to range from 30-50 on your physical defense types. There are magic attackers early on, but I would not focus on magic defense too much.
Speed: If your attack power meets the threshold of doing more than 1 damage to your enemy, then speed becomes a major contributor to damage because it allows you to attack twice.
Double attack if unit speed - weapon weight > enemy speed +5
Agility: Oh so important. Personally, I think this is the most important stat ever. Primary determining factor for accuracy AND determines the rate at which special skills trigger AND determines critical chance. Critical chance is not so important, but the first two are. You want a high agility for everyone, if only to activate skills. Aim for at least 70. Obviously it depends on the unit itself, so many times it is not possible to reach 70.
Luck: You don't really build around luck.
C. Stat typing
There are probably a lot of players who played Brave Frontier first before coming to this game. Make no mistake: typing matters in this game.
Vitality (high HP growth, low speed and agility growth):
Generally considered the worst typing in the game because it detracts from agility, and the fact that, unless you have like 120 HP, you are probably dead in 2-3 shots anyway. HP is not a useful tanking stat. However, HP typing is useful for staff types because staff weapons have godawful accuracy, and staff units, even dexterity types, tend to have godawful agility growth. In addition, when you heal, you sacrifice some of your HP. Needless to say, you don't tend to raise staff units for attacking purposes. There are exceptions, of course.
Force (high strength growth, low guard growth):
Magic (high magic growth, low spirit growth):
Useful for attacker roles, obviously. I am actually amazed with attack power types. They tend to have good growth in all stats. Defense is not that important here.
Guard (high guard and spirit growth, low strength and magic growth):
Obviously the typing you want for your tanks. Also tends to be a safe typing for any unit because who wouldn't want more survivability? Make sure you have two attackers in your team though!
Dexterity (high speed and agility growth, low guard and spirit growth):
Considered universally the best typing for attackers (although if you want to try an evasion tank, go for it). Dexterity type has decent attack power growth, but the reason it is useful as an attacker is the speed, which contributes to double attacks, and agility which increases crit chance but also increases skill trigger chance. Some units have ridiculous skills, like ones that do 200-250% normal damage before critical hits. You want an activation rate of almost 100% for those. Agility typing will help you get there.
Balance (all rounder, higher luck growth):
In my opinion (and all this is opinion anyway), there are few units that benefit from being balance type. Some can reach amazing stats as an all rounder, but luck is just not that important of a stat. Starter Longinus can make a very effective balance unit because she can reach 70 defense and 65-70 attack and her active skill ignores 50% enemy defense, which makes her an effective attacker and tank at the same time! I still prefer her as agility or defense typing, however (again, personal preference). I would really research a unit before you decide to limit break a balance type.
D. Leveling and stat growth
General mechanics
Every time a unit gains a level, each stat has a chance of increasing by one. This means that there is both a chance to get no stat increases on level up and a chance to have all of them increase on level up.
Every stat has a leveling cap, or maximum it can reach before it can no longer increase on level up. You can tell when a stat has reached its leveling cap when there is a pink star next to it. A leveling cap is different from a fusion cap, which is explained a little later. This cap is also completely separate from evolution bonuses, which is explained later.
The exact chance that a stat increases when you level up is unknown. However, we can predict how well a stat grows based on a number of factors (this also applies to stat and fusion caps):
Stat typing: As mentioned above.
Cost: Higher cost units tend to have higher growth rates.
Free vs pay: Kind of correlates with #2, however. Pay units tend to be more powerful and have higher cost.
Unit type: For example, flying sword units tend to have near equivalent stat growth in guard and spirit, whereas ground sword units are heavily skewed towards guard. As another example, armor units have high guard growth and poor agility growth.
The character itself: Each character has its own personality. Swimsuit Artemis, for example has lower speed growth than other archers of similar stat typing. As another example, starter Longinus has very poor spirit growth even as a defense type (although this seems to coincide somewhat with #4 as many spear units have poor spirit growth).
Mana seeds: JP version only for now. As long as you have one equipped, they increase the chances that a certain stat is raised. There are mana seeds that help increase one stat or two stats.
Calculating stat growth
The average stat growth per level seems to be around 3 in the JP version. For a level 80 unit, a growth rate of 3.6 is pretty damn good.
Calculate your average growth by selecting your unit in the Reincarnation menu. Subtract the stats on the right from the stats on the left. Add the results all together and then divide by the number of levels you have gained (79 for a level 80). Typically you want to exclude irrelevant stats, like magic for strength based units.
For people of limited patience, here is an online calculator in Japanese. Stats of level 1 are on the left. Top middle is the level of your unit. Middle column is the stats of your unit at the level you enter above. Ignore the very right column and the top right drop-down menu.
E. Fusing units
Fusing is pretty self explanatory, so I will just mention a couple of things.
When you get a fusion failure, the stats you gain are halved, but they are rounded upwards. This means you should try to aim for an odd stat gain if you are not sure of a success.
There is a maximum number of stats you can gain from fusing, as mentioned above in the section about leveling and stat growth. This fusion cap is completely separate from the leveling cap, and you may be able to fuse units even when the leveling cap has been reached.
In the JP version, there are dolls with spiky teeth that you can fuse to increase stats, but they are limited by the leveling cap, NOT the fusion cap. You can only fuse a limited number of them, dependent on the star rarity of the unit and the number of limit breaks it has.
F. Evolution
Upon evolution, bonuses are given to each stat depending on the final stat of the previous evolution.
The bonus is calculated thus: starting from 1, an extra bonus point is gained every 10 levels. Basically, stat divided by 10, rounded up. This means:
| Pre-evolution stat | Evolution bonus |
|---|
| 1-10 | +1 |
| 11-20 | +2 |
| 21-30 | +3 |
| 31-40 | +4 |
| etc | etc |
If your stat is very close to the next bonus threshold (e.g. 39 or 40), then you can fuse units to get its stat up to the next threshold (e.g. 41) for an extra bonus point.
You should not fuse units to get to the next threshold unless you are one evolution before the last evolution. If you fuse to meet a threshold at 3 stars, then that +1 bonus you got will be lost when you evolve to 5 stars, unless your stat at 4 stars is evenly divisible by 10 (e.g. 40).
Limit breaking before the final evolution can net you at most +2 points if you are super lucky, but usually just +1 point. All of this is highly dependent on luck. Limit breaking before the final evolution gives you extra levels and extra chances to get to the next threshold. It is up to you to decide if it is worth using units to limit break when those same units could be used to level your final 5 star skills.
