This page is my ongoing playthrough of Fate/Grand Order with pretty much only free servants, more or less. I'm going to just be crossposting this from Discord, maybe do some formatting later, see if that works out better. think of this being a bit like a VOD for a live SSLP.
This is my fifth go-through of FGO. I will not be covering the story, we've trod that ground to hell and back in the main game channels, and there's two people going through story on NA right now and giving their impressions there. I was and am planning on doing a casual playthrough of this, fuck around with xu fu and theseus and all the new toys that have been added since the last time I started fresh about two years ago, give or take
right now it's new years and there happens to be a koyan of light banner up, so I went and rerolled for her because it'd be sillier not to if i have the chance
I wrote the start of the playthrough over in JP chat before deciding to move over here
the short of it goes like this: after rolling koyan of light my third eye opened and i saw the truth of rain witch aesc, and put together this team in fuyuki
my brain now completely smooth and delegating all decision-making to the robot like a real gamer, I proceeded to clear out fuyuki, whereupon I was met with a popup I'd never seen before:
It looks like it's just a thing going like "prologue: the first grand order is set in 1431 AD. it's the middle of the hundred years war in france. save da world. get 24 quartz, 50 fragments and a grail" or something to that effect, but i don't think i saw that in any of my earlier playthroughs. I guess it's some kind of introduction to the upcoming story chapter for new players. Bizarre. No idea why they've done that
also i got an angra out of the fp gacha
he's still awful, but it's like a jumpscare whenever he shows up
Before starting Orleans I went and had a look in da vinci's workshop. Some mission or other had gotten me up to 530 of the welfare tokens, which was enough to buy a welfare and all their ascension mats. I went with gray because my roster's favoring buster right now and she has good buffs and a rankup, but I probably should've grabbed sieg, since sieg is AOE arts and has good base np gen numbers and will loop pretty easily off of a single castria, but I don't have xu fu to make the most I could out of the free pool options for blue cards right now. I'll grab him next if I get the chance though.
I still haven't grabbed my free 5* yet. Waver is the obvious choice, but I'm getting by pretty well without him so far, since friend Aesc has a 50% party battery and about the same attack buff as an unskilled waver (more if she's at low HP) i just haven't seen a reason to use waver yet.
Tamamo would be the next choice, and she's great for a fight in Olympus, but that's still a ways out. After those two some reasonable options would be Altria or vlad. If I had a kaleidoscope then Altria would be a no-brainer, but I don't, and they haven't added a permanent 5* genpool CE pick ticket yet. Vlad feels like he'd be a good pick as a general-use boss-killer to use with Xu Fu and a friend Castria, but I still haven't gotten her yet.
I'll probably hold off on the 5* ticket until I have a better idea what to do with it, since I'm getting by fine without it so far
I fiddled around with team comp a bit. I tried slotting in Gray for a bit, but I've gone back to the original Chen Gong/Koyan-L/support Aesc team I had at the start. I realized that if I used the 20% charge mystic code I could have the support Aesc NP twice, and she has a better damage CE than anything I have right now, and Chen Gong is good for buffing red cards. this ups how much damage I can do on wave 3 by a fair bit
i am barely in the start of orleans, it usually doesn't go like this
usually I have to wait for a lotto or my skills to be properly leveled or something before I can even start to think about making a halfway reliable team comp, or I'll be somewhere in the middle of london before I have a support of any kind. The thing with this comp is that I don't think I'd necessarily even need koyan-L. I think it would work with shakespeare or waver and the atlas code. It needs a couple of starting charge CEs, but it should work with a non-MLB dragon's meridian. gong/shakespeare/support aesc should be able to NP three times and clear a couple of waves pretty reliably. this is a bit smoother than the last few times I've done this, where the support options were like, get fucked loser and lmao, or making do with gong and waver and hoping a meta support banner or lotto was around the corner somewhere
right now I'm just letting the robot work through orleans. The numbers there are all so low that I'm not going to need to think for a while. I don't think there's a boss fight with over 100k HP until america. this is a bit different than how this usually goes, because there's usually not a stable enough team for me to work with until way later, but this is pretty smooth sailing so far. i'll probably need to look at the screen at some point because I know one of the nodes in Orleans is a weird 5-wave one and my party's only configured for 3 waves
ah, here's one where the wave has six enemies that deploy three at a time, and here's the five-wave fight, i should look at the screen again
oh it's already over, nevermind. this has been the experience for most of orleans so far, and continued to be the experience through the end of it. i have learned nothing. orleans has nothing interesting happen gameplaywise.
looks like septem gets a prologue now too
it looks like somewhere in clearing out orleans I got another 500 welfare leaves. I could probably grab a couple more NP levels for Gray, or I could get sieg and start working on leveling him, which I think I'll do
I'll probably want to grab santagale and ridertoki at some point before olympus, but that's at least a few weeks away, assuming I don't get bored around LB3 like I usually do on these alt runs
hm, i've rolled the off-brand scope
this does potentially move me over into 'i should grab altria off the 5* pick ticket' territory. if I want a boss killer I can grab chloe or ridertoki or one of the mecha-elis or shiki or jerker or hokusai, though at some point I'll be able to use cascu as a farmer without needing to worry about which CE I'm using.
I'll stop here for today, since it's close to midnight now.
back to the grind this morning, I'm using the daily mat tickets and mana prisms to get the octuplet crystals and embers to finish ascending gong. i expect that skill gems will continue to be a weak spot
fp gacha roll has gotten me mata hari. maybe i'll level her and try using her to stonewall goetia again
rolling on story has gotten me two cascus, which is almost getting into a range where I could unlock his append. making the most out of that would still take getting to lb6, but at least I've got some of the tools to make farming brainless if I can get there
I could roll on takeru, but his mats are awful. 216 traum knives, no thanks
it occurs to me that i could have gong fire off aesc on wave two and trigger a bunch more of her damage buffs, since she applies a guts with her skill
...
i once again forget that my team comp is predicated on koyan-L using her np on wave 2 to charge 10%
there's only so much to comment on when the game is just this for a few hours:
since mechanics don't really get introduced until like, late into america
I think i'll go and set up an FP bot to get me more tools to play with, so i stop spending quartz chasing after xu fu (note: i did not stop spending quartz chasing after xu fu)
septem done. here's the prologue screen for okeanos
Clearing out septem got me another pile of evocation leaves. I don't know who i should go with quite yet. Jerker would be good, but so would pretty much any of the ST DPSes
i think i'll go and farm some embers and think about it while I do that.
the team as constructed seems like it should be able to farm the 5* embers without too much trouble, by which i mean i need to just have koyan and gong both np on wave 2, and then support aesc is hitting the w3 hand for 105k neutral, so if I just pick the assassin boss hands it's no trouble
back to thinking about which welfare to grab next: the thing I remember from my other playthroughs is that there's a few walls with saber bosses where I can't borrow a friend support. normally I go with euryale for those since she's got a battery and gets a damage bonus against most of them at least up through LB5, so I'll probably want to get chloe up and running before camelot
naturally euryale shows up right after i finish ascending chloe
chloe will probably be useful at some point, it's hard for a servant with a 50% self charge and easy access to appends not to be. and by those qualifiers i mean she'll be handy for the fights against gawain, surtr, dioscuri.
though boy i sure wish i had xu fu. xu fu is like the skeleton key to fucking around with blue cards if you don't have your own castria or summervinci or any of the other useful blue people
i wonder if i should try rolling on the jarcher banner. i've mostly been rolling on story for marginally better odds at the good 5* CEs and the genpool peeps
got a casgil off jarcher's banner. this would be more useful if i didn't have sieg, or gong.
paracelsus has shown up four times now. i guess I could use him, but he needs so much investment to get working. i'll think about this some more.
i think i'll feed gong a few cups. i use him enough for it to be worth it
did you know you can click and drag the popup
i didn't
i'm out of embers and grails but gong has a gold border now
i'm half-regretting not starting this playthrough a week sooner during lotto, but this is also the new player experience. "wow, they put in the character i know from the other thing, maybe i'll start playing to get them. oh no, gems. oh no, mats."
not just flooding the player with skill gems at the start is one of the big problems in progression. they're doing a tiny bit to address it with all the tutorial missions, but those don't give nearly enough. wow, i can get barely enough gems to skill up one skill to like, four.
one run of the class dailies should drop like, ten skill gems. the other mats are already enough of a long-term grind, the basic class gems shouldn't be a problem anymore. Like, part of the gacha progression treadmill is to make old progression blockers less onerous over time. sure, lottos are good for this, but you shouldn't have a four week window out of fifty-two where new players can reasonably expect to make progress on the basic mats for skills.
since I've gotten a few more characters leveled, I think I'll go and start okeanos now. I expect this to also be several hours of staring at the farming squad clicking buttons since all the pillars are weak to cavalry class servants and that's most of what I'm running. it might take longer since I think okeanos is full of riders, and two of my main DPSes are casters
got my first loss to hektor while I wasn't paying any attention, lol
finished okeanos now. some of the fights at the end almost made me have to stop just letting the bot run on auto and click some buttons myself
the chapter prologues continue:
let's see if I got any more welfare leaves from that. looks like: yes, i have enough to get two welfares and their ascension mats, or four NP levels. i think i'll grab jerker this time, and then I think I'll grab a couple NP levels on sieg, start planning on using him. sure would be nice if i had black grail or heaven's feel or grail mud or something. anything that boosts np damage more than ryudoji temple
if i'm actually thinking about how i'm building a party right now chacha might actually be a good choice. 10% charge per turn and having her np on wave 3 would probably be a bit more reliable damage than gong
i should really go and farm the caster dailies
since i still haven't gotten xu fu i guess i'll go and start working on ascending paracelsus
and i don't have any pages. right. i guess i'll go and start london then. a bunch of my guys want pages and gears, and I think those start dropping in london
ah i guess i lost to mothman while i was out of the room cooking food
barbatos looks different than i remember
sounds the same though
used some white cubes and made gong's buster buff stronger
i won't level it to 10 yet though, i've got people's batteries to level first, but the extra 10% damage will be nice to have
looks like going through london got me the mats I needed to finish ascending spartacus
gonna take a break from progressing the rest of that to go and do his rankups. i'm at chapter 12 of london now, so there shouldn't be too much left
through with two of spartacus's rankups, starting the third now
and i'm through with that. now i can use spartacus when i feel like getting a berserker with a battery
this run has continued to be pretty much smooth sailing, though i sure wish i had a decent damage ce to work with, but then again the early game is pretty much always samey. there are no mats, all the people worth upgrading need some large amount of story finished before they can be usable, and everything's in short supply. white prisms and saplings paper over some of the worst parts of this, but there's only so much they can do to mitigate some of the worst of the deeply-ingrained design decisions without a fundamental rework.
I wonder if the welfare tickets are drip-fed out over the course of the story or if it's a reward for clearing, i should check my count.
yeah i'm still out, so I guess they must show up at the end of the chapter. i guess that checks out, that's when they give out the free 3*s as well
i just noticed the star wars blaster sound effect in tesla's attacks. neat
that's london done now, here's the prologue for america
a whole bunch of things unlocked
looks like a bunch of costumes, detective foulmes, and then a bunch of kanji i can't read that i assume means dante's dilf tower
and I guess it's 500 evocation leaves and ten quartz that i get for clearing out london
it looks like clearing out london got me enough mats that I can nearly finish ascending paracelsus. i bought eight bones out of the shop to finish it off. i'll go and clear out his rankup now, and then debate going into the caster gem mines
oh thank god, a real damage CE
if you're not familiar, here's what it does:
60% np damage up. it's pretty much black grail, but only for berserkers. I would prefer to get a real kaleidoscope and real black grail, but i'll take the great value version of both of them
running some numbers in my head here, guess I'll type out loud. so let's see here, jerker has 20%, gong has 10%, koyan has 50, and the mage association uniform gives 20. 20 + 10 + 50 + 20, yeah that should work. I'll need to use some white cubes but i should be able to run my own dps now
I've run out of white cubes though, so I can't get the other 12 assassin gems to take koyan's first skill up. it'd probably be better to get the coins to unlock jerker's append, but I should be good to hold off on that until camelot. worst case I can just borrow a support oberon and make up the difference
yeah this is probably more than good enough to handle the part 1 bosses
actually lemme see if i can buy any more of the shop embers or fous. looks like I got 200 green cubes, so I'll go and spend those getting jerker and gong some attack fous. jerker's now at 1000 attack fous and level 80, and gong's at 900 attack fous
i'm also going to go and make some blupples to store all this excess AP I've been getting. there we go:
the numbers in america seem like they're starting to get high enough that I might occasionally want to look at the upcoming fights to see if I should switch out for a more streamlined boss-killing team. most of the fights are trash that the bot can handle, but sometimes something will have 200k hp and it might be better to go in knowing that ahead of time
you know, i was wondering why i hadn't leveled arash yet. turns out it's because he didn't want to show up
immediately ascended him to 4A, and then ran out of embers
huh, I wonder when they went and put drunk jalter into the mana prism shop
golden sumo's been in there for a little while, but I don't think this one was part of the set last time I looked. the one below it looks like it would be alright if it didn't have mixed stats, but I'd need to check it on the wiki because it's another one of the ones that ran before I started playing. yeah looks like that one's 20% np damage up and 40% charge, but with mixed stats so it's not as useful as it could be
I'm about halfway through america now. I think I'll call it there for the night. the meat of the game hasn't really started since it's not into camelot yet, and there still hasn't really been anything that aesc, koyan, and chen gong couldn't handle so far