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
alright, gonna get back into it
i still haven’t had a reason to change out my party
i did decide to throw a couple more cups to gong though
wow this boss fight against arjuna went all the way to turn 3
i’m going to need to start paying attention to the fight numbers soon
okay i think i’ll switch over to a different team for this 300k HP spriggan
just gotta make sure I have oberon up on one of my support lists first though
alright let’s see if jerker can do number
can jerker hit 300k with black grail and support oberon???
(yes) 
with nothing but two meta supports, one of whom was only kind of skilled up
now it’s just a few fights against cuzilla with progressively more hp
400k is high enough that neurons are starting to fire so I’ll try throwing jerker at the next four fights here
and i think i’ll swap out koyan-L for gong right now in my boss killer team since gong’s buster buff is higher and the math still all works out fine
and none of these fights need 3t buffs
now for the real question: can jerker one-shot this 406k hp cuzilla?
just a bit short 
probably would’ve hit it if I’d kept koyan-l in the frontline. her powermod buff probably would’ve helped
now it’s time for a pillar fight, which should go about the same
this one has 419,000 hp now, wow
guess jerker heard me talking shit last fight
america clear
looks like chloe’s interlude unlocked. i will not be doing it
camelot prologue 
a bunch of things unlocked in the shop
arjuna and karna trial quest, chaldea teatime, all the statesmen, and then i think the rest of those are costumes, aside from the learn with manga questline near the end there
and then there’s another 500 evocation leaves
gonna do a tenroll on story, see if i get anything
nope, just fergus
i’ve also gotten ten tickets from the login bonus and finishing the panel missions, so i’ll try throwing those at tiamat’s banner
in the hopes of tricking the gacha into taunting me with xu fu
i have gotten: locusta
she’s fine
also fran, who is also fine
locusta is of questionable utility when shiki is in the welfare shop
but she has a winning smile 
now let’s see, what should i buy in the welfare shop
i’ve got enough for three np levels
i might want to get some more levels on chloe since camelot’s up next, but i bet i could get past the fights there with a sufficiently large jerker
i think i’ll do that, finish getting jerker to np5
and maybe also grail her to 90 for some extra insurance
np5 jerker hitting with berserker damage is hitting for 10k more than chloe hitting with class advantage
before factoring in everything else, like the black grail that only works on berserkers, or all the buster supports i have, or all none of the arts supports i have
chloe has a bigger battery that i can’t reasonably level, while jerker benefits more from support oberon, and so only really needs 10% charge
i went into this thinking “wow, i’ll use xu fu and all the fun new servants like theseus” and then i get no xu fu and no fun new servants like theseus
instead i’m just using gong and jerker
i’ve gone and tossed a couple of grails to jerker, since i expect
she’s going to start putting in some more work soon
🆙1
i’m looking over the nodes in camelot and i think my braindead party isn’t going to work anymore, so I’ll need to go and do arash’s rankup now
arash is online now 
somehow he is only np1, so he might struggle to clear basic waves
i’ve got a handful of 40% charge ces and one fake scope
if i borrow an oberon or something i should be able to make it work
checking the calc it seems like he should be able to clear waves that
are 14k or so 
alright that’s about as much prepwork as i can do. time to start camelot
the extra numbers seem to be helping jerker
round 1 against gawain 
gut feeling is that i’d need two nps to take care of the second fight, so i think i’ll go and get the plugsuit now
i could probably also just use some command seals
i’ve got some blue cubes
though they expire in 9 days
they bring them back at regular intervals
i think the point of them expiring is to discourage hoarding them
well, let’s see how much damage a normal np does and then play the rest of the fight by ear
let’s see, how hard does this hit him
96k huh 
gonna crunch some numbers
so then i think that would put that in this range somewhere
at least that’s the only way i get a number in the range i’m seeing in that screenshot
so then let’s see, would buffing her with gong and oberon secure a kill
oh right i’m also probably forgetting koyan’s powermod buff
nope, i’m not. doesn’t apply to him
gawain is attribute earth, i believe
and the other human part of the buff only applies to the random mooks like pirates or the roman soldiers
the datamine has also switched to using human
so now it looks like this 
plugging the values in, it looks like if I dump all my buffs now it
should finish him off 
since he’s got 284k left
let’s give it a shot
yep, that worked 
a clean kill with only one seal used
the fights between this and mordred are a bit harder than they were in the earlier chapters, as expected, but that mostly just means occasionally swapping out chen gong in my farming team for jerker
let’s find out if np2 arash can take out this 56k wave
barely. good work arash
i’ll probably use a seal for this second mordred fight since i don’t want to go and grab and ascend waver
oh right the tristan fight
i have no sabers
i mean, i technically have three of them, but gilles sucks, jason is
AOE and arts, and fergus is aoe and mid
i could probably brute force it with jerker but i’ll hold that thought for a bit
looks like the ST options in the welfare shop are saber liz (no) and saber hokusai (blue)
sure would be nice if summervinci were in the shop
that’d solve a whole handful of problems i’m having
brute forcing with jerker it is
though i think i’ll take along aesc instead of oberon because i’m going to need a bit more damage
oh right i should remember to unlock koyan’s append since she hit bond 6
alright that worked 
berserker black grail and jerker are still strong even without class advantage
lancelot’s been the easiest of the three knights so far
oh wait i’m not up to the real lancelot fight yet
that one’s still going to be easy as hell because he’s weak to berserkers
but right now i’m busy fighting the defense units
okay now it’s time to beat up lancelot for real
okay he’s done
oh okay i was worried she’d only barely hit 500k
i wonder if jalter can take care of the 580k one too
excellent work jerker 
oh no, a node that fucks with my brainless caster blasting
yeah probably the existing team will probably work but it’ll probably take like eight turns
hideous
i guess i’ll (barf) use face cards
seven turns. disgusting 
almost done with camelot 
now i just need jerker to do that kind of damage again
great work jerker 
here’s the prologue popup for babylonia
smaller pool of things unlocked this time. looks like take romance
and another glasses costume 
the usual 10 quartz and 500 welfare leaves came with chapter completion
oh nice i finally rolled a theseus with the quartz i got from this chapter
i think that’s enough progress for today. camelot is long
i’ll think about working through babylonia tomorrow
got my second ssr servant while rolling on tiamat’s banner
gonna hang out in part 1 with my friends captain nemo and koyanskaya
speaking of great gets for a new account:
:mikon:1
jiang ziya’s up there
though with how limited resources are i’d still probably rather level some of the lower-rarities first
i haven’t ever rolled nemo before though, so i do want to level him
oh gross if i want to finish the panel missions on the fp bot to get the +10FP CE i need to progress a bunch more story
looks like up through septem 14-3 at minimum
i am, but i have an account on my phone where i run fuyuki x-a to get more FP
and if i want to extract about 10% more fp per run i need to finish clearing out the panel missions to get the CE from that
alright, done with that mission now. time to send that bot into the FP mine as penance
running the fp bot overnight got me a few more rolls to mess around with. still haven’t seen any sign of xu fu, but i did get another np level on chen gong, and arash is np5 now
no
she’s genpool
i would if she were in the pool, but she is not
i picked up chacha from the evocation pool because she is an AOE berserker that theoretically has a charge
this reminds me i should do her rankup to get her from 5% per turn to 10% per turn at base (replies to an unknown message)
theoretically chacha can charge 40%
practically, since i have no gems, she will charge 20%
but since i have no gems spartacus charges a bit less
gonna start babylonia now. I remember this chapter being one where I usually start really wanting to have an AOE assassin
this is part of why i picked up gray earlier (also because i like her and she’s cute)
having gray and koyan is going to make the start of the chapter a lot smoother than it usually is
though not as smooth as that one time I did a playthrough and caught a lotto around the time of america
first fight with the 600k hp enkidu is going about like this
and then buster crits left him with about 20k
xu fu showed up on my fp bot
but not the account i’m actually playing. frustrating
took support mel to the ishtar fight. lol
not as high against tiamat as i would’ve liked but it’s good enough
to end the fight in one turn 
chucking some of the tickets i got from the start dash campaign at the merlin banner, got keisuke
theoretically he’s a support but he’s pretty awkward to work with
doing a tenroll on story got me an enkidu
and a bedivere
i should really save my quartz for an oberon banner
throwing the other tenner at story got me a third bedivere
guess i’ll throw him and cascu in the backline to get to bond 6 and unlock their appends
oh sick, a desperation single got me grail mud
that opens up some more options
it’s something like the third-best damaging CE in the game, after black grail and phantasmal princess (store-brand black grail)
it’s like heaven’s feel, but it overcharges NPs by two stages and has black grail’s stat curve
theoretically i can now use some servants besides jerker as DPSes
i guess i should push more story while the 0-AP campaign’s still up
hi quetz. bye quetz 
time for quetz round 2
second verse, same as the first 
time for the fight with gorgon you’re supposed to win
can you guess how this will go
that’s right 
perhaps the kingu fight will be different
it was not 
she is carrying every fight with a one-enemy wave
aesc and gong are carrying the rest
more progress 
looks like this next fight is one wave with two enemies. i’m going to see if np1 chacha can handle it with all the same backup
nope
took out about 180k
dismal work, chacha
remembered that arash exists. maybe he can do better
haven’t done his np upgrade yet but it should be fine
this was the attempt with chacha, incidentally
now let’s see how arash does
that’s better 
arash with ascension of the corrupting mud did way better than chacha with store brand black grail
closing in on the end 
maybe i’ll try having aesc and sieg loop through the lahmu
aesc could solo this lol
alright now to just have jerker blast tiamat twice
oh no, number slightly low 
guess i’ll just have to fish for buster crits on the next one
yeah that’s fine 
took some buster crits but gong buffs those and i drew two of jerker’s cards so it worked out
solomon prologue 
babylonia unlocks 
looks like merry christmas in the underworld and chaldea teatime, and a few costumes
sacrificing my babylonia quartz to story i have gotten: tsuna
who is: not as good as np3 bedivere
i should prepare for solomon
i will go and level mata hari and do her rankup
i like mata hari, and this is her one chance to shine
i guess benkei could also work but his skill seal is worse and needs a bunch of skill levels, while mata hari just needs levels and a rankup
checked my white prism count: i had enough to get the rest of the
eggs and arrows to finish koyan’s battery off
also it looks like i’m back to having over 400 evocation leaves, so i guess i should pick up another servant
let’s see who’s left. santa quetz, caster shuten, ridertoki, idol x, nobu, saber liz, caster liz, saber hoku, assassin scathach, irisviel, the mecha-elis, shiki, santagale, and ryoma
I think my next pick should be one of the mecha-elis or shiki
i have nemo, i don’t have any reason to grab ryoma
hm. i have the mats to ascend enkidu. i guess i should do that
muddy buddy hits hard
i think i’ll grab one of the mecha-elis. I have locusta or serenity or hundred faces if I really need an arts assassin
i’ll grab shiki later
??? another nemo spook? 
i’ve cleared out my rankups and there’s still an hour or so of 0AP story so I’m gonna go and do a chunk of solomon
jerker’s going to get a workout
oh good, just in time 
see now this is the barbatos i remember
imagine jerker blasting all the pillars. great, that’s what happened
same with solomon 
oh boring, he restores all his hp if you drain it
jerker and gong combined did 1m hp
time for mata hari to shine now
or at least do one thing
well that was close but fell just a bit short. maybe let’s try that again
perfect
you can see me debating “should i go for the stun” on turn 3
instead i went with the risky strats
oberon survived with 4 hp though and 4 is more than 0 so it all worked out great
i think i’m going to reset this last fight until i can draw two buster cards for jerker
there we go
oh that was a weirdly low roll
i wonder if i misclicked somewhere
well whatever it’s over now
I wonder if the lostbelts also get prologue popups now
I wonder if they update the credits at all
I saw mika pikazoo in there
though it seems like her first illustration was for servafes
grand order complete, etc
finishing part 1 has unlocked a whole bunch of shit
and then there’s some popup talking about something i can’t read. it
looks like it’s saying something about EoR and the the lostbelt prologue
clearing solomon has netted me another 500 evocation leaves
EoR has a bunch of free signs above each of the nodes
so, now that i’ve finished part 1: that was easy on the whole
sure i had koyan-light, but it wouldn’t have been that much harder with waver
aesc is a pretty hard carry
and jerker is still extremely good at dealing with the sorts of problems that part 1 deals out
making jerker free for everyone means you’ve got an easy carry through pretty much everything
at least so far as part 1 is concerned
i’ll use the tickets i got from solomon to make one last tenroll attempt at merlin
before all the banners disappear in nine minutes
(i did not get merlin, or anyone of note)
i still haven’t picked my tutorial 5*
the question then becomes, well, are the tools that they’re giving out sufficient for dealing with part 2, and that one I’m less sure about
i think i’m going to chill out on trying to make progress for a bit and just farm the class dailies until I can get the skill levels up a bit more
I want to get, let’s see here: nemo, paracelsus, jerker, chloe, koyan and gray skilled up, i think
maybe also mecha-eli and theseus
oh right i also should skill up cascu
if i can make it to lb6 then i can swap to some of the mindless cascu strats
i think now that i’m up to the lostbelts i should probably pick up santagale from the welfare shop, start prepping her to help against demeter
started part 2 and grabbed the arctic code. nothing especially notable in the prologue. a few more shop CEs unlocked. i got ibaraki off of story :ibasurprise:0
looks like the early lostbelts have been put on permanent 1/2 AP
oh huh, ridervinci has lines for the permanent 5* menu
it’s like 30 seconds long
figure i may as well post it since most people aren’t going to see it
got theseus to np4 off of the fp rolls today
and a 2030 off of story
i just want to get a xu fu
actually how many of the 3*s do i have 
looks like the only ones I haven’t rolled a copy of are jing ke and xu fu
surely i should be able to get np1 sooner rather than later, right
all the class dailies are open. i guess I’ll go and farm the mats for xu fu, even though this guarantees she won’t show up
at least i’ll go and farm the gold gems
today i got jing ke. now xu fu is the only 3* i don’t have
let’s throw the login bonus quartz at story and see if i get anything
nope
finally 
now i can save the rest of my start dash quartz
and stop running bone zone
also while i was doing this i noticed that the +75FP CE doesn’t
actually give any extra FP when used as a support
so i swapped over to having the bot look for the +25FP CE instead
alright, xu fu’s mostly skilled up 
I think I’ll farm the caster dailies a bit more and try to get the class gems for sieg
and whenever my mana prism supply gets a bit better I’ll go and pick up drunk jalter from the shop
that one probably ends up being a little bit better than golden sumo, i think
if for no other reason than because it works better with oberon
made some decent progress on skilling up sieg
I looked over the arts welfare refund numbers and I think sieg’s come out the best of all of them even before factoring in his np gain up
SC said she made do with a 4/4/4 sieg for a long time, so this 6/1/9 sieg is probably sufficient to start doing work
also i got xu fu pretty much as skilled up as I could get her
let’s see how sieg does against the saber daily
hmm 
63k neutral isn’t bad
but he’s probably going to need a bit more damage help before he can really put in work
he probably wants some starting charge though, and more fous, and maybe a few cups
his attack stat is very low
8394 attack at level 80 with the caster tax is rough
gave sieg a couple of cups to try and make his attack stat less bad
he might even have more than 10k by the time I get some more fous
made a sacrifice to story, got another casgil and dobrynya
oh shit np4 cascu
that’s enough to get his append
tried rolling for yui 
(i got yui over on the fp bot)
throwing tickets got me a mordred
oh there we go, got yui on the tenth ticket
tried pushing my luck a bit more with a couple more tenrolls, but got nothing
but let’s see. I think iori will probably be good to get
I’ve been working on leveling bedivere in the background, and as far as ST DPSes go it seems like iori should be better bedivere
i also rolled a few copies of theseus today, so I can now unlock his
append 
let’s see here
I’ve been working on leveling bedivere in the background, and as far as ST DPSes go it seems like iori should be better bedivere
my suspicion seems to be correct
not quite as strong as caesar can theoretically be, but that’s more theoretical than practical, and iori doesn’t need to farm mats for ascension
rolled ten tickets on the fp bot, got a musashi and a third yui
tried pushing my luck further, maybe get a second musashi, but no dice
looks like I should be able to do musashi’s strengthen if I can get her to 4a though, and that should help
let’s roll the monthly tickets and see what i don’t get
couple of coins for theseus and medea
i should probably close the thread now tbh. I think everything interesting that could’ve been gleaned has been and now I’m in the no gems no mats do events cycle
Let’s go over what we’ve learned here
skill gems are still a problem. white cubes help a little bit but not nearly enough to paper over how many you need
The welfare shop is really helpful, and jerker put in a lot of great work.
However, the welfare shop in its current state isn’t quite sufficient to paper over what you need to get through the midgame cleanly
The best free looper not named chen gong right now is sieg and his numbers just aren’t quite up to snuff for general use with only xu fu and a friend castria
I really wish they would add iyo and summer da vinci to cut back on how much of a dependence there is on casters
that way you could reasonably just farm the class dailies for a couple weeks and get up and running
instead of needing to wait on the caster dailies
having drunk jalter and golden sumo in the shop permanently is really nice, though I do wish ocean flyer and cranking were in there
It addresses some of the problems, namely that there aren’t really any good damage CEs and you need at least a 50% charge CE for basic human rights
but at the same time, god, the game is just so much worse if you don’t have black grail
FGO is a good game that feels like trash unless you have one halfway decent support and one halfway decent DPS
and one of the like three pieces of equipment that let you actually make plans around
In sum, the onboarding is better than it used to be, but it isn’t quite sufficient to get a new player into a place that makes the game enjoyable. This isn’t likely to change unless they can give new players some more tools they to get into the core loop faster, and to make it easier to deal with break bar fights
the tools they give out for free are great for using buster cards to laugh through part 1, but that stops being quite as useful when you need to hit higher damage thresholds multiple times in a row in the lostbelts
xu fu is a very good unit for a 3*, but her 20% arts buff isn’t quite good enough for general use unless you have a gacha unit like swimsashi or ibuki or someone at np2
and sure, they’ve been rerunning units more often but that’s not guaranteed, and I think new players shouldn’t have to just wait around for 6-9 months for a banner or event to make the game baseline playable
the events will give you mats but that’s less of a concern if you’re in the new player gem hell zone
There should be an accessible, readily-restocked supply of gems that refreshes regularly
with the way the early game is set up right now I'd really wish the ruler welfares were in the evocation shop. summer da vinci is a sufficient support to help get your damage amps online, and when I crunched the numbers it seemed like iyo ought to be good enough for most grinding if she's grailed and backed up by summervinci and a support castria. this, on top of rulers having generally easier materials, should help new players get into the flow of the game better.
I’ll close the thread now. I’ll probably reopen it whenever they’ve added a bit more newbie QOL improvements and see if that fixes how bad the onboarding is