If you started all over again, what would you do differently?

1. Don't do your dailies just to do your dailies, and never collect your daily activity rewards while still under level 60. The daily activity awards grant you experience points, but if you don't accept them then your only experience will come from spending energy. This means, essentially, that you'll farm more ship blueprints and toon shards per level. AFTER you hit level 60, collect those rewards with their extra experience points. The exact reason why might be hard to understand, but basically you don't get assigned to a Squad Arena or Fleet Arena group until you hit a specific level. If you avoid going up levels too quickly, then you'll have more developed toons & ships by the time you arrive at the crucial levels. Once you hit level 60, though, you're assigned a Fleet Arena server, and you will already be on a Squad Arena server, so there's no advantage to delaying any more after that.

So, yeah. Decline the daily rewards before level 60, accept them after.

2. Focus on Fleet first. When level 60 hits, fleet will be new to everyone, but the prepared player might have farmed blueprints of ships before level 60 and saved Galactic War Tokens to buy ship blueprints as soon as the GW store allows you to purchase them at level 60. With the right preparation, you can zoom out ahead of your peers. There are many fewer people who choose to focus on fleet as compared to Squad Arena, so the competition is less fierce. Because of this, you have a real shot at getting near the top of Fleet arena early, and using the large amount of crystals you get from FA rewards to better your ships even faster than your peers, and then get to the point where you're finishing #1 in fleet every day. Once you get there, the rewards are so high (400 crystals per day) that you'll be able to accelerate the work your doing on your toons that aren't pilots.

Fleet first, squad second is just a more efficient way to go.

3. Never refresh a node to accelerate farming characters until you've been level 85 for a good, long time. It takes the same number of attempts to finish a character whether you do them 10/day or 5/day, so do 2 characters 5/day each and you'll finish the pair of characters on the same day without spending any crystals at all. The only difference is that the person spending 25 crystals/day for months would get one of the two characters to 7* half way through while the other is still at 0 shards, but the person not spending has both of the characters at 5* half way through. Early in the game you have so many characters you need to farm, and you're facing enemies with low enough strength that 5* can still be a viable toon, that refreshing the node simply never makes sense.

Someday the time will come when you have the vast majority of characters already at 7* and you would struggle to find a good use for all your energy if you didn't make extra attempts at a toon. At that point you can start refreshing nodes, but that's a long way from now. Even on double drop days, just accept a small amount of double drops on many toons instead of getting lots of double drops on a single toon. It's not worth it.

"Antario;c-2263345" wrote:

Never chase up the latest shining new toons unless you are a whale.

Never unlock a toon or ship unless you are willing to invest in them fully. Especially unlock ships can be very expensive (massive GP increase).

Never apply Zeta to any toons without proper research. Some zetas are useless or only marginally improve the viability of the toon.

Focus on one good team at a time. Never build up a single toon without a full team. This is a 3v3 and 5v5 game.

Never try to build a team, which only has a niche use (a toon/team shall shine at least in 2-3 different game modes).

Lovely, great tips and glad I've been focusing on teams instead of toons. I just can't seem to build with future in mind - that is all I'm reading about having a squad that has GLs; I don't even know which GL to go for and what sort of synergy I want. :/

"MasterSeedy;c-2263357" wrote:
1. Don't do your dailies just to do your dailies, and never collect your daily activity rewards while still under level 60. The daily activity awards grant you experience points, but if you don't accept them then your only experience will come from spending energy. This means, essentially, that you'll farm more ship blueprints and toon shards per level. AFTER you hit level 60, collect those rewards with their extra experience points. The exact reason why might be hard to understand, but basically you don't get assigned to a Squad Arena or Fleet Arena group until you hit a specific level. If you avoid going up levels too quickly, then you'll have more developed toons & ships by the time you arrive at the crucial levels. Once you hit level 60, though, you're assigned a Fleet Arena server, and you will already be on a Squad Arena server, so there's no advantage to delaying any more after that.

So, yeah. Decline the daily rewards before level 60, accept them after.

2. Focus on Fleet first. When level 60 hits, fleet will be new to everyone, but the prepared player might have farmed blueprints of ships before level 60 and saved Galactic War Tokens to buy ship blueprints as soon as the GW store allows you to purchase them at level 60. With the right preparation, you can zoom out ahead of your peers. There are many fewer people who choose to focus on fleet as compared to Squad Arena, so the competition is less fierce. Because of this, you have a real shot at getting near the top of Fleet arena early, and using the large amount of crystals you get from FA rewards to better your ships even faster than your peers, and then get to the point where you're finishing #1 in fleet every day. Once you get there, the rewards are so high (400 crystals per day) that you'll be able to accelerate the work your doing on your toons that aren't pilots.

Fleet first, squad second is just a more efficient way to go.

3. Never refresh a node to accelerate farming characters until you've been level 85 for a good, long time. It takes the same number of attempts to finish a character whether you do them 10/day or 5/day, so do 2 characters 5/day each and you'll finish the pair of characters on the same day without spending any crystals at all. The only difference is that the person spending 25 crystals/day for months would get one of the two characters to 7* half way through while the other is still at 0 shards, but the person not spending has both of the characters at 5* half way through. Early in the game you have so many characters you need to farm, and you're facing enemies with low enough strength that 5* can still be a viable toon, that refreshing the node simply never makes sense.

Someday the time will come when you have the vast majority of characters already at 7* and you would struggle to find a good use for all your energy if you didn't make extra attempts at a toon. At that point you can start refreshing nodes, but that's a long way from now. Even on double drop days, just accept a small amount of double drops on many toons instead of getting lots of double drops on a single toon. It's not worth it.

Omg this is so smart, I wish I did this before I hit 50. Already 50 so I'll be doing skipping dailies from now. Is there any dummies' guide on the forum I can find to learn more about fleets and what to unlock/build?

Don't worry about GLs below level 85. Build up some groundwork first. Remember that it can take years to get everything. I've definitely seen new players inflate their power by taking a team to Relic 7 when they have nothing else. That's the other thing--you don't have to take everything all the way to R7 (well, 8 now) unless it's required for something, or there's some added benefit like being a GL (extra health+protection per relic level) or a fleet commander (more cap ship speed--but you don't have to worry about this until you are competing at end game level at the top of your shard). A lot of characters do their job at lower relic levels. Getting good mods is going to be much more important than maxing relics. As a general rule, mods>gear.

The other thing is to have fun and figure out the level of game play you're comfortable with. It's nice to do well enough in arena to get a good crystal income, but train yourself to be ok with not grabbing top spots everyday if you don't feel like climbingor are on vacation or something. It can quickly start to feel like an obligation and become stressful.

"crzydroid;c-2263408" wrote:
Don't worry about GLs below level 85. Build up some groundwork first. Remember that it can take years to get everything. I've definitely seen new players inflate their power by taking a team to Relic 7 when they have nothing else. That's the other thing--you don't have to take everything all the way to R7 (well, 8 now) unless it's required for something, or there's some added benefit like being a GL (extra health+protection per relic level) or a fleet commander (more cap ship speed--but you don't have to worry about this until you are competing at end game level at the top of your shard). A lot of characters do their job at lower relic levels. Getting good mods is going to be much more important than maxing relics. As a general rule, mods>gear.

The other thing is to have fun and figure out the level of game play you're comfortable with. It's nice to do well enough in arena to get a good crystal income, but train yourself to be ok with not grabbing top spots everyday if you don't feel like climbingor are on vacation or something. It can quickly start to feel like an obligation and become stressful.

Good advice, thanks! I'm still figuring out what mods are considered good, and yeah slowly working up.

"Intimmydation;c-2263422" wrote:
Fully agree with @crzydroid and @Antario here

Take a peak over at my new player guide thread, there are some pieces on the teams I am building (before going for a GL) and the last post I just made is why I am going for them. Building out your roster a bit to do well in more game modes, will in turn help you build towards that GL faster.

Also there are some great and really fun teams, but don't make sense to go for early as they are inefficient on everything you need (i.e. CLS and Rebel fleet).

That experiment you're running is super helpful reference, thank you so much for that. I've been building/farming the Imperial Trooper team, and have just started on Phoenix - the explainers you give are excellent. What do you think about taking Bad Batch + Cody to 7*?