Hi, I’m Elliot. I have been playing since the app launched (with some hiatuses for the sake of my sanity) and at the time of writing have “Beaten” the first main storyline, which I finished up at 4am while it was a live event taking place over Christmas. I am hopelessly addicted to Fate GO.
This is the obligatory “Check out my SSR Servants!” Screenshot.
I have spent GBP£300 on Fate GO in total so far. Don’t do that.
Using the QX20XX calculator, I’ve spent about GBP£17 per 5* Servant, unless my maths skills have entirely rotted away.
I’m QX20XX and I was tricked into playing Fate/Grand Order by Elliot on December 2016. I wrote the aforementioned “QX20XX calculator” after hitting rock bottom in this game and to save lives before others make the same mistakes I’ve made. I have spent over ¥20000 on the gasha, which is about $200 USD. I haven’t even cleared the main storyline yet.
“Check out my characters in Fate/Grand Order”
Pro FGO Tips for Scrubs, or How to Not Get Owned By Camelot:
QX20XX: Because no one will warn players otherwise, I have designed this guide around all the preparations that should be made before arriving at Camelot. It is possible to coast through the whole game on Support servants until E Pluribus Unum but Camelot will humble any casual player.
Elliot: Fate GO can be a lot of fun, but there are a lot of pitfalls that can waste your time and hard-won resources. Building a decent cast of Servants who will let you take on whatever the game throws at you (Especially the later storyline chapters) is an amazing feeling, but doing this efficiently requires pre-planning.
You upon realising you have wasted your time for no drops
QX20XX’s Hottest Tip: Max out all of Mashu’s abilities, throw all materials into her abilities whenever possible.
Elliot: Mashu is stupid good for a LOT of reasons: She has zero cost, has no class weaknesses, her skills can (and will) save your sorry ass, and she gets ascended for free as you progress through the storyline. She also gets a massive free stat buff during the storyline, but the US version won’t see that for a LONG time. Make sure you level her up regardless.
Also, sadly you will never get to hear Taneda Risa voice Mashu as she has now been replaced with the inept squarking of Takahashi Rie.
Mashu is love. Mashu is life.
Moe~~
Elliot’s prime advice: When starting out, level any gold (4/5*) servants you get and ignore everything else.
Elliot: Early on in the game you don’t need a deep bench of servants as you can muddle through Fuyuki using any old crap and a gold Servant has better base stats and better stat growth so your Return on Investment is much better than spreading your EXP cards around multiple Servants. Also level Mashu, as mentioned above.
When I first started out I wasted a lot of time levelling 2* and the odd 3* servants thinking I needed a deep team and was having to really drag myself through content, once I started ploughing everything into my 4* it got a lot better.
If you are a lucky sod and get a Gold (5/4*) Berserker then you are basically laughing for the early part of the storyline as nothing dishes out enough damage to really threaten you and your ‘zerker can hit like a tank in return.
QX20XX: Berserkers can pinch hit for any class you’re lacking in, but they’re extremely fragile against hard-hitting bosses and won’t last against common mobs with high HP. More to come on classes.
Delete your account: if you don’t draw a 5* rank Servant on your first legitimate 10-roll. They’re probably incorporating the free 10-roll for the guaranteed 4* but that one is sort of lame.
If you see this on your first real gasha roll, delete your account.
Elliot: I would argue that the game is forgiving enough for this not to be an issue, especially if you are jumping into the US version from the get-go. If they are kind (and they bloody should be) and give people a free 10-roll with a guaranteed 4* Servant when you start you should be set. Unless you get Siegfried - then you should reroll because he is shit. Take it from me, he was my first 4* and is now never used.
You can ignore tier lists and other shite for 95% of the game. Don’t read them, don’t worry about them. Even a “bad” 4* is still a good card (with some exceptions, fucking Siegfried) and should be treasured. When you start to max out your Servants and worry about high-end events you will need to start thinking about tier lists and team composition, and only then.
You can safely ignore 1* and 2* Servants unless there is a particular niche you need them to fill, or your player level is still hilariously low and you don’t have enough COST to fill out your team.
QX20XX: Absolutely abuse the freebies you’ll get if you jump in at launch. Mobage veterans know the deal, just scum the gasha until you get something good. Likely, the devs are going to make it rain premium items for the first couple of weeks and the only comparable event afterwards will be the New Year’s gasha. Heck, Aniplex is doing frequent Facebook promos right now for Saint Quartz and free Servants if they get enough Likes on their page (won’t comment on how FB sucks and the JP publishing company relies on less awful platforms like Nico Douga and Twitter). When you lock in a good 5* servant, bind your account so you won’t lose it if your phone explodes.
Elliot: If you are lucky, the US version of FGO will have its servers implode like the JP version did. Early adopters of the JP version were showered with goodies as a result because the publisher was scared to death people would go back to playing Derestage or Love Live.
QX20XX: There are people that have done all the work of datamining the game so if you don’t mind light spoilers, you can access any given Servant’s profile and the full breakdown of their stats, growth, development requirements, art assets, etc.
Learning FGO with Manga is essential reading if you want to understand the lore and mechanics in greater depth the jokes.
Learning FGO with Manga is the truth
ALWAYS UPDATE YOUR SUPPORTS: or no one will want to be your friend. Don’t be the rando with nothing to offer but a Level 1 Mashu. Even so, Friend Points are hard to come by unless you have either Jeanne or Merlin (Who you won’t see for a long time, start saving quartz for him now). Eventually people learn to use a variety of Servants once the game requires more strategy besides selecting only the highest ATK support.
Nice Gender Balance there, me.
Elliot: Remember: the COST of both the Servant and the CE are 0 for your friend so go fucking HOG WILD creating OP combos that they will thank you for. If you can make friends with Whales/ people with too much free time / lucky bastards, then life will get a lot easier for you as you can lean on their support Servants. This is especially true early on as suddenly you have a Level 90 in your friends list you can call on at any time.
I owe these people my life.
Memorize: the Servant class strengths and weaknesses.
Elliot: More than anything, this is vital. Even if you have a team of (relative) scrubs you can get through a level if they are strong to your opponents class as they take half damage and deal double damage. This is not to be underestimated, ever.
See that chart in the middle? LEARN IT.
Log in Every Day: The daily free items add up and every week you get a free Summon Ticket. The game also gives you lots of free Quartz on arbitrary milestones (every 50 days).
Now that you know the essentials, lets talk about the fun stuff, like the gasha.
The gasha is extremely garbage: 1% rate for 5* Servants, 3% rate for 4*s, lol.
Look at this crap. Why did I even bother?
QX20XX: Rate-ups don’t affect this percentage, it merely means “in this 1% chance, you have an arbitrarily greater chance to draw the event Servant as opposed to any of the dozens of 5*s available.”
Elliot: Save your Free Summon tickets! Don’t roll the gacha unless there is something you want - the devs love releasing time-limited highly desirable Servants.
Some Servants only unlock after certain points in the storyline, check the Wiki so you don’t try and roll for a Servant who isn’t available to you yet!
Burn 3* Craft Essences (CE) and EXP: The Mana Prism shop is offered as a booby prize to compensate for bad 10-roll Grand Summons. You get 1 Mana Prism for every 3* CE and 3* EXP card burned, and 3 prisms for every 3* servant. Grab the golden tickets first (20 Mana Prisms a pop) for a single free draw in paid gasha per ticket, then hold out on 4* EXP cards and Fou-kuns (the fluffy dog mascot thing) until the servant roster is a bit more established.
Yes yes, I’m sure you all have wonderful stories, but I already have like 6 each of you.
Elliot: When starting out you should use 3* EXP cards as they will still be useful. After you get a Servant to 40 they do jack shit.
The Mana Prism shop EXP cards are a godsend as every month you can get 50 4* EXP cards for no effort as you start to build up a reserve of Quartz.
The Mana Prism Shop will tempt you with special CE’s - only go for these if you are DROWNING in Mana Prisms. Also be aware that you will need to buy all 5 copies of them to limit break them.
Don’t burn all the 3* Servants: At least keep ones like Euryale and David who can knock off Gawain’s NP charge with their abilities.
Who is Gawain? Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.
Elliot: There are a lot of 3* Servants who are very good, especially if you get enough copies of them through free/quartz gacha that you can get them to NP5. Caster Cu Chuellian has saved my ass multiple times with WICKER MAN at NP5.
Also Robin Hood was so OP early on that they had to nerf him twice- despite that he is still very easy to build a team around and good at killing bosses.
Definitely don’t burn 4* Servants: Even if they suck and you’re mad about blowing your last quartz on a Servant you don’t want. Once the free saint quartz stops flowing, it becomes exponentially more expensive to acquire decently spec’d servants via gasha.
Most of the CEs are garbage: don’t kill yourself over these, just cross your fingers for Fragments of 2030 and Kaleidoscope to pop out of the gasha.
Kaleidoscope. See if you can spot my rookie mistake!
Elliot: Or at least, a LOT of them are highly situational. Far more important than the direct stat boosts are their bonus effects - read these and consider who should get what! You can get a lot more mileage this way.
Pray you pull an Ideal of the Holy King - This is a 5* CE that gives you a flat +1000 HP maximum HP bump to all your Servants. This is obscenely useful always, especially early on. This CE has been stapled to my Mashu since I first drew it.
Remember that when you merge 4 copies of a CE into another copy of it, you reach its “Limit Break” and the Effect will improve. Some of these will take 3* CE’s from “eh” to “good” and 4/5* CE’s from “great” to “Holy Cow”
This is my Ideal of a Holy King, with Limit Break. It’s a lifesaver.
QX20XX: When duplicates are merged, that’s permanent, so maybe those 5* CEs will be worth more to your team composition if you hold out on merging them.
Elliot: True, however outside of some particular special cases where keeping multiple copies is a better move (Kaleidoscope, Daemonic Bhodivista) getting a boosted situational effect is really powerful.
Grind the dailies: especially the 30-40 AP quests. Horde your Golden Apples to restore your AP when you can settle down for nice, long grinding session. This part of the game extremely sucks and you will hate life during the grind but do it anyway.
Elliot: Do it! The extra mana prisms are very, very handy and quickly add up!
You’ll get sick of this screen quickly.
Elliot: Once you can complete the 40AP EXP card quest routinely, grind it until your eyes fall out of your head.
Getting a stable team and supports that allow you to do this is pretty much the first real “meta” boss of the game as once you can do it you will never want for EXP.
If you can stomach it, grind out “spare” 4* EXP cards. This way, if you get a sweet new Servant you can feed them EXP cards and get them up to speed quickly.
QX20XX: It really sucks when you pull a good Servant and then need to spend hours making them viable.
Elliot: The EXP curve for levelling servants is hilariously steep. Going from 70-80 is painful, 80-90 is a crime. Going from level 1-20 takes nearly no materials and typically doubles starting stats, so it’s worth doing this to nearly anyone you think you may use.
This is Jack the Ripper (No really) - levelling her from 80 to 90 is going to take an *age*.
QX02XX: Sometimes you’ll get a bonus multiplier during the experience gain ritual, but more often than not, this multiplier only hits during useless situations like when you’re feeding your Level 89 servant a few 3* EXP cards to hit the Level 90 cap.
Ascend your dang servants: but ascend wisely because the drop rates on the materials are garbage.
Elliot: Plan out who you want to ascend ahead of time and make sure you SAVE those materials up. Otherwise you’ll get to level 50 and them realise you don’t have enough of Item X and will then need to grind for ages to get them.
I have a stockpile from playing for ages - you will not, sadly.
ALWAYS, ALWAYS prioritise 4/5* servants as they both take more materials and have better stats.
Roll the Free gacha daily! DO IT. In the JP version the free daily gacha is now a 10-roll, and hopefully they put this into the US version from the jump too.
PRESS THE BUTTON
Elliot: While the EXP cards and ½* servants become useless very quickly, you get a lot of 1-3* fou cards, which give servants flat stat increases to ATK and HP.
The order in which you hit enemies is crucial: Combat acts a little like FF1 - if you choose multiple attack cards in a row for the same servant they will maintain a combo on a single opponent, continuing to hit even if they run out of HP. (You will also see “overkill” on the screen)
Elliot: If you are fighting weaklings and know that a single attack will kill one of them, change which character is attacking within the chain so that more enemies are hit.
IE:
Servant A attacks a goblin, reducing it to 0 HP. The second attack card is also using servant A, so they keep hitting the goblin on 0 HP.
VS:
Servant A attacks a goblin, reducing it to 0 HP. The second attack card uses Servant B, who then attacks the next available enemy starting from the front of the group.
This will help you get through trash enemies quickly with a minimum of retaliation turns - saving HP for later waves and bosses.
Using a Noble Phantasm also breaks a combo, even if you use the same Servant afterward.
On the flipside, you may want a character to keep attacking a weak/single opponent after its HP reaches 0 to generate more NP % and Critical stars.
QX20XX: Hit the enemy mobs from the back. If you vanquish the enemy in the rear and you have a different Servant up at bat on the next attack, you’ll begin attacking the enemy up in the front. Wiping out a mob on Crit-boosted Buster cards via a strategically selected chain that exploits every weakness on the field is the best feeling.
Quick and Arts cards are good, actually: Of the three types of attacks, Buster Cards deal the most damage but that’s all they’re good for. Quick will burst more Critical Stars from enemies and Arts charge the NP meter. Each servant has a unique distribution of which card will appear in your hand, so team building will eventually require strategizing according to NP gain and Critical Star generation, on top of Class strengths.
Elliot: Team composition and synergy can be safely ignored for the majority of the game, but as you get into harder events and story missions you will need a deeper roster of viable Servants who you can form teams out of.
Always go for Quick or Arts Chains where you can - the flat extra crit stars / NP % is a massive boon.
Chains enhance the effect of the cards, making their effects even more pronounced.
Use your personal skills! They can really save your sorry ass in a pinch. When multiple different outfits unlock, take time to switch outfits and level all of them.
QX20XX: Use those Command Seals! Full NP charge! Complete HP recovery! Never spend Saint Quartz on party revival! If you’re about to get completely owned by a boss, a judicious Command Seal will save your ass. You can only pop 3 Seals a day, then you’re stuck waiting a couple of days for them to regenerate. If you get owned anyway, you probably need to work on your party some more, otherwise the next boss down the line will own your ass even harder, no matter how many Command Seals you burn.
Run time-limited events. These give you higher rate of return of materials, all of which you will need. In particular, make sure you run events where there is a Welfare 4* Servant available. These range from “Basically a mediocre 3*” (Saber Lily) to “Stupid good” (Rider Kintoki, Ryogi Shiki).
Elliot: Either way, they are a free 4* with easy to acquire ascension materials (available as part of the event) so never turn your nose up at them.
Raid a mountain for fun and profit!
The stories are usually good fun too, like the time that Evil Jeanne D’arc got lonely so she summoned a bunch of friends who immediately turned on her. Poor Jeanne Alter.
QX20XX: A good event will save your entire team from the dreaded mobage plateau effect in the main storyline. The devs are sadistic when it comes to material drops in normal play but the event shops that open up will offer all those coveted Reverse Dragon Scales and Demon Hearts you desperately need during the inevitable dry spell.
QP (The basic currency) is utterly ignorable: and you will never, ever run out UNTIL you come to level up skills, at which point you will never have enough because levels 6+ are hilariously expensive. (Level 9 to 10 is 20 million) It’s worth running the QP dailies preemptively so this doesn’t catch you out when you come to need it.
QP doesn’t last long when you have skills to level
Elliot: That being said, you can coast on level 1 skills for servants for the vast majority of the game. Don’t do what I did and waste valuable materials levelling a smattering of skills up on rando Servants you think may be useful, unless you want to curse your name later on down the line.
Focus on the characters you want to use and save materials for them alone.
Crystallised Lore (the purple cube in the screenshot above) is the rarest material in the game and must be treasured. This takes a skill from level 9 to 10 and the game doles out a very, very finite number of them. Outside of Mashu, consider VERY carefully before you use these.
QX20XX: The second rarest material in the game are the Grails you get after completing each Order. These will increase the level cap on a fully ascended Servant by increments of 5 before Level 90, then by increments of 2 until hitting Level 100, the highest possible level in the game. Lots of Servants have some insane growth potential beyond their max ascension, so do your research because you’ll only get as many Grails as there are Orders in the game.
Make these Grails count!
Elliot: Events will also give you grails, sometimes two. When the game first came out in JP there was no use for grails so everyone collected them and had no idea their point was for a whole year.
Level 6 Servant Bond really does take millions of points: You get a CE specifically designed around your Servant after Level 10. Of course, it will take a long time.
Elliot: Most of the CE’s that you get for Level 10 bond are situational (and some are just bad) - read up on them before you go hog wild trying to max bond your waifu/husbando. You do get free quartz for levels 6-9, which is nice but not worth the effort to explicitly grind for.
That just about covers everything we can think of that FGO babies will need to know before they’re thrown to the wolves. Some closing remarks from each of us follows.
Always post screenshots of your paid gasha 10-rolls on social media so we can have some hearty LOLs all around.
First, you read Fate/Stay Night (skip the anime), then you watch Fate/Zero, then play Fate/Extra, then you learn Japanese to play Fate/Extra CCC and read Apocrypha. Finally, read Tsukihime, Kagetsu Tohya, the Melty Blood manga, AND THEN play Melty Blood, available on Steam. Oh yeah, watch Kara no Kyoukai too, that one’s good.
Elliot: Have fun with the game! The story is bonkers and it delivers some legitimately exciting twists and turns, as well as amazing set piece battles that are fun to overcome.
If you really want to break your brain, go on Fate Wiki and open up as many tabs as you can. You’ll *feel* the brain cells dying from the chuuni and overcomplicated world-building. It is a good pain.
