I've been pretty busy answering questions and counseling new players on the official discord server ever since EN server OBT.
Reading through some some of the frequent questions, mistakes, and misconceptions, here's my 2 cents.
Before moving on, full disclosure, I'm a Korean user that's been playing for little over a year on the Chinese server and have been watching the trends and talks going on in Chinese, Korean, and English GF community during that time. I am also currently part of the mod team for official EN GF discord server, the one that's been established by the very devs of this game.
- Last update: 2018 May 20
#01) Do I need to re-roll my account for l337 craft pulls?
No, stop.
This game does not give you a guaranteed super ultra rare unit on your first craft/gacha.
The game already gives you plenty of opportunities to get craft tickets as it is and the entire game balance is implemented well enough that players can do just fine without any 5 star dolls.
#02) Where is the de-censor patch?
Assuming that this question is coming from a EN server player, no, there is none.
The devs have entirely blocked any kind of quasi-official methods of auto-installing pre-censored images. See #04 below for a slightly bigger picture surrounding this.
All methods will involve directly meddling with the internal game files. Have fun juggling with the chance of being permabanned.
#03) Is the premium in-game currency of gems only obtainable with real cash?
Not at all! There are renewable and non-renewable sources of gem within the game.
Non-renewable gems are from first gold medal clear of stages and various achievements in the game. You can view the list of achievements in the in-game Index. It's on the second set of menus after pressing the icon on the bottom right of the main menu screen.
Renewable sources of gem are from weekly in-game SNS share of your screen (try clicking that "Share" button you see in just about anywhere) and weekly consecutive login bonuses. SNS share function in particular will still reward you with 30 gems even if you didn't actually post anything on your Facebook/Twitter as the game appreciates you for at least trying to put one up.
#04) I found a bug! FN FNC is named as FFC!
EN server is being released on United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Unlike China, where this game got originally released and is still being developed by, United States actually has a functional civilian gun market. And with a market pie full of potential money income comes corporate entities eager to protect their copyrights and trademarks. The devs decided to avoid any clashes altogether in all of those countries by labeling stuff differently to avoid infringement shenanigans.
No, you have not found a typo, my friend, but you've found realities of life.
#05) Do I really need a handgun in my squad? I heard that PPK tanks like a champ!
Hundreds of people asked me why their squads are getting killed so easily and when they showed me their squad comp it almost always started with having handguns in the front column because they've read somewhere that certain handguns like PPK and Welrod are excellent to use as main tank.
DO NOT try to use handguns as tanks in early game until you have them level 80+ with suppressors and T type exoskeletons equipped. Whomever told you that PPK is a great tank didn't tell you that this was after fulfilling that condition. Stop. They will die like flies.
Formation setup screen will also flash a red exclamation mark when you are about to finish forming a squad without having a handgun in. Ignore it for now.
What the warning really wanted to do is prepare you for night ops. Night missions feature fog of war and without a handgun in your squad your squads are literally running blind!
Have a look at Night Ops Basics I've written on http://dmesse.egloos.com/3575440 if you want to know more.
#06) What kind of squad composition should I try to have?
Excellent question! I highly recommend 2 SMG 2 AR 1 RF.
A typical squad will have two tanks and three DPS units.
Why then, am I telling people to have 2 AR and 1 RF instead of 3 AR for DPS?
While that solo RF won't be exchanging any formation buffs, because RFs will naturally target backline units first they'll make short work to counter snipe enemy snipers. Jaegers headshotting your main tanks are going to be the biggest threat throughout the entirety of player's career. Either you level up and equip your ARs well enough to quickly kill enemy meatshields and then move onto backline heavy hitters, or employ a single RF in your squad to gun down Jaegers.
Players will typically begin seeing options of running 2 SMG 3 AR squads upon reaching doll level 90 unless M4A1 or Ribeyrolles joins the crew and until then 2 SMG 2 AR 1 RF would work best.
#07) Can I retire M4A1 / ST AR-15 / M4 SOPMOD II / M16A1?
No, please don't!
They are the protagonist squad of this game and such uncraftable storyline units are given only once.
While it is entirely up to the players whether to actively use them, if you're not going to deploy them do try to at least keep them in storage.
#08) Where should I spend the gems first?
Buy more squad slots up until 6 ASAP.
You will want 4 squads that are running logistics 24/7 fetching supplies while you have 2 for your general needs in missions. Remember, no ammo means no pew pew and no ration also means no pew pew for your dolls!
#09) What is Batteries/Dorms and how do they work?
Everyday on server time 11:00 ~ 14:00 or 17:00 ~ 20:00 you'll have chances to grab batteries charged in your own Dorm #1.
These batteries will pile up as time passes and proportionally more according to the total comfort level of all of your dorms. In other words, more comfy and decorated dorms will yield more batteries.
The rough calculation is 1 battery per 1000 ~ 1500 comfort level with somewhere between 50 ~ 103 batteries per additional dorms, all with diminishing returns.
Use these batteries to upgrade the infrastructure of data room, (pet) rescue room, fairy room, and cafe. The latter two are however not in EN version of the game yet.
It is highly advised for new players to spend batteries in data room rather than the pet room as kittens and puppies, while they are cute and chubby, are notoriously battery expensive and there are better places for batteries to be invested.
On 03:00 and 15:00 server time your friends on your friends list will have battery packs spawn that are up for grabs. They can be claimed by other friends on that person's friend list only, and it's a first come first serve basis of 10 charges. Each dorm that your friend has will increase the amount of batteries given to one of his friends, with 2 dorms being 2 each and 10 equal to 10 batteries.
#10) What is combat report and how do I use it?
Your trusty money loving adjutant Kalina has been commissioned to head into data room and write combat reports then compile them into diskettes. What do you do now?
Combat report diskettes are each effectively treated like a 3,000 XP worth of chocolate packet and can be gifted to dolls to give them flat amount of XP.
Squad 1 dolls go into Dorm 1 and squad 2 dolls go into dorm 2. Put a doll you want to give combat reports in one of your squads and go to dorms > warehouse > gift and hit that GIFT button to give someone XP.
These combat report disks are valuable in raising the level of dolls in a hurry or ironing out XP distribution discrepancies.
#11) Is there a tier list of dolls?
All tier lists that I've seen with my 1 year+ of experience on Chinese server so far in 3 different languages have been entirely subjective, heavily biased, cooked up with agenda, and feature oversimplification with distinct lack of unspoken context tailored to that author.
Both the Chinese players who have been playing for the entirety of 2 years of this game as well as Koreans who have been playing on Chinese servers (note: not Koreans who are playing on Korean server. more about this on #14) agree that oversimplified tier lists listing dolls as tiers 1~3 with no explanation are nothing but a rotting cold pile of filth. The only really used ones are opinion-free number crunching charts like top 10 DPS within ARs.
Unlike modern day Pay-2-Win games, Girls Frontline can be played just fine using 2~3 star dolls available from craft. Hardcore masochists have also been successful in reaping very nice results by deliberately not crafting dolls at all but only relying on field/event drops.
What you *really* need to do is make your own decision based on your own circumstances, especially with what you already have on hand.
Divide dolls by what their roles are. What are their strengths and weaknesses, how well do they blend in with other dolls, what skills do they have, what buff tiles do they put on the table, how do they tackle enemies in front of them; there are many different point of views.
After all this is a strategy game.
And of course if you find a doll exceedingly cute in your eyes nothing else matters.
#12) But... but is there really no list?
If you are so keen on having a general list of T-Dolls in this game with categories of usefulness, it can be divided into the following:
1> You claim someone as your favorite waifu
No questions asked, no point in arguing this over others. You find someone cute and lovely, you then use her.
2> You do not have her in your barracks
Just like love, except that this time it may or may not cloud your objective judgment.
I am being serious, there are a lot more people out there than you think who will say that a certain doll is utter trash just because they are super jealous of anyone else having her when they don't have her yet.
Either that or they never had a chance to tinker with how to effectively use her.
3> You have her in your barracks
Excellent! Find ways to use her.
4> You are a masochist for using her
These are dolls that are actually pretty difficult to properly use them either due to: irregular outliers with formation tile emplacement, amusingly bad stats for their own class, or very strange skills that players haven't quite found where to effectively use them.
Whether to retire them or chuck them into a small corner of storage room is entirely up to you.
Some profound examples are: Micro Uzi / AK-47 / AS VAL (bad aura tiles), Hanyang Type 88 (joke stats), PzB 39 / JS05 (strange skills).
#14) Always find more than one source of info and don't be afraid to experiment!
If there is one thing that was exceedingly useful and memorable that I've learned long time ago back when I was in college, it would be the idea of cross examining stuff.
I've noticed a surge of players popping up in the EN GF community including GF subreddit offering advice and tips. This is a good thing, of course, but it becomes problematic when you start seeing people putting up info that are either utterly wrong, nit picky, intentional troll, or far too narrow-minded.
There is no way that actual vets of this game can keep a 24/7 lookout for misleading info.
Despite spending well over 60+ hours ever since a couple hours before OBT launch in helping newbies, I continue to see people carrying wrong info from somewhere else and every time I have to get them free themselves from shackles of dark and gloomy biases.
Be prepared to get in touch with more than one person about this game when you have a question. Anyone and everyone has their own little bias (this includes myself too) and relying on too few of sources means you will get your worldview bent and warped with no room for expansion.
Don't be afraid to test out this cool new concept you suddenly got in your head. It may or may not work, but who cares, you're just trying to have fun.
In the case of all these huge influx of Koreans playing on KR server offering tips, remind yourself that they were forced to overly dedicate themselves in cold blooded min-maxing as the Taiwanese Longcheng (XD Global) publisher has been shoving down 2 years worth of game content down their users' throat within less than a year.
You will see a lot of them follow the narrative of "Tier 1 or trash" and "corpse dragging or delete" when it comes to doll selection and resource/XP management. Until we get to see that the directly developers run EN server is going to run in-game schedules jam packed with events and almost no breather in the between, listen to their words with a grain of salt, for the poor souls had to endure unnecessarily unpleasant hard times.
(P.S. Honkai Impact 2 collab was awesome. muhahahaha)
This is a mobile game. Your real life always has higher priority at all times. How you play this game, casually or hardcore min-maxing, is entirely up to you to decide. I hope that I don't get to see so many EN players on suicide watch after soul crushing 4000+ rounds of corpse dragging 4-3E.
Master index page for other guides: http://dmesse.egloos.com/3568507
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