This is a copy/expansion on something I've posted to discord. Just something to give people an idea of what they 'should' be doing in a game that's as open ended as VC. This is intended for fresh newbies, if you've been around this won't be anything new to you. If you're here for the collab you might want to jump to the end first as there is some collab specific advice.

Rough Step-by-step to get from day 1 to endgame

1. Reroll for Catalyst Sortishia if you care about PvP. Sort remains the most meta defining hero since her release, even with vindicators popping up. You may notice that she shows up in the top 10 usage rates of a LOT of connect battles. She heals, she protects, she disrupts, she damage amps. Valkyrie Connect is designed so that no hero can dominate everything, but Sort is the closest to that, or at least a swiss army knife that will make any newbie's early game smooth as hell, provided they have the patience to reroll for her. To aid in rerolls we have two guides here. All this said, it's not absolutely essential to reroll if you do not care about PvP, in which case you can do whatever you want, though know that your progress will be faster if you did reroll.

2. Orb up a few heroes to purple frame so they can equip 4 weaps/accessories, team of 5 p0 heroes should be able to handle most event connect battles at 4* difficulty, making you capable of farming for the event rewards at a decent efficiency ratio. You need to clear up to around chapter 10 in the main story in order to get to purple frame, you get a decent chunk of diamonds while doing this so you can probably think about what you want to use those on, or ask discord. If you have problems clearing main story, tap the crown icon on the home screen and follow around 20 people the top 100 total power score rankings, then use their mercenaries to absolutely maul whatever is in your way.

3. Start collecting gear and heroes through whatever you can, video summons can fill in a lot of holes, you must be on android or ios to access those. Save up diamonds and ask in discord if a new banner catches your eye, DO NOT WASTE DIAMONDS CARELESSLY YOU DO NOT GET A LOT OF THEM AFTER THE INITIAL BURST. For clarity, early on all your diamonds should be going towards good hero banners, these days that will probably be Alter Saga or Apocalypse Party banners up to step 4 for 9.5k diamonds each time they show up, they represent the upper end of power levels for what heroes are available a this point in time, but they're non-guarantee banners and it can be a very long time before you get anything from them. Alternatively, Yggdra Party has high rates on mid range power level heroes that can help you round out your roster for 12.5k diamonds in 5 steps, with a guarantee on step 5, normally people will pick up 1-2 additional heroes on the path to the guarantee, so if you just want more heroes and don't care who they are, go for Yggdra. Lucky Boxes is another viable but non-guarantee banner, but they're specialized towards specific endgame content these days, I would not recommend doing them early on unless you're rerolling.

Around this juncture you're probably going to get into a loop of farming the currently active event > not being able to clear out the event trader > not having time or resources to build up your heroes > another event starts and it happens all over again. Don't get discouraged if this happens, and don't feel like you're missing out by not 'completing' an event, it's not a big deal, you'll get there eventually.

4. Start looking at clearing Super (S1) difficulty connect battles, Gymir is a decent entry point so for that you will want to look to orb Light elemental damage heroes that have innate gravity field resistance to around p2. You may need Chaos field resistance rings as well. Repeat this process until you have at least Gymir and Angrboda promoted to 5*. The other supers are not as useful as those 2 and you'll probably be coming back later to do their S2 for runes anyway. Please note that you should be prioritizing event content over this, as those are time limited stuff and only come back once a year if at all.

5. Start looking at Infernals, same process as Supers but they will 100% demand max purple frame and high elemental field rings. All of the infernals are useful and borderline mandatory for endgame content.

6. You've been farming regular connect battles in the meanwhile I hope? Should be looking to awakening your best heroes that can he awakened in between all of this.

7. Push to at least B1 in arena and grand arena. This is easy as hell if you're actively attacking on saturday's reset time. Managing to do this gives you a decent diamond income on the daily even if you suck at pvp. pvp focused people should probably have done this as #3 l0l

8. Do some raids for artifacts, don't go too hard on them since event ones are better.

9. You're endgame now! Enjoy the endless grind and save diamonds for collabs whatever you're interested in. Go hit up EX and Heinous difficulty if you like suffering.

The basic playloop after you get to this point is just event connect battles > slap people around in arena near reset time > pull for hard to get good heros and cry when you don't get them > wait for collabs > repeat.

Common questions and pitfalls to avoid:

1. How does gear work? In combat a hero will use their equipped weapons in order from top to bottom on the equip screen, looping around when they hit the 4th slot. Every turn the hero will check first for whether the gear skill will be used (40% chance at skill level 1, going to 60% at skill level 5), then acting based on if it triggered or not, if the weapon failed to trigger then the hero will perform a basic attack using their primary offensive stat, you can think of it as 100% ATK/MATK to Nearest enemy, awakened heroes will have an elemental modifier to that basic attack.

2. What are Constant Buffs and how do they work? Stacking stat buffs correctly is probably the first step towards good team building. There's 4 categories of buffs:

Equipment Constants - Provided by stuff like Bangles from the connect trader. These have a stacking cap of 50%, meaning 2 Accessories that buff the same stat will likely cap it out for that hero, most of the time you should strive to get 50% of the heros offensive stat (ATK/MATK) in equip constants and then pile on HP/DEF/MDEF as appropriate.

Hero Passives - Most heroes these days will have a passive that buffs themselves or their teammates. These have a stacking cap of 50% and stack with equip constants. When they work in tandum with equip constants you may see a red numbered buff over the hero, that's not a bad thing, it's saying you're doing it right. Hero passives are much harder to stack to full while maintaining team cohesion, so they're generally put on the backburner.

Active buffs - Heroes and Weapons can apply a temporary buff to a stat. These (once again) have a stacking cap of 50%. These effects are typically afterthoughts since in pvp you're looking more for crowd-control effects rather than buffs and in pve you're looking for multi-target elemental damage. It should be noted that debuffs also have the same cap of 50% (shocking, I know!), and it's possible to have both the buff and the debuff on the same target, presumably this just neutralizes the effects but it has never been tested.

Artifact Passives - These seem to run by their own rules and do not have a stacking cap, according to the developers not like you can actually hit the typical 50% cap even if you max rolled anywayyyyy.

And then there are the non-stat constant and buffs like damage up against aesir/grounded enemies and elemental damage up and status aliment resistance. These DO NOT stack and the highest that is applied to a hero will take effect, while the lesser buffs are wasted. Non-numerical buffs like Light Ring will however stack with a light element damage buff or whatever's appropriate.

3. I got this thing called Slayer Ring should I make it 5*? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Well maybe it's not that dramatic these days. Slayer rings are one time rewards from a scenario event that comes around every now and then, for a lot of new players this will be their first thing with a beast damage boost constant. This is extremely significant because All crystals in connect battles are beasts and a lot of them demand that you pop the crystals first before you can deal with the boss. So to be clear, you only EVER get 4 3* slayer rings, that's enough to make 2 5*s if you use reforge rings, absolutely NEVER use scenario rewards as reforge fodder unless you know what you're doing, that includes reforging from 4* to 5*. With slayer rings people will opt to keep 4 4* rings since you get the full beast slayer effect at skill level 1 and there's no reason to go to 5* unless you're pushing stats. If you don't believe you're going to use that many, there's also an argument to run 2 4* and 1 5*. Just remember the stacking rules from #2 tho, a lot of heroes can also provide this effect so it's not as dramatic of a choice these days, but it's still relevant early on.

The larger takeaway from this is that you should not 5* hard to get equipment, it's very often more beneficial to have 2 4*s than 1 5*.

4. What's a good power score to have at level 50? Power Score is a horrible measurement of how strong a team is in most games, but I think VC has one of the worst PS to actual power mappings out there. Firstly SPD, EVA, ACC are completely irrelevant stats and easily make up 50-70k PS on their own in a 5 hero team. Even if you rip those out, you'll have old basic awakened heroes rolling around with the same PS as the newest hotness. Who the hero is matters a lot more than their theoretical max power score.

5. Is it better to do the discount pulls of all the gacha banners? LISTEN UP, the first rule if Valkyrie Connect is you don't pull without guarantee. The second rule of Valkyrie Connect is YOU DON'T PULL WITHOUT GUARANTEE.*except for alter saga since those never have a guarantee

The game's visible rates for its gacha banners are honestly some of the worst looking out there, but it's balanced around a fairly early pity compared to other games on the market. But this does mean that if you do not get to the pity steps, you're effectively throwing diamonds away.

6. What team should I run for <insert connect battle here>? There's a page for every connect battle/raid/bifrost/blah that exists right here on garm. A lot of players will consult the usages rate ranks to get a idea of what's good and proceed with refinements from there. There's already a note to the effect on each page, but I will reiterate here: Usage ranks reflect the amount of people who cleared using a specific hero, because this is a gacha with sometimes extremely rare heroes, you may not see a top performer on the usage ranks just because not enough people cleared using that hero. Don't blindly take the top 5 and expect to win, do some thinking.

7. What team should I run in Arena/Grand Arena/Colosseum? PvP is a bit of mess if I'm to be perfectly honest. Generally, a good pvp team consists of 1 status ailment resistance provider and then enough hard crowd control effects to lockdown the current meta heroes according to race or airborne/grounded state, this can come from the hero's action skill or weapons you equip. Top end PvP teams will likely have hard cc effects on every single hero during every turn they take covering the entire enemy team. You can look over the top ranking players in A rank arena for team ideas, imitation is the most sincere form of praise after all.

8. What gear should I keep and what should I toss? Here ya go.

9. What are the things worth buying out of the cash shop? *whale noises* Level Progress packs and straight diamonds with first time purchase bonus are generally considered worth, as well as the monthly diamonds pass. Periodically they will offer packs with a ticket that let you select and obtain an hero, some of them have some very good options you'll know it's good if discord rages about game being p2w . Be careful not to confuse those packs with packs that have a box with heroes instead of a select ticket, boxes are random and you'll probably be throwing your money away. Generally to evaluate whether something's a good deal you can take the raw diamond amount in the pack and divide by the cost of the pack, if you get a >175 diamond to $ ratio then it's probably a good deal, or at least you're not going to be seeing much better. If you need a conversion to another currency, I benchmarked this off the second most expensive straight diamond pack with first purchase bonus, that's 7000 diamonds divided by whatever you see in your own cash shop, which for me was $39.99 USD.

10. Should I be buying anything out of the traders with diamonds? ABSOLUTELY NOT. NO EXCEPTIONS.

11. How do I get more

Mana - Join raids and do as much damage as you can. Even very new people should be able to do Easy/Normal difficulty, and they massively overload you on mana.

- Join raids and do as much damage as you can. Even very new people should be able to do Easy/Normal difficulty, and they massively overload you on mana. Diamonds - Main story, hero quests, scenario events (if any are available), and arena/grand arena.

- Main story, hero quests, scenario events (if any are available), and arena/grand arena. Stamina - Video Summons, event card flipping, happy box.

- Video Summons, event card flipping, happy box. Blacksmith and Soul Tokens - Mana summon and sell everything.

- Mana summon and sell everything. Heroes and Gear - Video Summons for the basics, connect trader, and event farming.

- Video Summons for the basics, connect trader, and event farming. Time to farm - Oh god what did they do to you.

What does a day in Valkyrie Connect look like?

Or how to run through VC dailies as quickly as possible so you can get to your other games. You can do the following in any order.

3 hero quests and 5 main story quests using quick tickets. Hero quests are net positive for quick ticket gains so if you run low you can do more than 3 to restock. This should also trigger wandering trader, grab the orb boxes and whatever you need out of there.

3 connect battles, probably event connects of the highest difficulty you can handle, but if you're in a rush you can just do 3 1* solo runs of something in less than 2 minutes.

Sell junk out of your bag in the blacksmith and refresh trader for reforge knives if you have spare tokens. Also check soul trader for seasonal hero souls/sp weapons that you're missing.

2 or more arena/grand arena fights, preferably around reset time to maximize diamond gains. Countdown till reset can be found on the home page of garm.

Video summons every 3 hours or a 10x mana summon if you're in a rush

Open up cash shop and grab the daily free Happy Box

Remember to come back at noon and 6pm your local time for 100 extra stamina

Check for event stuff, like daily free summons or bingo/tic-tac-toe board or time limited special challenges under missions

And that should should clean out your dailies and give you a pile of around 750+ stamina to do whatever you need to do. Newbies will probably be using it on hero quests/orbing while veterans will be using them on event content. After you burn through that you have the 'option' of joining connect battles as much as you want for the rest of the day.

How does Valkyrie Connect compare to other games on the market?

Or why should or shouldn't you be playing this game. As someone who plays a lot of other mobile games, here's my personal take:

The Good:

Constant sense of progression - Nothing you do to improve your heroes or gear is completely wasted effort, as there will always be content that uses it at some point. Progress is also deterministic instead of random for the most part, there's no possibility that you can spend a day farming and get absolutely zero improvement to your account.

No stamina/energy/ap/whatever to limit gameplay time - At least not after you get your account up to speed. Joining connect battles that other people host make up for a lot of your gameplay, which does not cost anything.

No dupe requirement to get the most out of your heroes - Pulling a hero once is sufficient for the most part, you'll eventually work your way up to being able to earn red frame potions.

Free costumes/skins - Valkyrie Connect has probably the most bizarre implementation of this sort of thing. Costumes/skins are statted and can have very powerful effects, which may make you think they'd charge money for them.... but they don't, all costumes are free farmable event rewards or something you can just save up rubies to buy out of trader.

Longevity - Ateam has not shut down a single one of their games, even as some of them are closing in on the 15 year anniversary mark with a skeleton of a player base. If nothing else, you won't have to worry about Valkyrie Connect suddenly packing up shop.

Regular collaboration events - Some might say that this is the main reason to play Ateam games. I don't think any other publisher can match them for collab frequency.

Non-stop events - There's always something to do, if you're up for it.

Consistent production quality - Art assets, voice overs, and 3d models/animations keep to a fairly decent level of quality, even at the rate they're pumping new heroes out. They're not the absolute upper limit of quality for mobile games, but I'd say they're good enough.

The Bad:

PvP modes are effectively locked out for newcomers - The only way for a new account to be competitive in arena is to get both sortishias and put in 800+ hours of farm to gear them to a minimally viable spot. Getting 2 catalysts at all is extremely rare on a reroll or extremely expensive as a whale, getting 2 specific ones is even worse. Even if someone were to miraculously do this, there are certain gear that are just not obtainable as they're limited collaboration stuff, some of these are massively game-changing and don't have substitutes.

No regard for balance among heroes/gear - There are a lot of stuff that are overpowered by design, mostly carry overs from the last director of VC, but the current director apparently have no qualms about buffing stuff that are already overpowered. This does mean that it feels great to have/get some of said overpowered things, but it sucks all that much more if you don't.

Very little community interaction - While it's been getting a little bit better, the Japan-based developers have shown little inclination to acknowledge that the global player base even exists. Veteran players have time and again tried to push for changes that would be good for game health and in more than once case the developers went the exact opposite direction of what was proposed. Not to say that everything from the player base should be listened to, but there were some common sense stuff like "don't release a hero that's explicitly designed to invalidate the hero released last week." (Evan and Darrick if you're reading this at some point know that we appreciate you for trying)

Blatantly Money Grubbing Actions - While a game needs to make money to continue to exist, VC sometimes says "GIVE US MONEY" a bit too obviously. Stuff like "Oh hey is this new connect battle too hard? Here, go get this new hero that perfectly shuts them down!" What's worse, sometimes the translation ends up being misleading or completely false in describing what a summon banner consists of or what a pack contains. I doubt this is intentional, but the damage is still done.

Low variety in event format - All events boil down to farm tokens to get stuff while shoving other players out of your way if there's a ranking. While this is par for the course for mobile games, it does get old after a while.

Non-stop events - If you want to be competitive you're pretty much locked into an permanent farm loop with no breathing room to stop.

Very dated gacha system - VC is pushing close to 4 years old and there has been very few changes to keep the money machine up to date. There's no carry over pity/summon mileage, no daily free pull that actually means anything except during special events, no retiring or demoting of old heroes into the common/low rarity pool, little to no ability to farm for summon currency. Some of this is of course do the differences in implementation, but it definitely feels very bad to go from any game that had these things to VC.

No general autoplay - VC demands a lot of farming in the endgame, probably more than literally every other game on the market, but there's no way to keep the game on screen and let it farm for you for more than 5 minutes.

Inventory management simulator 2020 - A large section of your play time will be spent trying to wrestle to horribly inefficient equipment system to the point where you have usable stuff, there has been some quality of life changes made to this in the recent year but it is still FAR from good.

Some footnotes specific to the One Punch Man collab that's currently happening:

It's a simutaneous collab, so we don't have the benefit of foresight. We do know that Tatsumaki/Terrible Tornado will be the lucky box hero for this collab, typically lucky box heroes are the strongest offering for a collab, so odds are that she will be the one to reroll for when she shows up. Get a copy of sonic out of cards, do the collab scenario as best as you can for diamonds.

Some footnotes specific to the Valkyrie Anatomia collab that's currently happening:

Collab heroes are all free this round, just collect enough card tokens to grab Lezard out of cards and get a soul drop from the Lenneth collab that'll come along later and you'll have all of the collab stuff done basically.

Some footnotes specific to the EVA collab that's currently happening:

1. The best collab heroes to reroll for would be Sun God Asuka/Envy Scion Misato/Star God Kaworu/Mari & Eva Unit-08, followed by Asuka & Eva Unit-02 and Misato & AAA Wunder from the returning eva heroes banner. The new eva heroes are considered not as strong, but of them Rei & Sleipnir and Asuka & Vidofnir are decent. Sort is ofc better than all of them.

2. Make sure to get at least 1 copy of Kaworu & Heidrun out of the card flip and 1 soul drop from all of the eva connect bosses, their hero quests will open up after the collab ends and you can max them out at your own pace.

Did I miss something? Feel free to leave a comment.