Building your teams for new players

So there's lots of different type of content in Guardian tales, each with an emphasis on a different type of thing, depending on what the team is *for* a different setup will be optimal. Some different "styles" of gameplay are:
  • DPS (Offense) only - Generally speaking when a mode has a timer, and there's little to no chance of death, probably the point is to deal out as much damage in the alloted time as possible, one such example is raid. To optimize your party for DPS you want:
    • A full team of heros who primiarily are there to deal damage, or support other heros in dealing damage
    • Defensive bonuses of any sort, and healing are generally not useful
    • Abilities which provide extra bonuses to the entire party are a premium (for example defense debuffs on bosses in raid)
  • Survival (Untimed) - If a mode has no timer, and you'll be subject to consistent attacks, and there's no consequence for it taking longer, I'm calling it a "Survival" stage (even if it's easy to live) generally speaking modes where there's no consequence for taking longer are all survival, most story stages are survival stages. To optimize your surivial you want:
    • a top tier tank, keeping your enemies focused on a single hero who has high defensive abilities frees your other party members up
    • Healing, there's lots of sources of healing, and keeping your HP up is how you stay alive, overdoing the healing isn't terrible, but it may make gameplay slower
    • Some source of damage, without any primary damage dealers on your team, you'll probably win eventually, but it might take a long time, especially if you're facing enemy healers.
    • Note that you can work with less defensive abilities if you can dodge better, avoiding attacks really reduces the need to have as much defense or healing.
  • Mixed - This is a stage where not doing damage quickly enough has consequences, but there's also a non-zero chance of dying if you go all attack, Modes like orbital lift and colo fall into this category. For mixed modes, you'll be combining some of both of the above, there's always tradeoffs, and you'll be forced to make decisions about exactly what's important to you for a specific mode/stage/challenge, keep in mind that:
    • "Balanced" isn't always the best approach to all mixed modes, sometimes trying to force an all defense or all offense might work better for you.
    • Pay attention to how your team works together, a balanced team that uses abilities that compliments each-other is much much better than one who does not.
    • Read all the descriptions of all the abilities, it may give you ideas for synergies, and don't be afraid to ask for help.

Next thing you have to know is how team member's attributes fit together, there's a few pieces at play here, so let's cover each one:
  • Elemental vulnerability - If you know the element of the thing(s) you're fighting you can get a massive elemental bonus, Having Elemental advantage when attacking gives you +30% damage, having elemental advantage when defending gives you -30% damage taken.
    Some modes where this applies:
    • Raid, you always know the element of the boss you're attacking
    • Tetis, each level has a specific element for all the monsters/bosses
    • Colo - *sometimes* Colo is a complicated case, when attacking you know the element of all the defenders, but they may not all be the same, if you're careful you can line up elemental advantages, but that's not 100% always the best choice even when it's possible (because Colo has a wide array of factors)
    Elemental advantages are:
    • Dark has advantage over Basic has advantage over Light has advantage over Dark
    • Fire has advantage over Earth has advantage over Water has advantage over Fire
    Try to strongly avoid attacking at elemental disadvantage where possible
  • Party Bonuses - There's a number of party bonuses, these apply an in-combat bonus to all the heros it applies to, not every mode cares about every type of bonus, and not every bonus is useful to every hero (and even when it's useful it may not be *as* useful for different heros)
    • The way party bonuses stack, you can have multiple of the same type, but it's *more* effective to stack different effects (for example it's more damage to stack dark+melee damage than it is to stack melee+melee or dark+dark), for details see this chart: link

    • Be aware that "Melee damage" only effects melee attacks and "Earth Attack" only effects attacks made with an earth weapon, for more details on attack types see this guide: link
    • For "Normal" party attacks, that's everything that appears in the 'normal' portion of the hero's ability description, basically not chain or weapon skills
    • "Skill" damage bonuses apply to chain and weapon skills
    • Weapon skill regen rate increases the rate at which your weapon skill cooldown decreases, letting you use it more often, however only the party lead can use their weapon skill.
  • Passive bonuses - Every hero has some effects that happen when they hit 5 star, and some have additional effects on chain skills and on weapon skills, these bonuses may be for that hero only or apply to the rest of the party in some fashion (and the same thing about it *sometimes* applying to different heros that goes with party bonuses applies to passive bonuses as well)
    • Pay particular attention to debuffs, debuffs stack somewhat non-intuitively, all status's applied to heros and enemies basically work by applying a status to a creature, and if you apply the same one again it replaces it (with a new duration) for defense debuffs there's a few types that qualify as 'different' so they can stack on the same creature:
      • "On hit" defense debuff, heros like Eunha, Andras, Coco, Gremory have an "on hit" defense debuff, this is a general defense debuff that's applied as part of a hero's normal attack
      • "Melee" or "Ranged" defense debuff, heros like Nari, Kamael, Vinette, and Rey apply a defense debuff that's only applied against melee or ranged attacks, generally these are 'on hit' as well, but having different qualifiers makes them a different type
      • "When marked", Heros like Lillith, Kanna, 1st Corp Commander apply a "mark" or "symbol" which applies a debuff, note that a monster can only have one mark, and not *all* marks are defense debuffs (for example Eunha applies an "attack debuff" mark with her secondary skill)
      • Elemental Reisist down -- This is not actually a defense debuff, this increases the damage done by attacks of a specific element, but isn't actually related to the monster's defense, you can stack as many elemental resist down statues as you'd like, even if they're the same sort.

    • Some passive bonuses are equal to or even more powerful than party bonuses, and often have special restrictions, for example Vinette's got a passive ability that gives 10$ attack per dark hero in your party *to* all dark heros in your party, so if you have 4 dark heros she provides 40% attack which is almost as strong as a full 50% attack party bonus.
  • Complimentary skills - some skills are more useful in some circumstances, and sometimes skills go especially well together, for example Beth has an ability that gives her bonuses when there's enemies nearby, and most tanks have some kind of taunt, so if you can gather enemies together in a lump with taunt and have Beth hit all of them at once, she'll do more damage than if she has to chase each one individually.

So now let's talk about what game modes fit into what syle of gameplay:
  • Story - *most* story levels are "Survival" you want to get through the combat, alive, and how quickly that happens doesn't matter. You'll be looking for elemental advantage, but it's rare that it's immensely important, if you find yourself dying too quickly, you're probably underleveled, but element advantage can play a role there
  • Coop Expedition - Technically coop is a survival mode, there's no consequence to taking a bit longer to finish, but since you're playing with other players and survival tends to be pretty trivial (since a healer can pick you up even if you die) The main thing to do is to play your role to the hilt and make sure you know how the coop special role abilities work. Note that party bonuses do *not* work in coop expedition
  • Tetis Heros - Tetis is a special all-auto mixed mode, some exceptional things about it are that you have party bonuses (even though you have a party of 8, yes they stack even when you're not on the field) and every party member can use their weapon skill (for equipping purpose you can treat everyone as if they are a party leader) This makes skill damage and weapon skill regen party bonuses better than they are normally. Some of the abilties from the ability tree let you ignore damage in some fashion, they may change your optimal party from a mixed one to a pure-dps one.
  • Colo - Colo is a PvP mode, it's mixed, in the sense that there's a timer and if you don't kill your opponnent before the time runs out you'll lose, but there's actually a fair number of party makeup strategies that work, at the higher level you'll notice that defense debuffs rarely work (because defenders equip equipment to negate debuffs) You can actually in some cases run a full DPS team and have it work (assuming you can kill your opponent before they kill you) but the opposite (going full defense) has also been known to work Most of the more succesful teams though have a balanced approach, healing, however, is nerfed so it's not as large of a factor, typically you'll run a tank and then some number of attackers/supporters Colo has an HP multplier (lead HP is x6 and off-lead is x3, but healing is not increased proportionally)
  • Raid - Raid is as pure of a DPS mode as exists in GT, monsters *can* kill you, but since the whole point of raid is to see how much damage you can inflict in a short period of time, You'll want to employ tricks with dodging, positioning and timing to avoid anything dangerous
  • Dungeon Kindgon Arena - At first this looks like "auto raid" but since the monster's damage increases the more damage you inflict to it, there's a bit of a balance that needs to be struck you're kind of forced to figure out "what's the least defense I can get away with while inflicting the most damage" you *will* need a source of healing (but it doesn't need to be a super strong source), ideally without sacrificing much or any offense. There's no way to focus attacks on a single target, and attacks come at at intervals. You can also tweak your weapon skill/chain timing to try to line up with the boss's attacks to prevent the dangerous later ones, this tweaking is slightly different depending on your device, so you may have to do some serious fiddling to get it exactly right for you.
  • Boss Rush - Sold as a sort of "single player raid" this is actually closer to a mixed mode than a pure DPS mode, there is a timer, and if you fail to kill the boss in the timer you'll lose a ton of points, however the timer is pretty long and you get 99% of your points for just taking down the boss, regardless of how fast it happens. At the high levels you can increase this "kill" score by adding more challenges to your run. You can usually do a little bit better with some practice than the AI, but doing boss rush in auto mode can still quite viably get you all of a week's rewards.
  • Arena - A single-hero PVP mode, either mixed or DPS, typically... You pick 3 heros and have 1 on 1 battles until all 3 of someone's heros are dead. Party bonuses apply, but relic stage buffs do *not*, there's also a HP multiplier in arena... Generally since passive bonuses are only effective for the active hero, heros with "selfish" passive bonuses do better in arena than they do in other modes. You can run a tank, generally trying to collect boxes (boxes are a 10% attack bonus each) or run 3 solid heros who can stand alone (either dodge well and try to take them down quickly or slug it out trading blows)
  • Deathmatch - This is similar to area, with slightly different team-based rules
  • Orbital Lift - Orbital lift is technically a mixed mode, however it's also a 'challange' mode and while a lot of levels are easy to just cruise through, there are some that are just brutal and require very specific setups and/or specific builds and sometimes an excess of luck (you may have to run them many many many times to pass)
  • Elemental towers/Hero Towers - Similar to Orbital, but often with a little more of a puzzle element.

Equipment:
  • For accessories see the Quick and Dirty Accessory Guide
  • For Merch see the Merch Mini-Guide
  • For relics the only difference between the types is the 'stage buff' otherwise endowments/base stats are all randomly rolled and are not type dependant, the stage buff is only active if all 4 relics are the same type:
    • For Mixed modes you generally want Candles, moving a defensive bonus into your stage buff gives you more flexibility with your other equipment. However it's also reaosnable to use candles/books
    • For DPS modes, you generally want either candles or books for your relic type which one will be better depends on the team makeup, usually if there's a crit multipier bonus on the team or there's no crit chance bonus on the team, cups will be better, otherwise books will be better. However Crit chance does max at 100% so make sure you don't exceed that.
    • Stage buffs do not apply when theres more or less than 4 heros (arena, deathmatch, tetis) so you can ignore relic type
    Relic Endowments generally prefer either boss or PvP damage if they apply, if neither applies you can use either PvE damage reduction or Crit multiplier bonus

A couple of examples with explanations:
  • A DPS optimized raid team: Callie, Beth, Lillith, and Plauge Doctor
    • Callie provides a crit-hit chance party bonus (applies to all 4 party member's attack) and a melee defense debuff (applies to everything except beth's chain skill)
    • Beth provides a melee party bonus (applies to everyone) and a Elemental (dark) resist down, all 4 heros are dark
    • Lillith provides a melee party bonus (applies to everyone) and a mark defense debuff (stacks with Callie's debuff)
    • Plague doctor provides a normal attack/skill damage party buff (applies to everyone) and a 'general' defense debuff (stacks with lillith + callie)
    Note that while this is presently the best party that is available for dark, if lillith or beth had a dark attack party bonus instead of melee, the party bonus stacking would be slightly better.
  • A Colo team: Dabin, Kamael, Yuna, and Craig(Ascended)
    • Dabin provides a crit chance party bonus for the whole team *and* an additional crit chance based on the number of earth party members, maxed at 4 for all 4 heros
    • Kamael provides a ranged attack party bonus for Dabin, Kamael, and Yuna, and a ranged defense debuff for the same
    • Yuna provides a skill damage party buff and a general "attack" party buff, both of which apply to everyone, and a passive debuff from her totem which taunts, debuffs weapon skill regen and debuffs attack, she also heals and has a special survival after death attribute, which lets her be a second semi-tank
    • Craig provides a defense party buff that applies to everyone, and his passive lets him soak damage instead of everyone else, which basically lets him tank any hit from anywhere regardless of who is attacked with it, he's also got a wide-area taunt which attracts enemy attacks directly