A Casual Guide to Granblue Fantasy (Weapons)

[tsuchidaruma]

By casual, for casuals.
Mostly targeted towards newbies (below rank 100) who feel that the wiki is overwhelming with all of its fancy GBF jargons and grindy windy.
I've summarized the basics into 4 simple steps which, hopefully, clarifies things and makes you understand the wiki better.

STEP 1: PICK YOUR BIAS TEAM AND MAKE IT THE STRONGEST IT'LL EVER BE

Do you like playing with fire? Would you like to play with fire lots? Yes? Good. Make your fire team the strongest they'll ever be and it can wipe out all of the other elements in due time. GBF is that sort of game.

The first step of this tutorial is to pick your bias element and stick to it. (For example, all of my favourite characters happen to fall under the dark category... so I ended up working on it, wahaha. People said that it's the most difficult element to main at first but who cares!!!!) Like really, I highly recommend you to stick to it until you're sick of listening to the voices. Why? It's because focusing on 1 element is easier and more manageable than thinking about 6 different teams all at once. GBF is sooo complex (the wiki is a testament to this) already, your brain will explode! RL's giving us enough headache already, yeah? Good.

Stick to 1 element first.



STEP 2: Magnas, magnas, magnas!! GET THE 6 RECCOMMENDED MAGNA WEAPONS AND FILL UP YOUR WEAPON GRID

A very basic weapon grid. It comprises of 6 magna, 2 EX, 1 bahamut and a free mainhand weapon.

Let's start with a bit of jargon lesson.

Omega weapons, or magna weapons in japanese, are weapons which drops from omega raids. The omega raids consist of Tiamat, Leviathan, Colossus, Yggdrasil, Luminiera (Chevalier, in jp) and Celeste. Defeating them gives free SSR and SR weapon drops, which are very good fodders and is the main path to beefing up your bias characters!

However, be warned that not all of the SSR weapon drops are long-lasting. In fact, only 1 per element is desirable, so you'll get a lot of delicious skill level(slv) fodders in the process. So what are the nice ones? Here you go:

Tiamat gun (wind), Levi dagger (water), Colo cane, Ygg sword (earth);
Lumi gun, Lumi sword (light), Celes claw and Celes axe (dark).

Get 6 copies of those weapons, and fill your weapon grid like the above sample. There, that's your basic grid. 6 copies of those should give your characters 30% power boost (6 weapons x 5% ATK UP). Combine that with a uncapped magna summon (say, Tiamat, which gives 50% boost to its weapon skills) and the power up would be increased to 45%. These are the essentials, so be sure to get them! 100% HL certified.

The only exception being Celes claw, celes axe and Lumi sword. Celes axe gives the usual big boost (5%), but Celes claw has a secondary power-up skill, which is enmity. Basically what it does is that the claws make your party stronger as their HP decreases. At 50% HP, the claws give more power up than the axe, so it's better. This is why people recommend a mix of 4 claws and 2 axes but errm, this is more of a 'to-taste' kind of thing. I personally don't like to play enmity all that much, so my grid ended up being full-axe, haha. Meanwhile Lumi sword is extreeeeemely rare and is more of an end-game weapon, so it's best to keep it until you're HL (above rank 100).

Anything but the above weapons are fodders.

Basically, get 6 copies of those weapons by joining a lot of magna raids first. No need to limit break them.

Renown shop tip: save your renown pendants for the two SUPER RARE weapon drops: Celes Axe and Lumi Sword. They have a painstakingly low drop rate (people can go 3 months without seeing a drop)



STEP 3: Bored of Magna-hunting? Play the event! Or Skip.

MY BOY JAMIL IS SO STRONG thanks to the power of rings. See those +2350 atk? That's my love right there

The event is a fun way to power up, because you can play with other players and get nifty rewards! Notable rewards are of course, crystals, the SSR summons, SSR EX weapons (hence called EX weapons for convenience), premium tickets and rings!

Stashing in an EX weapon or 2 in your weapon grid is a must-have because it yields the best result that way. (For an extended explanation, see the Damage Formula) I recommend snagging an EX weapon or 2 and raising their slv's to 5. They make pretty good filler weapons, and hey, it's fun!

The other notable rewards are the rings. Bless the rings. Get those rings. Propose to your beloved waifus, husbandoes, sons, daughters, mommies and daddies -- those rings give additional status bonuses to characters, and are GOOD. Get them.

Premium tickets are always good too /o/

But if you're tired from work/rl/grinding, remember: focus on 1 element first. If you're building a dark grid but the event gives wind rewards, then it's ok to skip and recover from mobage fatigue. After all, what's a game if it's not enjoyable?

Tldr; Get the EX weapon, SSR summon, rings and tix. But if tired, feel free to skip.



STEP 4: Tired of both? Play the side-stories and get those filler SSR weapons!

Sandalphon appears here!!! The beginning of everyone's favourite LuciSan

Playing the side stories can be fun, but it's the most indirect way to be stronger. But it's the least taxing activity to do and they give free crystals...

Basically, if you're tired of grinding by this point, but still want to get stronger a little bit, then I recommend clearing the side stories. Reading them gives free crystals and free filler SSR weapons, so all is good! The SSR weapons can be used if you've got no other better weapons, and even if you do, they can be reduced to get weapon shards! Weapon shards are needed to do baby-HL stuff, like forging, upgrading, and uncapping weapons. You'll encounter these somewhere down the line at rank 90+. If you're still a bit unsure about reducing them directly however, then it's ok to keep them too. Whatever makes the gameplay exp fun, bro!

The other note-worthy rewards are the premium tickets. Farm them when there's someone you desperately want from the gacha pool! Rolling the gacha 300 times in a banner gives you 300 cerulean sparks, which can be cashed in for a featured chara of your choice. This process is called sparking. Every ticket counts, so go get them when you feel like it : D

There is one super-important side story in the current lineup, and that's What Makes the Sky Blue. Completing the storyline gives 1 free bahamut weapon -- which is the most important normal-weapon in everyone's grids. Bahamut weapons are the strongest normal weapons out there and it boost atks based on the characters' races. GBF has a lot of human characters, so you can never go wrong with getting the bahamut dagger. However, you can also go by your biases and pick other weapons.. : D (Why not?) For a full list of weapons and the stats they boost, see here.

Basically, get a baha weapon from What Makes the Sky Blue then have fun with the rest. Good to get weapon fodders, but not really important otherwise.



STEP 5: It's time to RAISE THEIR SKILL LEVELS!

Grindy-windy!

A-ha, the 2nd-most crucial part of all; raising the skill levels (slv)! Feeding SR weapons can raise skill levels, which in turn makes your weapons more deadly than ever. There are 4 ways to get SR fodders for slv: drops from magna grinding, drops from event stages, treasure exchange from sidestories and clearing arcarum stages. For simplicity's sake, I won't touch arcarum at this point in time since it's pretty hard. You can try, though! Yolooo : D

Drop rate-wise, magna grinding gives the most amount of SR fodder in, say, a string of 15 battles. It's the most efficient and straight-forward method of getting slv fodders, and that's why a lot of people whine about magna-ing a lot.... It's. We play it a lot until we got sick of it!!!! \(^q^)/

But we can also get sr fodders somewhere along the way as we play the events, so just have fun and don't worry too much about it.

To get a nice and solid build, it's best to raise all of their slv to 10. Start with that. You'll figure out the rest some way or another.

As a general rule of thumb, the number of sr fodders required to level up the skill level is 2 x [the current slv]. For example, your weapon's current slv is 5. That means you'd need lv 5 x 2 sr weapons = 10 sr weapons for the next level!

PS: Save your SSR fodders and feed them only to Bahamut weapons and weapons above slv5. For some unknown reason, only SSR weapons works for baha weapons. And for maximum efficiency, you can give 1 SSR fodder weapon to increase the slv of an SSR weapon from lv5 to lv6! Hooray for less SR fodder requirement!

Moreover! If you're desperate, you can also make a slv2 SSR fodder to be fused for slv 8 and above. A slv2 SSR weapon gives enough 'points' to lv up slv10 weapon to slv11, making it very efficient to use! For a complete skill level fodder efficiency list, see here: one // two.

But the most crucial part is still this: focus on one element at a time. One grid. Until the average slv is 5, then feel free to proceed to the rest.

Tldr; raise the slv of your main grid to an average of 5! ONE ELEMENT AT A TIME

At the end of the day, you'd want something like this.

In a nutshell:

1) Pick 1 element to power-up and stick to it! Thinking about the others is taxing, see.
2) Fill up your weapon grid/slot with;
:: 6x recommended magna weapons;
:: 2x EX (event) weapons;
:: 1x Bahamut nova weapon;
:: Free mainhand weapon!
3) Raise their skill levels up to 10/weapon. Or 5, if you're dying to play other elements.
4) Apply these to the other elements!

That's it! It's actually pretty simple, isn't it? GBF just provides a lot of, err, limited-time stages to add in to the importance of playing daily, and that's why a lot of players are... vocal about recommending others to do their dailies.

Things get A LOT easier once you've got a grid that has a full slv10, fully uncapped (flb/full limit-break) (3★) weapons, though. Aim for this one first.



WHAT'S NEXT?

Holy snap are you not tired yet? That's a lot of things to do, you know!! Months of (casual) activity is needed to get a basic grid!

But okay, cool! Time for an extended reading, then! :9

This is a full list of all of the recommended builds for rank 99 and below. Follow it and you can't go wrong!

For those of you who wants to skip a bit and get a magna weapon power-up, you can take a look at the Ancient weapon lineup and see which ones catches your fancy. These olden weapons are drops from the tier 2 summons: Twin Elements, Macula Marius, Medusa, Nezha, Apollo and Dark Angel Olivia. You can join these raids and try your luck! : D

I have heard that the better (if not best) wind/fire/water/earth weapons are Seraphic weapons. I haven't read up on this yet, though (/mains dark) so.. happy reading!

The best EX weapons are Xeno weapons. They give a massive boost (9%) to atk. Xeno weapons can be gotten from Xeno events, which usually happens bi-monthly. It's a pretty high-levelled event, though, so don't get discouraged when you can't do it. It's common to skip the event : D

Bahamut weapons are also end-game materials and are totes delicious.

Basically everything from the shop is End-Game tier weapons. Which means that if you want to know more about those, you have to browse through the wiki yourself! Have fun.? ^q^