Day2k's guide

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Some pros/cons about this game:

Pros:

- Automode farming on lower difficulty is relaxing

- All event units and weapons are fairly easily obtainable even at lower level… doesn’t mean you can fully awaken them though

- Free 5* units are generally just as good/bad as gatcha 5* units

- Well-controlled power creep 2 years in

- 5-man team + lots of buffs/debuffs means you can build lots of teams

- Customize your units with up to 4 skills

- Fairly easy to max out a unit to a usable state, sans awakening. No immediate need to pour tremendous amount of resources into any one unit.

- Star level === rarity. Only a handful of units that can ascend will increase 1 star level, but they also get rainbow guilding

- Beautiful portraits and cute SD units

- Box management is relatively easy

Caveats:

- It is mostly a single-player game

- It’s hard to catch up - start early and stay to gather all the free event units. Every unit matters!

- Also takes a while to level up because you can't easily power level off high level friends

- Raid boss is probably the only part of the game where you’ll feel left out because only the top few hundred get their hands on powerful unique weapons. Recently in JP version they made it possible to exchange for these weapons after completing 15 events.

- 6* gatcha rates is *horrible*, but at least they are generous with gems

- Tapping each unit to increase fealty is tiring (see below)

Player level

Focus on leveling up! Units can only be as high level as the player. Weekly event battles give the most exp. Couple that with an xp-boosting unit. The game gets much more fun around lvl 60, as you can farm the higher difficulty stuff and get more skills.

Gatcha & Rarity

There are 6 rarity levels. Everybody wants 6*, but there are many 5*’s that are much stronger than 6*’s. There are even 4*’s like Koide Hidemasa who are more useful than many 6*’s. Towards the end, most normal people will be using a team of 4*/5*/6*. However, 6*’s undoubtedly give the best weapon and building proposals. A few of the whales could beat the highest difficulty with a team of 3*/4*... My main tank is actually a 4* slasher because her awakened ability adds 50% exp earned. Also, free 5* units usually have the best stats because they get fully awakened from farming dupe drops.

Try not to sell *any* of your units. Especially any 2* and up. You want to up their fealty for weapon/building proposals and keep them around for duplicate skill scrolls. The generic 1* units are debatable...not sure if they do anything...but keeping them increases your total units, which looks nice. Also, you get a ton of them from friend pulls, so it's not really worth the trouble to sell them all the time.

Fealty

Probably the most tedious part of the game until they implement the swiping method... At the city view, you have to click each of the units with a heart on top to increase their fealty level. After they implement the swiping method, you can just swipe over all of them. Otherwise, you’ll have to feed them gems. Fealty starts off capped at 50, then 200, 350, and 500 as you evolve to level 3. Ultimates get upgraded at 100, 300 and 500. Building upgrades occur throughout. Weapon proposals occur around 30-120. Units with ascension can go up to 999 fealty. You get new portraits at evolution 1 & 2, and a special portrait after you fully ascend, but you can pick any portrait that you want.

When you get a new unit, I think within the first hour or so, you can keep refreshing the city map to increase their fealty up to 15. Afterwards, the cooldown timer slowly increases to around 4hr(?)

Buildings

Each unit can propose a different building. Some buildings give money, others give permanent bonuses to types and classes. Some of the 6* units give powerful unique buildings.

Weapons

Units get up to 4 weapon slots at lvl 61. Using a weapon increases the mastery experience. When a unit masters a weapon, that unit gets a permanent stat increase. Make sure to forge at least one of each weapon (regardless of rarity) and mark them as favorite. Except for 6* and a few 5* weapons, there is little reason to fully awaken the weapons. *Thus, it’s best to not assign any weapons to the slots, and instead just auto-equip un-mastered weapons.* Might make some stages a bit tougher. The first weapon gets full stats, and the other 3 get about 10% efficiency. Some rare weapons give un-numbered bonuses, such as resistance to silence. These weapons are best assigned to slots 2-4 because un-numbered bonus don’t get reduced efficiency.

One downside of relying on auto-equip is that your multiplayer team gets weaker because multiplayer teams do not have auto equip. One exception would be to use anti-debuff weapons on your main multiplayer team. You’d need a few extra ones though.

Due to mastery bonus, I tend not to pull on gatchas without limited 5* units (because 6* rates suck). I also tend to pull on step-up gatchas that guarantee limited 5* units, in order get more weapons/buildings.

Farming for weapon mats is quite difficult because drop rates are low and stamina consumption is high. I get mine mostly from higher difficulty levels of limited-time events. Then, when a reduced-stamina event comes for the story mode (often coinciding with a raid boss event), I start farming mats that I'm missing.

Skills

Units can have up to 4 skills when they reach lvl 71. Every duplicate unit gives you a skill scroll. You can also use the “awakening sake” to get a scroll. Sometimes you just gotta awaken a weak unit to get that extra scroll. It takes a long time to max skills though, so start with your good units first...and be careful not to waste your good scrolls. There’s no one way to customize the skills, so have fun with it.

Skill rarity doesn’t mean much. The best skill for strikers is actually the 2* knockup skill. It’s easy to level up, has a short animation sequence, triggers early, deals massive damage, as is the best skill against bosses.

Due to this, be sure to keep pulling the friend points gatcha. That’s where you get your important 2* scrolls. The main ones are the 2* knockup for strikers and two other 2* debuff skills for slashers.

Awakening sake

There are awakening sake's (Japanese rice wine) for 4*, 5*, and 6*. In JP, 6* awakening sake’s are usually only given during special periods when you buy the largest gem pack. 5* sake's are pretty hard to come by initially. Starting out, you’ll probably only get like 1 or 2 a month. 4* sake's are a bit easier to get. You get these from event battle drops (only from the time-limited difficulty), event battle exchanges, siege drops/exchanges, and Shizuka Gozen (regular boss) drop/exchange.

Here are some 4* units that you should use and awaken Ultimates
 * Sanada Masayuki - wood slasher - good tanky healer. Great ultimate & skill. Awakened ability will self-heal and increase xp earned. Pretty much the first unit that everybody awakens to +45. She is my main tank, and probably most people's once fully awakened.
 * Yamauchi Kazutoyo - fire striker - Ultimate boosts all ATK. I use her against Mizuchi (regular boss) because I don’t have a combo team against her. Awakened ability will self heal, reduce wood damage, and prevent silence. Basically as anti-Mizuchi as one gets. Also great for any battles. I actually have her at +25 because with all the knockups, I rarely get silenced.
 * Kuroda Kambei - water striker - Ultimate gives slash shield on all units. Vital for slasher raid bosses. Not really high priority to awaken her except to increase her stats and survivability (gotta fill up her gauge before getting hit by the first boss ultimate)
 * Koide Hidemasa - moon gunner - ultimate will charm up to 4 units. Awakened abilities are not that powerful, but she is one of the best moon gunners/charmers around

Well, buffs/debuffs are pretty clear. What’s not clear are the damage multipliers. You’ll just have to level them up and experiment. At lvl 75, some gunners do 50K damage, some do 300K+. And yes, for some end-game battles there are enemy units with 200K+ HP, so you’ll need to kill them in one hit.

You’ll quickly realize that ultimates are the scariest thing. You do not want to get hit by enemy ultimates. That’s why there are top 4 debuffs: charm, petrify, confusion, and silence. Having any of these debuffs will prevent skills and ultimates from activating.

Gloom can also reduce the ultimate gauge, but it's not super reliable. You gotta use it though if the other four are restricted.

Types/colors

There are 5 types. Water > fire > wood > water. Sun and moon deal and receive increased damage to each other. You can form your team color based on the enemy color. It's not quite clear what the enemy team is comprised of. You kind of have to play a lot to know the SD form of each character.

Classes

There are 6 classes: slash, strike, pierce, throw, bow, & guns, in that order (slash always go first). In general, you’ll want 1-2 tanks (slash), 1-2 DPS(strike, guns), and 1-2 utilities (pierce, throw, bow).

Starting out, the hardest part would be keeping your slasher tank alive due to lack of healing. Skills are usually best for this, as ultimates take a while to fill up. Slasher’s have a variety of self-heal skills. Your first heal other skill will likely be from pierce or throw, but some limited bowers have it too. You may consider using 2 tanks to let the first one die while everyone else tries to max the ultimate gauge, but that comes at the expense of less DPS.

Utilities are named this way because their stats are not minmaxed, and they get a wider pool of skills to choose from. Don’t underestimate them though. Some of their ultimates deal more damage than those of DPS. For example, Momochi Tanba, the guaranteed 6* thrower in the step up, has an ultimate near the top-end of AOE damage (and she has decent good combo hits)

Normal battles

As mentioned, the good thing about this game is that you aren’t really locked out of much content by farming at low difficulty. Farming at low difficulty lets you complete mission rewards, but you won’t be able to max-awaken the event unit. For good units, you’ll want to use the event drops to exchange for that unit in order to awaken her or get more scrolls. Eventually, when you can max-awaken someone simply from farming drops, then you can instead exchange for stamina or skill books or affection gems. I always stock up on stamina and the high-level skill books.

Debuff units rule in the normal battles. While debuffs are really useful, eventually there will be certain battles with restricted debuffs. Then you have to get really creative.

Bosses

Bosses will seem impossible at first. I didn’t really start beating them until around lvl 55. The two most important skills against bosses are heal and knockup. Knockup breaks the boss animation and could disrupt her skills. Heal because bosses do tremendous amount of damage to all units.

While normal battles generally rely on debuffs (charm, silence, etc), none of those work against bosses except knockup. There are 2 general strategies against bosses: You get more rewards if no one dies. If you can’t finish off a boss, ask for help rather than sacrifice more units.
 * 1) Go for the combo kill. You’ll need units with ultimates that have long hit sequences. Finding out which units are good for combo is part of the work though. You’ll need to time your units so that their attacks interleave with each other to generate a combo. This does insane damage as your combo goes up. This is also one of the most ambiguous part of the game (doesn’t help that you can’t tell the hit count from the ultimate’s description). The absolute Queen of combo kill is a limited 6* slasher called Shinmen Muni.
 * 2) Rely on shields, counter debuffs, and damage boosters. You might not be able to kill the boss, but that’s what friends are for. You can ask for help to finish off the boss.

Be creative. My general purpose boss team is actually a 5-sword team because I have an limited 6* skill that increases slasher attack by 3x. Then I have to tweak it for each boss, depending on how many debuffs I receive.

* Usually*, units suitable for bosses are less suitable for normal battles (because ultimates with high combo hits usually don’t come with debuffs). Thus, if there is a clear separation of duty, then you can give knockup skills to boss team units and debuff skills to others.

Multiplayer battle

Get up the ranking to get nice bonuses. Highest rank I’ve been was around 700, so I don’t know how good the rewards for #1 is. With the medals, you’ll want to exchange for the 5* Toyotomi Hideyoshi. She’s not super powerful, but she is one of the very few water gunners. Her skill is good, though the 3* version is probably better.

Most of the 4* units will be given out for free during each month.

Siege battles

When you can, you’ll need to complete these daily. Up to 50 free gems a day. Don’t stretch yourself though, as they can get really hard in the beginning. The 5* wood slasher is really tanky once you awaken her to +25. She is my main tank against water type sieges. I personally got her to +25, but I rarely see anyone who does. They probably opt for the 5* awakening sake instead.

Most of the 4* units will be given out for free during each month. One of the thrower here will be your steady supply of heal-other skill.

Occasionally you might get 4*/5* awakening sake as drops.

This is also where you get a consistent supply of 5* awakening sake (from medal exchange)

Ascension unit events

Around lvl 55 (?), there will occasionally be some limited-time events with an “ascendable” unit. Note that not all units are “fully” ascendable. As of 2018 in the JP version, only around 10 units are fully ascendable (and I haven't seen new ones in a *long* time). These often come unannounced and occur in parallel with another event, so you need to save up quite a few stamina in your giftbox. It takes 25000 medals to exchange for the unit, and it’s really only efficient to do so at the 2nd difficulty, but try your best. Especially Otomo Sorin, who is an incredibly powerful sun slasher once fully ascended.

These battles have lots of restrictions, which change daily. The first difficulty restricts types/class and is fairly easy, but gives a medal:stamina ratio of only about 100:25. The 2nd difficulty has restricted debuffs, is really hard, and gives a medal:stamina ratio of about 500:50. This is why you need to train up a large arsenal of units.

After you get the first unit, further medals will mainly be used to exchange for the special materials for forging weapons of ascended units. Max awakening an ascension weapon is a *very slow* process. I’m not sure if anyone has a maxed out ascension weapon.

Free ascension units do not have awakened abilities, but at least all ascension weapons give their owners unique abilities. Because of this, it’s a good idea to keep the ascended weapon permanently in one of the weapon slots, but this also means you’ll need to forge an extra copy with which to train weapon mastery for other units. Forging one extra copy is *hard*. For 6* weapons, you get up to 3 mats per event, but it takes 5 to forge 1 weapon. Ascending a unit provides a one-time bonus of enough mats to forge 1 weapon. Not sure about 7* star weapons...you get up to 1 per event, and I would guess it’s 3 mats to forge.

Due to the difficulty, ascension medals are carried over to the next event.