Epic Seven Beginner’s Quick Start Guide

by PuzzleByron

Selective Summon:

Five main routes as of 3/25. I ordered them for amount of sanity cost vs payout.

• Spin for and stop at the first 5* hero you see.
  • I have played a lot of Gatcha games and this is my highest suggestion. Re-rolling is no fun and this will keep your sanity in check as well as letting you play through the main fun part of game easily.
  • You do not need anything the game does not provide in order to complete all content.
  • Realistically most people don’t play a specific game for more than a month at a time, don’t waste the first few days mindlessly growing a grudge against RNG.
• Spin for Angelica, take whatever else. Angelica + most combination of units will clear all endgame content at the time.
• Spin and stop at the first 5* hero with 4* anything. Much more likely than you’d think as long as you’re not picky, I went this route. You just get more stuff, and will likely come sooner than Angelica.
• Spin for Angelica, re-roll for any 5* with her. Hilariously unlikely, but best start in game.
• Spin for any of the above starts, beat the game, spin on crazy person lottery with gold transmit stones for 5 star from a different rare unit pool, re-roll from there. Not recommended for humans, our lifespans are precious, don’t waste your life here.

Playing the Game:

• For speedy progression: Push to beat the game unlocking as many upgrades to your base as possible.
  • Do labs daily.
  • Do abyss daily until you can’t.
  • Join a guild asap!
  • Make as many rank 60 friends via reddit as possible! (And use them to solo clear or farm harder content.)
  • Decide on your favorite four units to take on the world. Only work on these core four and avoid other units until they have maxed out their initial gear, hit 6*’s, and max leveled.
    • Caveat: You may abandon any of your core four for a new shiny unit that you pull of course, but be aware of the time cost to bring the unit up to speed, where you could have been pushing new content.
    • With that in mind, do summon a bit when you start, to ensure you’re happy with your core four as to optimize your time spent!
• Ultimately the main goal of the game is to clear all of the Hunt 11’s, clear all 90 floors of abyss, and clear raid on hell difficulty.

Facts that you want to know about gearing up:

Guaranteed Gear – CabbageCZ

This topic really warrants a megaphone: the guaranteed gear will be what gets you through a lot of the progression hurdles.

• Labyrinth guaranteed items (look them up; they’ll likely get your first DPS into the 40K-50K range).
• Abyss sets – There are 3 sets of Abyss Lifesteal sets, with incredible all attack right side attack stats.
• Arena sets – There was a set of gear you use to be able to buy with Conquest points, but have rotated out. The next Arena set is coming in the next season.

Main Gear

Only upgrade red gear you find in abyss and lab for quite a long time (a month+). Use your resources wisely!

• Your power level/stats is mostly determined by your hero level and your right side gear, ie necklace, boots, ring. This is because this gear can instead of having a flat stat, have a % boost to your overall stats. Higher level gear can raise for example your base attack stat by 60%. That’s nutty large an amount. Thus, sell ALL gear on right side that has flat main stat (except boots with speed).
• All gear has substats. Try to be picky and invest only in gear that does not have flat stats (except for speed).
• It can be safe to say that speed is the best stat for every unit. In rare min max situation you can disprove this statement, but realistically, you can really bank on speed to solve virtually any problem in this game. For a measure: +14-17 speed is extremely powerful.
• Charms save money, but grey and green gear can be used at a loss to gear up faster. You want your core team to be +12’d out asap.

+12/+15 Your Right-Side Gear – CabbageCZ

A gear’s +15 main-stat value is 5x the +0 value. It starts slow, but at higher ranks it jumps by a lot.

The difference between a +10 piece of gear and a +15 piece of gear is massive. Just the last few ranks make a huge difference, most of the power is in the last ranks. Prioritize +12, +15 on the top right side gear you have ASAP, it’s a huge boost in power.

Sidenote: you should be watching the secret shop for jewelry/boots like a hawk when you unlock lv70/85 gear. The first +50/60% ATK or +50/60% HP gear will be a great power spike for your main healer/tank/DPS.

Artifacts

Artifacts are typically class specific gear that can drastically change how a unit functions. For the most part keep one of every artifact. You can find exceptions by searching reddit.

• Many characters have artifacts that really define the characters power level.
• There are many artifacts that specifically shine in PvE or PvP, some are just well rounded choices for all game modes.
• I’ve listed some strong artifacts in the following lists to give you an idea what traits are regarded as strong in this game. There are many artifact analysis on single artifacts that span the length of this entire guide! Thus, please excuse the brevity of the following lists.

The Best 3 Star Artifacts: Daydream Joker (god tier PvE), Candlestick, Tonfa, Sheath. All of these are good even in endgame.

• Feel free to sell everything else. 3 star artifacts are hilariously common and you’ll get back whatever you need in short order.
• There are a few jank 3*’s specifically used to handle certain hunt 11 mechanics, they include Egg, and Envoy.

The Best 4 Star Artifacts:

• Borderline OP: Aurius (knight), Wondrous Potion Vial (Soul Weaver).
• Also among the best: Rosa Hargana, Dust Devil, Infinity Basket, Hell Cutter, and Hilag Lance.
  • These are great, the power level of Aurius and Wonderous Potion Vial are through the roof great.

The Best 5 Star Artifacts: Anything Soul Weaver. Rhianna & Luciella (Thief) best in slot almost all of the time. Uberius’s Tooth (Warrior). Song of Stars (Ranger) .

• Most 5 stars have unique effects and are rare to see. Don’t dust them in general unless you have dupes, and even then, ask on reddit!

Again, I repeat that I don’t feel that I’m doing the artifacts justice, all the while, my lists above are all sorts of hand waving magic. My suggestion would be taking some time and read the text on each artifact you own to really get the most out of your setups. (And further research through reddit!)

What is Farming in E7?

Farming in Epic 7 is a majority of the game. The goal is to get gold, exp, and catalysts for unit advancement.

• You will spend a lot of time in the unit advancement phase. That is, you need to get materials (fodder) to raise the rank of your units to 6*’s and materials (catalysts and runes) to unlock all 6 awakenings.

Prioritize clearing Side Story Event: Always farm event currency in the Side Story Event mode, and with it, buy every item in the Side Story Event store.

• Sell the 3* penguins. (You get a transmit stone and 50k gold. The penguins are more valuable sold than used as exp!)
• There is an argument that mid and high tier runes might not be optimal, but they are certainly easier for most players than Altar rank 10.
• If you’re early in the game check out the remaining days before the side story ends, budget enough time to clear the store if you decide to push main story aggressively, first. You’ll regret not picking up the catalysts from the side story.

AP Store

When you are done with Side Story: Farm Epic Catalysts using the AP Store, clearing as many Epic Catalysts as you can each week. This is the best gold, exp, and chance of catalyst vs stamina spent possible.

• Pick a location with an epic catalyst in the AP Store in world difficulty
• If possible clear world maps for double the efficiency of normal. 8 instead of 4 AP per clear.
• If possible clear a map that contains both an epic drop chance and the catalysts you are looking for.
  • Otherwise prioritize the catalyst that you would like dropped from enemies, and farm the corresponding location.
• During that grind bring a white dog, a gold dog, and some level 1-5 fodder unit.
• If your friend list is incredible, don’t even bring your own unit an carry 4 fodder.

Friendly Advice: You are statistically unlikely to farm “Epic” catalysts and succeed in getting 1,2,… 15 of them from world maps. If you’re farming with the expectation that you’ll get them, you are setting yourself up for failure. (There is only 1 chance per drop typically on the boss monster. As opposed to non epics which have a chance to drop from the 5-11 other enemies on the map.)

The remainder of your epic catalyst will come “free” from Side Story and purchased from a Raid Store. I strongly advise for you to resist purchasing normal catalysts, and instead farming for them, or trading guild mates for them.

Promoting Units:

Always promote max level units before foddering away the unit. Units can only promote by being max level, they have to eat equal rarity units, but the food does not need max level. Much of the game is leveling fodder to feed.

• 2*White Dogs and 2* Fodder eats other unleveled 2*Fodder.
• 3*Yellow Dogs and 3*White dog eat other 3*White dogs and 3*Fodder from previous step.
• 4* Black dogs and 4*Yellow Dogs eats other 4*Yellow and 4*White dogs.
  • Try not to eat too many yellow dogs, have a few around for leveling up. Yellow dogs level faster than other units.

Your first two 6* s should be your DPS, it’s nice to have an AoE and a Single Target, optional. Lorina is a good choice here.

• Generally this should be your fastest AoE farmer. Premium units would be Vildred or Sez.
• Ignore claims they may or may not be endgame from reddit (you can find a use for virtually any unit).
• The rate they’ll get you your other 6*’s is worth it from the human time they save you.

Your third should be either a support unit that buffs/debuffs, or your healer. Fourth should be which ever you didn’t do.

• Virtually any healer goes here.

What to do on the various maps:

World: Main story maps. Either carefully 3 star everything your first trip. Or come back and do it later. There is a second difficulty that continues the story when you beat 10-10. Clear everything for both difficulties. Prizes are generous especially on world difficulty.

• World map farming for catalysts are the best farm-able gold/stamina returns in the game.
• Buy as many Epic Catalysts as possible from AP store each week.
• The drop rates according to most research is the same in normal as it is hard difficulties for catalysts. The only difference is the amount of exp you get per quest.
• For human time spent, hunts would be the fastest way to farm gold. (Or literally buying gold, but will not go there.)

Labyrinth: Look for little regions that stick out, go there for gold chests. Goal is to find them and push towards exit asap.

• Feel free to auto battle lab runs until you die. There is no cost respawning the first time each trip.
• There is also no cost to just entering lab and yielding out without using the exit, you will not keep spoils of war, but you do keep items you buy from the shops.
• Ignore other advice about leaving when moral is low, just keep farming a map until you die to something, take the free respawn, and teleport to an exit that you’ve found.
• You can use mini map to teleport to different spots.
• First pass at all of the labs will grant your initial team gear for the next month of game-play.
• There is a merchant you might meet. If you can afford it, buy all charms and bookmarks without hesitation. His wares refresh each day.
  • “Easiest access is probably Lab 1-3 in the middle (enter, TP to the eastern gateway, go like 2 tiles right/up and you’re there.)” –CabbageCZ
• Look up a calculator to find out what your best camping moral is 30 is a good number to shoot for.

Raid: There is a 2 cost lab called Raid, try it as soon as you unlock it and prioritize it if you can beat it. The eventual goal is to finish all 5 bosses of the raid in 3 runs. That requires run 1 with 28 moral (1 boss and clearing towards next boss), run 2 with 33+ (2 boss clears), and run 3 with 28 moral (clear queen first then last boss). This will let you move units around to handle each boss mechanic.

• Look up guides on what to do (they’re a novel of mechanics that someone else has covered better than me already).
• There are two shops in Raid where items refresh daily, one in each difficulty. Everything other than common catalysts are great, do not buy regular cats.
• Beating Queen in raid gives you a hell raid token. You can buy these in conquest shop.

Hell Raid: At the time of writing there are only two bosses. Only spend raid currency on buying the God Tier raid gear.

• The left boss, the minions heal the boss and the boss steals a turn at 50% hp. Keep a minion low. The rest of the mechanics are about the same as normal.
• The right boss starts stealthing at 70 and 40% hp. At 40% hp the boss starts to really pump out damage. Try to slow rolls up to 41% and start bursting hard, keeping souls and cooldowns for this moment.
• After clearing a boss, hunt for mini bosses for extra rank 88 gear drop chances. (Most people are rightfully sad at how rare drops are.)

Abyss: Do it until you can’t. First two life steal sets are huge power spikes for free. Push for them aggressively.

• The last life steal set will take a bit of time to reach.
• Use reddit and floor number each time you’re stuck for a solution.

Altar: Clear as far as you can initially, farm them only when you need to.

Side Events: If possible, buy out the entire store every time. This is the best use of your stanima period. Farm normal with 1 of your own units, one helper, and 3 fodder for best rate of return. Hell is only good for burning all of your stamina for event currency and poor for exp and catalyst drop rate.

Hunts: Go as far as you can just to measure your progression. Beating Hunt 11 on auto battle is currently the same as “beating the game.”

Event Battles: There is the regular battles which have a chance of dropping charms (NOT WORTH IT.) Do clear them for quest prizes once.

More importantly there are Limited Event Battles which have a chance to drop artifacts. Play until you get 1 event artifact. Then stop unless you’re at the stage where you can clear hell, then max one out. Doesn’t matter if you think it’s good or not. It might be useful later.

Arena: Spend all resources fighting bots, it’s okay, you’ll reach a point in ladder climbing where this is what you’ll do a lot of anyways.

• Arena is a good source of equipment exp, and it’s “free” just by participating. Winning gets you more, but even losing 5 in a row still nets you a participation repeat prize.
• Use extra energy fighting easy enemies, refresh list for free every chance you get.
• You can get to masters just by picking off people who are losing intentionally.
• If you want to win at Arena, speed is a premium.

The main two strats, are to have a speedster buff up team, then everyone else aoe’s (called a cleave team). The other main team is the team that can survive a the first wave of cleaves with sheer stats or disruption, and wins from going second.

• In general focus speed and have high +’s on your gear and you’ll win your way through to challenger without too much terror. After that, it’s entering whale territory.

Upgrading Sanctuary Buildings:

• Max out forest 0-3-0 first.
  • You will be pumping out penguins until you have a core group of level 50’s.
  • Then you will be pumping out silver dogs until you are poor.
  • Then you will be pumping out penguins again but this time to sell them all for money.
  • Repeat.
• Max out main base 1-3-3 next.
• Have 1-1-1 for your dispatch building.
  • When you do your quests here, don’t put too much thought in optimizing who goes there. Just dump 4 fodder or heroes you want to get the exp.
  • The most valuable two are the ones that reward you with lab currency and arena currency, have that up 99% of the time.
  • The best efficiency is the 30min ones. Do those while you’re actively playing, and do the 2-4 hour ones for when you’re done for your play period.
• Have 3-3-3 for your forge, you won’t touch it until end game, so this is low low low priority.

Guild:

Join any guild ASAP! There’s a shop in guild here with prizes you want. Donate aggressively to get them.

• Try not to give away catalysts unless you’re friendly with your guild. They’re rare and can be much harder to farm than claws, or stones, or what not.
• Do a favor to the guild and ask for high tier claws, it’s the fastest way for guildies to rank up contribution points.
• Push to buy out the guild store every week!

GvG – Play daily for prizes. Doesn’t matter if you lose, just crash your teams and your fodder into things.

• Units with strong survival or single target damage have more premium in GvG than Arena.

Shopping

There are a lot of currencies.

Skystone / Pack Store

• If you choose to pay, Monthly Pack and Rank up pack is the best bang for buck from what I’ve seen in excel sheets. Never just buy raw Skystones, always get some pack with it.
  • Don’t over spend!!!
  • This game charges a premium for rare things, Molagora, Moonlight summons etc. From a sanity perspective, they’re a horrible deal (opinion!). But if the greed monster does rear it’s head, keep yourself in check.

Normal Store

• Buy lief lab entry’s aggressively, people say the 240 stamina is worth more than a lab entry, and eventually this is true, but you’re paying to power level yourself by getting more runs of a time gated event which holds the best gear you’ll get for the first month of play.
• Buy the weekly lab compass for quiet some time as well.
• While we’re at it, buy guild weekly lab compass weekly.
• If abyss is easy for you, power level yourself faster with the Abyss Guide tickets, the earlier you get abyss gear, the sooner you get a power spike in character progression.
• Buy only galaxy bookmarks with gold transit stones
• Buy Molagora, yellow dog with transit stones weekly. One day years down the line, maybe you skip the yellow dog because you’re done promoting units. Who knows?
• Buy lesser Artifact and Greater Artifact charms for the first month or two.
  • The power level boost from having strong artifacts is great, but be reminded that transmit stones are quasi limited.

Power of Knowledge Store

You get powder from selling 3* or better artifacts. Use guides to determine the “must haves” for your team.

• Each store item set set lasts for 1 month. If you’re aggressive, you should have enough natural materials to get 2 5* artifacts every 3 months.
• Only buy 5* artifacts.
• Never buy 4* artifacts.
• Unless the desire sensor is too high, or you’ll get an immediate impact on content clearing, try to save your purchases until the last day or two in order to protect yourself from the statistically unlikely chance you pull the artifact you were going to purchase.
• There are strong opinions that differ from my view, so I’ll point it out that there is a good case to buy specific OP Artifacts such as Aurius. Do it at your discretion!

Ancient Coin Store

• For the most part buy any of the charms for massive power level boosts, since they go to your rings and necklaces, which are % stat slots.
• In the fringe case where you have literally nothing to level up with charms, you may buy Raid Hell entry tokens.

Conquest Points Store

• Prioritize buying MolaGora seed over everything. Followed by buying all the stamina in the shop everyday.
• Remaining can be spent on charms, doesn’t matter the size. Budget enough points to buy more stamina.

Friendship Store

• Buy out the energy and flags daily.
• Buy out bookmarks aggressively, there is no other function to friendship points. See next section for what to do with them.

How to get more Trasmit Stones / What to do with Friendship Bookmarks

Friendship bookmarks are used for low quality 10 summons. You get two types of junk, unit fodder, and artifact fodder.

• Unit fodder starts at level 5, so very fractionally will reduce their grind to level 2 for promotion and being eaten by white dogs.
• Artifact fodder you can feed to your main artifacts OR clear a quest multiple times that requires leveling up artifacts, which pays out in Silver Trasmit stones.

The quest requires you to “skill up” an artifact, every so many times you do it, you’ll get a quest complete for a bunch of silver transmit stones. The quest line goes up to 30. With your friendship points you can quickly front load all the silver transmit stones you’d otherwise have to wait months for.

• The most efficient way to do this, is to create a +3 1 star and 2 star artifact of each type (just feed them copies of themselves until they’re +3, you’ll do this 100’s of times, so you’ll get the idea quickly) and sit it there in your inventory until you complete all upgrade quests.
• You grab an artifact with no +’s on it, and feed it a +3. This will make that artifact +3. Repeat until you run out. of artifacts.

Lobby

There are daily log in events you have to take part in, swipe left from the big banner button until you find your current weeks event.

• There’s a secret shop, click on the demon bartender, it refreshes every hour. Rank up to 50 for his shop to offer level 85 gear. Until then, check every hour you can for a chance at bookmarks.
  • Always buy bookmarks.
  • Buy level 85 right side gear if it has % base and % sub-stats in what you want. Otherwise walkaway and don’t look back.
  • You can refresh if you want to, people math’ed it out to be comparable to just buying bookmarks, but instead of free penguins, you pay for bookmarks and have the chance of seeing good gear.
• You can talk to your guild by using guild chat located in the top right, where chat channels are.
• Reputation Quests: They come naturally, remember that if you rank up, you get account wide perks, but you have to click the view story button to get it.

Battle

• Dying in a mission has virtually no catch in this game, if you have a healer, you can just auto battle an easy stage after a complete wipe and have full hp again. Never use the heal all button that cost precious gold.
• You can click on hourglass from timeline to see more details of what will happen. You can click on boss portrait to see information about the boss, such as immunities.
• You can see HP numbers when enemies attack.
• Defense Break, Attack Up, and Immunity are the best overall buffs debuffs.
• Bleed and Burn scale with attack damage.
• Posion scales with max hp of target.
• All three guardians are good. Use doggie when in doubt.

Random Advice or Facts:

• Max out your equipment inventory.
• Max out your hero inventory.
• You can make up to 10 teams. It’s cheap, do it if you want to.
• When selling units, the game remembers how many duplicates were used. So if you “merged” 5 3*’s together, and found out later you didn’t want it anymore, you can sell them for the value of 5 units, so 5 transmit stones (units) or 5 powders (artifact).
• “For those who really just want to run through 5 Adventures cheaply and quickly, enter 1-5 Normal, tap on map and teleport to the exit to complete the stage. This is faster than auto-ing any stage.” –everythingisatoms
• Cracks in the world should each be completed once for Mercedes power up. But future runs are only Exp and human time efficient, they are terrible for Catalyst drops, gear, etc.

Molagora

You will hear horror stories about how limited and rare these guys are. Only three rules of thumb to follow here.

• If they’re in core team, and it says cooldown -1. You buy it. Healers first!
• If you love your unit, you buy everything.
• If it says effect rate up and in core team, consider buying it.

All other cases, don’t buy it.

General Spinning Advice

Personally, I’m afraid of getting new units, they cost so much time and investment to add to my teams. This is what keeps my desire sensor in check. Until I fully built my current project, I tend not to want to divert my resources to another character.

That said! When first starting out, you do want to do a good amount of spins (maybe 200 bookmarks?) before saving up, it’ll flesh out your artifact and utility heroes earlier on. But at some point you want to stop and begin to hoard for things you want/need.

In order to not be burned, you’ll want to save 600 bookmarks for limited banners for the pity rate to kick in and get you the unit. You hope that you don’t spend all 600, but the 121 spin club is a real thing. =(

When spinning on just regular character banners, be happy for the little things.

• Got a stray 5*? YAY!
• Got a 4* off a few spins? Time to stop and enjoy your victory!
• Got a few (too many) 3*’s?
  • Dust the unused artifacts and build towards one that you want!
  • Got junk 3* heroes? MERGE them to SSS rank and sell them. You get a quest that typically pays out 19-20 bookmarks and a bunch of transit stones.
• DON’T fall into gamblers fallacy of believing that you can “whiff” that many spins, you absolutely can. Stop after a few and try again later (spread out the “fun” of gambling, so that you’re less tempted to gamble more).

Generally don’t save MoonLight ML summons, spend them right away. Mystic Summons (GvG currency) you can save until the rotation has what you need.

Spin all friendship bookmarks until you can’t handle the fodder or artifact count. Ideally you use friendship summons to replenish fodder and farm transit stones.

• But before you save up 1,000, 2,000 friendship summons, maybe it would be a better idea to just convert it all into gold, as gold is more valuable to you now. You could just summon and sell everything.

Daily Rotation:

• Collect free summon!
• Do a hunt.
• Do a altar.
• Auto battle 5 quests from Side Event or Main Map.
• Pay with stigma to buy penguin.
• Collect dispatch rewards as well as queuing them back up again.

Then collect all reputation quests for the day.

• Do check the event banner for what you might still be missing.
  • The requirements change event to event, covering dailies typically overlap and covers events.
  • This should be apart of your daily rotation

If you have more time:

• Buy out all stamina from friendship and conquest and burn through it.
• Buy arena flags with friendship.
• Collect the 80 daily stamina from GM and burn through that too.

What is end game?

At this point you’re just doing PvP, GvG, auto battling Hunt 11’s, doing Hell Raid, and collecting free daily prizes from abyss (since you only need to complete it once).

TLDR: Spin for pretty much anything and beat the game with it. Do daily rotations. Game gives you enough stuff for gearing and promoting first four characters well. %based stats and speed are best stats. Spin early game, save mid to late game. Beat story, Beat Lab, Beat Abyss, Beat Side Story. Then grind ad nauseum and keep desire sensors in check.