New Player Guide from someone who just went through it.

[Erithmu]

Hi ya. If you are here then a couple things are going on. The first is that you are enjoying Skullgirls, and the second is that you want to know how to go from your early bronzes, up to an army of Gold monsters. To be fair, I'm not quite there but being in the middle of it I'm probably closer to being able to give advice more so than some of the long standing regulars who have to make some effort to remember what it was like. One point of clarification: I'm not going to cover specific character builds, there are subforms with tier lists and build recommendations that I recommend looking for. Also each player will have different preferences on fighters they like (I like speedy fighters so I kinda like Filia and Valentine) so this guide is intended to be mostly Fighter neutral. Sadly this is two posts long, so take your time to read it ... if not I have this:

Table to Contents/TL DR
1) Theonite (Spend it on 10+1 normal pulls)
2) Story Mode (Do it at your leisure)
3) Event Mode (Do the highest you can for good specials/Blockbusters)
4) Prize Fights (XP!)
Second Post:
5) Fighter Development/Evolutions (Adv. Combo Node/Don't Power Up)
6) Fighting (Play defensive to offensive)
Closing (Thanks for reading)

1) Theonite
Theonite is one of the two resources of the game, it is basically the real money currency and can over write any Canopy Coin (and skill point) requirement for developing fighters. I have spent no money on this game and gotten 7 Gold fighters from roughly 12ish 10+1 pulls and the bonus fighter relics from story mode and Prize fight rewards. At this point I basically have most of the characters minus the relic specific Gold fighters.

If you really really like a specific fighter you 'can' spend it on a fighter specific 10+1 buys but you do lose out on basically 5 fighters. The reason I recommend the 10+1 normal relics is that you get a silver/gold fighter relic after getting so many fighters.

2) Story Mode
Story Mode is where you will feel like you spend most of your time early on. Each chapter gives you some move relics and fighter relics. At this point I need to point out some things. There are a couple of nodes that have specific requirements that make your life a little interesting. Through normal difficulty you shouldn't have too many issues, but in advanced things get more complicated, and in Expert they get down right hard and lucky for fighters. The short version is level up a variety of fighters and invest some skill points in them. However ... keep a couple of your strong fighters at bronze, and wait to deal with evolutions until you beat Story mode. (Short version: there is a 1 bronze vs 2 Gold in Expert story mode near the very end, any fighter.)

In addition to Story Mode there is now Origin Story mode. Don't worry about this till you get a Gold fighter up and running. These missions are HARD even on basic mode. I believe origin story mode requires Player level 20 to even start. Not only that every origin story requires that you bring a Fighter for that origin story to every fight. So if you are doing Peacock's Origin story, you need Peacock in every fight (including the solo fights). The rewards are nice, but you might want to finish the normal story mode first.

3) Event Mode
Event mode is a weekly cycle of 1-2 fighters a day that allows you to get skill points and moves for that fighter. You will end up spending some time here in the early game just to get skill points, and moves. It is probably one of the more effective uses of your energy and time for getting skill points and moves. Later on getting moves from event mode is a pretty good way to get Canopy Coins. Although you might only do the highest difficulty.

4) Prize Fights!
Well this is where you are going to spend quite a bit of time once you get going. This is where you gain most of your fighters XP. On top of that Prize Fights has its very own energy system so go nuts. With that in mind the main rewards from Prize fights early on is Theonite to buy more fighters. As you progress and get some fighters you can work not only on the milestone rewards, but the Event rewards (keys, fighters, moves). The nicest thing is that you get 3 days to work on this so don't feel rushed if you are only doing the milestone rewards.

That being said there is some strategy:
First: Each bracket of prize fight (bronze/silver/gold) has fighter requirements and each prize fight normally has a special effect that will make you rethink how you fight. So look at those as they are different between each bracket. If you are working on two different brackets then remember that if you swap between them.

Second: Prize fights are 'streak' based in terms of points you get and XP you gain. The higher the streak the higher the reward. Now ... you can use your strongest fighters but the difficulty is based upon your Fight score (sum of all your fighters). What you can do is take one of your strongest fighters and two of your weakest fighters and fight 1 v 3. You will notice this just a little bit as you look at opponents. If you do go for the 1v3 strategy look for even teams to take advantage of. Up till about a 3x multiplier (roughly 8 win streak) you will have almost no problem winning. The down side is that if you lose your 1 man carry, you basically lose your streak. Just remember, it is bound to happen at some point.

Special mention - Medici Events: While these look like Canopy Coin providers, they are probably one of the best ways to level up your higher level characters. This is because this is the only prize fight that can pair Golds in the same fight with Bronzes. This means that you Golds can have two very low strength allies that keep your enemy strength down so you should be able to 1v3 up into 10 win streaks and get piles of xp.

 

[Erithmu]

5) Fighter Development/Evolution
This will probably be the most controversial section as everyone has their own opinions. This will not be for the purpose of end game build, but for working towards it. With that being said here are a couple things that I learned, and are just some things that might help people out. In no logical order

- Grapplers:
Cerebella and Beowulf. Throws are nice, but special move throws are kinda better because you can't tech them. For Cerebella: Merry Go-Rilla, and Diamond Drop and For Beowulf: Wulf Shoot and whatever his Blockbuster throw is ... are unblockable if you are in range of the target.

- Important Skill tree Nodes:
1) Advanced Combo: This node is worth roughly 40% damage. If you want offense, get this node.
2) Defense Nodes: There are two of these and provide a huge survivability boost to your fighter.
3) Move Slot Nodes: Remember that moves provide bonuses to fighter stats. Gold level moves provide comparable stats to some of the early level nodes of fighters trees. Get moves, get stats.
4) Fighter specific nodes: If you have an ability that triggers off something, then those nodes become more important to get. If you have something that triggers off crit chance, then get your crit chance nodes.

- Unused Fighters:
The reason i recommend doing the 1v3 prize fight strategy, is so that you can get skill points out of your fighters that you aren't going to use. Skill points are not per fighter card, but each fighter. ie any Filia skill points you gain, can be used on any filia I don't recommending using fighters to 'Power Up' fighters as you need them for evolutions. I currently have 4 different Filia's that I'm trying to skill up, but because I used 3 bronze level 1 filia's to evolve and lost out on about 45ish skill points.

- Investing into Fighters:
I recommend playing every fighter for two reasons. The first is so that you have a fighter that can fight in the daily event treasure chest fights. And the second is to learn what are the animations of the end of combo strings that you can then punish. That being said, when you find a fighter you like, invest skill points, canopy coins, XP gain focus. If they are bronze or silver, you will eventually get a Gold that will be stronger. It happens, accept it and eventually you can go back around to finishing them off. Like I said ... im working on 4 filias right now ... 4 ... filias.

- Fighter Tier Lists:
Moisterrific has solid Tier lists for every fighter in the fighter specific sub-forums and they are ranked from top to bottom. That said ... anything recommended evolving to gold (even if they are like 4th or 5th in the list) means that if you have something, go ahead and evolve it once you have the resources and have cleared the strange requirements in story mode. From what I can gleen is that most of the tier list depends on the specific Fighter's Trait. Generally speaking Natural Golds will be stronger than Natural Silvers which will be stronger than Natural Bronzes.

6) Fighting
It is a fighting game so we should talk about fighting. There are very few characters that can provide effective aggressive or 'rush down' type of play style, sadly the best are the grapplers because even if your opponent blocks, you have a move or blockbuster that can throw them for damage. For this reason most people play defensive to offensive type of style: block till your opponent does an attack you can punish, and then full combo them to punish. Remember when I said play every character, this is how you learn what attacks you can punish. So just some notes to get extra damage out of your basic combos, For advanced combos look in the character specific sub-forums:

1) Standard combo is full ground combo -> Launcher -> Full Air Combo -> finisher. Finishers can be special moves, certain blockbusters, or worst case a down swipe trip. If you have nothing up, just down swipe out of habit. I think all the down swipe animations are faster than fighters 'standup' animations.
2) Play around with blockbusters. The Tier lists give a good idea of what is reliable in a majority of situations.
3) There are some weird nuanced interactions: ex Valentines advance combo ender can't be converted into a launcher, so you have to launch early. ex2: Filia's Drill Tempered super can work on most characters after an air combo, but is fairly unreliable mid screen vs Cerebella. You will learn these with time.
4) Lvl 3 Blockbusters: These are nice to have, but under Player level 30, don't worry too much about them. They are very useful when doing 1v3s in Prize Fights, but are mostly useless in story mode. I probably wouldn't even equip a lvl 3 until you have a 4th move slot available.

Closing
In reality, there is no wrong way to play a game. These are just some comments that hopefully help you not regret doing anything that you might regret later. I'm having lots of fun and actually just got my first top 10% in a Gold Prize Fight ... which got me a 5th Filia ...

I'm open to edits, but hopefully I can do a revision or two and get this to the point where it might be semi sticky worthy.

V1.0

 

[bobtehnoob]

a combo thats better than dash > ground > launcher > air > finisher for most characters is dash > ground > launcher > dash > ground > finisher (test with various characters to get a feel for and compare these)

 

[LemonTea27]

Overall a really good guide but I would recommend something differently for theonite usage.

If you're a really really new player I would actually recommend spending some of your theonite on the single pull relics instead of the 10+1. This seems counter intuitive i know but there are several reasons why i would recommend this but it all comes down to speed (how fast you want to climb).

1) The chances of you getting a Gold card from even a 10+1 (or any relic pull) is actually quite low. The rates for the pull is 3.36% for gold plus one at 6.67% for the bonus which means that the chance of you pulling at least one gold is about (1-((0.966^10)*0.9321)))= about 33%. This means that realistically you have to probably be pulling 3 times the 10+1 relics before you even see one gold card (which for 1100 theonite per pull i don't think is REALLY worth it). If you're a scrub like me with average to rotten luck then you should expect to see bronze cards for most of what you pull.

2) It's better to work with the cards that you DO have. Because (at least for now) most of your cards are going to be bronze, its better to work at them one on one. If you save up for the 10+1 pull from the beginning, it will take alot longer for you to expand your roster and a lot longer for you to level them all up. By pulling the single relic, you get to work on your fighters earlier so that by the time you get your 10th bronze, your first bronze would already be strong enough to win some Prize Fight battles. Getting your fighters earlier will also mean you get through the story faster. The guide says to take your time with the story part of the game, which for the most part is true, but if you're new to this game then you should know that the Daily event's won't open up until you complete 'whos the boss'.
The DEvents are important because not only does it give you skills and BB moves as rewards, but it also provides you an alternate way for you to levels up your fighters. So if you find yourself stuck on a certain part of the story, you can turn to DEvents AND PF to help you level up your figher faster.

3) Most of your Golds with come from Prize Fights anyways. If you're a poor student with rotten luck like me, chances are you can't really rely on relic pulls to give you gold cards nor can you afford to spend real money on a mobile game. For the most part, you will have to rely on Prize Fights to get your golds anyways. The good thing about that, is that with PFs there is at least a guarantee you will get the card you want if you happen to make it into the top 10%. If you check the forum threads you can see that most of the top players' army of golds are either promoted silver cards or PF wins. Exclusive cards come from lots of sweat and grind (and money if you have it) to be able to pull the 10+1 1500 theonite worth relics multiple times. Besides, all the best cards are free to win on PF anyways (skullgirls mobile is awesome cuz of that), just check out moisterrific's Tier threads.

4) You're not going to run out of theonite. I think it was Keebs who made a thread about how to grind for gold, where he/she also included several ways to grind for theonite even after you complete all the stories. Plus with the new daily rewards, there is no real shortage of theonite once you hit the higher levels, so go ahead and spend that 100 gems you just made on a single pull.

Trust me as someone who has lurked on this forum for about a month before playing the actual mobile game, this is probably one of the fastest way to climb. Like all mobile games, Skullgirls is designed to reward players exponentially (i.e the higher your level, the easier the game). Skullgirls is better than other mobile games imo because unlike injustice or mortal Kombat mobile it doesn't require the players to spend TOO much real money. There are ample of opportunities to gain fighters and theonite. So the quicker you get out of the beginner's rut, the quicker the game gets easier for you.

 

[zzMedVeDzz]

@

Overall a really good guide but I would recommend something differently for theonite usage.

Yo. So you suggest to always do 1 pull, or do 1 pull untilesertain moment, when you start doing 11 pull?
As I understan PF is not opened from the start. You need do something to open it frist. Also how many time you need to play to get those top 10%? It's not like today you opened it, yesterday you are top.

 

[LemonTea27]

@


Yo. So you suggest to always do 1 pull, or do 1 pull untilesertain moment, when you start doing 11 pull?
As I understan PF is not opened from the start. You need do something to open it frist. Also how many time you need to play to get those top 10%? It's not like today you opened it, yesterday you are top.

I suggest doing 1 pull until you have about 11 or so cards, or until you unlock who's the boss on story mode. By that time, the time it takes for you to use up all of their energy is quite long so that the next time you do the 10+1 pulls you can start prioritizing which cards you want to level up to cap.

Getting top 10% for PF gold is quite hard but as I understand it even if you only get top 60% you still get a consolation silver card which can help you build up your roster and get you closer to the top 10%. Also its not about how long you play because everyone only has a 3 day limit anyways, it more about how you do on the curve.

 

[zzMedVeDzz]

TY