Beginner's Guide

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Super short TL;DR - Backup your account, do Mog's Gym to understand basic mechanics, level summons (at least get 1 summon to Lvl 30) and tackle whatever time-limited stuff you can for Enhancement Points. Do that while referring to the Glossary, Summon Hub and asking questions. Look at our other visual guides for character information, weapon/armor leveling, selling and equipping. Have fun~

Beginner Priorities

Visit our Beginner Priorities (basically a part 2 or tl;dr) for a clear list of what to focus on. There is SO much in this game, it will help answer common questions and establish best practices along with things to avoid doing! 

Click to Jump!

Character Acquisition (Start Here!)

DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY OPERA OMNIA is gacha-based game. This means that there is a luck factor involved with acquiring things in game, and in DFFOO's case, those are weapons. You have to manage a limited number of in game resources to acquire these weapons, but don't worry, this game is *extremely* free-to-play friendly, possibly the best game out there for that. More on this later!

As it is a fan-service game, luckily every character in the game can be acquired for free! There are three places to recruit characters.

Story (Permanent)
A significant amount of characters (53+) in the game can be recruited by going through the story. 


Character Event (Limited-Time)
This is the standard way of new characters being introduced into the game. Character events last for 14 days.  After the event ends, they won’t come back for a while until their...

Lost Chapter (Permanent)
After approximately 8 months, event characters will return in their Lost Chapter.  This content is permanent and they can now be recruited at your leisure in any order. 

While Farming Levels, Crystals, Story/Lost Chapters for Gems or Summons for other goodies

 quicken up the process by making an Auto Farm team!

Looking for where to find a specific character? Don't see a lost chapter for them? You can check the DissidiaDB timeline to see which chapter to recruit them!

Note that you may also buy a character's weapon from any of the Weapon Shops to recruit any character at any time. As buying weapons requires rare items, this is generally not recommended, but read our guide fully before taking this step!

Banners, Resources and Gacha (Pulling for Weapons)

BEFORE YOU PULL OR BUILD! 

Take a look at the character Infographics we provide along with their webpage to see when they were last updated and if you need the tools they provide for your roster! (Expand for a detailed explanation of the Infographics)

Pull Strategies

At the end of the day, DFFOO is still a gacha game so we still need to spend resources in game and play the odds in order to acquire weapons. The game is generous enough to allow us to play our favorite FF characters for free but in order to enjoy them fully at their max strength, we need their weapons. You acquire them by pulling on the banners that are currently active. If you manage your resources well, DFFOO is possibly the most friendly free-to-play gacha game in the market if you choose that route. We have a page dedicated for smart pull strategies, but we recommend first reviewing how banners are setup in DFFOO, and we will link pull strategies again at the end of this section!

So, where do you acquire these resources as a beginner? Luckily for us DFFOO is one of the most extremely generous games in the gacha world when it comes to free-to-play players.

If you just started, as of Dec 2022, there are about 2 MILLION gems and 10000 tickets that can be acquired for free just from permanent content alone! If you participate on all of the events for the month it usually gives around 75,000 gems and around 200+ tickets on average.

Most importantly, these 5weapons are all rare! Remember to press the Lock button on them so you don't accidentally sell them or use them power up another weapon! You're now ready to review Pull Strategies for efficiently using your resources!

Now onto what pulling looks like!

New BT debut Banner 

Returning BT Banner (with main FR)

Start Dash Campaign 

(Squall, Cloud and Lightning's weapons)

G Token Exchange

100 G Tokens (25k Gems) = 20 Power Stone

100 G Tokens (25k Gems) = 1 Book of Ruin's Mysteries (Red Book)

200 G Tokens (50k Gems) = EX, LD or 4 High Power Stones

300 G Tokens (75k Gems) = FR Weapon or BT Book 

400 G Tokens (100k Gems) = BT weapon

G Tokens are one of the greatest blessings in the gacha world.  This means that as long as you save enough gems, you WILL get the weapons you desire! A Book of Destruction is great, but only if you already acquired all the weapons you need!

All regular banners have at least 3 featured characters per banner. The weapons they usually offer are as of June 28, 2022:

Your main goal here is to acquire the LD & FR weapons (EX if you lack EX tokens) of the character you're aiming for either by using gems or tickets. BTs are also desirable however they have a bit more nuance in that they're huge power jumps for the units you get them for, but not every BT/FR character needs their BT/FR to function as a call or "fodder" unit in Dimension's End lockout fights.

LD and FR weapons are ONLY available on banners unless you use LD tokens which are given once to new players since the 3rd anniversary or you pay the big bucks! FR tokens may appear sometimes but are also limited to paid only.

"But you said that the other weapons are just as important as the strongest weapon, why not aim for all of them?"

True, but the other weapons have a higher chance of dropping compared to the LD & EX so chances are you get multiple copies of them along the way. Click the Draw Info button in the top right to make sure the weapons you want are actually available on the banner!

"Why Do I Need So Many Weapons?"

Another way to get the 15cp and 35cp (to improve your first & second skill) weapons is through the 

As a beginner, you are presented with the Start-Dash Banner, featuring Cloud, Squall, & Lightning with all of their weapons. You have access to this banner for 7 days, and you even get a free Multi-Pull on it. They all offer good damage if you decide to invest in them, furthermore:

Gems 

It costs 5000 gems to do a 10+1 pull.  The +1 is a guaranteed 5 weapon with a bumped up rate. Note that gems are the commodity in DFFOO that have a monetary value (more on that below).

Every time you do a Multi Draw on a banner, you acquire 20 G Tokens. These tokens can be spent on the banner's corresponding shop in the Item Exchange in order pity (guarantee) a weapon or item, ignoring the odds/drop rate.

Tickets

Tickets are used for risky pulls as this is the more unreliable way to get the weapons you desire since there's no guarantee to get any 5weapons (or higher rarity)! The rate up +1 on the multi-pull and G tokens are not applicable to ticket multi-pulls.

Note that despite the odds, most players will say that many of their weapons were actually acquired via lucky ticket pulls! Just know there are no guarantees with them and using them on a weapon you were planning to use gems for is borderline foolish! Use tickets if you're willing to walk away!

Mog's Gym

We highly recommend tackling Mog's Gym (find it in the Events menu). It is beginner-focused content that teaches you about many game mechanics not covered in this guide! It also offers a TON of goodies!

(Click to see a list of the important rewards!)

Fully Powering up Characters!

BEFORE YOU PULL OR BUILD! 

Take a look at the character Infographics we provide along with their webpage to see when they were last updated and if you need the tools they provide for your roster! 

(Expand for a detailed explanation of the Infographics)

Now that you know where to acquire your favorite characters, it’s time to learn how to make them stronger!

The bread and butter of what makes your character perform at their best.  Most of your resource management in this game will be centered around acquiring weapons for your characters.

As mentioned in the Crystal Strength section, unlocking a skills' Extension upgrades its capabilities. Characters have access to many weapons, and they are all important for improving your character. 

But your character can only equip one weapon at a time! Does that mean you have to choose which skill to improve? Not quite. This is where limit breaking your weapons come in. Below you will see some items underlined which link to our glossary page which explains a lot of basic concepts & items!

Limit breaking is the process of fusing copies of the same weapon and maxing its weapon level with Power Orbs (or bronze items) to unlock its weapon passive. 1 duplicate = 1 limit break.  A weapon is considered max limit broken (MLB) at 3 limit breaks and max weapon level  (indicated by the blue background and the check mark at the bottom right). This grants you the weapons passive which you can now equip even if the appropriate weapon is not equipped.

Power Orbs can be found in Co-op and World of Illusions: Carbuncles Treasures (when it's up).

Now you can equip the weapon passive for 20CP (Capacity Points, discussed in next section) instead of the weapon itself to gain the improvements.

Not enough copies to limit break?  You have the option to use Power Stones instead. 4 Power Stones = 1 limit break.

When a weapon is fully limit broken (MLB'd for short), you can sell the weapon for 4 Power Stones if you have a stronger weapon to equip on the character. Selling non limit broken weapons only gives you 1 Power Stone, NOT 4 so make sure you know what you're doing before selling it.

What to Equip

As you start Max Limit Breaking (MLB) and leveling weapons for passives, you'll get copies in the future with the red checkmark. These weapons with the red checkmark are safe to sell as you have their passives now!

EX weapons are a little trickier to know when to sell as they have to go through realization to obtain all it's passives and unlock the respective Character Board path and C90 passives to enhance EX abilities even more! Once you get your EX+ 3/3 fully maxed, it turns purple. 

Armors are the second equipment you can wield. Their main purpose besides bolstering your defenses, is increasing your CP (Capacity Points), allowing you to equip more passives, which gives additional stats & capabilities to your character.

There are 3 tiers of armor for every character. 

Limit breaking your armor follows the same process as weapons except there is no Power Stone equivalent for it so you need to purchase multiple copies. Don't forget that Lost Chapters and Time-limited Character Events (only) will give you two copies of the first armor for free! Fully limit breaking the 2nd tier of armor unlocks a character's third sphere slot (more on that later).

This is what you are driving toward!

UW > BT+ 3/3 > FR > BT > EX+ 3/3

As you begin to tackle the most difficult content you want every advantage you can get.  This is where Training Boards, artifacts, bloom stones and spheres come in. We would also like to note that farming is required to get many of these, so it might not be for everyone! Under each category, we indicate the relative importance to your character in completing end-game content!

Basic Character Strengthening

Character Levels

Just like any RPG, raising your character levels bumps their stats. The current maximum character level is 90. Take your characters to battle to level them up or use Chocobo Feathers (pictured below) if you don't want to grind.

Chocobo Feathers can be found while griding Cycle Quests for Crystals or Gil. Cycle Quests are found in the Events Tab near the bottom (pictured above). The good news about grinding for feathers is they're also great stages to level units so it's a double whammy!

Characters are automatically leveled to 70 as there are other, more beneficial grinds for you to do instead of just fighting a crystal/exp black hole to get off the ground.

Crystal Strength

All of the characters in this game have affinity to 1 of the 6 crystal colors.

You’ll need 7 types of crystals to upgrade your character to the maximum character level of 90.

Tiers 1-6 crystals (above) are earned through now farmable from Cycle Quests Lv 50 stage! These get all units to crystal level 80.

Tier 7 crystals (above) are earned partially through Timed Events & Co-op Shops. If you can obtain all those from farming and do LUFENIA (Lv 200) mission, you can earn enough crystals to *always* raise the featured new awakened characters to Level 90!

Summons

Summons are companions that you can bring in battle that give passive benefits for your team. They have their own unique Blessing that they grant as long as you fulfill the conditions for it.

Another massive benefit of Summons is calling them for help in battle once their charge is up. While the summon is active, your team's MAX BRV is increased, they enchant your character's attacks with their element, and it gives your team consecutive turns to pummel your enemies!  

You can find all of them in World of Illusions - Trials of Summons.  Start collecting the materials needed to level them to get the most out of their benefits.

As of June 29, 2022. All Summons (except Spirit Moogle) will start at Level 20 upon finishing Act 1, Ch 1.

To level Summons up to Level 30, you will need to get materials from the Lv100 stage in that summon's Ultimate Trial. Grind the Level 100 stage for materials, but check out our Summon Hub for more info!

Getting Summons to Level 40 means either grinding their Divine forms (these give 400 tickets, 400K gems each) or doing the 2nd node of their Spiritus Stage (if it exists) granting the summon a stronger summon attack and unique perks while in summon!

With the introduction of Spiritus Summon World of Illusion maps, you can farm to raise your summon level up to Level 50 all in one little world making it much comfier. At Level 50, the summon hits MUCH harder (up to 1.8 Million hp damage).

For tips on Ultimate, Divine/Illusion & Spiritus board farming see our Board Farming page!

Weapon Tiers Explained

EX Weapon

The EX Weapon is a special 5weapon that unlocks your EX Skill.  This is the weapon you want to be wielding as it has significantly higher stats than the other two abilities that you have.  You also want to fully limit break this weapon to maximize its power.

Unlike your other 2 basic abilities, your EX skill doesn't have a limited number of uses!  It has a recast gauge instead that allows you to unleash its powerful ability every time the bar is fully charged!

Realization (EX+)


Now that you have your 515cp and 35cp weapon passives for your character, and they have their 5EX weapon equipped, it is time to raise the power capabilities of the EX ability. Once your EX weapon is Max Limit Broken (MLB), and has a blue background, you will be able to "realize" the weapon to its EX+ version using a Book of Destruction via the Enhancements > Enhance/Realize button. Use our infographic to learn about the items for EX realization and how you use them.

Trying to find the materials? Check our glossary, directly linked to these items!

Using your realization materials

Use Enhancements > Refine menu to convert your pages/fragments and nuggets to their upgraded, usable equivalents (books & ingots

Important! You do not need to max limit break all of your EX+ weapons on characters you don't plan to use often! You will not have enough materials to do so, as these are difficult to come by as you start using up the materials. Early on, you may leave many of your weapons at EX+ 0/3 Limit Break, just to get a free red ingot.

Once you have three red ingots saved, you can max limit break one of your EX+ weapons. It is generally recommended that most EX+ should be either 0/3 for an ingot on another character or 3/3 for heavily used characters, and rarely stop with only one or two ingots. Partial investment is not advised! Most characters can operate in a limited capacity for a single battle if you compensate around their weaknesses, but you'll want a full investment if you plan to use them repeatedly. Ask on Discord for help!

C90 Note: With the addition of Crystal Awakening 90, to equip and utilize the C85 passive to it's full effect that enhances the EX skill even further and provides other buffs and changes, a character MUST have their EX+ 3/3 passive! Each event gives enough crystals to C90 the banner featured characters and a little more so get to it!

Limited (LD) Weapons

LD weapons introduce a brand new, 5th skill for a character.  It generally has 3-4 uses and provides the character potentially a long lasting buff & stats.

Their effects can be very powerful, sometimes on the power level of a character rework, oftentimes adding new HP+ variants or buffs that may change the character's playstyle. With only 3-4 uses, you must carefully manage them as they also cannot be used for free even when you have free skill use effects.  Use them when their buff or effect is about to expire, or at a critical juncture of the battle!

Limit break them via Power Stones/Duplicates & Orbs. The weapon passive that you get from limit breaking them costs 0 CP to equip. LD weapons are the most important

Burst (BT) Weapons

BT weapons introduce a new mechanic which allows the equipped character to enter Burst Mode for 6 consecutive turns. In those turns, you can use each skill once for free, including your fully charged EX. Your buffs/debuffs/effect also won't decrease while in Burst Mode. Note that only 1 hero & villain will get a BT per FF game! All characters will have an LD.

On your last turn in Burst Mode, your character will have a special Finishing Burst skill which exceeds BRV & HP damage limits!  And if that's not enough, you'll also get a unique Burst Effect after you exit Burst Mode that empowers you or your allies even further for a series of turns.  Timing is important to maximize the use of such effects, so you generally don't want to finish a boss with your Burst as you would lose the power of that effect.

Although you can bring multiple BT weapons in a fight, you can only use one Burst per battle. So if you do so, choose carefully which ones you pick. Note that friend usage of BT is not included.

While you can now realize a BT weapon to BT+ (similar to EX+), the materials for these weapons are the rarest in the game and should be saved until you know what you are doing with endgame content (Lv250)! 

Burst+ (BT+) Weapons


While you can now realize a BT weapon to BT+ (similar to EX+), the materials for these weapons are the rarest in the game and should be saved until you know what you are doing with endgame content (Lv250)! 

The rule of 1 party BT phase is still in place so when Realizing and Limit Breaking, the rule of thumb is book BTs on unit's you'll use but don't need the BT effect from all the time and BT +3/3 units you plan to use a lot and will use their BT Effect and finisher a lot!

With all these weapons available to you, you might be wondering which one to equip on your character. The next section should help answer that question!

Force (FR) Weapons


Force weapons are a 130 CP weapon obtained through the gacha. Eventually every unit will get one, however this does not necessarily mean you want to build them all - at least not right away. A new tier of powerstones are also introduced called the High Power Stone and they are awarded in-game or can be converted from 20 normal powerstones. To fully Max Limit Break a Force weapon with no dupes, you will need 12 High Power Stones.

A MLB FR weapon allows you to wield the passive while equipping an Ultima Weapon with better stats and passives.

The Force Ability can only be used when your party's Force Gauge is at 100% and will trigger Force Phase lasting 10 Turns. During these 10 Turns, you get an HP Damage Bonus (FR Bonus) which multiplies how much damage your unit did by it's value. You can raise the FR Bonus by fulfilling conditions set by the specific Force Ability you used (these vary by character and will be on our infographics).

The point of Force time is to try to deal as much damage as you can in these 10 party turns, but note that EVERY party action will lower the turn count once it starts which means AAs and CAs should already be up before triggering your Force Phase.

Stats wise, you want to equip:

 UW > BT+ 3/3 > FR > BT > EX+ 3/3

Your character will be significantly weaker if you do not have all of their Equipment Passives from their 15cp, 35cp, and LD weapons

In the next section, we're going to show you where to pull the best weapons for your characters!

High Guard Armor (Lufenia Armor)

Importance: Low | Ease of Attaining: Medium| Cost of Attaining: Medium

Summon Boards

Importance: High | Ease of Attaining: Easy | Cost of Attaining: Time-consuming

High Guard Armor (HA) can be purchased from the High Guard Token Exchange (in the Item Exchange menu) for the price of 20 High Guard Tokens. These tokens are acquired for completing any Lv200 difficulty LUFENIA stage. Some LUFENIA fights can be manageable with enough damage to ignore orbs, however some fights have mechanics that will push back against this approach. Try some yourself and if you hit a wall, feel free to ask us or the community for help!

You may only purchase an armor if you have the character's 2nd level armor already maxed out, realized, and fully limit broken with ingots. If you do not, the button for the armor will say Requirement. Once you purchase a High Guard Armor, that's it! 

You only need one copy

Simply max level the armor in the Enhancements menu to acquire the new strong passive, which is named after a type of Keystone.

These new Keystone passives are more than just basic stat boosts & CP space! Here are all 5 types, parentheses indicate the new upper limit

HP DMG Limit is the maximum amount of HP Damage they can do. Also refered to as "Held BRV" and "Max BRV Cap." The default is 99,999.

Want to find out more about High Armor+ (blue armor)? Check our FAQ!

Summon boards are stat and passive grids that can be unlocked by spending Summon Points.  Summon points are farmed in World of Illusions - Ultimate Summons, particularity the LVL 100 fight.  

Each Summon has their own board that gives permanent stat enhancements and equip-able passives even if the particular summon is not on your team.  We currently have all 10 boards available right now, and it is important to complete the stat grid for all 10 for characters that you plan to use in difficult content. It's generally best to start with Ifrit > Odin > Bahamut > Brothers > Ramuh, if you need an order.

A large amount of farming is required to max out your character's summon boards but it also gives significant rewards from treasure nodes (gems, tickets and armor tokens). We advise everyone to only max the boards of characters you have gear for and get the treasures for everyone else.

For a more in depth look, check out our Summon Hub

Enhancement Points & Char. Boards

Importance: High | Ease of Attaining: Easy but Limited | Cost of Attaining: Low-ish*

Additional Ability & Bloom Stones

Importance: Medium | Ease of Attaining: Easy | Cost of Attaining: Low

All characters now have access to a character board for themselves. This board provides them medium improvements across their Skill 1, Skill 2, and EX skill, and generally very strong improvements for their LD.

Each board has 4 sections, one for each skill, and your character will be required to have their crystal level and all weapon passives to complete the board. The last 1/3 of the EX branch will be locked unless you have their EX+ at 3/3. This is not a reason to 3/3 an EX+!

The cost to complete a character board is 8,000 points (5,000 for S1/S2/EX & 3,000 for LD) however the most important part is the LD branch (straight down). This can cost up 1030, 1340 or 3040 points depending on how tightly you want to budget.

With the addition of Force Weapons comes Force Enhancement which are passives bought with Enhancement Points and Force Stones/Shards that will improve a unit's ability to fill the gauge on their turn and preform as the gauge is above 80%. This is where things can get expensive as you want to Force Enhance (FE) 23 or 30 your most used units which can cost 11,200 or 15,000 enhancement points respectively.

Only current events offer up to 5,000 points (15,000 with basic Moogle Pass and 30,000 with premium mog pass), so each month you can earn around 30,000 total points as a F2P.

The most important places to spend points are in the LD branch and Force Enhancement Levels!

For a more detailed breakdown and explanation of the budgeting options, check out our Enhancement Points page!

Additonal Ability (AA) is unlocked at Crystal Strength 65.  Like the other basic abilities, this can be improved by it's Extension (c70) and Bloom Stones

Bloom Stones can be purchased in the Bloom Token Exchange.  You buy the Bloom Stone for the character and like weapons, you limit break it using Bloom Fragments to unlock the passive.

Bloom Stones and Bloom Fragments can be acquired from Raid Events, Chocoboards and Heretic Events

With Crystal Level 90 Awakenings, AAs are upgraded yet again and become very potent!

Artifact Passives

Importance: Low unless Cursed Six | Ease of Attaining: Easy | Cost of Attaining: Random

Spheres

Importance: Very Low | Ease of Attaining: Easy | Cost of Attaining: Very High

One of the rewards you get for doing events are High Eidojas (gold items pictured).  These items, when raised to their max level grant you Artifact Passives that can be equipped on your characters 3 at a time at the cost of CP.  These Artifact Passives grant additional stat boosts to your characters. The recommended artifacts for a character are listed at the bottom of every infographic we publish!

Since the introduction of High Eidojas, regular Eidojas, Eidogas and Eidoras (silver & bronze) are merely used for fodder to level High Eidojas since the chances of getting red passives (which you want) are significantly increased for High Eidojas. If you have the Basic or Premium Moogle Pass, you are guaranteed to always roll double red passives for artifacts! This is a paid item, and by no means required, but it can save you significant amounts of time in real life if you usually farm for double perfect rolls. We recommend getting 3x of the character's primary statistic (usually ATK or cs50 Boost, character dependent) and moving on! You do not need double perfect artifacts for any character (generally). Some 

6 Units may need 1 or 2 of their "cursed" specific artifacts: Serah, Yuna, Aerith, Vivi, Cater and Lion.

After fully realizing an EX weapon, you are rewarded a Sphere. These are one time use items that grant an always-on passive. The sphere gets destroyed if it's overwritten / replaced. You can safely remove a sphere with a Reset Stone. We get 3 for free, but further stones are included in the paid ingot bundle in the Gem Shop. Twice a month, whenever a new BT comes out, we get a co-op which drops materials to get Refined Spheres. These can be farmed easily but have 40% of the stats of a normal Sphere (which is fine since you can farm them!)

Character spheres are categorized by 5 letters. A sphere for one character can be used on a different character with that category letter.

Each character has 2 different sphere slots and their letters may vary.  A third sphere slot can be unlocked by fully limit breaking your tier-2 armor.

Their importance is listed as Very Low for a reason. There is not a single piece of content in the game that will ever require you to have spheres equipped. They are simply a fun way to further power your favorite character. 

For more details and recommendation on Spheres, check our page on Spheres

Glossary (Terms, Items and Mechanics)

Don't know what something means? Most of the highlighted words link to our Glossary where we we explain some basic game mechanics and community terms for stats, interaction, roles, etc. so take a look there through the link provided above too!

We can't recommend Discord enough, but if you are too shy - our contact info can be found on Our Team page. 

You are welcome to email us or message us on Reddit!


Links for the content listed above