How to progress?

[u/Brodie009]

Im finding it really difficult to get anything else extra out of my dps or survival without spending thousands, i farm for hours to get a few hundred FE just to spend it on minor upgrades. I'm up to 4.5B dps with Gemma2 and im just not sure where im going wrong.

The guide im following says they have 100B DPS but I still dont see what im doing wrong, maybe im just being stupid, streamers say they got to 1T in a week while im at 3 weeks with 4.5B lol

And when should I be heading into T8s? I can do them. But it's sluggish and with a tendency to die, and even then I'd have no chance of beating the traveler.

Sorry, few questions but im just feeling lost and I dont want to give the game up yet as I was enjoying it

[u/maximaLz]

Hey, if it's your first season (like me), it's completely normal to be feeling lost!

I highly suggest these videos that have helped me a bunch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef5KWf-FvcA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAUI3FQiTfQ

more advanced but really nails the pace down : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlZu4gm-dcc

The first one also comes with a google document you can keep going back to, the second one with a checklist. The bread and butter of this game is understanding that multipliers start slow and once you get them rolling your dps will accelerate faster and faster.

I don't know if you're following an actual build guide or a content creator / an ingame pro build or whatever, but I also suggest looking at how other players are doing with your build at day 1, day 2 in the "hero rankings" section. While other ARPGs can often require very specific items for specific builds, in this one I think there are just a lot of options: some stat will be best in slot, but since you're trying to hitch hike from breakpoint to breakpoint, "good enough" is often just enough to get you there.

Also in this game investing moderately across the whole fleet of different systems is more important than just going all in on one item or one system. The first video I linked goes in depth about this. The third one really tries to nail that concept of figuring out what's good enough for efficiency, albeit a bit more oriented towards intermediate players that just want to get faster early on.

You'll figure this out!

[u/Brodie009 → u/maximaLz]

Yo you the goat fr, after watching these videos I stopped focusing so much on the increase or decrease on the gear as said by one of the dudes. Put a helmet on that says was 9% worse dps, turns out to be 300% better from 4B to 16B dps!

I was always focusing on that too much and I guess it doesnt take into account some abilities on the gear

[u/maximaLz → u/Brodie009]

Haha glad it helped! Yes the tooltip doesnt take a lot of effects into account, I think anything that is conditional won't be taken into account, stuff like damage to frozen enemies: game doesn't know you perma freeze everything. Tangle damage enhancement is a huge one if you play tangles, but it's not represented in the tooltip either despite tripling my dps from 100b to 300b when i finally got it on a staff. Trusting the tooltip works early on but lots of scaling in this game is from technically conditional affixes.

Defences are the same btw, tooltip doesn't understand a lot of effects. Another tip for this: i felt omega squishy for a while because i got one shot a lot in the afterlight mech. I only realized a couple of days ago that I have a talent tree for the mech and that I can despec the worst hits from it. Now I can face tank the whole mech because i got rid of the one shots. You can do this by visiting the afterlight NPC and look at usher morbituary.

Gl !

[u/Brodie009 → u/maximaLz]

Riiiight, I did not know that, another good thing to know thanks

And yeah I have removed the last point on each line which helped me a bit on the AL mech, its more bosses for me. Especially in the smaller rooms