Last Cloudia Beginner's Guide

There’s 3 main kinds of resource in LC, and they all tie in directly to your account progression. You may notice straight away that there’s no stamina system in place. Or at least not in the standard fashion anyway.

In its place we have both Blue Orbs and Red Orbs. Instead of being charged a set value for entering any stage, you’re charged the cost of the arks being equipped by your party.

But thankfully there’s no additional costs, so this means you can enter any stage for free as long as you don’t equip any arks. You’re free to grind away for as long as you want.

Both Blue and Red orbs are needed to upgrade Arks. This is the only way to level up Arks, there’s no such thing as “Ark experience”. You can increase your orb income by finding new Orb Spots by progressing through the story and upgrading them.

The third resources is of course Gold, which you’ll use to buy gear in town, as well as upgrading your Blue spots and capacity. It is also used in raising the level cap of your heroes, as well as other less important things. 

Now that you’ve settled into your account, it’s ok if you feel a bit aimless. Besides clearing story, you can find yourself wondering how to be optimal with your resources, especially with so many options ahead of you. I’ll try to be as concise as possible.

Your priorities as a new player are:

Pretty self explanatory. As you clear regions on the map, you’ll unlock more spots that will increase your total Orb output, which is strictly tied to Ark progression. You’ll find a total of 5 Blue spots and 2 Red spots by the time you finish Chapter 3.

Blue Spot No. 1: Available from the start.

Red Spot No. 1: Available immediately after arriving at Port Aldana.

Blue Spot No. 2: Available after clearing Royal Capital Aldana and recruiting Zekus.

Red Spot No. 2: Available after clearing Dara Desert for the first time.

Blue Spot No. 3: Available after clearing White Laboratory and recruiting Theria.

Blue Spot No. 4: Available immediately after reaching the Lanzelia continent.

Blue Spot No. 5: Available after clearing Evria Ice Caverns, right before Blaze Garden.

This is where the vast majority of your resources as a new player should be going. Spending Gold on Blue Orb generation will in turn allow you to upgrade your Red Orb generation.

You’ll often find that in order to further upgrade Red Spots, you’ll need to upgrade the capacity of your Blue Orb Tanks, and this too should be a priority.

As for Red Orbs, they’re only used for Ark leveling and equipping costs, so you’re free to use them however you like. However, that leads into the next point.

Ark cost increases after each level up, meaning that you’ll end up spending more orbs in order to equip them in battle. This means you’ll have less resources later on to upgrade spots and other arks.

You can’t level down an Ark (as of now), and you can’t actually own any Ark dupes whatsoever (nor Unit dupes for that matter), so any decision made to level up an Ark is final and cannot be reversed.

This is especially true for SSR Arks, which have the highest cost and can really hurt your orb income if used incorrectly. If you're a hardcore player, you might even want to leave them at level 1, in other to farm their Ether reward more efficiently (spending less orbs per run).

Later on, when your orb generation is much, much higher, you’ll start looking forward to level up Arks a bit more, since you can realistically aim for high level skills.

For those wondering what to spend Red Orbs on at the beginning, I've got a few Ark candidates for you that people usually focus on first:

Sorcerer's Eden 

The mage’s bread and butter Ark. It’s usually one of the first arks a player will fully upgrade, since it gives access to Fast Aura (20% INT buff at the beginning of each wave) and the INT Up I and MAX passives (2% and 15% INT increase respectively).

Additionally, it slightly decreases your casting speed when equipped so that’s a nice bonus.

Grand Bargain

An Ark specializing in boosting the overall tankiness of your frontline fighters. You can level it up to 4 early on to teach them Hp Up II and Allure, the latter of which will increase the chance of them being targeted by enemies.

If you choose to keep focusing on this Ark, you'll be rewarded with the Exp Up passive, which will boost earned experience for the party after a stage by 20% (non stackable, even if a friend unit has it).

The Ark itself is also very good for melee users, as it will boost STR by a significant amount, relative to your current HP.

Hidden Treasure, Makyuodyne

The main reason you want to invest in this Ark early on is its level 6 skill, High Level Magic Chant. This one will greatly reduce the time needed to cast spells, and it's kind of vital to equip this if you intend for your caster to start throwing Tier 3 magic around (25+ MP offensive spells).

Keep in mind that if either Zekus or Blood Rose are your main mages, they already learn this skill on their tree, so in that case you shouldn't make this Ark a priority.

Leveling these Arks will also require you to upgrade your Red Orb Tanks frequently, so be sure to do that if your Red Orbs are close to the current cap.

One of the most unique things about this game is how you can teach the vast majority of passives and spells to any character you like, and that includes free units, even monsters. 

You do this by equipping an Ark under a character and then clearing stages with it on. Whenever you do, your character will gain AP for each skill on the Ark, equal to the multiplier stated on the Ark screen.

When that character reaches the goal value on the right for any given skill, it is now learned. You must repeat this process for each character you want to teach this skill to.

You can equip and unequip Arks at will, the AP progress for each skill will be saved for when you resume learning it.

Once a skill is learned, you can equip it by going to your Units menu and entering the skill menu.

In here, you can activate and deactivate skills you've learned with a single tap without spending any sort of currency or resource.

Each skill in the game has it's own SC (Skill Capacity) points. When equipping skills for your character, their combined total SC cannot exceed his current maximum, shown at the top (Skills that cost 0 SC are the ones that your Unit has learned via his ability tree).

This brings a great deal of customization to the game, since there are over a hundred spells and over two hundred passives to learn from Arks, and you'll be experimenting a lot when you start out.

Keep in mind that for an Ark to teach its strongest skills, it will have to be leveled up first. To the right of the Ark screen you'll see the required level for each particular skill, and you will only gain AP towards the skills the Ark currently has access to.

Giving you more options in building your characters is why Arks are so strong, and why they're often sought out even before the Units themselves. 

Learn the Heal Wind spell

This is your first AoE heal and it’s kinda vital for staying alive on early-mid game boss fights. Some units such as Theria and Lilah can learn it via their skill tree.

Otherwise you can learn this spell from these Arks:

• Maiden's Prayer (SR) at level 1
• Giant Tree (R) at level 4

If you find yourself in need of more healing, you can always teach it to the rest of your party members to make use of their MP pools. Anyone can make use of it, even physical attackers.

Use Debuffs

Debuffs in this game are quite strong, and are accessible right from the get go. You'll want to prioritize Blazer and Lostoma, as they reduce STR and INT respectively, effectively cutting off a big portion of the damage you recieve from bosses.

You can learn Blazer from Hidden Treasure Makyuodyne (SR) at level 1, and Lostoma from House of the Witch (R) at level 2.

Their Giga versions are just as useful, debuffing the entire enemy party at once.

Run the Limit Breaker Field stages

Make sure to spend most of your orange event  orbs on these stages. Early on you will have a shortage of 3* and 4* LB mats, so make sure to do these as often as possible, so that your characters don’t get stuck on the lv 20 and 40 caps for long.

Try to clear the hardest difficulty that you can at any given point.

The second stage has Lv 27 enemies, but you can try clearing it at level 20 if you're feeling bold.

The third stage has Lv 51 enemies, and likewise you can begin trying at level 40 or so.

Once over 40 however, the next cap (lv 60) will require 5* LB mats. These are only obtainable on the weekend dungeon, which requires you to have at least one level 55 character on your team (your friend doesn’t count) to enter it.

There’s also the daily gold stage, which helps out at the very beginning but becomes largely useless later on.

Team Composition 

It’s good to keep in mind to build a variety of unit types. However when deciding about their starting lineup, a lot of players can be very indecisive regarding what to pick first.

In general you’ll want to make sure to have at least one offensive caster on your starting team, as well as access to healing spells, which can come from either support-focused characters or just learning them from the arks themselves (see above).

The rest of the team is usually filled up with physical attackers, since they can draw attention to themselves and are capable of breaking the bosses.

Ranged physical characters are quite rare at the moment, only Lilebette really fits the role. And in my opinion they are a bit finnicky to use, in that they like to move all over the place before attacking to make sure they’re at the right range.

Conquering

The Conquering system that you unlock after finishing Chapter 1 (and recruiting Zekus) is vital to character progression.

It's very important that you unlock all of the slots with Crystals, as this is where you'll receive most of your Unit Souls from.

The only other way to get extra souls, besides pulling dupes, is by going really hardcore on the Unit Story for the character you want to power up, but the drop rate is incredibly low and will take forever to get a significant amount of souls.

Upon completing Chapter 3 (Blaze Garden), you'll also unlock a second column with another five slots.

Even though they are significantly more expensive to unlock now, it's still heavily recommended to do so since they provide a lot of value over time.

Friend Points

It's ok to use most of your Friend Points at the beginning, since you'll need a lot of low tier mats to progress faster.

You can even buy 3* and 4* mats directly from the Shop to break past the level caps faster, even though you can only buy one per day.

You'll want to unlock all of your friend slots as soon as possible. This only costs 1000 gems, so it's a no brainer really.

The first few days or so, it's usually best to ask for 200 gold gifts to speed up early Orb Spot upgrades. After that however, set it back to 20 friend points per gift, to gain the most value over time.

Once the materials gotten from FP pulls start becoming largely useless, it's usually best to hoard your FP and wait for FP Gacha events. In these, valuable items are added to the pool, and drop rates of existing rare items are buffed as well.

While we're here, don't forget to do your free friend pull every 8 hours! This helps out a lot early on.

Spending Crystals/When to pull

If you're free-to-play and you're wondering how best to spend your Crystals, there are basically several ways to go around it.

• You can just pull whenever you feel like, as long as you want something from a certain banner. You'll have less resources to spend later on, but usually the game is generous enough to warrant at least one or two multis on each banner.
• You can also choose to pull only on banners where you want both the featured Unit and the Ark, and stop whenever you get either, in order to maximize your chance of getting anything featured.
• Of course you can just hoard all your Crystals and wait for the eventual limited banners, if you don't feel confident about your luck. Just be warned, they are quite far from GL launch and you'll be waiting forever.

There is a pity rate in the game, but you'll need to spend a whopping 90000 Crystals withing a single month to get any featured Unit or Ark you desire, and that's quite the unrealistic goal for a free-to-play user.

On JP there have been 2 limited banners so far, the first one being the Swimsuit Lilah banner, and then the more juicy Secret of Mana collaboration banner.

It can be extremely hard to get all 6 featured items (3 Units and 3 Arks) from the latter if you haven't got a sizable amount of gems ready for it. The provided Step Up summon is however very generous.

But there's no official confirmation on any of these banners, and it would take several months for any of them to arrive on GL anyway, so you shouldn't worry too much at the moment.

Lastly, Tickets shouldn’t be saved in my opinion, since they can only be used on the general gacha, and thus will never include limited units (but will include newly featured normal units).

The only reason you’d want to save these is if you already have almost everything, and you really want to slightly increase your chances of getting something new when a new banner comes out.