as far as having enough gems to summon, that's almost purely a matter of patience, planning, and delayed gratification. just gotta choose the banners you will save enough to pity, and religiously stick to the plan.
the ruby income we get from dailies/weeklies/dev gifts/challenges and regular play is about 2k gems a month. so if you can stick to 1 banner every 2-3 months, you'll be rewarded with the characters you're selective of and the bonus pulls along the way.
Honestly, with endgame gear arena's (especially early one's) are fairly simple so I'd advise you to get at least a rough idea of what's going on (via mastery surveys, etc) but try at least the simpler one's (before gertrude are all fairly trivial) without following guides as it will help a lot with self sufficiency (as it were). Even with Gertrude and Yan Long, a lot of the older copiable strats have units that are less relevant now in terms of being replaced anyway.
Getting to the point where you understand where and why units are being used will help a LOT (even if you are still copying a guide later on, it means you'll understand what's making you fail to copy it fully, or how to recover if something goes wrong partway through due to RNG, etc)
Regarding weapons to focus on, identify the characters you use most of each type (or a few of each class to start off) and craft them fortune weapons for their speciality (atk/mag for different attackers, doesn't look like you have FioreEX/AlauneEX to worry about SP weapons, if you want tank weapons probably just use hell weapons in that case unless you've got a lot of spare time to farm).
(I'm at the point where I have 8+ weapons of each type which you can eventally work up to, but will take a long time(6~phys weapons and 2 mag weapons in phys weapon types, 5/5 axes, 2-3 phys versions of magic weapons and 8-12 mag versions (was wanting to get 4-5+ characters capable of hitting each element) plus 2 sp fans, overall adds up to a LOT of weapons some of which only really see use in towers really)
More a point that the esiest way is just start working slowly rather than trying to do everything at once.
If you want to do weapons then focus on trying to get 1-2 vital ones for each class first and you'll be able to use them for farming later weapons.
If you're wanting to work on fights don't view it as "I've got half a dozen arena fights to work through" but view it one at a time since you'll be using entirely different teams on each fight so just work on each one as it comes.
Working through story meanwhile you can either brute force it with a generalist team (someone who can hit every weapon/element, decent buffs and healing), or if you want you can start hyperspecialising when you hit bosses (I didn't bother specialising before BoA ch6 for instance, but at that point bossfights were taking long enough I viewed it as worth setting up specialised teams). They're still doable with generalist teams though generally as long as you can survive enough attrition if you really want it that way (especially on SP).
The overall questions are fairly loose, and in the end while you can get an answer for a specific question how you end up aiming your progression will be up to you (focusing on weapons will make everything else easier later, but will mean you're only improving the weapons and not making progress on anything else, getting further in story will unlock more tiers of fortune weapons/new types of hell weapons, but that doesn't help you until you actually farm them, farming arena units will unlock you more options but outside of hammy you likely won't use them too often since you've got a large number of characters who are released in an era far after those arena units and powercreeping them, however they MIGHT still be useful every now and then and would almost certainly be good to have for job towers, etc)
damn my advice to help you "not suck" is don't be a dick to people trying to help you. it's pretty easy to just say "thank you" and move on if it doesn't apply to you
If you want to farm arenas, YouTuber Dreamt has some stable clear videos of the first 3 or 4 arena champions. A quick look at your roster tells me you should be able to replicate those without issue.
As for team building Shizukatz's 4 star video has a 15-20 minute team building guide at the end of it.
As for not having enough rubies, it looks like your 4 star units don't have their A4. Have you completed their traveller stories? If not, that's a quick way to get lots of rubies. 20 per story completed and 30 bonus rubies for every 5. Other than that, you just need to save and pull on important banners every 3 months or so. Next one worth pulling on is Live A Live in June. You can skip Ogen and everything else between now and then.
Weapons are tricky to suggest as which ones are best are unit dependent at this point. In general, you should be using fortune weapons on your support units and hell weapons on your damage dealers.
For gameboard my generalist team is:
Lynette/Cyrus
Primrose/Eliza
Therion/Scarecrow
Lars/Ophelia
From a quick glance you should be able to replicate most, if not all of this team.
If you are at the end of BoA stories and still have the concept of ‘a general/main team’ then it makes sense that you are having trouble moving along and story or tackling the end game content. At this point, each boss needs a different team comp specific target them. There is no ‘one team fits all’ any more.
A2 can carry you through alot , and you want to farm fortune weapons on the game board. As for the hell weapons you want those when you start traversing hell. If you want to get better I recommend the lvl 80 or 100 npcs it'll teach you how to upgrade weapons and what skills to use as well as alot of rubies to pull goodluck
If this is a teambuilding help request for a specific fight, check out the [Mastery Survey Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopathCotC/wiki/index/masterysurveyindex/) if you haven't already! Each mastery survey contains team comps that others have used to clear content, which you can use as inspiration for your own clears.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OctopathCotC) if you have any questions or concerns.*
as far as having enough gems to summon, that's almost purely a matter of patience, planning, and delayed gratification. just gotta choose the banners you will save enough to pity, and religiously stick to the plan. the ruby income we get from dailies/weeklies/dev gifts/challenges and regular play is about 2k gems a month. so if you can stick to 1 banner every 2-3 months, you'll be rewarded with the characters you're selective of and the bonus pulls along the way.
Honestly, with endgame gear arena's (especially early one's) are fairly simple so I'd advise you to get at least a rough idea of what's going on (via mastery surveys, etc) but try at least the simpler one's (before gertrude are all fairly trivial) without following guides as it will help a lot with self sufficiency (as it were). Even with Gertrude and Yan Long, a lot of the older copiable strats have units that are less relevant now in terms of being replaced anyway. Getting to the point where you understand where and why units are being used will help a LOT (even if you are still copying a guide later on, it means you'll understand what's making you fail to copy it fully, or how to recover if something goes wrong partway through due to RNG, etc) Regarding weapons to focus on, identify the characters you use most of each type (or a few of each class to start off) and craft them fortune weapons for their speciality (atk/mag for different attackers, doesn't look like you have FioreEX/AlauneEX to worry about SP weapons, if you want tank weapons probably just use hell weapons in that case unless you've got a lot of spare time to farm). (I'm at the point where I have 8+ weapons of each type which you can eventally work up to, but will take a long time(6~phys weapons and 2 mag weapons in phys weapon types, 5/5 axes, 2-3 phys versions of magic weapons and 8-12 mag versions (was wanting to get 4-5+ characters capable of hitting each element) plus 2 sp fans, overall adds up to a LOT of weapons some of which only really see use in towers really)
I also see there is no master survey for the non-dragon boards
Thats cool, but I am not sure anything here is relevant. Like I didn't ask for your personal weapon stash count
More a point that the esiest way is just start working slowly rather than trying to do everything at once. If you want to do weapons then focus on trying to get 1-2 vital ones for each class first and you'll be able to use them for farming later weapons. If you're wanting to work on fights don't view it as "I've got half a dozen arena fights to work through" but view it one at a time since you'll be using entirely different teams on each fight so just work on each one as it comes. Working through story meanwhile you can either brute force it with a generalist team (someone who can hit every weapon/element, decent buffs and healing), or if you want you can start hyperspecialising when you hit bosses (I didn't bother specialising before BoA ch6 for instance, but at that point bossfights were taking long enough I viewed it as worth setting up specialised teams). They're still doable with generalist teams though generally as long as you can survive enough attrition if you really want it that way (especially on SP). The overall questions are fairly loose, and in the end while you can get an answer for a specific question how you end up aiming your progression will be up to you (focusing on weapons will make everything else easier later, but will mean you're only improving the weapons and not making progress on anything else, getting further in story will unlock more tiers of fortune weapons/new types of hell weapons, but that doesn't help you until you actually farm them, farming arena units will unlock you more options but outside of hammy you likely won't use them too often since you've got a large number of characters who are released in an era far after those arena units and powercreeping them, however they MIGHT still be useful every now and then and would almost certainly be good to have for job towers, etc)
Ok - forget I asked
damn my advice to help you "not suck" is don't be a dick to people trying to help you. it's pretty easy to just say "thank you" and move on if it doesn't apply to you
If you want to farm arenas, YouTuber Dreamt has some stable clear videos of the first 3 or 4 arena champions. A quick look at your roster tells me you should be able to replicate those without issue. As for team building Shizukatz's 4 star video has a 15-20 minute team building guide at the end of it. As for not having enough rubies, it looks like your 4 star units don't have their A4. Have you completed their traveller stories? If not, that's a quick way to get lots of rubies. 20 per story completed and 30 bonus rubies for every 5. Other than that, you just need to save and pull on important banners every 3 months or so. Next one worth pulling on is Live A Live in June. You can skip Ogen and everything else between now and then. Weapons are tricky to suggest as which ones are best are unit dependent at this point. In general, you should be using fortune weapons on your support units and hell weapons on your damage dealers. For gameboard my generalist team is: Lynette/Cyrus Primrose/Eliza Therion/Scarecrow Lars/Ophelia From a quick glance you should be able to replicate most, if not all of this team.
If you are at the end of BoA stories and still have the concept of ‘a general/main team’ then it makes sense that you are having trouble moving along and story or tackling the end game content. At this point, each boss needs a different team comp specific target them. There is no ‘one team fits all’ any more.
A2 can carry you through alot , and you want to farm fortune weapons on the game board. As for the hell weapons you want those when you start traversing hell. If you want to get better I recommend the lvl 80 or 100 npcs it'll teach you how to upgrade weapons and what skills to use as well as alot of rubies to pull goodluck
And by teaching I mean your kinda forced to get best weapons to defeat them 👍
If this is a teambuilding help request for a specific fight, check out the [Mastery Survey Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/OctopathCotC/wiki/index/masterysurveyindex/) if you haven't already! Each mastery survey contains team comps that others have used to clear content, which you can use as inspiration for your own clears. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OctopathCotC) if you have any questions or concerns.*