Princess Connect! Re: Dive - Upgrading Your Characters
Princess Connect! Re:Dive isn’t your standard mobile game that lets any player and their grandmas complete all the content in the game without working hard for it. It’s true that the gacha element is one of the more dominant factors to succeed in this game, but for a huge bulk of the game, hard work can go a long way when it comes to powering up your team. Having a team full of top-tier characters won’t mean anything if you don’t develop their potentials in battle.
As we mentioned in our Guide on Character Roles, building the perfect team is a stepping stone to winning in the game. Once you are committed to the team you’ve assembled, it’s time to equip those characters with the good stuff. Characters displayed on the tier lists are placed thereafter comparing their final stats. This means that the characters you have now are only shells of what they could be; it’s up to you to make sure that they achieve their final form as soon as possible.
Character Ascension
Character ascension is one of the most important aspects of making a strong team. The number of stars that a unit has represents the strength of its base stats. This means that 3-star units generally have higher total base stats compared to 1-star or 2-star units. Take note that just because a unit is 1-star, it doesn’t automatically mean that unit is weak compared to other 3-star units. All characters can be ascended to 6-stars, and that’s the point where the real comparison happens.
Believe it or not, a lot of 1-star units are rated SSS-tier when they hit 6-star ascension. It’s crucial that you ascend all the characters you have on your main team to increase their total base stats and increase their power rating completely. If your main team has a lot of 1-star units, it’s no surprise as to why you might have difficulty on the Main Quests. It will take weeks or even months for you to fully ascend a character to 6-stars if you’re F2P, but patience will reward your hard work.
Equipment Refinement
A common misconception that new players have is that they refuse to refine their equipment since they’ll just lose it anyway once they rank up the character. While it’s true that you lose your refined equipment on rank up, that’s no reason for you to stop yourself from refining your equipment. All of your equipment should be refined to max level, especially if you’re stuck trying to clear a stage that you keep dying on.
Equipment Refinement uses Enhancement Crystals or Gear from your inventory. Both of these items are relatively easy to earn, so don’t worry about whether you should use them or not on specific characters. Refining your equipment doubles the bonus stats on your equipment, so it’s always a good investment to have.
Character Stories
A hidden trick to increase your character’s stats is to increase their bond level with you. Leveling up your bond with a character unlocks a new chapter in their story. Viewing those stories will yield permanent stat bonuses for those characters. With that in mind, you might want to go to your story tabs right now to start getting those free stats that you probably didn’t know of.
A lot of players aren’t interested in the story, nor are they interested in the 20 gems that are rewarded to them after finishing a chapter. If you’re this type of player, you might be glad to learn that you can still receive the stat bonus and gems even if you instantly skip the scenes and dialogues using the SKIP function. You can claim up to five stat bonuses depending on the maximum bond level you can have with that character.
Skill Levels
Max all skill levels. It doesn’t matter whether you think a skill is good or not because all of a character’s skills contribute to overall damage output for the team. Maxing characters’ skill levels can cost a lot of mana, and players will often feel strapped for this resource. Once they reach higher levels, players will start spending on the Shop and other investments (as they should) using mana as their primary currency.
Skill levels scale with character levels, so make sure to update leveling your characters as well. Once your character hits the next level, update your skills as soon as possible. For you to achieve this, it’s ideal that you save up on Mana from the Grotto or by grinding Normal Dungeons since they reward a decent amount of Mana. If you don’t have any energy but have more gems than you can spend, try buying it from the Mana Exchange.
Increasing Level Cap
Obviously, you want to hit your character’s max level. Leveling up a character isn’t much of a problem since you can do this by simply questing or using the abundance of EXP potions that you have in your inventory. The real problem is increasing your Level Cap since it’s directly connected to your account level. There’s nothing much you can do except try to catch up on levels with other players by grinding dungeons or other modes.
Account EXP is gained by spending energy. The amount of energy you spend is the exact amount of EXP you will gain on your account. Your energy bar recharges every six minutes, so it will take a really long time before your energy bar goes back to full once you’ve drained it. The most useful trick to catching up on EXP is to never let your energy bar stay on or beyond the maximum capacity for a long time.
Spend your energy as much as possible. If you really want to catch up with other players, spend gems to refresh your energy bar so that you can continue grinding. You can add 120 energy points by spending 40 gems, which isn’t too expensive, considering you can immediately earn back those gems using the 120 energy. You can do this multiple times, but keep in mind that the price for each recharge will rise a little bit each time.
