Valkyrie Connect Beginner Guide

Valkyrie Connect – Getting Started Guide

Welcome to Valkyrie Connect! The purpose of this guide is to help new players get off to a strong start, offer advice on efficient progression, and provide a tips and guidance to the game in general. As a F2P player, Valkyrie Connect is a resource management game first and foremost and an RPG second– you will need to invest your time, stamina, and other resources carefully to maximize your power and break into the top ranks. 

Part 1: Getting Started Strong – Building a High ROI Core Team

Your first goal is to get started strong. This means acquiring the most powerful heroes early and not wasting resources on heroes that are more niche or situational. The two best methods of doing this are 1) Rerolling during Star Party 2) Rerolling before Star Party and then amassing resources to spend on Star Party. 

What is Star Party?

Star Party is an event that, thus far, occurs at the very end/very beginning of the month. Many of the best heroes in the game can only be summoned during Star Party and having them on your team early is extremely useful since you can pour resources into them immediately and get huge returns on investment. Many of the other top tier heroes are also in the Star Party summon as well, making it the best use of your diamonds.

If Star Party is going on, you can begin rerolling immediately. If not, you can either wait for it to be active, or, reroll now and begin stockpiling for the next Star Party.

What is Rerolling?

Rerolling is the process of resetting your account until your initial summons provide you with the heroes you desire– in this case, high value heroes. Every account has access to a large amount of essentially free diamonds on creation, after these are exhausted, earning diamonds is much more difficult. Thus, your goal is to make sure that your pool of early diamonds is used wisely. Since summons are random, if you get unsatisfying results early, you can reset, and tap into the easy diamonds until you get the result you want (reroll).

What am I rolling for?

At a minimum, you are aiming for a high amount of investment grade heroes which can form a powerful core team (group of 5). Ideally, you want every Star Party exclusive as well as certain other high tier heroes, but even with patience, there is finite time to reroll before Star Party ends, or before you would just be better off investing in a good hand. My list of High Return on Investment is as follows (Star Party Heroes are in bold):

1. Urd
2. Odin
3. Verdandi
4. Ymir
5. Skadi
6. Luca
7. Thor**
8. Freya**
9. Ranco
10. Niji*
11. Canon**
12. Mia
13. Wolfgang*
14. Mani
15. Gullveig*

Commentary on them is as follows:

Urd: SS Class. Simply overpowered and excels in all content. She has a huge heal over time effect and can carry even slightly underpowered teams through connects, allow them to get more offensive items. She can also serve as a backbone for tank arena teams and is obnoxious to deal with– she has the highest ROI in the game and will be a staple of your teams for the foreseeable future. Grab her with no regrets. She is the best unit in the game period. Heals over time are generally overpowered in every game as they pre-empt damage and are prone to less overheal, and this game is not an exception.

Odin: SS Class. Very slightly below Urd, Odin excels at everything. He buffs your magic damage, does all target damage, has great stats, and his items let him dispel debuffs, valuable in both Arena and Connects. The Omnipotent is a fair title for him.

Verdandi: S Class. Verdandi does best girl things– her ability lets her hit the midrow and the back row, she buffs other ranged, she does absurd damage, and well-protected, she can carry you to glory. She shines in arena and connects due to her multi-target abilities and incredible gear.

Ymir: S Class. First boy is best boy. His ability is bane to Heimdall and does massive dark damage. He’s tanky and can take Boku no Pico levels of poundings. He stops obnoxious barriers and doesn’t afraid of anything. His gear is exceptionally valuable and frees up very limited magic damage gear for your other casters.

Skadi: S Class. A tanky, high damage frontliner who can be immune to charm. Skadi is THIC and she puts the HP in HiPs. Seriously hard to kill while doing great damage, useful more in PvP than other settings, but PvP is the majority of the content so it’s irrelevant. She also has CC. There’s not much more you can ask for in a frontline DPS.

Luca: S Class. Luca is invaluable in tanking for connects and PvP. While she can be countered in PvP, the same is not as true for connects, where she can serve as a valuable frontline in nearly every situation. She turns damage into healing, can be immune to charm, and is obnoxious to deal with for most players. She also gets a free 3 star accessory. Best tank in the game.

Thor: S Class. Thor has incredible stats, high damage, all target AOE, combined with CC, and great items that make him a powerhouse. He would be higher on the list, but there are items to counter him specifically and most players will understand what to do against a Thor at a certain point– until that point, he wrecks face. He’s also amazing in connects, amazing at basically everything. A wonderful contributor.

Freya: S Class. Freya is often disparaged by high level players– because they all had to build around her. Her charm absolutely fucks many teams, her magic damage is absurdly good, and she has high-defense personal gear that makes her resilient, particularly early game when all of your accessories suck. Freya is great in arena, connects, and is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. 

Ranco: S Class. With Ranco’s awesome stat distribution and her abilities, she fits into damn near every single team comp. She is not quite best girl, but she’s pretty damn close and her versatility makes her pretty much a must have. Steamroll, tank, backline kill– she can do it all. Her own weapons also make up for the lack of good archer weapons. You are not going to go wrong with Ranco and she should be a primary target for acquisition.

Mia: A Class. Mia is valuable as a counter against tank/heal teams– which are all over the place. Her own intrinsic value is not that high, but since she helps obliterate very obnoxious PvP teams, you will find huge uses for her. Certainly an excellent addition, you want Mia as part of your tank-busting teams. She is high value simply because of how much she will help you counter other teams.

Niji: S/A Class. Niji is pretty badass. You can build her as either a 100% tank (who cannot be charmed, because lolis are pure) or as a bruiser-magekiller who does great damage while being obnoxiously hard to kill (a sort of pseudo-Skadi). She’s a Tank/DPS, which is a great combo in both arena and connects. For connects, she allows you to increase your DPS while still having a tank. For Arena, same deal. Her accessory gear is also great for early game when you will have few good accessories.Twintails ftw.

Canon: A Class. Canon is basically great at everything, particularly single target damage which will help in connects, guild wars, and simply slaughtering anyone troublesome in PvP when you get lucky. She combos well with Freya and is just an all around jerk for the other teams to deal with– very slightly superior to Wolfgang, as she can wear Mermaid’s bikini and is more useful to you personally than to the group in connects.

Wolfgang: A Class. A great backline MATKer who debuffs connect bosses and troublesome arena enemies. He will be getting improvements soon via costume gear which might make him even stronger. His role is a magekiller/debuffer.

Mani: A class. Valuable for backline kill builds, she is really useful in many situations. There are many great mage options, which is why she is not ranked higher.

Gullveig: A Class. A lesser Freya who is probably slightly more useful in Connects but less useful in Arenas. She’s a glass cannon– but does great damage and has valuable CC. She’s tied with Mani on usefulness in my opinion, but in PvP there may be better options. Still a strong pick.

There are  many other great heroes that did not make the list, largely because they are exclusive summons and you should focus on adding them after you have built your core. You are rolling for the above, but other exclusives and regular summons that are investment grade do exist– Amaterasu, Matisse, Zato, Risa, Nautica, (in that order) are all great options. Beyond that, there are non-rollable heroes like Marmalade and Hrungir that are excellent additions. Still, focusing on that main list is not a bad call for a rerolling guide– because these other heroes are not obtainable through re-rolling and can be focused on after you build your core group.

So, reroll until you are able to, either directly or through ticket using, obtain 5 of those heroes to invest in, ideally grabbing one tank (niji/luca), one melee dps, two casters, and one ranger. You want to be able to run at least a 2-2-1 (2 frontline, 2 mid, 1 ranger). Urd alone is worth a full re-roll. So striving for Urd, then other things, than accepting, is a viable strategy.

The Way to Reroll During Star Party

1. Reroll starter hero to Freya or ignore this step for more shots at step 5.
2. Follow top 50 players by going to leaderboards and then following them.
3. Use their mercs to clear through content your goal is 3k diamonds!
4. Do arena on cooldown for more diamonds. Invest xp/orbs only in that Freya.
5. At 3k Diamonds? GOOD TIME TO PULL.
   1. Did you get URD or a Star Party Exclusive! GOOD! KEEP GOING!
   2. Did you get something else? GO TO STEP 1.
6. Add the other 50 top 100 players.
7. Burn all of your stamina racing through the main story quest while spamming arena on cooldown.
8. Pull star party whenever available.
9. Join connects when you begin to not be stam capped.
10. After 5 pulls, evaluate:
    1. Did you get Urd and Odin – YOU WON THE REROLL CONGRATS.
    2. Did you get Urd plus around 4 others on the list, excluding Thor? – YOU WON THE REROLL CONGRATS!
    3. Did you get Odin but not Urd and many others on the list? PRETTY GOOD. You can keep this or reroll for Urd if you have the 6 hours to get the diamonds.
    4. Did you get Odin, but only a few (2-3) of the others? Good! But CONSIDER REROLLING.
    5. Did you get many (6-7) on the list including Luca? Good but consider rerolling if you have the time.
    6. Did you not get many on the list? BAD! TIME TO REROLL.

What do I do next?

1. Build up your High ROI Heroes and push Arena, continue to farm for:
   1. Star party if you did not get URD or Odin.
   2. 1500 Summons if you need more things outside of Star Party.
   3. Eventually, farm for Exclusives once you have an incredible roster.
2. Do Hero Quests daily for all High ROI heroes. Every Day, up to your top 9 heroes (you will add 5 star thor to avoid having to do his hero quest)
3. Do Dailies Every Day.
4. Earn all of your free connect diamonds.
5. HORDE THE DIAMONDS for either 11a, 11b, or 11c.
6. Assess your roster as you proceed to focus on orbing heroes as needed. Play arena at normal speed so you can identify points of failure.

The above will be elaborated on, but as long as you:

1. Use mercs to clear content to avoid losing stamina/time on inefficient heroes.
2. Reroll if you don’t get a great starting roster.
3. Don’t invest in shitty heroes.
4. Proceed forward with great courage.

You are on the path to power. Keep in mind that the game gives you about 12000-15000 diamonds in the first 6 hours. There remains a pool after that, but once it is exhausted, 12000-15000 diamonds could take you 2 months or so to accumulate. So getting off to a good start will put you far ahead of the game.

General Advice

Gear

1. Do not invest in 1* weapons/armor. Vinland swords, 1 star bows, robes, etc. They are all to be used as enchanting fodder for infinitely superior 2 and 3 star weapons. Increase your inventory space if anything, but do not invest in these items.
   
   
2. On the other hand, do invest in 1* accessories. You will have few accessories at the beginning and, as a whole, good accessories are more difficult to get than good weapons/armor. 
   1. You want to build towards having 5, 5star magic defense bangles. These will be useful for your whole team. Start by getting the tank’s to 3* and skilled, then get everyone else there, then push to 5*, prioritizing by survivability.
   2. You want to have 2-3 5 star defense rings. These are for your tank, physical offense, and possibly backline for early defense against Momiji.
   3. You want to have 2-3 5 star physical offense rings. Likely two. You will put them on your main physical attacker and your backline dps if archer.
   4. You will want to use 1star and 2star reforge rings fairly liberally. The 1star ones moreso.
   5. Later, these will be replaced with better accessories, but may even then still have situational usefulness on your main team. They will keep being useful since you will hand these down to your next-in-line arena team.
      
      
3. Bangles/Connects
   1. Outside of the dailies, you will want to ignore bangles until your team has really developed, probably around 90k powerscore or so is where you can start to begin some serious bangle farming. Ideally you can do 4 stars with ease and survive a carry through 5 stars at a minimum to make this not a tremendous waste of time.
   2. Ideal bangle order is to cycle through, similar to the earlier accessories. Get your physical DPS bangle(s) for your frontline and backline, since they add both defensive and offensive stats, they will start to beef you up. Then focus on initial bangles for your tank (def and mdef), then magic bangles. You can consider a defensive bangle for your backline as well, before shifting to upgrading bangles.
   3. You can also add another set of defensive bangles for your connect healer.
   4. The reason that mages are focused on last is that mages are less accessible than the frontline and backline. Many attacks hit nearest or furthest row, but outside of Verdandi, there is nothing that will middle row focus. Ranco’s ability and Cannon’s ability can hit middle row, which is part of what makes them rather valuable. This is why you want to shore up the HP of your front and backline first.
   5. After you rotate, upgrades will sort of depend on bangle inventory. Currently bangles are very scarce, but that might not always be the case. You can focus on upgrading where you see your team lacking. If the tank is dead, those bangles are a priority.
   6. You want to do a connect boss at every level possible (1 star – 4star) when it is up. You also want to host connect bosses (spend the stam yourself) until you have at least 1x of the bosses token. This unlocks its hero quest, which is an additional 330 diamonds.
   7. When starting connects, try to do it in a populated channel, if you do it in some obscure place, you might not have anyone join. You may also want to search channels when looking for particular connects, be sure to use connects on the chat tab to join fresh ones, so that you are not cock-blocked by joining one that’s already over.
      
      
4. On Events.
   1. In general, events are a terrible thing for a beginner to invest in too heavily. This is because they often will not have the strength or assets available to clear the content, and the heroes from them have items which are of limited availability or might not be upgradeable. Saber without her X weapon is very different than Saber with her X weapon.
   2. Still do them for the diamonds, but beware of trying to push too hard here. These are better done when you already have a solid core arena and GA team.
   3. You don’t have to pass the conditions all at once, i.e. if something says “Clear it with 2 elves” and “Clear it with no one dying” you can bring 2 elves, clear it with them dying, and then bring your real team to get the other challenge done.
   4. An example of a danger is investing a lot of resources in an event boosted character who will not add any value after the connect is done.
      
      
5. On Guilds
   1. You should join a guild either on a successful first reroll, or anytime thereafter. You want to join an open guild with at least 10 people, this is because every day you can “help” 9 guild members for an extra 90 stamina. This is a valuable daily resource and will help with the huge burden of doing a ton of hero quests early.
   2. You will want to migrate to a more serious guild when your power score is developed or sooner if a good one will take you. You can find guilds via ingame chat, discord, or other means– what matters most is that the members are active and that the Jarl will continue recruiting and guild wars.
      
      
6. On Onslaughts
   1. You can change the team you are going to fight by refreshing them and it is super cheap to do so. Do this liberally. There is no point in fighting a 20k powerscore team when you could fight an 8k team. There is no point battling someone’s godlike turtle comp when you can refresh until you get a poorly constructed team. Refresh until satisfied.
   2. You can throw some of your weaker heroes in advance to build up the limit burst for your better comps/heroes. 
   3. You can also use your underdeveloped heroes to “tank” for a stronger hero. For several floors I was able to rotate in a cast of 4 level 1s to shield my Verdandi while she wrecked the other side in the time they bought for her.
   4. Chests unlock over time. Stop your ascent when your inventory is filled with chests. Just wait it out. You do not have to spend diamonds on them (nor should you).
   5. You can use mercenaries in Onslaught. I recommend doing this for the final three floors. 
   6. Healers/turtle comps are great for Onslaught because you can continue using a character until it dies. Slowly poking away at a floor until it’s dead works (this is not the case in guild wars).
   7. For Onslaught items, I recommend GA and Aesir’s Tears. Due to the shortage of good accessories early, Aesir’s tears warrant a look. Due to it’s strength, GA warrants a look. In general, melee weapons are plentiful and you usually only have 1 character who can equip them in a 5 man comp, meanwhile mage items are in shorter supply.
      
      
7. On Arena
   1. The first arena group you join will (hopefully) have experienced players walled out. This will let you climb without being trampled. Stay in it until it gets invaded. Your goal should be top 300ish as long as possible.
   2. You want to spam arena and watch it at non-2x speed things to focus on:
      1. When are your item abilities going off and are they at good times? Switching the order of items switches when they go off, so you can improve your team.
      2. Points of failure. Is your tank lasting long enough or is it falling before the rest of your team? Does your backline crumble to Momiji or Dandi? What heroes are really causing problems for you? What can be done about it?
      3. Damage. Look at damage after both wins and losses, you may even want to track it in a spreadsheet. If you start to see that Gullveig is only doing 6k, while everyone else is doing 30k, you need to investigate why this is the case.
   3. Strategy. You want to build your arena team around a general strategy. The standard meta is 1 tank, 1 phys attack, 2 mage, 1 ranger. But even with that as a general strategy, there are synergies you can focus on.
      1. Steamroll Comp. A comp that aims to kill enemies from the front to the back. Damage to nearest row/enemy is more valuable.
      2. Backline Kill Comp. A comp that aims to kill enemies from back to front using heroes that target the back-row to get their squishies and then handle their frontline.
      3. Target Kill Comp. Ex. Mage-killer. Thrud + Niji both have abilities to target the highest MATK. Complement this with items and general AOE and you can go after soft targets.
      4. Other. Your strategy can be something else, but you should have a plan for how your team wins, and there should be abilities/heroes/items that all support this plan.
8. Grand Arena
   1. Like arena, but grand.
   2. When GA unlocks, your main team should be orbed– focus on getting them to purple, then start getting your best 2-3 outside of them to purple as well.
   3. Your goal is only to develop 2 strong teams. Since in order to climb, all you have to do is beat the enemies two weakest, you want to overcome that by having 2 slightly stronger teams. You do not need to beat their best to climb, just their weakest. Yes, you will get knocked down after, but you can secure a much better position with two strong teams.
   4. Analysis matters more in GA for how best to use your heroes (when you have options). You may wish to scout. To scout players, go to the friends screen>player search> type in parts of their name.
      1. If they think they are being tricky by using special characters or moonrunes, look to see if the name of their guild is something normal or non-weeb.
      2. If their guild is also named using black magic/sorcery, see if you can find it in the top guilds. Then find them from there. At a high level, they cannot hide. This will let you see how their heroes are geared. Perhaps throwing Freya at their purity ring equipped team is not wise. If you know where the rings are, you know where to put Freya.
   5. Simple math also helps. If you see that they are 150k Powerscore and 80k of it is in team 1, and 20k of it is in team 2, you should attack team 2 and 3, the weakest teams.
      1. Counter-point when setting up your defenses you can actually troll hard if you have a hero who is vastly op and you are in the lower brackets by hiding them in the supposed weakest team. Generally this doesn’t work.

Rerolling (Non-Star Party)

Most new players will be re-rolling outside of Star Party, this can provide advantages over the Star Party reroll if you are able to amass diamonds and then spend all of them only on the best summons (and get reasonable outcomes). The disadvantage of Star Party rerolling is that you have a very limited amount of time/stamina as F2P to get your outcomes and your total amount of rolls will always be less than what you could roll if you had time to prepare, do hero quests, unlock all of the Connect Diamonds, and bring your full war chest to the table. 

When you Star Party reroll, if you do not get a full portfolio of investment grade heroes, you will also be waiting a long time to incorporate new heroes into your pool. I.E. If you get Urd, Odin, and do not get Luca after all your summons, the next optimal summon window will be a month away, and if you get Luca out of it, she will be a month behind in hero quests, and more difficult to sync into your core team. 

The disadvantage of rolling outside of Star Party is that you will have to resist temptation, and may be frustrated by not having as many investment options.

When you are rerolling outside of Star Party, you have very specific wants/goals.

1. Freya is your desired initial hero. You will reroll for her until you get her.
2. Luca is highly desirable from your first pull, although you do get a free Niji to mitigate.
3. One/Two of Ranco, Canon, or Wolfgang. Listed in order of supremacy.

Your goal is basically to get Freya, Luca, 5* Thor, 1 good ranged, and use Hel to fill. Investing in all of these is safe– you can downgrade Hel to your second arena team when you get a better mage option (Odin/Ymir/Etc) and she will help with GA team construction.

The unfortunate thing is that, other than 1500 Diamond Summons, to gain an advantage you need to horde diamonds for Star Party. This means you will be painfully short on investment grade items and unable to do as many hero quests off the bat. Still, you get way more rolls during the next Star Party if you play your cards right.

Phases of Power Growth

1. Core Team Development
2. Core Team Expansion & GA
3. Bangle Farming / Connect Farming
4. Further Core Team Expansion
5. Specific Connect Team Development / Niche Hero Acquisition
6. Superconnects

Loop of Activities

1. Hero Quests (All priority heroes)
2. Daily Quests (Orbing priority hero)
3. Connect Spam / Orb Spam (Depending on Connect Value)
4. Guild War / Onslaught / Etc.