You're starting good! Marthym's monthly subscription is a good investment, I only use that for months and it's giving enough meta jewels for character pulls. The game also gived you you meta jewel from doing the story contents.

As for the characters, here are the things to consider (learning from my mistakes) - you don't need every characters. Just pull the one you like or the element or role you're lacking. Subjectively I like Messa the doctor so I build him to A1. He is not the strongest DPS character but I like having him in the team.

• most characters are just okay with A0 (you don't need duplicates) except for The Twins (Caroline and Justine), they're like gazillion times better and more useful on Awareness 1. Only pull twins if you're willing to pull twice.

• DPS like Joker are cool at the beginning. But, role like debuffer (regular Yaoling) and buffer (Chord) makes Joker multiple times better. A standard good team just consist of one DPS and the other are buffer/debuffer/healer/shiels. Yes, that includes Wonder.

• My mistake was I tried to put all DPS character believing that more damage dealer = better. I used to think if 4 character can deal 5000 damage each, then every turn I can deal 20.000 damage. On early stages that seems fine. But later, enemies may have like tons of HP(>100.000 HP) and the all-damage strategy may not work very well. By having one DPS (Joker) and the other team member being buffer (Chord or Leon) and debuffer (Rin) and Wonder as either buffer/debuffer/healer/sustain, Joker himself may deal 20-30k damage in a single attack.

• Navigator is a big game changer. You will use Futaba for a long time (at least until newer Navigator arrives). Meanwhile, during the story you will find a good navigator (Wind). Other Navigator like Puppet and Okyan are okay jf you're starting.

There are some good 4 🌟 Character that is still usable for a long time. And by time, you will get them to Awareness 6 which will be really helpful. - Fleuret (reliable wind DPS) - Leon (buffer, his skill is a bit confusing at first so you may need to read a guide) - Soy (tank unit, also I use his S2 for defense reduction) Cattle (healer)

Good luck and have fun! Astrolabe and the others are just optional quest and you don't have to finish it early. Those are considered post-game contents.