The usefulness of this guide of sorts is rather dependent on when you start up Dokkan and the units you obtain from pulls and such. For example, let's say you just start the game in June- well naturally the things I discuss now may not be too important by then. Your pulls from a banner will also most likely be completely different from mine. These are factors that are simply unavoidable due to the nature of gacha games. However, part of the intention of the blog is to simply talk about the day-to-day objectives of what I want to accomplish to improve my account, with reasoning provided, to potentially help you in the decision-making process as a new/newer player. With it being closer to the end of the school year and the Dragon Ball franchise in general coming off the Broly movie, it is a pretty exciting time to start playing Dokkan! It is not a new game in the slightest, but is still proving its staying power, popularity, and profitability.
I. Installation
Installing and getting the game going is fairly straight-forward if you've ever downloaded an app from the Play Store (I am Android-based). After you've downloaded Dokkan from the Play Store, simply open it. Be sure to turn the volume down (I keep mine completely off when I play Dokkan), as the opening sound with Hercule in the background has scared many-a-people. I can't even describe what that sound is, other than pure annoyance and it being completely unnecessary lol!
When it gives you the option of Enhanced Color Clarity and Animation Settings, I chose On and Save Power, respectively. Dokkan can be a battery-drainer, which I am mindful of, but still prefer it to look nice so I went with those options. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much here. After you agree to the Agreements and do the annoying puzzle-piece ReCaptcha thing, you will be prompted to do the large (1353MB) data download, but it should be complete by the end of the tutorial!
II. The Tutorial
In all honesty, the majority of this tutorial you can simply click "Skip" on and not miss too much. The big takeaways are: 1) movement on the board, 2) collecting Ki spheres, 3) the type advantage/disadvantage wheel, and 4) links. When I first started out, the Ki spheres and links were rather lost to me, although I did understand type advantage/disadvantage from playing Puzzle & Dragons. A lot of other gacha games have this type of thing as well. I will talk about Ki spheres and links later, most likely in separate posts, but here is an explanation of type advantage/disadvantage. Go along the wheel and you will see "what beats what".
Starting from the top:
Orange (PHY) beats
Purple (INT),
Purple (INT) beats
Green (TEQ),
Green (TEQ) beats
Blue (AGL),
Blue (AGL) beats
Red (STR),
Red (STR) beats
Orange (PHY).
This means that PHY type units will do increased damage vs INT units, while doing less damage to, and taking more damage from, STR units. This advantage/disadvantage system creates an interesting aspect to the game which will definitely come into play with what teams you use and that kind of thing. In the early stages of the game though it's not too important or game-breaking, but just keep it in the back of your mind. It's always up in the top portion of a battle anyway so you don't really need to go out of your way to memorize it! It will just come naturally over time.
After the Goku vs Vegeta scene, you will get to do your very first summon. I am not entirely sure what the pool is for this summon, but I think it is all mediocre SR's (Super Rares). What you get here won't have a tremendous impact for you and is not something you need to re-roll for. I ended up re-rolling 4 times until I was satisfied with my later early-game pulls (explained later). My results for this summon were:
First attempt: SR STR First Form Frieza
Second attempt: SR AGL First Form Cell
Third attempt: SR AGL First Form Cell
Fourth attempt: SR TEQ Krillin
Fifth attempt: SR AGL First Form Cell
Nothing to really see here, again what you get here will most likely just end up as Baba points.
After this summon, you will be prompted to pick a nickname with a 10-character maximum. You get to change this whenever you want- if you want to pull LRs, you may want to set your name to Nanogenix (lol may be explained in the future).
The First Stage
The first stage will have you team up with an NPC SR Trunks, along with Yamcha, Tien, and Chaotzu who are already placed in your team. Basically no synergy whatsoever here, but it's just the tutorial so it doesn't really matter.
As you go through the stage you will land on a tile with 5000 Zeni and get a short explanation about Zeni, and then fight a battle with the fat dude, black dude, and blonde dude. Clearly I don't remember their names nor care enough to look it up lol. When you see the white x1 button, I would recommend clicking on it to increase the battle speed to x2. This will make future battles much faster, which helps a lot in grinding. After you beat these guys, the game will have you land on the 4-star Dragon Ball and give you an explanation. Obviously once you collect all 7 Dragon Balls, Shenron will grant you one wish. Next up is the boss battle against Hercule. Here you get to see Tien and Chaotzu active one of their link skills, and eventually Tien will finish off Hercule with his Super Attack.
At this point you should be notified that the data download is complete. You will be bombarded with in-game news items and pop-ups that tell you about current things that you can purchase or summon on. Ignore them for now, especially the ones that require you to spend money on. Even if you are willing to put money into the game, these really are not worth it. You will also receive a Day 1 login bonus of a Dragon Stone and a few other items. Generally you will be awarded a Dragon Stone or two for logging in every day so at the very least, be sure to log in and collect the bonuses. This is the same for most gacha games out there.
II. The Main Menu
The main menu has a lot of stuff going on, which over time you will explore and learn about, but for now we are primarily interested in getting as many Dragon Stones as quickly as possible. Dragon Stones are similar to PAD's Magic Stones, FGO's Saint Quartz, and the like. Essentially what you use in hopes of pulling stronger units. By selecting Gift in the bottom right corner by the START button, you will be able to accept 54 Dragon Stones, bringing your total up to 59. Once you have collected your stones, select the scouter icon along the bottom of the screen. Ignore the New Player Support banner, as none of the units you pull from there will have any long-term use. Even at 5 stones, it's really not worth it. Swipe up and you will see the current Vegeta banner.
III. Summoning/Re-Rolling
The Vegeta banner is currently the best banner on Global. I would say it offers a moderate amount of value for newer players, so it is a decent banner to re-roll on. The Gogeta/Broly banners that recently left were better, but at this point that is neither here nor there. Re-rolling, similar to other gacha games, is the act of creating an account, seeing what you pull, and if you are satisfied, keeping the account. Otherwise, uninstall the game and try again with a new account. Rinse and repeat. This can be a tiresome process but the ability to clear content in the long run may be impacted on your first few multi-summons. The nice thing with this banner is that the first multi-summon is discounted at 30 stones, while normal multi's are 50 stones. By starting with 59 stones, that will allow you enough stones left over so that you can do a little bit of grinding to summon again, and see how your account looks after 2 multi's. It is generally not advisable to perform Single Summons, as multi's now guarantee you at least 1 SSR.
Criteria for Keeping Account
The primary candidates we are shooting for are the first 5 featured units:
PHY Vegeta,
INT Vegeta,
TEQ SSJ4 Goku,
TEQ SSJ4 Gogeta, and
INT SSJ3 Bardock. Any of these would make great leads to carry us through most of the game. Unfortunately the featured
STR SSJ3 Vegeta isn't good enough of a leader to justify keeping the account. He's a good sub, but for a new account we are looking to pick up a good leader. If we don't pull any of the featured units, we are shooting for at least 2 usable SSR's to justify keeping the account.
In my
first attempt, the SSR's I pulled were
TEQ SSJ GT Trunks, and
INT Demigra. Neither of these are great units so it is an easy decision to re-roll.
In my
second attempt, I pulled
STR SSJ3 Vegeta. Like I mentioned earlier, it's just not quite good enough to justify keeping.
The
third attempt was actually quite a conundrum for me. I accidentally touched the screen before taking a screenshot, so my entire box is shown here. We pulled 4 SSR's, with
INT Pandel,
INT Hellfighter #17,
TEQ Masked Saiyan, and
TEQ Super Buu. Pandel is decent support on a Fusion team, and Masked Saiyan has a generic Leader Skill which provides 2 Ki and a 40% HP/ATK/DEF boost for all types. Getting a unit with a generic Leader Skill like this is great since we can essentially run anything for the time being. Unfortunately in the current game, Masked Saiyan's stat boost is quite low, even when Dokkan Awakened where he provides 3 Ki and +50% HP/ATK/DEF.
This summon technically meets my requirements, so I make the decision of keeping it, grinding out stones to do another multi, and making my eventual decision based on that.
IV. Friend Point Summon and Vegeta's Family Crest Exchange
Once you are satisfied with your summon results, you can go ahead and do a multi-summon on the Friend Point banner as you can get some SR's which can eventually become LR's. In my summon I didn't pull a single thing, not even a Hercule statue. Currently via the Baba Shop (click Exchange on the bottom banner and click Treasure along the top) you can exchange 2 Vegeta's Family Crests for
TEQ SSG Vegeta and
PHY SSJ Trunks. Currently they have Extreme Z Battles for both of these units. We won't be able to fully progress through this event but getting free SSR's is always good, especially early on. Exchange for 1 of each unit, as getting 2 of one will not be as beneficial since you can't put duplicate units onto your team. My team now looks like the image below. By clicking Friend Supporter, other potential friends can use your unit as a leader in battle. This will net you friend points to perform more summons on the friend point banner. I'd recommend selecting your best unit to maximize the friend points coming in.
V. Grinding Stones through Quest
Now that we have a functioning team, I'll be grinding 29 more stones to do another multi-summon on the Vegeta banner. If you are satisfied with your pulls from the discount summon, I would recommend stop summoning on this banner and saving up for the 4-Year Anniversary in July.
The key to early-game content is choosing high level friends who ideally have generic Leader Skills or match up with whatever unit you are using. For example if you decided to keep the
STR SSJ3 Vegeta, you'd ideally want to use a unit who boosted Ki and stats to STR type units or all types. You can click on Switch Display in the friend selection screen to read what their unit's Leader Skill does.
Area 1
Stage 1: Pink capsules are Awakening medals, Red capsules are Training items, and Blue capsules are Support items. Generally I prioritize landing on awakening medals, then training, then support. Like I mentioned earlier, getting as many Gregory awakening medals will be important throughout your Dokkan experience as 50 of them are often needed to start the awakening process for a lot of units. In this case since I am just farming for stones for the additional multi-summon, I am not intentionally trying to land on them. If you are satisfied with your account, then by all means go ahead and start the accumulation process. The Normal stages in the early areas should not give you any problems, even if you don't get enough Ki to do a Super Attack. It may even be faster just to go through it using normal attacks, with the battle speed set to x2 of course.
Stage 2: Collect the Dragon Ball. It's ok if you miss it or the numbers just don't work out for you- you can always re-do the stages. Landing on the Baba tiles gives you the chance to exchange Zeni for a random support item. It's kind of hit-or-miss, but early on you can get decent support items like Dende's and such.
By the time you are done with Area 1 you should be around Rank 5 and starting the process in getting friends with good SSR and UR units.
Area 2
Stage 1: Avoid landing on red circle tiles with enemy faces on it. They just take extra time and the items/XP you get from them just don't add up to much.
Stage 5: We can finally see the 1-star Dragon Ball, which should be the last one you need to summon Shenron. We can also see that the Dragon Ball is 2 spaces after the boss fight, so if you have a 2 for one of your numbers, be sure to hold onto it. If you don't start off with a 2, use a bit of strategy with your movement to maximize your chances of getting a 2 (or two 1's), even if you have to land on an enemy or damage tile (the red circles with cross-hairs). After you beat the stage, back at the main screen you will see an exclamation point next to where it says Shenron.
VI. Summoning Shenron for Stones
Shenron will give you 4 options to choose from. Over time you will go through all of these, but since I am shooting to do another summon, I want to pick extra allies and stones (option 1). You can retrieve your 10 Dragon Stones in the Gift section, again found on the main screen. We now have 52 stones, enough to do another multi-summon!
VII. Summoning Again on Vegeta Banner
I ended up with
INT SSJ Gohan and
INT Demigra again. Both of these units are pretty bad and doesn't help my situation on this account. Ultimately I decide I will end up re-rolling again, as I don't want to be 130 stones deep into the Vegeta banner with potentially nothing more to show for it. At this point I have 8 SSR's excluding Kais. Realistically you could end up keeping this and making decent progress in the game from Masked Saiyan's generic Leader Skill, but there will be a limit sooner than later. If there was at least a category or 120-lead this would have been a keeper, but it just didn't work out that way this time.
VIII. Re-Rolling Some More
So we are back to the beginning and in my
fourth attempt I pull
STR Toppo. He is a good sub, but he is simply not good enough of a leader. This is easy enough of a decision to re-roll, although now I'm regretting letting go of the previous attempt. Coming to the
fifth attempt, I get a Vegito fusion animation, and I start to become hopeful. I fear the worst and pray that it's not
STR SSJ3 Vegeta again. The second unit is none other than
PHY Vegeta!! We end up getting a very outdated
AGL SSJ2 Goku, but at least he's a Pure Saiyan that will be boosted by the Vegeta's Leader Skill. This is basically the chase unit of the banner, so finally on the fifth try we get an account I am satisfied keeping.
IX. Rounding it Out
Now that we are satisfied, again we want to remember to do our multi-summon on the friend point banner and exchange the Vegeta's Family Crests for the
TEQ SSG Vegeta and
PHY Trunks. We get an SR Android 17/18, which can eventually be an LR so that's a positive as well. After all is said and done, the box now looks like so:
We have 4 Pure Saiyans who will be boosted by Vegeta, and using 2 units as filler. Like I mentioned earlier, Pure Saiyans are easy enough to come by so the filler can easily be swapped over time. The other banners do have Pure Saiyans on them, but they simply aren't worth the stones and we can get by with what we have and what we can farm for free. My next priority is to train up my characters a bit and hope we can clear the Ginyu Story stage. In order to get additional training items and XP, clear the Turtle School Training and Training in the Clouds stages which can both be found in the Growth tab. The Auto feature in training is quite helpful for now and for low-level units, Training in the Clouds will get you some decent levels and you may also get an Elder Kai Awakening medal from it, which you will most likely need to Awaken your units, depending on what you pulled.
X. Taking on the Ginyu Event and Day 1 Results
After some leveling up, I decided I will try and see if I can beat the Ginyu event. Each weekday there is a different member of the Ginyu Force which you can obtain by clearing the stage. This is important as you can collect all of the Ginyu Force members, and the
STR Kid Gohan who is a Planet Namek saga category lead. These units form one of the best F2P teams out there which will help you clear a lot of content. We just need to be strong enough to take on these stages each day by most likely relying on our friend. For me I was able to find a UR
PHY Vegeta friend who allowed me to clear the Ginyu stage. If I didn't have this friend I don't think I could have cleared it though since I did not have enough training items and awakening medals to awaken any of my units. At the end of Day 1, my box now looks like this:
Now obviously you can continue to grind out stages but for me, this is where I call it the end of the day for this account. I still prioritize my other 2 accounts I consider my main accounts, but for one day this is a pretty good point. Plus this post has become incredibly long! Moving forward, I plan to put in a couple hours each day into this account, although at this low of rank it's possible to put in more. Again I want to take it a bit more casually, but maximizing the time I do expend to show you that you can make good progress without playing obsessively. Tomorrow is a new day!
