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Tier List by Team BethelFrankel

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Tier List FAQ New Player FAQ and Guides Changelog

Index

Guides

Beginner Guide

The updated beginner guide created by Eclogia, going over a variety of information new players should know. Includes how to reroll, which characters to select from the free selector, and an up to date glossary.

Advanced Guide

The advanced guide created by Eclogia. Created with the intent on guiding players after the beginners guide, the guide goes over many strategies, stages, and resources in which a mid-lategame player might struggle with.

Example Teams Per Element

A guide which lists some of the strongest team compositions you can make. Worth looking at, even if you do not have many high-rarity units, in order to understand team building.

Refinement Priority List

A guide on which refinement is most worth your limited Paradigm. Take note that a game-changing refinement does not strictly equal a meta unit.

Gameplay Tips

A collection of tips to how to best position Aurorians in a team, when to best use some Active Skills, and how to play some of the more complex units in the game. A good read for beginners and veterans alike.

New Player FAQ

Q1: What Should I Be Spending My Early Game Prisms (Energy Resource) On?

Short Answer: Just blaze through the story as fast as possible to beat level 8-14. The resource farming stages in this game are exponentially better the higher you go, so you want to max out your Colossus (the game's home system) ASAP to unlock the highest resource farming stages. Don't be afraid to do resource farming on lower stages if you can't beat a story level without leveling, but generally speaking you should just rush getting to 8-14, especially if you use the abusable friend support system.
In terms of building your Colossus, the station that lets you access harder resource stages is the most important, followed by the station that generates Prisms. The others don't matter as much, but max them out sooner than later as they give a lot of nice QoL benefits. When you're out of Prisms and waiting for them to recharge, you may progress in your Spire clears or try some event stages.

Q2: Is X reroll good?/Is rerolling necessary?

All starting rolls are playable in AS due to the F2P "selectors" you get every couple chapters and the guaranteed Converter from beginner banner. While it's recommended that you stick to just one element while you're starting out, you will eventually want to build all four elements for endgame content, as counter-element damage rises with higher Equipment levels. The only real question is how smooth do you want progression to feel - story mode isn't that hard, but it is something to note.
With that said, some people like rerolling and it is undeniably a bit of a time saver in the long run. If you want to reroll, you can read the reroll section of our beginner guide.

Q3: Selectors?

Clearing Chapters 3, 5, and 7 gives an achievement that rewards you with a "Reinforcement Kit", a special box which lets you choose between different (specific) 5 stars.
We created a selector section in our beginner guide on which units are worth choosing.

Q3.5: I bought the 6-star unit selector. What do I get with it?

That depends on your account. If one of your elements is weaker than the other, then choosing a DPS or converter from your weakest element might be the best course of action. Strictly speaking, however, Azure is the best pick from the selector in general, followed by Hiiro and Dantang, both at BT3. As DPS/Converter hybrids, these three are the most desirable for an account. If you already have all of them, then grabbing either a BT on a "whale" converter that requires them to be good, or else choosing a unit that’ll fulfill a desirable spot on your roster will be a good course of action. Note that you have several months to use your selector.

Q4: How strict is tiering in this game? Can I succeed with a low tier team?

Leaning towards lenient, but probably stricter than something like Arknights. On the one hand, as long as a unit does their job, most teams can succeed. On the other hand, what that job entails can often include somewhat rare effects in their own element/character pool. Furthermore, the base competency of units can be pretty weak. The general rule of thumb is that anything S-Tier or above can work without much overleveling, anything A-tier or above can work with some overleveling or synergies, and anything B-tier or below will require significant investment.
Overall, low tier teams can succeed, but you do have to have a pretty solid grasp on what you're doing and perhaps some extra grinding.

Q5: What is the most common team composition in this game?

2x DPS (Generally Detonators or Snipers) + 2x Converters + 1x flex, where flex can be just about anything ranging from 3rd DPS of any type to 3rd converter to a healer or whatever. You will often have to judge case by case.
Team comps are almost always mono-element, or mono-element with off-element captain. The reason is two-fold: 1) Hard content tends to be element-based and 2) Converters really only help DPS units of their own element. Given that damage multipliers mostly scale on chain length, mono-element conversion is basically necessary to pass all damage checks.

Q6: What's the best element?

Elements in Alchemy Stars don’t really compete with each other; in general, you’ll be running mono-element teams. Each element is well balanced overall, albeit with significant differences in playstyle.
Thunder is the most vanilla option outside of some limited interactions with summonables, but has the highest ceiling thanks to Reinhardt. Water tends to focus on strong low-CD DPS units with quirky playstyle requirements for maximization, as well as summons. Forest leans heavily into enhanced tile teams to maximize its damage, but also has the strongest options for general mobbing and Poison DoT. Fire is likely the strongest overall element nowadays, with the most general mobility, defensive options, and key DPS units that can turn said defensive utility into offensive output. However, its best options often require significant investment in Breakthroughs, teambuilding, and/or refinements. Late- and endgame content, including modes like Spire and Pandora’s Box, continue the trend of mono-element teams, often with specific element requirements. Counter bonus also becomes much stronger in late-game stages due to the way it improves with Equipment levels. You’ll want to have multiple good teams for each element for endgame content like Abyss, but for most other content you only really need one good team in a given element.

Q7: Why is preemptive conversion so desirable? When is it not that important?

If you consider a typical map of 15 turns, you only get 3-5 burst windows, depending on your converters' CDs. Preemptive conversion allows you to fit in another burst window or make the last burst window easier to guarantee, and additionally allows you to begin setting up the map immediately (or give some flexibility to what your opening strategy is per map). That said, as map length increases, preemptive conversion becomes less and less valuable. You can absolutely skate by on non-preemptive conversion, especially in content like high-level Spire and Abyss.

Q8: Why are Detonators more valuable than Snipers?

The game tends to favor multi-tile bosses over single-tile bosses already. Additionally, a Detonator can sort of do a Sniper's job by virtue of having AoE, so long as you have the movement or conversion to support their more limited range. A Sniper cannot do a Detonator's job - it's almost impossible for a Sniper chain to outpace a Detonator chain on any content above 1x1 enemies.
Furthermore, the range that Snipers give you can be a double-edged sword. Staying at range represents a very large DPS loss because your point blank autoattacks make up a huge portion of your damage. This doesn't mean range is useless, but it shouldn't be your preferred strategy unless the map is forcing your hand or you're just autoing with the game's terrible AI.

Q9: Do I need a pure healer?

You should have one raised for each element you're planning on using, but you don't need one for every map - consider the healer as your first "6th" member to raise and swap in and out.
It's best to think of damage as a secondary time-limit, and you need to balance between the actual time limit vs the damage that you're taking. Sometimes that damage limit will be very strict (Spire 43 and 89 come to mind), sometimes it's not. Similarly, the turn limit of a map can be more or less strict, depending on how it's tuned.

Q10: Why are resets rated so poorly compared to other conversion?

1) Because reset conversion is random, you have no guarantee that any tiles you generate will create a valid path. You can bolster this with other converters in your team, but this eats up team space.
2) Testing has revealed that resets have a significantly nerfed chance to generate tiles of a unit's own color (a ~10-15% chance). Only characters that have the line "additional small chance to generate X tiles" rise above that rate.

Q11: What about Desolation Codex? What is good in Desolation Codex?

This mode is largely independent from the rest of the game because of the overwhelming value of counter-element damage and the banning of % HP damage. Because of that, pretty much everything works in one way or another, as long as the teamcomp itself is solid and the characters are the correct element. Generally speaking, tile respawn mapping and knowledge of various niche endgame strats is much more valuable than any amount of dupes. You really don't need much of anything unless you're aiming for top 50 Legendary. Visit the Official Alchemy Stars Discord's channel on Desolation Codex if you want more specialized advice.

Glossary

BT0/BT2-6/MBT

A unit's number of breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are this game's versions of dupes; for 3 and 4 stars, you should be able to get all BTs. For five stars, your first dupe is BT2, and your 4th dupe is your MBT. For six stars, your first dupe is BT3, and your 4th dupe is your MBT. Note that the Silent Hunter units (free after a relatively long quest) use their own system for BTs which is generally much easier to max out, although time-gated.

DPR

Damage Per Round. This is generally estimated, as actual DPR is dependent on a lot of factors that are hard to standardize. Refer to the Chinese Math Gods' Teachings for an explanation of how DPR is calculated.

Burst Turn

A burst turn is when you use a large amount of conversion at once and then perform long combos (sometimes adding on a second burst through Aurora Time). Because chain damage and normal damage increase damage with the amount of steps, burst turns with mono-element or near mono-teams lead to the highest DPR, although not always the most flexible targeting. N.B., an off turn is the opposite of a burst turn.

Multiplier

The bonus you gain from long combos that affects your chain and normal damage (see the Reddit post, which is also found in the links section if you're on Kimaris). Certain effects, such as Charon's equipment, are not affected by this multiplier despite triggering on chains or normals - whether these effects grab this bonus or not is referred to as "picking up the multiplier" here.