Fate/Grand Order can offer plenty of challenges to newcomers, and one of the biggest hurdles that new players may face is understanding how to improve their team of Servants to tackle the game’s many challenges. Although the game is much easier with five-star characters acquired from the game’s gacha system, most of the game’s story mode can be approached with three-star ranked Servants.
This is especially true if you bring them to level cap and use the Ascension system to improve their ranking and viability in encounters. However, this might seem confusing at first, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the resource-heavy systems that gacha games often use. Here's a simple breakdown of all the basic systems for leveling your Servants.
How To Level Your Servants
Each Servant that you obtain in Fate/Grand Order comes with a set of stats that determine their effectiveness in combat, particularly HP and ATK. These two stats in particular will vary a lot based on the Servant’s level, star ranking and class. Every Servant starts at level one, regardless of their star ranking, but a level one five-star Servant will usually be higher in ATK and HP than a level one of a three-star Servant.
The best way to improve your Servant in a general sense is to level them up. To do this, you need to head to the Enhance section of the menu, then select the option to enhance a Servant.
From here, select the Servant you want to level up, then click one of the many slots next to it. At this stage, you can select cards to be used as an source of EXP for leveling up your character.
EXP cards, also known in the game as ‘Embers’, come in various different types. They’re also colour-coded and star-ranked for ease of understanding.
Essentially, bronze and silver Embers offer small chunks of experience points, whilst four or five-star gold or rainbow Embers offer significantly larger amounts of experience. This distinction is important, as the amount of experience required to increase a character's level will scale with how high their level is.
EXP cards can be obtained by simply progressing through the game's main story quests, or from completing side quests. EXP cards appropriate to your expected level will usually be given as a reward for quest completion.
During the level up process, EXP cards can be mixed and matched accordingly to increase your character's level. When your character hits their maximum level, don't worry, as that isn't all you can do — you can still progress them further with a process known as Ascension.
How To Ascend Servants
Many Servants can progress from a lowly three-star character all the way to the power of a five-star character via a process known as Ascension. This allows you to raise the level cap of a character, greatly improving their potential in the process. At the highest levels, ascending a character multiple times also changes their card artwork and in-game appearance.
To ascend a unit and increase their level cap, the character must first be at their maximum level. After this, you can find the Ascension menu under the Enhancement section of the menu.
As with leveling your Servant, you can ascend your Servant by exchanging materials. In the case of many types of Ascension, you'll need small chess pieces that represent the different classes. These chess pieces can be obtained through main quest story progression, as well as daily and weekly missions. The piece you need will typically correspond to the class of the character you're ascending.
Sometimes, additional materials are needed for ascension, especially at higher levels (80-120), such as Evil Bones. Materials like this can also be found through story progression, but can also be bought from Da Vinci using Pure Prisms under the Shop section of the menu.
If you want to skip most of this process and go straight to a character's best level, you can do this a single time using a process called Special Ascension. This will immediately move a character to its best form without expending any resources such as EXP cards or Quantum Pieces.
Ascending your Servant successfully will increase their level cap, meaning you can then go back to leveling them in the standard way using EXP cards. After you reach the maximum levels of Ascension achievable (indicated by stars underneath a character's level), you can increase a character's level even further via a process known as Palingenesis.
How To Do Palingenesis
If you've ascended your Servant all the way, then the final step is Palingenesis. This allows you to use the Holy Grails obtained from story progression in order to take your character to the highest possible levels.
Because of the resources required (you don't get Holy Grails very often) you should reserve Palingenesis for your absolute best characters. Paligenesis with the right Servant can take a character all the way to level 120 (the current maximum).
However, you'll need to expend a lot of resources to get to this point, by going through all the prior steps of leveling, Ascension, and then finally using your Holy Grails for Palingenesis. If you've made it this far, your Servant will undoubtedly be as strong as you need them to be for most of the main quests.