Ash Echoes Beginner Guide

So you decided to play Ash Echoes. Welcome to Senlo! The first advice we can give here is, do not approach this game expecting a standard gacha. Aurogon Shanghai, the developers of Ash Echoes, are well established in developing single-player games and even an MMO, with this being their first gacha. It was their choice to go for an unorthodox approach that may make some people feel confused or underwhelmed at first.

But don’t worry! Many of the standards of gachas still apply here, and for the ones that don’t, we’ll try our best to make your experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

If you still have no idea what kind of game this is, we highly recommend checking out our “Introduction to the game” page first:

Introduction to the game

The Prologue of the game is quite simple and straightforward. It will introduce you to the basics of the RTS aspect of the gameplay, including how to deal with block gauge, intercept projectiles and basic elemental reactions.

At first, you will have the Director (aka the “Main Character”, also known as “you”) as the Team Leader. The Director doesn’t really participate in battles and stays in the background, offering bonus stats. After you’re done with the prologue, you can claim your Pre-registration and initial rewards and start summoning. If you wish some guidance on which characters to start with or who to reroll for, we got you covered:

Reroll Guide

Relax, keep on playing and enjoying the story if you’re into that, or skipping and enjoying the gameplay.

Once you finish the first chapter, you will be introduced to one of the main game modes of Ash Echoes: “Echoing Nexus”.

Here comes the big ~spooky-scary-overwhelming-complex part~

The game loop of Ash Echoes can be summarized into:

1. Collect Memory Traces - They come from gacha, story rewards, event rewards, selectors, battle pass. More details later;
2. Open the Echoing Nexus interface, select the path you want to run and your Leader character;
3. Equip your Traces in your Leader character;
4. Run Echoing Nexus.
5. Once done, you will have an amount of skill points to allocate (most of the time you can just click “Recommended”) and that will give you an “Engraving”.

In short, Memory Traces are nothing more, nothing less than the equivalent of pieces of “gear” here. You combine them into a set that will represent one version of your character, called “Engraving”, and this is what you will use in any other content in the game. All the stats and skills contained in the Engraving will affect the entire team, so you only need to worry about building your Leader character. However, do so keeping in mind the kind of team you want to use them with.

TL;DR: Level your character Ascension/Skills and your Memory Traces, Run the Roguelike mode, use the final Engraving.

Can I have more than one Engraving per character?

Yes. You can have as many as you want. Deleting old engravings gives you Memory Trace upgrade materials, so you don’t need to worry about “wasting” anything or bricking your account.

I have no idea which Memory Traces to use!

For most casual content, you can just click “Recommended” and not think about it. You can also just copy and paste recommendations available here on Prydwen or from other CCs. If you feel daunting enough to read (*gasp*) you can have fun making your own builds and theory crafting. As said above, it’s never a waste, don’t be afraid to experiment!

How do I know what to choose when running the Nexus?

The Nexus is quite intuitive and most of the time one of the options will have a far higher number than the others. Just pick that.

Do my choices in the Nexus affect my Traces outside of it?

No.

The Echoing Nexus takes too long to finish!

On your first run, yes. But you can skip stages you already cleared, there are both a Full Auto and Semi Auto modes, and the more you run it, the easier it gets. Running Nexus with different characters increases its “reputation”, giving you more stats bonuses and thus making the runs faster and smoother.

With Traces being such a fundamental part of the game and having a banner for them, I feel it’s not very F2P friendly…

A lot of the staple Traces are free. You will see “Behind the Curtains”, “Karma”, “Beneath the Deception”, “Codename Diversity” a lot in build recommendations, either as BiS (Best in Slot) or as a good alternative. Each Main Story chapter gives you an SSR Trace (that you can max dupe for free with friendship currency in the shop). Every 300 pulls you can select an SSR Trace, you get a free SR and a free SSR Trace selector from Beginner missions.

A good amount of SR Traces have very good skills and can be better in some builds than SSR ones. The game also regularly gives you “Memory Backflash”, the currency to pull on the Memory Traces banner, so you can just use that to focus on pulling for Traces that are more vital to your teams. Oh, and there’s a Wishlist option too! But you likely won’t touch that unless you’re a spender.

More details on Echoing Nexus here:

Echoing Nexus Overview

As you may have noticed by now, Ash Echoes gives a lot of freebies. From early game alone, you can get these Echomancers for free:

• 
  Su Xiao
• 
  Di Yan
• 
  Tian Ruo
• 
  Yuqi (x2)
• 
  Pris
• 
  Changyao
• 
  Xiangling
• 
  Reid
• 
  Ms. Lew
• 
  Roar
• 
  Rodney
• 
  Bellia
• 
  Sambheka (Discord giveaway at launch).
• one 5* selector from beginner missions,
• one random 6* from beginner missions.

In fact, one of the first screens you will stumble upon is this:

You can pick whatever option fancies you more. This screen will pop up at account levels 10, 20 and 30, so you will end up getting all of them sooner or later. If you really want someone telling you what to do, the “Explosion” set is the most “”powerful”” for early game and can carry you for a good while, especially if you get Cyros.

After your first 30 Summons, you will be given a 6-star selector. You will get another at 300 summons, and a free random 6-star after finishing Phase 6 of the beginner missions (takes roughly a couple of days and finishing Chapter 3). It’s advised you pull until you get at least your first 6-star before using the Selector. If you can wait until you get your random 6-star, even better. If you need help deciding what 6-star to pick, our Reroll Guide has advice on that, you can choose based on the kind of team you want to build.

For 5-stars, it’s highly recommended to get

Characters don’t have “levels” in Ash Echoes. Instead, you increase each character individual power through the following ways:

Ascension:

Ranging from S0 to S6, Ascension will dictate your character’s base stats, level of their Leader Skills, and max level available for their Combat Skills.

Combat Skills:

Pretty straightforward, you upgrade the skills that your character uses in combat.

Seed:

“Seed Skill” is how Ultimates are referred to here. Character dupes are the only way to increase a Seed Skill level. At Dupe 1 and 3, the character also gets an improvement to their combat traits.

Fitness Training:

Available at S.E.E.D. dome, it’s a way to further increase base stats. For this reason, it’s recommended to focus on upgrading the “Fitness Room” of the Dome first.

Potential Exploration:

This part only matters if you’re using the character as the Leader of the team. Completing Milestones in the “Leader Record” will award you Crystaplates, while running the “Path to Proficiency” game mode will award you with Badges of Origins. By upgrading a character’s Potential Exploration, you make them fairly stronger, as well as enabling several passives both for themselves and the rest of the team.

Ash Echoes has many game modes that range from casual to challenging. You can check our dedicated section that lists them here:

Game Modes

Dailies only take a couple of minutes, and you don’t need to worry too much about “stamina overflow” since it will get stored permanently (up to 2400) and you can draw from it any time. Dailies and weeklies also give a decent amount of refreshers (Food). Most game modes don’t use Activity, so you’ll be using the chunk of them to progress through the main story and in farm stages (sweep function exists).

Tip 1: Your Director has an Engraving too!

Unlike the free flow format of the Echomancer builds, the Director equips one Trace of each stat. The more dupes that Trace has, the higher the stat conversion. For this reason, unless you’re a whale, often the best Traces to equip on the Director will be the free SSR with max dupes you get from events. The Director’s Engraving only has the purpose of giving your Leader extra stats. You don’t need to think too much about it.

Tip 2: Engraving Rating gives a ton of gacha currency and account exp.

Running Echoing Nexus with varied characters can help level this up fast. But for early game, there’s an easy tip that you can follow. You can click the “Simulation” button to generate an Engraving in a couple of clicks, without having to run Nexus! This Engraving will borrow from what you have equipped in your Director, and will be very inferior compared to the ones from an actual Nexus run, but hey, we’re trying to speed up account progression and get more summons here. As your level grows, the “Simulation” method becomes less and less effective.

Tip 3: Join a Guild (aka Club).

Daily Guild activity takes less than a minute, and you can get a lot of free materials from the Guild Shop. The Club Event “Echo Hunt” (a cooperative boss challenge) also gives a lot of free materials, mainly to upgrade skills.

Tip 4: Unlocking Boss

Boss

Boss is one of the 1-star characters unlockable through achievements only. She requires 4000 Coziness in the Lounge (Tea Time). Boss is a key character for Speedruns on Leaderboards. If you are into that (or if you just like cats), unlocking her can be quite fast and hassle-free:

1. Join a Club
2. Buy “Tea Time Universal Invitation”
3. Spam Tea Time
4. Buy Furniture until you reach 4000 coziness

Tip 5: Light Spender Tips

You can spend $0,99 to get

Begonia

In terms of spending priority, as is par for the course, Monthly Pass (S.E.E.D. Pass) is the best cost-benefit $4,99 for roughly 20 summons and lots of extra Activity, followed by the Battle Pass (Project Vein) $9,99 for a max dupe SR Trace, several materials and summons.