I’ve been playing SWGOH for nearly a year and a half and I made a number of mistakes when it comes to building my team. The one thing I wish I knew earlier on was how to farm characters and gear effectively. I wasted a lot of time and spread myself incredibly thin trying to build teams I wouldn’t eventually use all that much.

I know there are a lot of guides out there but I wanted to put something together for the GoingNerdy readers to help them learn how to farm effectively. If you are already an expert and noticed something I left out, please leave a comment in the section below.

 Research

Find out who you want and research them. In the beginning, you are going to want to farm those characters that are most available to you. These are the Jedi, Sith, and Empire, and Droids who have the most nodes or who are available in the various stores and shops. Luminara, Phasma, Mace, and 5s are all easy characters to get. There are dozens of other characters who have multiple hard and cantina nodes and are available in other locations.

When looking at who to farm, look at who you already have. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to farm Wedge Antilles if you don’t already have at least the beginnings of a Rebel team. Don’t go after Vader if you don’t already have an Empire team. Look for characters that will bolster your ranks and make you more formidable in Galactic War and Squad Arena.

This will help you rank higher, which will result in more crystals, which will then turn into more opportunities to farm characters. And so on.

The best advice I have is look at the different farmable areas and make a list of overlapping characters your squads could benefit from and go after it.

Focus

I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten distracted over the last year and I have wasted time farming ineffectively. Either because there were a few people I was farming at once, or because I felt the drop rate for another toon would be better. Let’s just clear this up, the character drop rate is roughly 1 in 3. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but it almost always averages out to be one in three.

The key to farming effectively is knowing who you are farming and sticking to it. It can be easy to go after a new character or someone who you read a review about. There are a lot of great characters in SWGOH. Whoever you start to farm, stay with them until you level them out. Depending on the character’s availability and your willingness to use crystal refreshes, it can take anywhere between two weeks and a month to farm a character.

Know Your Daily Crystal Intake

One of the things I wish I knew when I first started playing Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is the true value of the crystals in game. When you first start out as a newbie, you get crystals hand over fist. Every time you level up and every battle you beat for the first time leads to more and more crystals. It’s was always obvious that eventually this influx of crystals would end, but when I was getting them hand over fist, it wasn’t something I thought about.

The first thing you need to know about crystals is how many you get on a daily basis. There are different crystal amounts you can earn in any given day, a few are set while others vary depending on your level. Each day you can earn:

• 65 crystals for the daily activities once you reach level 80
• 25 crystals for completing the Galactic War
• 15-500 crystals ranking in the Squad Arena

There are also crystals available for completing a level for the first time, daily login rewards, and for various achievements. On average, you can expect just a little over 100 crystals a day, depending on your ranking in SA and how you fair in GW.

Purchase Crystals

For most players, I wouldn’t recommend this. Purchasing crystals can get very expensive. Unless you are looking at becoming a whale, someone who pays large amounts of money to get the latest content, this is not the way to go.

There are a few times that buying crystals is wiser than others. The first is when crystals go on sale. From time to time, the powers that be set the cost of the crystal purchases as a reduced rate. Or, more precisely, offer more crystals for the same price. It’s usually enough to make buying the crystals more enticing.

If you decide to make a purchase, this is the exact time to do it. You get more for your money and are capable of doing some serious good with what you buy. A word of warning though: if you are going to make the investment, consider going big. The more you spend, the more you get. So a package worth 100 dollars during a sale will go farther than buying a package worth 20 or even 50 and will yield greater results.

The other way of buying crystals that I recommend is purchasing the Daily Crystal Booster. This package delivers an extra 100 crystals for 21 days. If you are farming gear or character shards and don’t want to spend a bunch of money, this is probably your best bet.

Use Refreshes

As you’ve probably noticed, energy runs out. Three times a day you receive free bonus energy, but this only goes so far when farming gear and shards. For a price, you can refresh your regular and cantina energy. You can refresh your regular energy for 50 crystals twice, before the cost goes up to 100. Cantina energy refreshes are more expensive at 100 crystals for two refreshes and go up to 200 crystals thereafter.

When farming, it’s important to use these refreshes strategically. If you don’t use them, it will take soooo much longer to gather vital gear and character shards. But if you refresh too many times, you’ll quickly run out of crystals.

If you don’t buy crystal packs, then you can easily earn enough crystals in a day to either do one refresh for both energies or two regular and one cantina, if you have extra to spare.

Be Patient

Don’t try to do too much at one time. It’s easy to get frustrated when the drop rates seem to crash or the team your trying to build just isn’t coming together like you would like it to. If you’re patient, your teams will start to develop more efficiently and the characters you have will become a force to be reckoned with.

So what do you think of my brief farming guide? Did I forget anything? Leave a comment in the section below and tell how you build your Holotable teams.