So this game resists tierlisting. Cool. But if I'm looking at my list of SS Styles, how do I evaluate them? How do I tell what's good for what?
Click a style's "abilities" (the three things they get, one innately, one at level 10, one at level 30). Look for things that increase damage. The more damage increase abilities and the higher they are, the better. Whatever the general "increases damage" ability is called in English, look for rank IV of that (V if those styles have started showing up yet).
How do skills unlock? Most of them seem to pop out after I swing with a few normal attacks, but some stubbornly refuse to open up. Is there something I can do to improve my chances?
Welcome to the SaGa series! This is skill sparking. The answer is No. Keep at it!
I just unlocked the ability to "awaken" skills and spells. Where do I find these colored sands I need to do the thing?
Sands are dropped in Hard-mode stages, crystals are dropped in Very Hard stages. There are also some random events etc. you can get them from too, iirc.
At any given moment, I have a dozen different quest tracks I could be progressing, thanks to all these concurrent events, daily challenges, etc. etc. Are there some I should prioritize? Some that are more for endgamers that can be set aside?
-Do your dailies; there are two under the "dailies" tab. One for money (2/day) and one for a lot of style experience for your styles (2/day). Then, under the challenge tab, you get tickets for the...jungle? with egg shards, and you can get a few pretty good S-rank accessories there. You don't have to do those daily, but do them enough that you stay below the max 10 key items so you don't waste those. And finally there's the hidden dojo; do that once a day. Do each on the highest difficulty you can do reliably, and increase that gradually as you go. Don't worry about doing any "dailies" for the holy stones(?) until you need those to evolve weapons.
-For events, most start at low levels and go to higher ones, so you should be able to do at least a few quests in each event. I recommend you do so; it's a good source of jewels and often other drops. You can also get some stuff with whatever event-specific currencies drop, including styles, equipment, or rare consumables (like for skill empowering, which comes later after normal skill evolution). Once you hit a roadblock, don't stress about getting further, though it might be worth coming back and doing whichever quest levels have the increased currency drops 3 times/day. If you really want something from there, hit full-power autobattle and grind levels that your party will clear without your paying attention while doing something else.
-Finally, do normal quests. They're another good source of jewels. You might be able to start doing Hard-difficulty quests sooner than you think, at least to a certain level, and it's worth doing so for the increased stat growth, experience, currencies and drops. Then you can go back and push farther in the lower difficulty for more increases, then back to farther in the higher difficulties, etc.
-Also I recommend doing instant expeditions. It's not, like, compelling, but it also doesn't take a lot of time and it's an effective way of getting a bunch of stats. You can only instant-return characters on an expedition so many times before they hit the cap for that expedition level anyway. And the difference the extra stats makes can be big. But your main source of stat-ups will be running event or main story quests with the characters who get increased stat growth there, so instead of 1 at a time you can get 2, 3, and later on even 4 at a time. If you have characters who qualify for that, put them in for those quests and watch them get beastly.
Edit: Hell, there's one of these event quest things that I can't even figure out how to play, because it requires some item expenditure to enter and I don't know where to get that item. I miss how in Arknights, tapping on any given inventory widget tells you what it's for and where you can get it.
Looks like you solved this one?
