I was able to beat the lvl 100 Cosmos with my team, Zack 100% got me through it with his incredible tanking. It was incredibly exciting at the end I was really thinking about what I had to do with each character to survive and I was able to get a full clear didn't miss a reward.
I was wondering about that summon board! So I get that by doing the next Ifrit level?
Your going to laugh but I really wanted gems fast so I unlocked every character I could through the lost chapters but no further than that. Then I put 3 lvl 1s in a party at a time and used Eras supports to do the Cycle quest with a times 3 XP Book and power leveled all 80 characters to lvl 30 minimum, which was one or two fights depending on if I got the flower head cactus. That brought my rank from 100 or so to 300 and I got like 30k gems from the whole process hahaha 😂
I don't even know if that was the best way to do it but I had a ton of fun doing it.
Anyway so yeah I should finish those Lost Chapters, I did Zacks and hard mode.
Basically, when you do fights in the Summon Trial map, you get Summon Points for every character participating, plus some Wild Points you can allocate to whoever.
The EX fight right in front of the Summon themselves, those give the most for your time, 150 Points normally, which is multiplied both by EXP support items like books and stars, and by that character having a banner, and flashing a EXPx2 in front of their portrait.
Both stack too, so by taking one of these characters into these and stacking bonuses, you can max out their board in short order!
I forgot how much it is to max out a board, but each board gives permenent stat bonuses each node, can provide up to three unique 2cp passives, and gives treasure along the way, 3 tickets, 5 Armor Tokens, and 300 Gems.
If you don't wanna grind to get the roughly 6000 points to max somebody's board, you only need to get 1800 to get the treasure for a particular board, which is 4 runs with a 3 times EXP book, and half that if the character is on a current banner.
So, work your way to maxing Ifrit, because they are one of the most consistently powerful summons because they give you like 25% extra attack all the time, and work your way to unlocking all the others with time.
If you have the stomach to run these with one powerful character and two nobodies you are just running to get the treasures from, with a powerful support like Quistis with her 3 turn delay skill or Setzer with his delay and massive single target damage skill, you can get a TON of resources from these boards.
Put this into perspective. The game has over 100 characters right now, which means, if you had the time to run each of them at least 4 times to get their Summon board treasure, that's 300 tickets, 500 Armor Tokens and 30,000 Gems. And that's just one board!!! We have five of them now!!!
That's why people advocate for buying EXP books when they are on sale, they cost so little that they are paid for easily by Summon Board Treasures they help to get! Also item books are good too.
The grind takes a long time, but the best part is that it's always available, and always easy. If you are ever really hurting for gems or tickets, Summon Board grinding will get you what you need, it's only a matter of time.
Don't worry too much about it, just keep it in mind. Your bigger focus is unlocking all of them, so you can max out the summon boards on your best characters, those stat increases add up! The Wild Points can help with this too, but I usually save them for getting treasures when I don't wanna grind.
The passives that are the most useful are usually pretty obvious, but check out the reddit if you want more info. Hope it goes well!