TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children

The central and most important avenue to character progression is the Mastery Board. You can slot in Masteries to get various passive and active benefits to your character, these Masteries can be acquired as random loot from enemies (who can only drop Masteries they themselves possess) or through research, in which you spend some amount of other masteries in specific amounts and types to craft new ones. To get new mastery research you need to either acquire a mastery for the first time as a drop, rank up a character's class, fully obtain an enemies information (which immediately unlocks for research any masteries they can drop), through certain plot decisions or in some rare situations through a research chain. You can identify a research chain by a little plus sign on a mastery in the research screen. If it's grey, you can craft that mastery and obtain a different one from it. If it's yellow, you've already done so.

If you slot in four specific Masteries at the same time, you trigger a set. These range from extremely good to merely nice to have, but they're oftentimes the main goal you're shooting for when designing your board. Unfortunately, the in-game information on these sets relies heavily on experimentation, and since experimentation uses up rather expensive Training Manuals it might be best to use a guide to figure out what sets are even possible. A good one to shoot for early game, which remains useful for the majority of the content is Shukuchi, made when you slot in Extreme Speed, Run, Bounding Step and Lightning Reflexes at the same time.

You should head to Shooter Street to pick up sidequests as early as it allows you to. These sidequests provide an invaluable boost to your early game activities and also reward you with "grinding sets" which make getting specific crafting materials later on far more efficient in exchange for being fairly mediocre pieces of low level gear. One exception is the Gem Crafter's set, which remains quite solid as a primary combat set for a long while.

There are some bosses that only spawn on Hard difficulty and above, so you should aim to play on that difficulty as soon as you're comfortable enough with the game.

A little trick with dashing attacks. Some attacks, mostly close range melee moves, can be executed as a dashing attack in which you both move and attack in the same action. However, the further away you are from your target the worse your accuracy is, even with these. So if you're at double move distance away from a target, you should almost always move first before executing the attack, to reduce the distance penalties.

You should aim to fully max out all three of a characters classes as they all provide extremely useful abilities which can be slotted in regardless of which specific class the character is currently in. Make sure to make a separate mastery board for each class, it makes things MUCH smoother, even if its more expensive initially.

Item crafting can be extremely useful for gearing up late-comer characters and making up for deficiencies in loot drops, but it can be VERY expensive. I don't recommend messing with it until you're level 20 or so, for access to specific grinding locations. However, it's not a bad idea to disassemble gear you don't plan on using as soon as possible. Finding a balance between selling and disassembling trash loot is important for getting a reasonable crafting cycle going.

Early-game tip: Don't sleep on grenades! Wind Pressure, Smoke and Flash grenades can be absolute lifesavers if used at the right time. Later on you might have actually useful gear to place in those slots, but for early on consider grenades rather than the rather crappy Spoons.

Early on you get to pick a company mastery, which applies to all your characters and can be switched out later for 1000 Vill. I highly recommend the one that grants you extra Masteries to start with, but an argument can be made for the one that grants you extra items. The others ones are probably not worth your time.

Also early on you get to pick an additional district to add to your Jurisdiction. The menu looks complex but you barely get to interact with it until MUCH later in the game, so just pick a single district that seems immediately helpful and ignore any set benefits or the like, as you won't get to benefit from those for a long time. I personally recommend the Shadow Fog district to start with, as it lessens the grind for Troublemaker info, but this is a personal choice. Keep in mind you only get one of the listed perks at any given time when choosing.

For equipment selection, early on Hit Chance is your primary and most important goal. As you progress other stats may compete with it, such as Block Chance or Dodge Chance, but Hit Chance is ALWAYS important. A piece of gear with a high Hit Chance roll is far more valuable than a piece of gear ten levels above it with no Hit Chance bonus.