The Journey to Transcending Seofon

hey there! happy october. it's october 6th, 2023 as of writing this. :) today i'm going to be detailing some of my transcendence progress with mr. siete (seofon) granblue fantasy. if you don't know anything about granblue fantasy and transcendence, i'm happy to explain! the eternals are a group of characters that you have to go on a big grind for, they can be kind of niche but very helpful and even core in certain team compositions. in granblue, most characters can have their levels uncapped 4 times, but some go up to 5 (allowing them to be level 100 if they're a ssr). the eternals, however, can be uncapped 6 times! and their levels can go up to 150. the sixth star they get by uncapping them to level 150 is divided up into 5 fragments (stages), which increases their level by 10 each time. what i'm working on right now is the first stage, which would then uncap seofon to level 110.
after transcending an eternal, their art changes and they also gain access to a new charge attack (with a very pretty animation). here's seofon's 6* art!!

anyway, i've been keeping track of my progress, and i wanted to archive it here too. i'll timestamp the steps i've been completing in order to get him to level 110. at this point i'm nearly done, just waiting for some events to make grinding a bit easier and such (namely the damascus crystals). when i've completed his transcendence, i'll be sure to chronicle that as well. ;)

4:55 PM · Sep 24, 2023

i began the process, not much to see here. i had some materials already but not enough to actually do anything at all! haha.

3:02 PM · Sep 27, 2023

a few days later i got on the grind, funnily enough it was the 27th, and seofon's number is 7, so it felt like he was on my side and working with me.
the reason i didn't start sooner was because it was guild wars, a notorious event where everyone drops everything in order to play the event over and over again. gw is also helpful for initially adding the eternals to your roster. but regardless, i was grinding out gw so i wanted to wait until it was over to continue working on siete.
also if you're wondering why i change up his name, it's because his name in japan is siete! i like both names so i use them both, simple as that. both names mean "seven", which is neat. it's kind of a codename for him though, as his real name is unknown. we'll probably never find out what it is and that's okay. he's seofon to me. heart hands emoji.
regardless, the materials i aimed for first were the halos, it just seemed like a nice starting point. halos are a little annoying to get, since there's four types that can drop, but i was getting really lucky with my drops, which the screenshot shows!

3:49 PM · Sep 27, 2023

nice! screenshot explains itself.

11:20 PM · Sep 27, 2023

i had finished up the halo grind a bit earlier and took a break. next up... the gale rocks! these drop from ewiyar, my beloved little kitty cat dragon. her design rocks, please look at her.
i made a joke that i'd get an eternity sand before i finished getting the gale rocks, and you'll never guess what happened to me at around 11:06pm, just a bit before i made it to the halfway point for the gale rocks.
eternity sand has a very, very low drop rate, i believe it's a 0.1% chance of dropping per fight. lucky indeed to just have one thrown at me. thank you kitty cat...

2:02 AM · Sep 28, 2023

and thus i had to stop petting the dragon cat while she placed rocks in my hands.

i also got a rank up in the middle of all this. a neat side effect! i will gladly take rank 185, thank you very much.

2:42 PM · Sep 28, 2023

next up were the damascus crystals. :D i got a majority of these from the the dragon weeps before daybreak, which was quite interesting! i'm not the biggest fan of the dragon knights, but i think the writing in this event was fine. but don't take my word for it, because as i said i don't really spend my time with the dragon knights and maybe they had wonky writing actually. however, they did give us another non-binary character, and i am very happy about that. adding the they/it to my collection of transgender gbf characters (there's quite a few, mind you!).

6:11 PM · Sep 29, 2023

i went in for surgery on my mouth this day, so progress was real slow. but regardless, i did make some general progress.
for the rest of my damascus crystals, i beat up ultimate bahamut for damascus grains (an item that can be turned into the crystals when you collect 3 of them). in the end i decided i'd be better off focusing on these later, so i didn't go for the full 20/20 and instead stopped at 14. my next grind was for the silver sword shards! you need 200 of these, and they can be obtained either through the akasha raid or angel halo. i went for angel halo, because it's consistent and gives you other helpful materials. sure it'd be nice to get a gold brick from akasha, but that's the least of my problems. i'll deal with the gold brick problem when i get there.

2:23 AM · Sep 30, 2023

slow and steady wins the race!

12:31 PM · Sep 30, 2023

i have one joke.

9:38 PM · Oct 1, 2023

my rusted sword + rusted sword relic collection at this point. you only need thirty of these bad boys, but unfortunately that is easier said than done. they're the whole reason why i'm running angel halo a million times versus doing akasha.
they require a lot of materials to make. well. kind of. if you're making just a few, it's not too bad, but thirty of them requires a huge amount of resources that drop from angel halo, and trust me. it goes fast. you'll blink and suddenly you're out of low orbs. get in the angel halo mines again. do it. you have to.

10:58 PM · Oct 1, 2023

and here i made it to the halfway point for the silver sword shards! i was pretty lost in the sauce and doing this on autopilot at this point.
i forgot to mention that the way to get these is to have an eternal in your party and play the nightmare level of angel halo. this challenge (it's not hard) only unlocks after running angel halo a few times (it can be a while sometimes... still not so bad i guess) and it'll drop a single shard per run - so you're looking at quite the grind! although you can get lucky and sometimes it'll drop a silver sword relic, which can be reduced into 5 relic shards, and if you upgrade it/have certain bonuses, it can be reduced for even more! so in the end it's not that bad, it's just something you have to do for a bit.
the shard you get depends on which eternal you have in your party, since they all have an associated weapon type. siete is obviously the sword guy, so i'm getting sword shards and sword relics all over the place.

2:00 AM · Oct 2, 2023

and it was a good night indeed... i slept well knowing that this grind would soon come to a close.

6:16 PM · Oct 2, 2023

and what happened here was that i got a silver sword relic drop right near the end of my grind, so i ended up with a tiny surplus of silver sword shards. very cool. unfortunately i am not done with the angel halo grind, as i am very low on low orbs (haha, funny!) but it felt nice that i didn't have to worry so much about the shards anymore.

10:39 AM · Oct 3, 2023

five more rusted relics for the collection! i took a break from angel halo and got these from bonking proto bahamut. i love the new raid finder, but i feel like this might've been easier if i grabbed the raid ids from twitter. it's a shame they had to stop doing that due to API changes. it makes me sad. but i'm not here to talk about that. my progress kind of dipped here because i was very excited to finish up msq (act 1), but i was back on the grind soon enough. what do you think i'm doing as i write this? that's correct, i'm grinding baby!

4:18 PM · Oct 5, 2023

like i said above, i had taken a few days break to prevent burnout but also to work on my msq archive. can you tell i really like granblue fantasy? because i do. :]
there's 17 rusted sword relics here, just so you know! so close to 20, but minimal progress from the last image.
for the record, you can uncap sr weapons with steel bricks, but who do you think i am? don't answer that. i already exhausted my supply of steel bricks and any sources they may have come from. i'm doing this the old fashion way! which means i have to get four copies of a rusted sword before i can turn it into a rusted relic. it's fine, it's not too bad. i don't mind it, really, and plus do you know how exciting it is to see a rusted sword pop up as a drop? it rocks. almost as wonderful as seeing a sette di spade pop up, i'm sure.

6:26 AM · Oct 6, 2023

once again another side effect, although this time it came from angel halo.

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but that's it for now! i wanted to get this archived and up before i inevitably finish everything. i'll probably update this again once i finish up the rusted swords, and then again when i get damascus crystals and the gold brick, which is looming upon me. scary.
thanks for reading! ☆
edit: hey! i'm back because i finished up everything. :) get ready for smug sword man number 7...

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10:44 AM · Oct 11, 2023

the final rusted sword for my collection. of course, i immediately turned it into a relic and went on with my day. fun fact, i had exactly 250 low orbs left over, so if i wanted, i could've made another sword relic. but there was no point doing that... for now! mwhahaha! i'll get there whenever i decide to transcend him more, but as of right now, 110 is fine for me.

12:14 AM · Oct 12, 2023

well, i bonked ultimate bahamut a ridiculous amount of times. i don't feel like counting, but i saw so many of those raids in the past 24 hours... shivers... as i explained before, i was grinding for damascus grains. this was the final grain i needed to bring my stock of damascus crystals to 20. voilà! can you guess what happened next...?

3:03 AM · Oct 12, 2023

can we talk about how cool that flavour text is? it's seriously cool. flavour text for big brother seofon! amazing, epic, wonderful, etc etc. but hold your applause for the man himself because we have to uncap him now! blink and you'll miss it, as they say! understandably, i hovered over this screen for a bit but eventually... eventually...

3:17 AM · Oct 12, 2023

...oh! i am so nervous, what have i done...
but... i! must! proceed!
...

bam. it's done, he has been TRANSCENDED!!!!!!!!!!
oh, i'm so happy. i could explode right now. he looks so wonderful. shout out to this guy... look at him... thank you.
so? in conclusion? well. that was really fun, i think it was definitely on par with flb'ing caim, i feel satisfied and happy with the result.
don't forget to throw siete to keep him in check! i'm serious.

thanks again for the read! ☆ and a super big thanks to those of you who cheered me on during this journey! appreciate it~
until next time! ☆
ps - if you're wondering about the gold brick, all i have to say is that good things come to those who wait. don't even worry about it. i am a lucky man.