G.I. Joe: Battleground Tips and Tricks - Promoting your Characters

[General_Hawk]

Now that G.I. Joe: Battleground has reached mass release (via iOS, anyway, with Android coming soon!) I figured it was time to start gathering together some tips and tricks. The first questions that have really seemed to emerge in the short time that G.I. Joe: Battlegrounds has been launched as revolved around promoting your characters.

I took some time to write up a quick tutorial about this that will hopefully help ease some confusion.

Promoting Characters

One of the draws for accumulating multiple cards in G.I. Joe: Battleground is the fact that you can “promote” character cards into even more powerful cards. By combining cards together of the same character, you can increase the stats of that character and in some cases, evolve that character into a totally new, more powerful card.
There are some things you must keep in mind for this process.

Star Ratings

The Star Ratings on the upper left of each card will give you an indication of how powerful that card is and how powerful it can possibly be. Cards will have anywhere from 1 – 4 stars, and any number of them can be “filled in”.
Cards with 4 stars, but only 1 “filled in” star have the largest capacity for promotions, as one of those stars is filled in every time you “promote” a card. For example, if you find a Lady Jaye card with one filled in star (and three blank ones) she can be promoted more times (and thus be more powerful) than a Lady Jaye card with two filled in stars.

Certain Rare cards (like General Hawk) only have two stars to begin with, and if both of those stars are already filled in, those cards cannot be promoted at all.

In my opinion, you should target the 4-star, 1 filled in star cards for promotion first, as they have the largest potential to be as powerful as possible, though it will take some time and effort. I would also recommend that you not even bother to work on promoting C (Common) or UC (UnCommon) cards as they will not gain enough power to be worthwhile. That is, unless the UC card has four empty stars and can possibly be upgraded to the maximum (as is the case with the UC Barricade from the recent Cobra Battle Simulator event).

Leveling vs. Promoting

There are many different ways to improve your cards as you play through G.I. Joe: Battleground, and it can be a little confusing. When talking about “Promoting” I will also be talking about “Levelling” and they are two different things. As you play through a mission or even in PVP, your cards will gain “Levels” and get more powerful as a result. Some cards have a max level of 40, some have a max of 70, and the most powerful cards have a max of 99. The goal before you promote is to have your secondary card be the highest “level” it can be. The once the level is maxed, you can go through promotion.

Primary and Secondary Cards

When promoting cards, you select a “Primary” and a “Secondary” card. These cards must be of the same character (but do not necessarily have to be the same card). The Primary card must have at least one empty star in order to be promoted.

When cards are promoted, the primary card gains 5% of the stats from the secondary card, unless the secondary card is fully leveled. If the secondary card is fully leveled, the primary card gains 10% of the stats from the secondary. For that reason, it is strongly recommended that you level the secondary card up to max before using it to promote the primary.

Keep in mind, the primary card gains the stats from the secondary, so the primary card does not necessarily have to be at max level to gain 10% stat boost. Only the secondary card must be at that max level.
But if you plan on using the result of this promotion to promote yet another card, you’ll want to be sure to level this card up as well to act as the secondary. Keep in mind that your "Leader" card is an exception, and cannot be promoted or used as a secondary card in the promotion of another.

The “Perfect” Promotion

In some cases, you may end up with enough cards in order to make a “perfect promotion”, which makes a card as powerful as it can possibly be. This will likely not happen often, but during events or for certain boss cards, you can sometimes accumulate enough cards to do this.

A perfect promotion requires EIGHT of the same card. We will number these cards 1 – 8 (for obvious reasons). The Primary card in each case must only have 1 filled in star. The way it works is like this:

Card 1 + 2 = Card A
Card 3 + 4 = Card B
Card 5 + 6 = Card C
Card 7 + 8 = Card D

In order for this to be a perfect upgrade, the secondary cards at each point must be at their max level, and again, the primary card must only have one filled in star. After all of these upgrades above are done, each resulting card should have 2 stars. After you’ve combined all of these cards, and then once again leveled up the secondary, you can do the following:

Card A + B = Card 10
Card C + D = Card 20

After these upgrades are finished, you should have two cards that have three stars. That essentially means they can only be upgraded one more time. Make sure the secondary card is fully leveled again, and then do the following:

Card 10 + Card 20 = MAX LEVEL “PERFECT” PROMOTION

The flowchart below might give better visuals on how to progress through the promotion. The star icons in each box represent how many stars the card will have before and after promotion.

For a more visual look, the following flowchart (courtesy of kneroh) shows it in even better detail:

Obviously opportunities to do this are somewhat few and far between as it can be a challenge to build up 8 of the same cards. If you have enough invite codes, you could potentially do this with Storm Shadow, and recent events have supplied high ranking members with a large number of cards like Quick Kick, Dusty, Gung Ho, and Destro.

Using this technique requires a lot of patience, but the result will be a very powerful card that should give you the upper hand in many cases. Is it worth the trouble? That’s your decision to make.

[troynos]

I've been leveling an EP (epic) Lady Jaye, 3 stars. I wish I had gotten an R with more stars to promote but can't see Lady Jaye not being in my squad. Second Wind is just too good an ability to have.

[MamuNestor]

I haven't seen a value in upgrading using anything higher than uncommon.
I have been lucky with promotions as I have used 2 rare's, 1 that I leveled up a bunch and a fresh rare. They have gotten me max epic promotions several times.

[kneroh]

Awesome article! I'm hoping go have my first perfect character (PD Destro) by the next event!

[MamuNestor]

Tip: have the characters you want to level up in your Joe or Cobra line up and have your most powerful characters in your mixed line up. When you hit a PvP select your mixed line up to fight for you. Your win ratio will go up and you will develop other characters at the same time.

Also there is value in promoting Common and Uncommon characters, they are needed to complete the collection. I have 1 perfect Tomax. My Snake Eyes is almost perfect.

[kneroh]

Tip: have the characters you want to level up in your Joe or Cobra line up and have your most powerful characters in your mixed line up. When you hit a PvP select your mixed line up to fight for you. Your win ratio will go up and you will develop other characters at the same time.

Also there is value in promoting Common and Uncommon characters, they are needed to complete the collection. I have 1 perfect Tomax. My Snake Eyes is almost perfect.

Holy cow! You were able to randomly snag 8 1-star tomax cards?!

[MamuNestor]

Holy cow! You were able to randomly snag 8 1-star tomax cards?!

No I got a couple of rare Tomax's and promoted them. 1 of them I worked up to a level 50ish and promoted him with another rare Tomax I snagged they combined to a perfect Tomax. There are no more upgrades I can do. He is darked out on the promotion page and the upgrade page.

[MamuNestor]

Anyone know how to access the battle simulator. I saw it was live but don't k ow where it is.

[kneroh]

Anyone know how to access the battle simulator. I saw it was live but don't k ow where it is.

https://www.facebook.com/GiJoeBattleGroundFans

According to the fansite it's just a glitch announcement right now. I'm sure it will go live soon enough.


Oh and on the topic of promoting, I just found out the hard way tgat any Uncommon card (UC) can not be promoted into a Rare (R) or above.

I have a 2 star Firefly that I was going to feed into my 3 star but I decided I'd level up 2 Uncommon (Renegades) Firefly and promote them into each other to make a 2 star, then feed those to my Rare 2 star making him a 3 before combining him with the Epic, obvisously to get a 4 star. For whatever reason this can not be done though. Sucks that I leveled 2 UC's to 40... and I did the same thing with Sigma Six UC Cobra Commander that I was developing at the same time. Whoops... 3 characters to level 40 for no reason. Ugh.

[troynos]

But can still use those UC to Promote a Rare though right?

UC promoted/fed to another UC won't make an R but a UC promoted/fed into a R will promote that one.