Guide to Girl Skills

[Attirm]

About Girl Skills

Each girl has upgradeable skills that can improve her battle performance, including in Leagues, Seasons, Pantheon, Champions, Labyrinth, and Villain fights. The system can be confusing for beginners to approach, and this guide is intended to help guide beginners in how to utilize this system, as well as being a resource for more experienced players who want a more detailed breakdown of how these mechanics work.

Bulbs

In order to use skills, you will need to acquire bulbs. You can find the bulbs in your inventory. By giving bulbs to your girls, you unlock their skills. Bulbs come in five rarities (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Mythic) corresponding to the rarity of the girls. You can only give a girl bulbs that match her rarity. So if you wish to upgrade a Legendary girl, you must use Legendary bulbs. Bulbs can be obtained from Daily Goals, Cumback Contests, event rewards, and can be purchased from the Labyrinth shop.

Best Practice: only Legendary and Mythic rarity matters. Common, Rare, and Epic bulbs have very little value, and for many players will be completely worthless.

 

Resetting Skills

For a ymens cost, you can reset all the skills on a girl. This reclaims all your bulbs, allowing you to select different skills on that girl or assign the bulbs to a different girl entirely. This cost increases based on the rarity of the girl and how many bulbs are currently assigned. The expense is very high, and can exceed 100 million ymens to reset a single girl.

Best Practice: resetting skills is very rarely worthwhile, and if you do it regularly it can cost billions of ymens. Only the very highest reward tiers in leagues give enough of a reward to be worth paying this price, so for most players you only want to reset to correct major mistakes.

Skills
There are a total of 5 skills: 

1. Income Surge
2. Stat Boost
3. Trait Bonus
4. Special Passives
5. Active skill

In order to access a skill, a girl's affection grade must be equal to or higher than the skill's tier. So for instance, the Special Passives skill is the 4th skill tier, so a girl will need to have at least 4 affection upgrades before she has access to it. This means that 3-star girls can never access the 4th and 5th skills.

Skills must be upgraded in order. You must fully-upgrade income surge before you can begin upgrading stat boost, and you must fully-upgrade stat boost before you can begin upgrading trait bonuses. The number of bulbs required is based on the rarity of the girl. 

The maximum level of each skill is based on the rarity of your girl, as seen on the following table:

	Income	Stats	Trait	Special	Active	Total Bulbs	Total Bulbs (passive only)
Common	6	6	3	3	1	19	18
Rare	6	7	3	3	2	21	19
Epic	6	8	4	4	3	25	22
Legendary	6	9	4	4	4	27	23
Mythic	6	10	5	5	5	31	26

 

Income Surge
This increase the amount of ymens income a girl produces. When upgrading this, you must choose between two options: +200 ymens, or +2% ymens. You can select each option a maximum of 5 times, which means you must select the other option at least once. 

Best Practice: For best overall incomes, 5-star or better girls should upgrade +2% income five times, and +200 once. All other girls should upgrade +200 income five times, and +2% once. However, the effect is very small for most girls and the difference is not noticeable. The only girls for whom the benefits are significant are the starter girls, which have much higher income levels to begin with.

Stat Boost
This increases the girl's stats. Your choice is between +100 to the girl's primary stat, +1% to the girl's primary stat, or +70 to the girl's secondary stats. So for instance, a Hardcore girl would have the choice between +100 Hardcore, +1% Hardcore, and +70 to Charm and Know-How. You can select each of these options a maximum of 5 times.

Best Practice: For most purposes the +70 to your two secondary stats is the best option, and should be maxed out first. Mythics and 5-star Legendaries should put their remaining allocations into +1%. For all other girls, the +100 option is better.

There are a few circumstances where secondary stats do not matter, which makes the +100 to your primary stat the better option. These are champions and places of power. These are much less important than PVP, but if you are applying girl skills to improve performance in those circumstances then +100 to the main stat is the best choice.

Trait Bonus
Depending on the girl's element, they will receive a trait bonus. Your choices are +0.2% to Attack, +0.2% to Defense, and +0.2% to Ego. This grants the hero an increase to their power based on how many girls on the battle team share the same trait. The affected trait is based on the girls element:

Dominatrix (Black) and Eccentric (Red): Eye Color
Submissive (White) and Exhibitionist (Green): Hair Color
Physical (Orange) and Voyeur (Purple): Astrological Sign
Sensual (Blue) and Playful (Yellow): Favorite Pose

So for instance, a Dominatrix girl with Blue eyes will have the Blue eyes trait. If she chooses the +0.2% Attack bonus then your character will receive a +0.2% increase to Attack power for every Blue-eyed girl on the team (including this one). If your team consists of 7 Blue-eyed girls each with the Blue-eyes Trait skill, then the effects stack and can result in extremely high attack bonuses.

Best Practice: Attack power is significantly more valuable than Defense or Ego, and should always be selected and maximized. You should pay attention to girls your harem and attempt to build complementary teams that can benefit from each others trait bonuses. Girls whose Trait skill is for a rare or uncommon trait are not very valuable, as it will be hard to build a team that can make use of that bonus. Girls with a common trait can be very valuable. 

For beginners, Blond hair and Blue eyes are the best choices of traits to pursue as girls with these traits are extremely common and new ones are released on a regular basis. For experienced players who already have most of the released girls, Column pose is a very strong selection as many mythic girls share this Trait skill.

The ideal strategy will vary depending on the weekly blessings and what girls are available to you, but for most players the best course of action is to build teams of 7 girls with complementary Trait skills, and use the team that best matches the week's blessing. Changing your team structure by resetting bulbs is not advisable as the cost of doing so is very high, and only makes sense if you are pursuing 4th place or higher in Dicktator 3. At any lower PVP tier, the rewards are not high enough to justify the cost of resetting skills.

Special Passives
You have the choice of either increasing attack power by +0.2% with each successive turn, or decreasing the opponent's defense by -0.2% with each successive turn.

Best Practice: increasing attack power is significantly more valuable than decreasing opponent defense power. Always maximize that one.

Active Skill

In Leagues, Seasons, Pantheon, and Villains fights this provides a powerful bonus that can activate once per fight. Only the first girl on your team can use an active skill, the other girls are ignored. As a result, you only want to put bulbs here if your girl is going to be in the lead slot on one of your battle teams as it will have no effect on any other girl. The skill has a different effect based on your girl's element:

Sensual (Blue) and Eccentric (Red): Instantly finish the enemy if their ego is low
Dominatrix (Black) or Playful (Yellow): Gives a chance to stun the enemy, skipping their next 2 turns. Can only activate once per fight.
Voyeur (Purple) or Exhibitionist (Green): Reflects damage back to the enemy for 2 turns. The more damage they deal, the more damage they take back.
Submissive (White) or Physical (Orange): Creates a shield that blocks incoming damage. The higher your ego, the bigger the shield.

Best Practices: 

Shield is very powerful in Leagues. You score more points depending on your remaining ego, and you want to have consistent results, and this is exactly what Shield does. As a result, it provides the best option for maximizing your ranking in the Leagues. It's still very strong in other formats. It also synergizes enormously with the Chlorella booster, as the higher your own ego the higher the benefits of this boost are. Chlorella is by far the most common booster from pachinko and other rewards, so using a skill that synergizes with it can be a very good idea.

Stun is very similar in power to Shield, and in many cases will be stronger. However, because it activates at random it is extremely inconsistent and can result in wildly different outcomes. A stun followed by two critical hits can result in a perfect fight against even a very powerful opponent, but if your stun doesn't activate at all then you can lose a fight against a much weaker opponent. Stun is strongest when fighting enemies significantly stronger than you, where you need to rely on a little bit of luck to win. This makes it by far the strongest choice in Pantheon. Stun works best if you can win fights quickly, giving you the chance to win before the enemy's skill can activate (since stunned enemies cannot utilize their skills), and synergizes best with the Cordyceps booster.

Reflect is interesting in that it actually gets stronger when your defenses are lower. The more damage the enemy deals to you, the more damage that Reflect deals back to them. This means that Reflect is actually strongest when you aren't using boosters at all. This can make it very useful in leagues when you are not fighting. Enemies who attack you when your boosters expire will take extra damage from Reflect, and will get a lower score. This helps slightly reduce the score of your rivals. Reflect is currently not very useful in fights where both sides are boosted, as the current meta favors Chlorella and high ego which Reflect can struggle against.

The Finisher is a very weak bonus, and there is usually no reason to use it over the other active skills. It is better than nothing, and if you do not have a good option for Shield, Stun or Reflect then you should use it. However, if you have a better option you should use that instead and avoid this one.

[Ich42]

I think it's well summarized. I think there is a small hint missing in relation to the Love Labyrinth.

The fact that with every active skill in your top 7 in the Love Labyrinth Squad, the fights get increasingly tougher.

 

[Irvbert Pervington]

This is very helpful, and I greatly appreciate it! I do have a couple of questions, though, if that's okay: 

Is there the best team trait bonus to go for regarding your team just the one you have the most of to get the most stacks of buff? 

Also, given the limit of bulbs, is it maximally efficient to just go through the fourth tier (the passives) for the majority of girls, and just for select few who would lead their teams, invest into the fifth tier of active skills? If you have a good team set up, between individual girls, does it matter who you have using the skill at the head of the team? 

Any answers you can give, I greatly appreciate. Sorry if I'm asking in the wrong place; I can repost elsewhere if that's the case. Thanks again for your hard work! 🙏

[Attirm]

7 hours ago, Irvbert Pervington said:

Is there the best team trait bonus to go for regarding your team just the one you have the most of to get the most stacks of buff? 

What's in your harem is indeed your biggest limitation. If you don't have the girls to run the lineup, then you can't run that lineup. You ideally want to stack the most buffs possible, and whatever that is for your harem is what you should be focusing on running. 

The only other major consideration is active skills, which may not be possible for certain team lineups. For instance, I have a really good Blue eyes team (Bright Agate, Royal Housemaid, Leona, Violetta, Shegobora, Sunless, and Ellie) but because of their elements I can't get the Shield skill with this team. I have to give up at least one team member to introduce a White or Orange element girl to get Shield. This is a tradeoff, Shield is much, much better in Leagues. This does make Astrological Sign and Hair Color based teams more attractive, since they get access to the best active skill in leagues naturally and you don't have to go out of your way for it.

8 hours ago, Irvbert Pervington said:

Also, given the limit of bulbs, is it maximally efficient to just go through the fourth tier (the passives) for the majority of girls

Yes, I would agree with this. To repeat what I said in the guide with respect to active skills: "As a result, you only want to put bulbs here if your girl is going to be in the lead slot on one of your battle teams as it will have no effect on any other girl"

8 hours ago, Irvbert Pervington said:

If you have a good team set up, between individual girls, does it matter who you have using the skill at the head of the team? 

No, the active skill is all that matters for the lead slot. Otherwise it's the same as any other team slot.

[Irvbert Pervington]

Thank you very much for your clarifications on those points, friend! You are awesome. 🙏 Best wishes to you! 

[Sylar Rose]

I have a question about the 4th skill. Here, it's described as "You have the choice of either increasing attack power by +0.2% with each successive turn, or decreasing the opponent's defense by -0.2% with each successive turn." In the game however, it literally says: "Increase the Attack power with each consecutive attack.

Now - does it really mean that it's increased by 1% each turn (for each girl having it?) or does it mean that it's increased with each consecutive attack of that particular girl? It makes a huge difference since for instance - if we assume that our 7 girls have it at +1% and it's summed up, we already have a +7% buff as our second girl attacks, we have a +14% when our third girl attacks, +21% when our fourth girl attacks and so on. It would be the most powerful skill. If it's just about the girl performing an action - it may be still worth investing in it - since a second girl attacks with +1%, a third one attacks with a +2%, a third one attacks with a +3%, you get between 5-10% buff at your final hit in PVP, which may decide the outcome or it may trigger finish her off skill from the blue/white/red girls. However, if it's just about the given girl, which needs to attack again after all the rest attacks - then such a skill becomes basically useless so it makes more sense not investing in it at all while raising up the other girls attack power through their 2nd skill only, stopping there for those who are not used as alpha and whose 3rd skill bonus does not match well with any other girls we're using.

So - how is it in the end? It's obviously a question most important for Mythic Girls, I'm finishing upgrading my 12 Mythic girls up to LVL 750, I collected 3 from each useful attribute and I'll build upon that to get all the 5/6 girls of those attributes, then those useless ones for fun and for weekly buffs - so it's clear I need to manage the bulbs properly. I've got 1 Green, 1 Orange and 1 Blue girl maxed up already, since those are used as Alphas for their active skills, other 2 girls of those attributes waiting and 3 black girls waiting. I've collected 194 red bulbs to distribute when those girls hit 750, I could start distributing already but I'm waiting to understand how exactly it works.

If it's just +1% each turn, then upgrading the 2nd skill becomes a priority to make the girls usable but the 4th skill may be still a viable option when there're enough of the lightbulbs aka optional. If it sums up from all the girls and it's +7% each turn, it becomes a must upgrading the most used ones fully up to their 5th skill, which we leave blank. If it's +1% or +6% but with a consecutive attack of a given girl - then it's literally a useless skill to eat up the bulbs so we stop at 2nd/3rd level depending on our teams.

So - how is it in the end? A mod of my server in the chat (or however that function is called) couldn't answer me, they directed me here.

Edited September 13, 2024 by Sylar Rose

[Attirm]

3 hours ago, Sylar Rose said:

Now - does it really mean that it's increased by 1% each turn (for each girl having it?) or does it mean that it's increased with each consecutive attack of that particular girl?

It's 1% each turn for each girl having the skill. So with 7 mythics fully-upgraded you should be getting +7% per turn. However, it's actually better than that and in practice is closer to a 10-12% damage increase per turn.

This is because how defense works. Roughly speaking, the damage you deal is your attack stat minus the opponent's defense stat. So if you have 200k attack power and your opponent has 70k defense power then you will deal 130k damage. If your attack stat increases by 7% to 214k attack power, then you now deal 144k damage. So that +7% attack power increase actually resulted in a 10.7% increase in damage output! 

This is also why the defense power upgrade sucks, as the same dynamic works in reverse and means it does less than advertised, and a 7% increase in defenses only drops the opponent's damage by around 3-4%. 

 

[Sylar Rose]

Oh, that's great and actually - the most important information on this topic 😛 All the rest remains fairly clear - but this particular answer allows building the skills in a much more conscious way. Thank you very much.

[Montana]

Bruh I'm out here reading this whole guide wanting to finally start putting my collected bulbs to good use, then I go ingame and realize you need level 500/650 girls for the two most important Skill stages, while I'm still stuck at level 450 with my team 🥲

Good guide nevertheless, now at least all my Starter girls can make me a bunch more money while I wait until I can unlock the higher Awakening levels!

[Attirm]

This is one of the places where it's hard for us veterans to give advice to lower level players, since we were already at the level cap when this feature was introduced so we don't really know how it plays out at lower levels.

With that said, the key advice for reaching the level 750 level cap is to make sure you buy out the book vendor every time he refreshes, and get your Places of Power upgraded to level 9 because that's the main place for farming gems. It took me a little under a year to go from level 450->750 after the gem feature was first released, so if you can get your farming in order you should be at the maximum level cap by the end of 2025. This game is a marathon, not a sprint, you aren't going to reach the top echelons of Dicktator 3 without a lot of patience. 

[holymolly]

22 minutes ago, Attirm said:

 not a sprint, you aren't going to reach the top echelons of Dicktator 3 without a lot of patience. 

had to ping @SafiTheOrca even though she quit.. you can clearly get there without a lot of patience ... but you need a lot of ..other resources..

but yeah for the average joe playing.. patience is key.