Nearly every regular battle in Silver Nornir is pushover easy and can be quickly won through the autobattle feature, but boss battles are challenging and the game has a few other quirks to be aware of. As usual, this tip guide will have no story spoilers and no details about about specific boss fights.
Like certain other World Wide Software games, Silver Nornir can and will radically alter the player's party without warning. Be prepared for this to happen anytime during the main game (in the postgame the player is free to choose their favorite team and stick with it).
Cautious players may want to maintain a backup save in a safe place. I recommend always keeping everyone's gear up to date, and always keeping a large supply of HP and MP restoration items handy. Another precaution is to keep a few extra, unequipped magic gems on hand just in case.
TP restoration items are nice but expensive, if they can be purchased at all, and it's better to spend gold on other priorities. TP-fueled Special Moves are powerful, but not really needed until the postgame.
Another quirk of Silver Nornir is that it can be tricky to remember where to go or what to do next. Sometimes instructions are given in dialogue exactly once, even if the player talks to the same NPC again. A story recap option in the menu helps, but I generally recommend always keeping the main save (not the backup save) in whatever dungeon or town progresses the story, so as not to lose track.
Although individual characters in Silver Nornir have a few unique and innate spells, most magic spells are tied to elemental gems that characters buy and equip. These gems can level up to 10 from EP (a special kind of experience earned from battles, along with regular exp that levels up the party). Higher level gems give access to more spells from their elemental family.
Elemental gems can be switched around between party members anytime out of combat. Gems never lose levels, and switching them transfers access to their spells. Certain characters have a gem slot reserved exclusively for a gem of a specific element, or a dual-element gem where one element is the specific element.
Single-element gems give both stat boosts and stat penalties when equipped. Dual element gems give no stat penalties and access to spells from both elements, but they are difficult or expensive to obtain.
The most important spells taught by elemental gems are buffs and debuffs, which affect the whole party or all enemies. These make a tremendous difference in boss battles. Buffing Magic Defense (water) and Physical Defense (earth) while debuffing enemy Magic Attack (dark) and Physical Attack (fire) will help keep the party alive. Buffing speed/debuffing enemy speed (wind for both) will grant the party more turns in battle. Buffing Magic Attack (dark) and Physical Attack (fire) while debuffing enemy Magic Defense (water) and Physical Defense (earth) will substantially increase damage done.
The only buff/debuff that seems to be unimportant is Luck (fire). The Light element provides no buffs or debuffs, and is therefore the least important element.
When setting up gems, I recommend giving individual characters access to multiple elements, the better to ensure the quick application of buffs and debuffs. A character's magic-related stats do not matter for buffs and debuffs; they last a fixed amount of turns no matter what.
Characters who are faster or get more turns will see their buffs drop off more quickly. Reapplying a buff or debuff already in place won't extend it. To check what debuffs an enemy has, target the enemy with any single-target attack. If a character's default attack is naturally multitarget, then it won't make enemy debuff markers visible; target the enemy with a single-target spell to see the debuff markers.
One other very helpful spell is the high-level wind spell Uranus, which lets any character pass their turn to any other character.
Special attacks that combine two or three characters are extremely powerful, but have strong drawbacks. They cost TP (and often MP) from each character involved, and they use up the turns of all characters who participate.
There are no items that will heal more than one character in Silver Nornir. Spells or abilities that heal the whole party are vital for boss fights. A couple characters naturally have strong healing moves, but it's better to hedge one's bets by equipping high-level Water gems to multiple characters, just for the healing magic. Characters with high magic stats will naturally cast more powerful heal spells, but even low magic characters can be useful healers in a pinch.
What to buy from the Shop? Console versions of Silver Nornir make Shop currency easy to grind, but mobile players will have to choose carefully. The Shop dungeon has useful treasures and a high number of "rabbit" encounters that yield more exp and gold - but if the player gets Shop dungeon access too early then its regular encounters can be quite threatening.
I recommend Shop exclusive (or near-exclusive) accessories that block bad status, and block instant death attacks. Bad status attacks are generally more common. All other Shop accessories are cool toys but not really needed. The Shop accessory that guarantees stealing is fun to play with, since stealing normally has a low success rate, but stealing is never or almost never worth the effort anyway.
It's possible to buy Orihalcum (used to upgrade weapons and armor) from the Shop, but it's also possible to buy Orihalcum with gold, in addition to finding a few treasure chests with Orihalcum here and there. Orihalcum isn't really needed until the postgame anyway. Gold is not hard to obtain through autobattling and through selling off extra consumables whenever one gets a full stack of 99.
Miracle Gum (restores 150 TP) is almost impossible to get except from the Shop, and very useful in the endgame and postgame.
Most character titles in Silver Nornir come from talking to NPCs or progressing the story and confer no benefits or penalties. Some postgame titles confer strong benefits, penalties, or both when equipped. Some titles are only equippable by certain characters, others are equippable by all characters. No two characters can ever have the same title equipped at the same time.
Are you trying for S rank in battles? The biggest factors for an S rank seem to be the number of turns taken (lower is better) and whether the enemy was hit with an attack it is weak to (which can be counterproductive if the player only has access to low-damage attack spells). Overall, I recommend not worrying about S rank unless one is deliberately trying to grind Shop currency, and even then, just autobattling random encounters is so fast that it can make up for time lost getting lower battle ranks.
Spoiler-free tips for Silver Nornir
Thanks as usual for the many useful tips. Although it was challenging at first, I powered up my party as soon as possible in the "shop dungeon", and whenever a new party member joined, I let my maximum level (150) party carry him or her to maximum level in the "shop dungeon" immediately. Doing this takes away all of the remaining challenge, though, which is exactly what I aimed for. 