in my case i've only been playing for 4 months.... quickly reached over rank 100 due to spamming tons of flower gems as refills, but that was mainly cause i focused on event 5*'s at the time (in fact, never did the storyline past chapter 12 yet). they hand out 5*'s like crazy this way so i figured a lot of them would carry the teams for a while

now that I CAN make a whaleship full of 5* and above, i'm more oriented towards pulling gacha with those flower gems. especially since events seem to give 16 each run and logins will help too.

due to this, i do have some grind points for whaleship (pretty much 9-3 or 4-4 if i don't want RNG involved), but still will take a moment