The guide to being a newb

There's a german saying:

"Wer lesen kann ist klar im Vorteil"

This means those who can read are at a clear advantage.
This is true to so many things and especially true to Megaten.

So this guide will not teach you how to play Megaten,
but will instead teach you how to learn playing Megaten.
The first and most important thing is the Megaten Forum.
There's a ton of information on here and the most important posts
are almost always stickied, so you'll find them at the top of the page.

What should you read in there?

New Player Help has useful information about builds and Acts.

Most important to you will probably be the thread about your Class:

Caster for Shotmages, DD-mages, Enhancers and the like

Gunner is pretty self-explanatory

Melee

and also

Crafter/Synther if you want to specialize on construction instead of fighting.

I would NOT recommend a newb to make a Crafter or Synther since it can be very frustrating and boring.

There's so many more interesting/informative topics in the forums.
Just go and check it out, visit the pages that sound interesting to you and make sure to check the stickies (threads at the top with a little read dot on them).

Now what's important beside the forum?
Definitivly the Wiki. It has soooo much information and helped me a lot.
Over the forum it has the advantage of being more clearly structured and having
all the useful information concentrated. It does however lack up-to-dateness sometimes.
One important thing to note about the Wiki is, that not only the menu on the lefthand-side contains
a lot of stuff but also the main page is full of links to usefulness that can't be found on the menu.
One of the greatest links I found was Technical Data. If you like to calculate things but don't know how:
Check it out! It rox!!

Since Megaten is originally Japanese it doesn't surprise, that the Japanese community has a bigger collection
of Megaten-knowledge than the English-speaking one. That's why the Japanese Wiki is sometimes useful.
It's a bit tough to find your way through, google-translate is really not perfect yet :).
But I have personally managed to find helpful information on the JWiki I couldn't find on the American one.

Last but not least people keep asking about SI. SI stands for Soul Infusion and is also known as Spiritual Mixing. It is described in the Wiki, in the Forum and there's also an in-depth guide by Finella.
After reading those I could rather easily sort out my last confusion by talking for a short while to an
experienced player about it, and hopefully so can you :).

Finella's SI-Guide
SI on the Wiki
SI Forum Guide