>>530881289
Starting out you pretty much just work with what you get. Once you start farming 5 star artifacts, you first look for ones with the right main stats and mainly focus on those. You balance leveling the best you find with the artifact exp you have available while looking for better substats and better rolls.

Ideally you want 4 good substats with good rolls, but that's extremely unlikely to find. It's dependent on character, but attacking stat, crit rate and crit damage is generally what you want on damage dealers, as long as your artifact mostly rolls into those, it should be a decent piece. Supports will want the stat their supporting scales with and likely energy recharge if they need their burst. Again, you work with what you get, so maybe your first piece will only have Atk% and maybe CR, but you'll probably want to level it anyway rather than staying extremely weak and waiting for a piece with all of the three mentioned stats. There's online calculators you can use if you ever get to the point where you have a bunch of similar pieces and can't figure out which combination would be the best.

Once you get going and have a team or two geared, you can be more picky and wait for a more ideal piece before leveling it.

>>529863220
Yeah do those as soon as you can, you'll scale into the difficulty pretty easy and you get more rewards from mobs etc
If you're having trouble use food buffs or reference this pic