Warrior General Games

My free safety is always in a zone defense. am I better off starting with first step to get the superior vision or should I load up on zone sa first?

Until you are done with stats, no SAs at all.

You never "load up on an SA" unless you have a piece of AEQ to go with it or its one of the first two in the SA tree imo. You will always be sacrificing something to get an SA higher than 6 naturally. Also my opinion but if you are dropping more than 12 SP into an SA something is missing. UNLESS youre building a strictly run stop DT strength beast.