Rabbit’s Reviews #367: Chloe von Einzbern (4* Avenger)

Chloe is, if not the best Servant of this summer batch, definitely the most interesting and most unique. She is, essentially, an SR version of Crane who isn’t reliant on her NP to function. She provides buffs to the party, and potentially also NP charge, and then swaps herself out for an ally. This is really really powerful in many contexts, effectively making any servant stronger with next to no action economy cost. Many more Servants can now loop CE-less, and hitting damage thresholds is easier than ever before. The catch is that you run into team cost issues—it’s not possible to run a team with an SR or SSR damage-dealer, three SSR supports, Chloe, and a full set of SSR CEs, with the current cost cap. Chloe also imposes some other timing limitations that may result in lower damage on earlier turns, and by virtue of taking an extra support slot, she locks you out of potentially gaining bond with another Servant, or gaining their bonus drops in events that tie drops to Servant selection. In hard fights, this is mostly a non-issue—Chloe is going to be a great choice for a lot of burst-oriented teams—but in farming it means her value is more situational than it might otherwise be. If you don’t need to use her to clear a particular node, you don’t want to bring her, as she slightly reduces farming efficiency… but if you do need her, and she moves you from not being able to 3-turn a node to being able to do it with four-ish drop CEs, she becomes extremely valuable.

There are surprisingly few SR Avengers in the game, considering that the class has been around nearly as long as FGO has been running. Chloe has the lowest attack and highest HP of the bunch, which isn’t surprising given her supportive lean, though it does limit her damage-dealing potential—which is actually also quite high—a bit. Fortunately for Chloe, Avengers have high offensive stats as a rule, so even with low-for-an-Avenger attack, she still hits pretty hard.

Chloe’s NP gain is pretty good. She has standard Arts-card NP gain for her single-Arts deck, but her three Quicks all have pretty high NP gain stats, and her NP hits a respectable nine times. As a triple-Quick unit with high hit-counts, she can also be counted on to rain stars, helping to fuel party crits. She has the standard Avenger passives—defensive NP gain up, crit damage up, and passive NP charge—plus another crit damage buff from Independent Action. None of these passives really matters for her supportive functionality, but they help out a bit when she’s trying to deal damage.

Appends actually don’t help Chloe all that much. Since Skadi can’t split her batteries, 20% starting charge on a Servant without easily accessible self-charge won’t matter a whole lot, and the other two appends are of middling value. Mana Loading is still probably the best pick, if only because it can help Chloe NP quickly in a Castoria team, but it matters less than usual. The Extra Attack buff is nice in light of Chloe’s good cards, and anti-Caster damage helps Chloe deal damage against a common class, so you can prioritize either.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x8 Forbidden Page x8 Eternal Gear
3	150,000	x8 Fool's Chain x8 Tearstone of Blood
4	500,000	x8 Shell of Reminiscence x8 Claw of Chaos
Max	1,500,000	x8 Primordial Lanugo x8 Cursed Beast Gallstone

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x8 Forbidden Page
2 → 3	200,000	x8 Eternal Gear
3 → 4	600,000	x10 Fool's Chain
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood
5 → 6	2,000,000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence
6 → 7	2,500,000	x12 Stake of Wailing Night
7 → 8	5,000,000	x12 Arrowhead of Malice
8 → 9	6,000,000	x12 Obsidian Knife
9 → 10	10,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100000	x8 Dragon Fang
2 → 3	200000	x8 Claw of Chaos
3 → 4	600000	x10 Black Beast Grease
4 → 5	800000	x10 Primordial Lanugo
5 → 6	2000000	x10 Eternal Ice
6 → 7	2500000	x12 Cursed Beast Gallstone
7 → 8	5000000	x12 Reactor Core of Dawn
8 → 9	6000000	x12 Twilight Ritual Sword
9 → 10	10000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Chloe’s skillset is the core of her kit, giving her her distinct supportive value. Unlike in many other cases, all three of Chloe’s skills are crucial to what makes her unique… but the critical aspects of these skills actually don’t scale with level, making maxing out her skills a bit less important than in the case of most supports. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Chloe can function as a DPS with the usual setups—triple Skadi, or two Skadis and an Oberon, or even a Skadi/Castoria shell—but the majority of her value comes from her support potential. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to use Chloe as a support, which I’ll refer to as the “free damage” and “free battery” setups.

The free damage setup ignores the charge potential on Chloe’s third skill, swapping her out as soon as possible to maximize damage on all turns. The idea here is that you treat your team as you would any other farming setup, except you start with Chloe and use all three of her skills on turn 1. For a Buster setup, this will usually mean running Chloe/DPS/Koyan/Koyan/Oberon, with a 50% charge CE on the DPS. On turn 1, you use the DPS’s skills, plus Koyan 1’s damage skills. On turn 2, the second Koyan comes in, and you loop as normal. For Arts, you usually do Chloe/DPS/Castoria/Oberon/Castoria, with Black Grail on the DPS, and plug Castoria 1 for Castoria 2 on turn 1, using the rest of your batteries as needed. Quick skews closer to the Buster or Arts setups depending on the refund specs of the DPS in question.

The advantage of this is what it says on the tin: free damage. The Buster setup hits a little less hard than a conventional team on turn 1 but deals more damage on turns 2 and 3 than would otherwise be possible. For the Arts setup it’s pretty much pure benefit. This can make it easier to hit 90++ damage thresholds, which is always appreciated, though running a full set of SSR drop CEs is impossible. One thing that’s worth noting, though, is that the damage gain is such that a Buster Servant can run Dragon’s Meridian instead of an SSR charge CE and still come out ahead damage-wise. With Dragon’s Meridian on the DPS, Mash in the backline, and SSR CEs on everyone else, the team cost comes out to 113, which is feasible for high-level players. There are drawbacks to this setup—most notably that you can’t farm bond for anyone not actively involved in farming—but it might enable 5CE clears of certain 90++ nodes that were out of reach before.

The free charge setup is a touch more complex. The idea here is that you keep Chloe on the field through turn 2, saving her second and third skills. On turn 1, you use her first skill, you let your DPS generate Manuscript Complete stacks, and then you use skill 3 to cash those out for charge before Chloe finally leaves the field. This further delays your maximum damage—your turn 1 damage is even lower than in the free damage setup, and you don’t hit full buffs until turn 3—but it gives you somewhere between 10% and 30% extra battery you wouldn’t have otherwise. This gives a truly massive amount of extra flexibility for Arts and (to a lesser degree) Quick teams. Nearly every AoE Arts unit can loop when provided an extra 30% battery, and even with less than that, this is a substantial improvement to effective loop specs.

The most interesting use for this, though, comes in Buster teams. Any Buster unit with a 50% battery on a 6-turn or lower cooldown can now loop CE-less, provided wave 1 has 3 enemies. To do this, you run Chloe/DPS/Koyan/Koyan/Oberon. On turn 1, you use the DPS’s battery, along with Koyan’s. On turn 2, Chloe provides 30% charge and gets ready to leave, and you plug Koyan out for Oberon, who uses all of his batteries on the DPS to secure the loop. On turn 3, Chloe swaps herself out for Koyan, who uses her 50% battery, making the DPS’s battery available again, bringing you to 100% charge. This can technically be a 6-drop setup if the drop CEs are 3* or 4* in rarity, or a 5-drop setup with SSR CEs… but the main value of this is letting your DPS run the Black Grail for extra damage. In most cases, what this does is make 90++ damage thresholds more accessible to certain Servants. Losing two drop CEs relative to 90+ is not generally worth it, but if you need Black Grail or starting charge to clear the 90+ node anyway, or if you value the other benefits of 90++ (such as bond or higher drop rates on incidental mats) more than pure event farm efficiency, this can have some value.

Prior to now, 30% charge and 50% charge on Buster AoE units was mostly interchangeable. 50% chargers got to skip Mana Loading, or could use event CEs that gave charge without needing them to be MLB, but aside from that they mostly worked the same as 30% chargers. This gives 50% chargers a more meaningful farming advantage, even if a situational one, which is kinda neat. Kukulkan is the biggest beneficiary of this, as she was already mostly on-par with the highest-damage Buster units, and now she can also loop with BG under the right conditions.

Chloe’s CE choice only matters in CQ contexts, as for farming she’ll just take a drop CE in most cases. For hard fights with Chloe as a support, CEs with short-term benefit are a good pick. Ox King increases her damage push for Buster Servants specifically, and anything that provides a burst of stars can help fuel crits. You can also snag her bond CE, which gives a free bonus stack of Manuscript Complete when she arrives on the field. As a DPS, the Black Grail is the best pick for damage. You can also run something like Traces of Christmas for cases where you’re trying to stall or are worried about loop specs.

Chloe’s best use case is as a support, so supportive CCs are a nice choice. CCs that remove buffs from enemies can be good, and the ones that provide NP damage buffs to the party are great if they aren’t already in use elsewhere. Alternatively, you can give her the usual crit damage CCs—Chloe should flood the field with stars pretty often when used as a DPS, and she’s light on innate crit bonuses, which makes them appealing (even if they’ll be washed out with Skadi buffs usually).

Chloe’s a great Servant, and Avengers are great grail targets. That said, most of her value is as a support, and extra stats won’t help with that. They won’t hurt either—since Chloe removes herself, extra HP doesn’t make it harder to get rid of her—and if you plan to use her as a damage-dealer, she’ll appreciate the extra stats, but if you think you’ll use her primarily as a support, she doesn’t need the help.

Chloe is a highly unique Servant, to the extent that her practical value is a bit difficult to anticipate. She is, in theory, an extremely powerful support, and the things she brings are not replicable with any other Servant. Whether those things will end up mattering is a bit of an open question. Personally, and especially if there aren’t notable holes in your box, I think she’s a Servant worth targeting. There will absolutely be cases in which she’s excellent—the question is just how frequent those are. It’s pretty rare we get a Servant who is mechanically completely unique, and from that standpoint at least, Chloe is the star of this year’s Summer event.

Overall: 10/10
Single-Target DPS: 9/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 3/10
Offensive Utility: 10/10
Defensive Utility: 4/10
Farming Usefulness: 9/10
Manga Panels: 10/10