Rabbit's Reviews #278: Van Gogh (5* Foreigner)

So, Van Gogh is a weird as heck Servant. On the one hand, she has a weird kit that has some readily apparent flaws and is missing pieces expected of Servants in her roles. On the other hand, the tools she does have are extremely powerful—enough so that she still has potent use cases, even though her flaws hold her back. She’s not an amazing Servant by any means, and she’s not someone to target unless you’re prepared to work around her quirks, but she has the potential to be fun and distinct if you go to the trouble of enabling her.

With six SSR Foreigners on the books now, Van Gogh replaces Abby as having the second-lowest attack and second-highest HP of the class’s SSRs. Bulk is nice on a support, but the low attack is less-than-helpful when VG tries to do damage, and even in a supportive role she prefers fast teams, so the stat spread isn’t the best. Van Gogh also has a really bad deck for supportive purposes—her triple-Quick setup makes Arts chains difficult, and her NP gain isn’t anything to write home about. She’s solid at star gen, though, which is a small plus. She also gets the usual Foreigner passive, which provides an extra 2 stars per turn. Beyond that, she gets Insanity and Divinity to help her damage a touch, as well as Item Construction to make her debuffs slightly more likely to land against resistant enemies. VG’s passive list ends with a unique passive that prevents curse from killing her, which is effectively just an added bit of safety to ensure her own gimmick doesn’t take her down. It also makes her functionally unkillable in a certain Lostbelt 3 story fight, for whatever that’s worth.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Void's Dust x10 Fool's Chain
3	300,000	x10 Phoenix Feather x10 Black Beast Grease
4	1,000,000	x10 Claw of Chaos x10 Primordial Lanugo
Max	3,000,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood x10 Spirit Root

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Void's Dust
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Seed of Yggdrasil
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Forbidden Page
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Homunculus Baby
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Aurora Steel
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Spirit Root
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Fruit of Eternity
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Glowing Star Fragment
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Van Gogh’s skillset is pretty good overall, although it does lean itself a bit more towards offense than does the rest of VG’s kit. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

Van Gogh’s most obvious use is as a supporter. She innately provides 20% Quick resist down, 20% defense down, 60% attack up, and 50% crit damage up—and when supporting one of her favored allies, that crit boost jumps up to a sizable 150%. Her large battery lets her use her NP easily, and she brings some decent defensive utility to the table as well. Relative to Waver and Reines, VG brings extra damage ampage in exchange for having a bad support deck and for providing no NP charge whatsoever to her allies.

As a support, then, VG is a most natural fit for Quick Servants who can easily access their NPs without non-Skadi help. VG is situationally a better third-support in double Skadi teams than Waver/Reines, providing more damage in exchange for sacrificing consistency. Quick Servants with innate batteries and good cards—think Ridetoki, Kama, and Achilles—can rely on just the two Skadis and their own tools to loop semi-consistently in CQ contexts, letting VG push their damage a little higher than it would otherwise be. Summer Okita is also a notable DPS choice here, if only because she benefits from Van Gogh’s Foreigner Crit buff. An Okita with two Skadis has a ton of extra crit damage already, so this isn’t hugely advantageous for her, but it will let her hit harder than she would otherwise… provided she doesn’t self-stun.

All that said, the Quick resistance debuff is a relatively small part of Van Gogh’s kit, and she has some potential alongside a Buster DPS and a Merlin or two. VG’s star weight buff can stabilize certain Buster Servants and let them do their thing a bit more reliably. The best Buster-support-VG context, though, is Summer BB. Unlike in the case of Summer Okita, Summer BB isn’t flush with crit buffs (outside of Hero Creation turns), and an extra 150% crit up, on top of all of VG’s other offensive buffs, can give her impressive turn-over-turn damage, particularly if she can lock in a brave chain. The caveat to all this is that Himiko brings similar general-purpose value that’s tailored more cleanly to Buster teams, so if you have both Himiko and VG, there’s not a lot of reason to use VG here unless you’re supporting BB specifically.

Lastly, VG can work as a DPS if properly enabled. She gives herself a ton of buffs and brings a fair bit of defensive utility as well, letting her do solid turn-over-turn damage in some comps. Skadi is a natural support pick here, boosting all of VG’s Quick cards and letting her access her NP more frequently. Double VG also has the potential to be powerful if you can clear fast enough, as then both VGs have 300% crit up to work with. VG’s damage is so dependent on having card access, also, that Summer BB is useful for letting VG leverage her buffs fully. Granted, if you’re running Summer BB anyway you’re better off letting BB herself be your DPS, but if your goal is to get VG’s damage output as high as possible, BB’s a good option.

If VG’s skills are maxed, any 50% starting CE will let her NP immediately without outside help. His Rightful Place, if you have it, is a great pick for this, as it gives VG a total of 16 stars per turn while her NP is active, giving you a good head-start on enabling crits. It’s also worth noting that even with her first skill at level 1, VG can NP immediately with just an MLB Imaginary Element.

Supports aren’t good grail picks in general and VG’s a weird enough Servant that even if you like her design and character I’d recommend waiting to grail her until you’ve used her a fair bit and know whether you like her kit. If you like how VG feels as a DPS, though, the extra stats will go a long way towards shoring up her damage.

Van Gogh is odd. On the one hand, she has a lot of supportive value, especially in terms of raw offensive buffs. On the other hand she’s missing the batteries she’d need to fully support Quick teams properly, and her defensive utility isn’t enough to reliably sustain longer playstyles. On the one hand, she can give herself huge damage buffs. On the other hand, she has a non-damaging NP and a triple-Quick deck, which limits her damage potential.

The biggest knock against her in my view, and the thing that most crystallizes where she falls, is that she doesn’t really work “generally.” There are specific setups where she can be good, but they require access to some combination of Skadi, certain strong Quick DPS Servants, and/or certain Foreigners. Her good teams are not especially accessible, and relative to Himiko (who also needs specific team setups to work), her floor and ceiling are both a fair bit lower. Ultimately this is a Servant I wouldn’t recommend pulling for unless you have the tools to enable her and actively want to put in the effort to make her good. There are plenty of easier ways to build more effective teams, but if you’re motivated to use Van Gogh and you have the right tools available, she can be fun and pretty distinctive.

Overall: 7/10
Single-Target DPS: 7/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 5/10
Offensive Utility: 7/10
Defensive Utility: 6/10
Farming Usefulness: 1/10
Stars: 10/10