Rabbit's Reviews #248: Altria Pendragon (5* Ruler)

Introduction

Summer Lartoria is a really boring servant. She’s an exceptionally bland Buster Crit Ruler with unusually high steroids that only exist to offset her pathetic attack stat. She has passable Merlin synergy and is a workable point servant in standard Buster teams, but she doesn’t really bring anything of value to differentiate herself from her competition beyond the fact that she’ll take half damage from most everything.

Servant Data

Ruler

QQABB (Lancer)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

4

3

5

4

Attribute	Heaven
Alignment	Lawful Summer

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

April Fool's

Max HP 16,912

HP Rank

Max ATK 9,593

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,482	Base HP	2,480
Max Atk	9,593	Max HP	16,912
Grail Atk	10,501	Grail HP	18,528

Magic Resistance A

Increase your Debuff Resist by 20%.

Territory Creation B

Increase your Arts Card effectiveness by 8%.

Card Hits	4	4	3	5	4
Per Hit	0.57%	0.57%	0.57%	0.57%	0.57%

	NP per Hit (%)						0.57%
	NP when Attacked (%)						3%

	Star Absorption	100
	Star Generation per Hit	10.0%

Overview

Material Requirements

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Archer Piece x5 Lancer Piece x5 Caster Piece
3	300,000	x5 Saber Piece x5 Rider Piece x5 Assassin Piece x5 Berserker Piece
4	1,000,000	x5 Archer Monument x5 Lancer Monument x5 Caster Monument
Max	3,000,000	x5 Saber Monument x5 Rider Monument x5 Assassin Monument x5 Berserker Monument

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Archer x5 Gem of Lancer x5 Gem of Caster
2 → 3	400,000	x5 Gem of Saber x5 Gem of Rider x5 Gem of Assassin x5 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Archer x5 Magic Gem of Lancer x5 Magic Gem of Caster
4 → 5	1,600,000	x5 Magic Gem of Saber x5 Magic Gem of Rider x5 Magic Gem of Assassin x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Archer x5 Secret Gem of Lancer x5 Secret Gem of Caster
6 → 7	5,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Saber x5 Secret Gem of Rider x5 Secret Gem of Assassin x5 Secret Gem of Berserker
7 → 8	10,000,000	x12 Shell of Reminiscence
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Dragon's Reverse Scale
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Servant Skills

Lartoria’s skillset is actually pretty strong, but it’s not so powerful as to compensate fully for her bizarrely defensive stat spread. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Start Np

Royal Bunny A

Increase own NP Gauge.
Apply Evade to self (1 turn).
Gain a delayed buff on self:
After 1 turn, increase own ATK (1 turn).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
NP Gauge +	20%	22%	24%	26%	28%	30%	32%	34%	36%	40%
Atk +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Royal Bunny is a busy skill. It’s a 40% battery, which is fairly strong but also not enough to let Lartoria immediately NP with a 50% starting NP CE without help. This may be by design, though, as the skill also comes with a delayed one-turn steroid, which means Lartoria should ideally be using her NP the turn after she uses her battery, which (without Waver shenanigans) probably means not using her NP on the turn she presses this skill. The combination of the 40% cap and the delayed buff means Lartoria isn’t really ideal for clearing the first wave of enemies while farming, but with low-HP enemies and/or outside buffs she might be able to handle a second wave in some cases. The skill also has a dodged tacked-on, which it doesn’t really need but which makes Lartoria even bulkier than she already is. Generally speaking you’ll probably use this more for the battery and the delayed buff than for the dodge, but extra survival is always a nice bonus and this can let Lartoria live through an NP or a mega-crit-turn in some instances.

Command Shuffle

Royal Card C+

Randomly deal 5 new Command Cards.
Increase Critical Strength for all allies (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Crit Damage +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Royal Card is weird. It’s our first instance of card shuffle on a servant skill, but it also comes with Lartoria’s only crit steroid. While a “normal” Buster crit servant would wait until they have good cards to use their crit buff, Lartoria just… presses this whenever and hopes for the best, I guess? It’s very on-brand for a gambling-themed character, but it’s also unreliable in a way that does Buster teams no favors. This will be more valuable in teams that involve a semi-support (or just a Buster Crit attacker with some utility, like Karna) as more servants can make use of the buff and there are fewer possible “useless” draws, but generally speaking those types of setups will be considerably less reliable than just running double Merlin or Merlin/Mash, and reliability is ostensibly Lartoria’s biggest point of differentiation anyway due to her class. There are two ways this can be beneficial, though—albeit both are pretty marginal benefits. The first is that if you draw all your good cards on turn one of a cycle and on turn two you see that you’re stuck with bad draws for that turn and the next, you can use this to reset and avoid the two bad turns, which might occasionally be worthwhile. The other is that, as this resets your deck, you are guaranteed to get all of Lartoria’s cards during the skill’s uptime, provided nobody dies and you don’t use another skill to mess with your draws. In that sense, this skill actually adds a bit of consistency—but since you don’t know when her cards will pop up that technical consistency has little value in practice.

Dmg Up

Knight of the Lion B

Increase own ATK (3 turns).
Increase own Critical Star Gather Rate (1 turn).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Atk +	20%	22%	24%	26%	28%	30%	32%	34%	36%	40%
Star Gather +	300%	320%	340%	360%	380%	400%	420%	440%	460%	500%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Knight of Lions is a pretty good skill in a vacuum. Most 3-turn buffs cap at 30%, and this goes all the way to 40% in exchange for an extra turn of CD relative to most skills of its type. It also boosts Lartoria’s star weight for a turn and its duration matches Hero Creation perfectly. She’ll hit decently hard with this up, though her low innate attack means her damage still won’t be all that great, and she’ll fall off hard while this is on CD.

Noble Phantasm

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
A+	Anti-Army	4

Effect	Deals damage to all enemies. Increase your NP Gauge.

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Damage +	300%	400%	450%	475%	500%
NP +	20%	20%	20%	20%	20%

Overcharge Effect	Increase your Quick Card effectiveness (1 turn). [Activates first] Increase your Arts Card effectiveness (1 turn). [Activates first] Increase your Buster Card effectiveness (1 turn). [Activates first]

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Quick +	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%
Arts +	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%
Buster +	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%

Usage Tips

Grail Potential

Conclusion

If you need a general-purpose AoE Buster servant you can take anywhere, Lartoria will be… fine. She works well with Merlin and she won’t go down easily. Unfortunately, she doesn’t really have much to recommend her over her competition, so if you have other alternatives—Arjuna Alter, Gil, Ivan, Tesla, Ishtar, Cleo, and so on—she doesn’t serve much of a purpose. She’s also not cleanly better than Santa Quetz, who’s free, and with Lartoria at NP1 especially I would argue Quetz is a significantly stronger pick. Lartoria’s not a bad servant, to be clear, and she’ll definitely serve newer players well, but for more established accounts (or even for future-focused new players) there’s not much reason to pull her, at least from a gameplay standpoint.

Rabbit's Arbitrary Ratings

Overall: 7/10
Single-Target DPS: 6/10
AoE DPS: 6/10
Survivability: 9/10
Offensive Utility: 4/10
Defensive Utility: N/A
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Believing in the Heart of the Cards: 10/10