Rabbit's Reviews #266: Altria (5* Caster)

So, uh, this Servant is a thing that exists.

There’s a concept in game balance called “best in context,” which refers to the idea that in a well-balanced game everything should be the best in some context. To apply this (simplistically) to FGO, you might have a Servant who’s the best at farming waves of Sabers, while another might be the best at taking down high-HP Rider bosses, while yet another might be the best at surviving against enemies who spam their Noble Phantasms. While there have been some balance misfires in the past, this is an idea that FGO has seemed to at least make an effort at reflecting.

And then Altria Caster comes along. She is, through this framework, best in every context.

She’s the best farming enabler in the game, she’s the best high-end CQ support in the game, she’s the best budget team support in the game, she’s the best support to double up on, she’s the best support for when you can’t double up, and she’s probably the best at stall, too. She’s straight-up the best Servant in the game and it’s not even close. She more-or-less matches the things Waver, Reines, and Skadi do and then improves upon them, and she makes the value Merlin brings largely unnecessary. If your goal is to run the strongest team possible, there is literally no situation in which you would not bring her unless she is explicitly prohibited or countered.

I’ll go into some detail with regards to what this might mean for the game’s balance going forward in this review’s conclusion, but in the interest of jumping into the bulk of the review, suffice it to say that Altria Caster is really freaking strong.

Altria’s stats are fairly standard for an SSR support Caster, roughly even with her competition. Her HP is very slightly above average (matching Skadi’s), and her attack is very slightly below average. Because of how her kit works, though, her stats will very rarely ever matter at all. Her internals, however, are a little more interesting. Her Arts cards are a little above the norm for a triple-Arts Servant, and she has Territory Creation EX plus an in-kit AoE NP gen buff working in her favor. This means Altria’s Arts cards gen better than Skadi’s do most of the time, and she has three cards to Skadi’s two, too. Given that Skadi is notable for having really good Arts cards as supports go, this is a pretty nice advantage (albeit not one that will matter in most contexts—she’ll generally rely on batteries to gain access to her NP). Unfortunately, her one Quick card is bad, and her deck also means she’s not going to be genning many stars. For passives she has the aforementioned Territory Creation, as well as Magic Resistance and a unique passive that buffs her Arts Crits. Altria’s unlikely to be critting very often, so this doesn’t matter much, but it’s still kind of neat to have.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Caster Piece
3	300,000	x12 Caster Piece x9 Seed of Yggdrasil
4	1,000,000	x5 Caster Monument x10 Forbidden Page x2 Spirit Root
Max	3,000,000	x12 Caster Monument x4 Spirit Root x5 Glowing Star Fragment

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Caster
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Caster
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Caster
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Caster x5 Forbidden Page
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Caster x10 Forbidden Page
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Caster x6 Seed of Yggdrasil
7 → 8	10,000,000	x12 Seed of Yggdrasil x3 Egg of Truth
8 → 9	12,000,000	x8 Egg of Truth x10 Glowing Star Fragment
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Altria’s skillset is ludicrous. At core, she’s a 50% charger who also has nearly Tamamo-level damage buffs and better-than-Paracelsus-level NP looping buffs—and that’s before you even take her NP into account. It’s nuts. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3, but all three skills are amazing and you’ll want them all leveled asap.

Oh boy, where to begin?

I’ll start with the obvious: Altria enables Arts looping extremely easily. With cards in play, almost any Servant can loop with Two Altrias, Black Grail, and one of Tamamo, Paracelsus, etc. If you can run these setups, they will be the best setups for both farming and CQs, by and large.  Plenty of AoE Servants—and a few ST Servants—can do this even without cards, especially if you allow Waver or Reines as the third Servant. A small handful (such as Rider Da Vinci) can do this without using the plugsuit at all.

Assuming you’re running double Altria and plugsuit, the big question becomes “who do I bring as my third support?” This will depend on your DPS and the fight, but the most notable options are as follows:

-Tamamo provides the biggest damage boost, while also helping with recursion a little bit. If you can bring Tamamo and still loop, she’s the best option. Interestingly, this means that rather than outmoding Tamamo, Altria actually made Tamamo more valuable than she was before, as Arts finally has a way to fully leverage Tamamo’s high steroids.

-Paracelsus is the best at pushing NP gain. If you’re struggling with consistency but not damage, he’s a safe pick.

-Waver and Reines can help with looping consistency while also providing more damage than does Paracelsus.

-Sherlock lets your DPS ignore defensive buffs, and he helps push damage a little as well.

If a Servant can’t loop with Black Grail, they almost certainly can with a 50% starting CE and one of Waver, Reines, and Skadi. This works just like traditional Quick looping: you use one of the Altrias’ batteries and both Arts buffs and then follow up with additional batteries on turns 2 and 3 to finish out the loop. A few Servants still can’t farm this way—Servants with one-hit NPs, mostly—but most can, and even those who can’t will be able to get by in CQs with the benefit of cards.

That all assumes double Altria, of course. The thing is, though, there are so many options for Arts supports that you can probably find a way to get your Servant-of-choice looping even with just one. Paracelsus still provides a whole bunch of NP gain, and Tamamo and Bride aren’t bad at it either. Even Lanling can facilitate looping, especially with his bond CE, and the battery supports can help a Servant “cheat” as always. You’ll be taking a damage hit without double Altria, of course, but her buffs are so good even single-Altria fastburn will be super strong provided you get creative with your team comps.

And if you just don’t have the tools to make fastplay work? Altria stalls, too, and all of the tools Arts had that were useful for stall still exist now. An Altria/Tamamo shell keeps Altria’s buffs up more often while also letting your DPS hit hard on damage turns, while an Altria/Merlin team is mega-stable. You probably won’t need much more defense from your DPS, but if you do you can bring Servants like Edison and Munenori, who will more or less shut down whatever card damage gets past Altria’s NP while also contributing reasonable damage themselves just by virtue of the raw damage ampage Altria brings.

Even if you have no native supports, you can run Altria with Mash and immediately have a powerhouse Arts shell. To make this even better, the best free tools the game gives out are all Arts. Altria/Euryale/Mash, for example, is an excellent slowplay team, and literally everyone has access to it.

I can’t reasonably go into detail on every Arts Servant who works well with Altria in the context of this review, but here are a few notable winners:

Berserker Vlad loops off his NP alone in the right teams and deals absurd levels of damage. He makes a strong case for being the best ST Servant now.

Orion (the original; not the new one) can now spam his loaded NP to keep enemy attack damage and crits under control and to prevent a single enemy from having any chance to NP.

Dioscuri loops trivially and doesn’t have to bring Sherlock (sacrificing damage) in order to get around enemy defenses.

Summer Musashi is the highest-damage AoE option available. She should stomp basically anything AoE.

Rider Da Vinci loops trivially, even without plugsuit. She also guarantees the Altrias get access to their NP in time for wave 3. Even at NP1 she can hit omnifarm damage numbers with black grail, and her sheer consistency makes her one of the best farming picks in the game. She also slowplays brilliantly if you need her to.

Saber Hokusai and Kenshin are both welfares with exceptionally high damage who loop easily with cards. Hokusai is a little better overall but Kenshin is also strong and crushes Archers.

Euryale, Robin, and Tell are free options with good-to-great Altria synergy, and even new players can use them. Euryale is the best in slower contexts but has a little more trouble looping; Tell has nice crit access and is generally very consistent; and Robin has the highest damage with the caveat that he falls off hard if his poison misses.

Chen Gong is an absurdly powerful DPS who can potentially hit numbers comparable to ‘Zerker Musashi if you have the right supports to feed him. Chen Gong often draws attention for his supportive value, but don’t forget that he hits ridiculously hard as well.

If a Servant isn’t on this list, that doesn’t mean they aren’t good (or even excellent) with Altria—this is just a small set of examples.

And that’s just Arts. Altria’s kit is such that she’s also useful in Buster and Quick setups. Buster teams appreciate her batteries and her defenses, and Quick teams appreciate both of those plus her NP gain buff. Altria’s kit makes her a better third support than the likes of Waver, Reines, and Bride in most Quick teams, and even some Buster Servants can benefit from supercharged Arts-card NP gain. It’s also worth noting that you can throw Altria’s third skill onto your support (Merlin, Skadi, Waver, etc) to protect them for a turn and help them build up their own NPs more quickly in a pinch.

Honestly, Altria’s CE choice doesn’t matter nearly as much as your DPS’s. That said, you’ll usually want a starting NP CE to make sure Altria has access to her NP if you need or want it. Demonic Bodhisattva is a great pick, as it ups the number of invulns you get off Altria’s first NP by 2. Altria’s bond CE is also a strong choice, as it boosts your team’s attack and NP gain with very little opportunity cost.

Altria may be the best Servant in the game, but she’s also a support and her stats don’t matter. Grail her if you love her; skip otherwise.

In case it’s not obvious already, Altria is absurdly good. Like, “fundamentally change the way we perceive the game’s balance” good. My first reaction when I saw her kit was, and I quote, “This is bad—like, actively bad for the game. Wild.” From a traditional balance standpoint, I stand by that—although it’s a little too early for the kind of doomsaying that’s been going around in some circles.

The next few paragraphs will be a bit of speculation on my part with regards to how Altria might impact FGO’s gameplay as a whole moving forward. It is, again, speculation, so if you aren’t interested in my thoughts about this, feel free to skip to the end of the review.

Altria radically raises the thresholds of what’s possible at the high end—and at all levels of play, really. Top-end Arts teams are by and large significantly stronger than even top-end Quick teams were before Altria’s release. A well-built Altria team should be able to crush pretty much anything we’ve seen in the game to-date.

There are, broadly speaking, two notable alternatives with regards to how this impacts balance moving forward:

In case 1, DW balances around Altria teams, and everything else struggles to keep up. High-end Quick teams do okay but have issues, while low-to-mid-range Quick and anything Buster has an awful time trying to clear content without command seals. Running anything but double-Altria becomes super painful, and the only meaningful gameplay variety comes in how you built your double-Altria teams.

In case 2, content stays on more or less the same trajectory as it has been, and Altria exists as something of a cheat code, or an easy mode. Players who don’t really care about gameplay and just want to read the story can steamroll everything with Altria, while players who want to run more interesting teams can stick with lower-end teams. Difficulty becomes more-or-less self-imposed, determined by the strength of the team you choose to use rather than by the quest itself.

And then there are of course a range of possibilities that fall somewhere in the middle. The biggest concerns about Altria’s release tend to come from people who think case 1 is the most likely, or at least is likely enough it’s worth being worried about.

Personally I think case 2 (or something similar) is more likely. FGO is and always has been driven primarily by its narrative. Provided the game’s difficulty doesn’t skyrocket, Altria provides a way for players who just want to read Lostbelt to circumvent the trickier story fights. From that standpoint her addition makes a certain degree of sense—threading the needle between making story content hard enough to interest gameplay-minded players and easy enough to not discourage story-oriented players can be a tricky one. Altria, it seems, provides an out.

Ultimately, we don’t know what the game will look like in six months. At the very least, Altria democratizes fast farming, which is without question a good thing, no matter what the long-term balance implications might be. It’s absolutely valid to worry about what Altria’s release means for the game going forward, but I think it’s a little too early to panic.

All-in-all, Altria is ludicrously powerful. She is the best at all levels of investment, in pretty much all styles of play. The only thing she doesn’t do is facilitate crits—and who needs crits when you loop your NP regardless? This is a must-pull Servant if ever there’s been one, but even if you miss her (by choice, luck, or timing) a single Altria pulled off your support list will make your life drastically easier. She’s just that good.

Overall: 11/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 7/10
Offensive Utility: 11/10
Defensive Utility: 9/10
Farming Usefulness: 11/10
Scale-Breaking: 11/10