Rabbit’s Reviews #386: Marie Antoinette (Alter) (5* Avenger)

Marie Alter is a bulky AoE Arts Avenger with great loopage and low damage. This isn’t a bad proposition, per se—stall servants have their place—but Marie’s damage is too low to make her a particularly good neutral farmer, and Arts teams aren’t generally hurting for survival thanks to the nonsense that is Castoria. Typically what you want out of an Arts Servant (and out of an Avenger, for that matter) is damage. Killing faster usually means killing safer in Castoria teams, as the longer the fight draws on, the more likely you are to lose a Servant to bad RNG, whether that’s due to an unlucky stun debuff or to enemies deciding to focus-fire one unit or to something else entirely.

This is to say, Marie isn’t a bad Servant. She’s quite good, in fact, especially if you aren’t looking at high-tier farming content or very hard CQs. She faces a lot of competition in the neutral DPS space, however—she’s generally worse than Spish, Avenger Kama, Ruler Melusine, and Summer Ibuki—and as a utility-focused AoE SSR she doesn’t hold up to the likes of Tez. Her closest competition is Avenger Nito, but Nito boasts a 100% battery, which is more unique and more valuable than the things Marie brings.

If you happen to pull Marie, she can do some good things, but she’s definitely on the lower-end of her particular role, which makes her less appealing than she could otherwise be.

Marie has high-ish attack and low-ish health for an SSR Avenger—in fact, her stats are tied with Kagekiyo—which means she has very high attack relative to SSRs as a whole. This is a good starting point for an offensive Servant, though unfortunately that strong offensive lean doesn’t carry through to the rest of her kit. She’s not great at star gen, though she does have two 4-hit Quicks. Her active NP gain, meanwhile, is just okay—her Arts cards are at the lower end of what’s normal, and her Quicks are actively bad for NP gain.

Marie’s only passives are the usual Avenger ones, which are mostly relevant for giving a bit more passive and defensive NP gain. For Appends, similarly, the usual stuff applies: Marie is a 30% charger, so Mana Loading is borderline required, while Anti-Rider attack up is marginally useful for farming in some contexts, and the Extra attack buff doesn’t do much for Marie.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence x10 Tearstone of Blood
3	300,000	x10 Phoenix Feather x10 Cursed Beast Gallstone
4	1,000,000	x10 Ball of Rainbow Thread x10 Obsidian Knife
Max	3,000,000	x10 Scale of Fantasy x10 Flower of the End

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Phoenix Feather
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Serpent Jewel
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Tearstone of Blood
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Cursed Beast Gallstone
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Tsukumo Mirror
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Giant's Ring
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Obsidian Knife
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Flower of the End
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence
2 → 3	400000	x10 Great Knight Medal
3 → 4	1200000	x12 Stake of Wailing Night
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Aurora Steel
5 → 6	4000000	x12 Fruit of Eternity
6 → 7	5000000	x15 Ball of Rainbow Thread
7 → 8	10000000	x15 Scale of Fantasy
8 → 9	12000000	x15 Remnants of Madness
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Marie’s skillset is quite simple—loopage, damage, and survival, in that order. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

Marie can loop 1/2/x or 2/1/x nodes CE-less, but she’s just shy of being able to loop 1/1/x nodes. 1/1/x nodes tend to require ST units to hit damage thresholds anyway, so this isn’t really a problem—as long as Marie has the damage (which is very much not a given, mind) she should be able to loop anything you’d want her to. The setup for this is the typical Castoria/Castoria/Oberon team, with Mana Loading on Marie. Make sure to use Marie’s battery on the first turn, and use the rest of the batteries as you need to cover the specifics of the node, and she’ll do fine.

Given her low damage, Marie is more useful for CQs, where she doesn’t necessarily need to clear quickly. Here, too, she’s pretty straightforward—you can run Castoria and one of Reines, Tamamo, and Lady Avalon for a stall-focused team, or you can run double Castoria and rely on Marie’s third skill to survive until a second buff cycle for shorter fights.

Outside of high-end teams, Marie is pretty self-sufficient and should work decently well with any budget supports. Xu Fu is particularly good here, bringing Arts up, NP gain up, and NP charge—all things that help Marie’s loop-focused gameplay. Mash, Mozart, and the like are all also good picks for the usual reasons. Marie’s defensive tools are more valuable on teams that aren’t flush with them, which makes her a relatively strong unit if you don’t have lots of good supports.

Marie loops so easily and is so bulky that there’s little reason not to run her with Black Grail, unless you’re using an event CE. If you don’t have BG, whatever CE you have that provides the most damage—Heaven’s Feel, Mark on a Smiling Face, Formal Craft, et cetera—is the best fallback.

What Marie is most in need of is extra damage, and NP-damage-boosting CCs are quite rare. Assuming you’re using those elsewhere, there aren’t a lot of great options here. Buff removal and debuff removal CCs can be good for consistency, and healing CCs make Marie a little bulkier, but both are marginal benefits. The other notable option is curse CCs—Marie doesn’t need them, usually, but it can make it slightly easier to trigger her power mod effect against enemies with very high debuff resistance.

Avengers are great grail targets and extra levels help offset Marie’s low damage. There are plenty of better options for taking to 100—or even 120—but if you happen to find yourself with a high-NP Marie and are having trouble hitting damage thresholds, grails and gold fous are a good way to address that, at least in part.

When Avenger Nito dropped, I said she would have been great if health thresholds were lower. Typical enemy health hasn’t dropped since then (though it also hasn’t really grown), so the same sorts of things are true here. Marie is an extremely consistent AoE Arts unit, which is nice! She’s especially nice if you don’t have other good Arts units, or if you’re light on supports.

The thing is, we’re a long way into FGO’s life cycle. We’ve had years and years of (admittedly quite gradual) power creep, and we have plenty of alternatives as neutral damage-dealers go. If you’ve been playing for a while, odds are pretty good you have one of the many better alternatives, and that you have several (if not all) of the meta supports. This doesn’t make Marie bad, but it does make it hard to advocate pulling for her. FGO has been rerunning Servants a lot more recently, too, which makes pulling for weaker versions of other Servants even less enticing—sure, we don’t know when the others will return, but we can reliably say that at least one of Spish, Ibuki, Tez, Melusine, and Kama will come back before too long.

All-in-all, Marie is a good Servant. If you pull her and invest in her, she’ll do well for you. There’s just little reason to actively target Servants who aren’t at the power ceiling and who don’t do anything unique—which, unfortunately, makes Avenger Marie pretty forgettable, at least as gameplay goes.

Overall: 8/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 5/10
Offensive Utility: 1/10
Defensive Utility: 7/10
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Cake: 10/10