Rabbit’s Reviews #388: The Count of Monte Cristo (5* Avenger)

New Dantes is easily the standout unit of Ordeal Call 2. He makes a good case for being the best ST Quick Servant in the game, and his only real competition is MHXA, and only then because her damage is so high. Dantes does all the things: he has great NP gain, great damage, a 50% battery, and silly strong defensive tools. His only real drawback is that he’s a Quick Servant, and Quick is the card type least suited to stall… but even if you treat him purely as a burst-oriented Servant, he’s pretty much as reliable as a fastplay Servant can be. Dantes is, in short, excellent—a great pickup for anyone who happens to pull him.

Dantes is the second SSR Avenger of the chapter, and his attack is identical to the first. His health is slightly lower than Avenger Marie’s, though, but that’s okay—he has more than enough survival in his kit, and having high-ish attack by Avenger standards means he has very high attack relative to SSRs as a whole, which is great. His internals are similarly very good—his Quick focus and high hit-counts mean he’s great at generating stars, and while his Arts card is only average for a single-Arts Servant, his two Quicks are both very good for NP gain.

Dantes only has the three typical Avenger passives, granting him increased defensive NP gain (which won’t often matter since he can keep his targets stunned almost constantly anyway), slightly increased crit damage (which is negligible in a world with Skadi), and passive NP charge (which is always nice). Appends, though, are a bit more complicated than usual. Mana Loading is hard to pass up, but Dantes is a 50% charger whose favored supports don’t have split batteries, so the extra 20% starting charge isn’t going to matter as often as it does for most Servants. It can still be helpful if running a Castoria stall team, or for cases where you’re running a non-MLB Kaleid or a non-MLB event CE for some reason. The Extra Attack buff, meanwhile, is arguably Dantes’s best append, as Dantes has great cards and appreciates having a stronger Extra. Anti-Avenger damage is highly situational—Avengers aren’t all that common as enemy classes go—but especially if you don’t have a good Moon Cancer, it can be nice to solidify Dantes as an Avenger-killer.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Fool's Chain Open Fool's Chain configuration options x10 Ghost Lantern Open Ghost Lantern configuration options
3	300,000	x10 Deadly Poisonous Needle Open Deadly Poisonous Needle configuration options x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
4	1,000,000	x10 Heart of the Foreign God Open Heart of the Foreign God configuration options x10 Reactor Core of Dawn Open Reactor Core of Dawn configuration options
Max	3,000,000	x10 Ashes of Forgetfulness Open Ashes of Forgetfulness configuration options x10 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant Open Flaming Oni Lantern Plant configuration options

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Fool's Chain Open Fool's Chain configuration options
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Ghost Lantern Open Ghost Lantern configuration options
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Deadly Poisonous Needle Open Deadly Poisonous Needle configuration options
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Cursed Beast Gallstone Open Cursed Beast Gallstone configuration options
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Reactor Core of Dawn Open Reactor Core of Dawn configuration options
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant Open Flaming Oni Lantern Plant configuration options
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Golden Cauldron Open Golden Cauldron configuration options
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x10 Evil Bone Open Evil Bone configuration options
2 → 3	400000	x10 Eternal Gear Open Eternal Gear configuration options
3 → 4	1200000	x12 Claw of Chaos Open Claw of Chaos configuration options
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Black Beast Grease Open Black Beast Grease configuration options
5 → 6	4000000	x12 Heart of the Foreign God Open Heart of the Foreign God configuration options
6 → 7	5000000	x15 Arrowhead of Malice Open Arrowhead of Malice configuration options
7 → 8	10000000	x15 Small Bell of Absolution Open Small Bell of Absolution configuration options
8 → 9	12000000	x15 Ashes of Forgetfulness Open Ashes of Forgetfulness configuration options
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

As an Avenger, Dantes needs no skills or pieces, and instead he asks for a range of different mats. The usual story applies here: he’s not terribly hard to max out, but odds are good there will be at least one of these mats that you’re low on. He also needs an unusually large number of gold mats, specifically, and many of them are Lostbelt mats, which makes his mat asks particularly unfriendly to newer players. On top of that, he needs 15 of Ordeal Call 2’s new gold mat per skill, which may make it hard to max him out until we’ve had a few events with those in the shop.

Dantes’s skillset is straightforwardly strong. It doesn’t do anything especially unique, but it provides everything you’d want in a DPS skillset, plus a few snazzy extras. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

There are two main ways to approach using Dantes: as a highly stable burst-oriented DPS, or as a highly damaging stall Servant. Both are pretty conventional in terms of ideal team comp, but Dantes brings something unique to each one, resulting in a style of play that’s not quite the same as your typical ST Quick.

For a burst-focused Dantes, you want triple-Skadi. Doubling up on Summer Skadi is marginally better than doubling Caster Skadi, as Summer Skadi brings more NP-relevant buffs, and Dantes has two Buster cards with which to leverage her Buster crit buffs. There’s little complexity here: you use Skadi buffs for damage, Skadi batteries for charge, and Dantes cards whenever you can. It should be trivial for Dantes to use his NP three (or maybe four) times running. Against a single foe, this means you won’t even start taking damage until Dantes is through his burst window, so even if that doesn’t kill, you only have to survive two or three turns of attacks before you have Dantes’s skills and the Skadis’ buffs off cooldown and can do the whole thing again. There won’t be many conventional ST fights that can survive two full Dantes DPS windows, and at the point that’s insufficient, the fight probably wants you to stall anyway.

For a stall Dantes, you run Castoria with either Caster Skadi (for slightly more stability) or Ruler Skadi (for slightly more damage). In a typical Castoria/Skadi shell, you want to use your DPS’s NP every three turns, as part of a Skadi->DPS->Castoria NP chain. Dantes, though, is a little different. Assuming you’re fighting a single, stunnable enemy, you want to use Dantes’s NP whenever you can, even if that means losing a hit of Castoria’s Solemn Defense when you do ultimately have it ready. Generally, the optimal approach is to have Dantes keep NP-ing until you don’t have enough battery or refund to let him continue to loop, at which point you use a Skadi->Castoria NP chain to buy you some time while Dantes rebuilds towards his next NP. This will be faster and safer than typical Quick stall strategies, since every Dantes NP is functionally a turn of absolute protection.

Dantes is a super self-sufficient unit, too, so he’ll do okay even in lower-end teams, despite the fact that Quick Servants typically struggle in budget contexts. For budget Dantes teams, your top priority should be facilitating NPs from Dantes, since more Dantes NPs means more safety. Hans is a nice partner for Dantes for this reason, as are usually-Arts-leaning picks like Xu Fu, Asclepius, and Paracelsus. Prioritizing Dantes’s cards leads to a good amount of damage ramp on its own, so you can afford to sacrifice the damage you might get from a usual Quick-leaning budget support (like Barti) in exchange for more Dantes NPs.

Assuming that you can kill quickly enough for the damage demerit to not be an issue and that you aren’t having issues looping, the Black Grail is Dantes’s best CE. Dantes has no in-kit NP damage buffs, and none of his preferred supports bring NP damage up, so BG’s NP damage buff is pure multiplicative benefit for Dantes. For the same reason, Heaven’s Feel is a good alternative if you don’t have BG or are worried about Dantes’s survival. If you’re having issues looping or are running a budget team, you could consider something like Traces of Christmases Past instead—it’s a lot less damage, but between the starting charge and the extra push to Quick cards and NP gain, it can help keep Dantes NP-ing, which in turn helps keep your party alive.

There’s a clear best choice for CC type for Dantes: burn. Every burn CC on one of Dantes’s cards is an extra 10% supereffective damage applied to Dantes’s NP each time that card gets used. There’s nothing else you can get out of a CC that’s worth more than that, and there’s nobody else who makes better use of the burn CCs. Give them to Dantes! You won’t be disappointed.

Dantes is an excellent Servant and Avengers make great use of grails. I highly recommend taking him to level 100 if you have him.

Dantes is really strong. He’s a highly consistent unit who works well at both the high end and the low end, and in both fast and slow teams. It’s really rare to see an ST Servant who can do all the things at once. There are plenty of other ST units who are very good at various things, and if you have a well-developed roster, you may not have need for another strong generalist… but it’s hard to do it better than Dantes does.

Overall: 10/10
Single-Target DPS: 10/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 7/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 10/10
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Vengeance: 10/10