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With a BBAAQ card deck and a base NP gain of 0.46%, John’s unsurprising 4-hit Arts cards put out a total base NP gain of 1.84, barely above the average for his card deck. As always, this comes at the cost of his other cards, with his sole Quick being pretty awful, his Busters…honestly providing a decent amount of NP gauge in Arts chains, and his Extra genuinely sucking for NP gain.

John has it much better for star generation, producing a significant amount of stars from his Busters and Quick card, though the Avenger class star weight means he’s unlikely to capitalize on his own star generation effectively.

All that in mind, John’s lucky he has the Avenger class’s passive NP gauge generation and supreme defensive NP gain to help compensate for his mediocre NP gain on his regular cards.

Skill 1

First for the skill lineup is Fool King’s Charisma. No guesses for what the primary benefit of this skill is - a combo of 20% Attack Up and 30% Critical Damage Up to the team for 3 turns, as well as a very handy AOE Buff Removal on the enemy team.

While this is a straightforward team Charisma buff, it comes with the minute drawback of a 500 damage Curse debuff on the team for 3 turns. While that doesn’t have much impact, the overall power of this skill is pretty low, so any drawback feels excessive.

It doesn’t help that this skill also has an 8-turn base cooldown instead of the 7 turns a weaker Charisma skill usually has, not great at all.

Skill 2

Next up is King Lackland’s Pride. This skill’s a targeted ally buff, providing the chosen ally with a 30% Buster Up buff for 3 turns, 30% NP gauge charge, and reducing their skill cooldowns by 1 turn. It’s like a miniature Koyanskaya in one skill, how cute.

Much like the prior skill, this one also comes with the drawback of inflicting Curse, but only to John himself. In general this skill’s benefits are fantastic, providing a decent offensive buff and gauge charge to either John himself or a chosen ally, on top of a skill cooldown reduction that has great synergy with Buster teams in general.

The 8-turn base cooldown on this skill is much more appropriate for his power than the prior skill, and even ensures his skills have aligned cooldowns.

Skill 3

Last but easily most interesting of John’s skillset is False God Metamorphosis. This skill provides John with some potent benefits right from the get-go, gaining a 20% Attack buff for 3 turns and 30% gauge charge on use.

On top of those more conventional benefits, John also slaps a 30% Effective Damage buff against Neutral alignment foes on himself for 3 turns, as well a buff that gives him +10% Critical Damage before a regular card attack, both buffs lasting 3 turns. The Critical Damage buff sounds great on paper, but in practice the duration of the buff and general turn cycles means John is probably only getting +50% Critical Damage at most out of it, and that’s ignoring the fact he’ll struggle to gather Critical Stars with his Avenger star weight.

The Neutral alignment effective damage is also in an odd place - it’s the second least common Alignment trait, after well, Neutral but on the Law/Chaos axis. Not only is it rare for Servants to have, but NPC’s basically never have Neutral as an alignment. Remember that Neutral isn’t “lack of an alignment” but specifically being in the middle of Good and Evil. Animals and robots and so on aren’t Neutral, they lack alignment entirely, so NPC’s that have it are almost entirely limited to Servants in an enemy-only form. On top of all that, the actual damage bonus isn’t very high, making it underwhelming overall.

This skill has the same 8-turn cooldown as his prior skills and, following the theme of every other skill John has, this one sinks him with a 1k damage Curse debuff for 3 turns, so that damage will really begin to add up…or will it?

To bring John’s whole kit together we have his NP, Invercio Libertatis Auraculum. This is a Buster AOE NP, so we’ll see if his damage numbers are capable of farming, but let’s get into the effects.

Before dealing damage, John applies +10% NP Strength Up to himself for 1 turn for every Sovereign and Evil trait present among allies and enemies on the field. As John himself is both a Sovereign and Evil, this will always provide +20% NP Strength at baseline, but it’s pretty easy to build this up given Koyanskaya is Evil, and a pretty good sum of Servants are royalty, too. And naturally, since both of these are common, they’re common on enemies, too.

John then deals his damage, with no special frills to be found. After doing damage he slaps the enemy with a 20% Buster Resistance Down debuff (Scaling with Overcharge) for 3 turns, and he also buffs the allied team with an effect that converts Curse damage into healing, for 3 turns. In other words, so long as John NP’s on turn 1 and does so at least every 3 turns, his Curse debuff drawbacks are essentially team regen. I’d love to see how much healing Van Gogh-chan can gather with that inversion of curse damage, yeesh.

The effects on this NP are some great damage boosts, so let’s see how they add up in practice. With just his own buffs active, John is dealing about 26.5k damage neutral with his NP, a very respectable sum of damage, though pretty low by Avenger standards. With his access to 60% NP gauge charge in total, John can also perform a 3-turn farming loop with double Koyanskaya and a Kaleidoscope, provided he has the skill cooldown reduction append skill, so let’s look at those damage numbers.

On Wave 1, John dishes out, uh 48k damage neutral. On Wave 2 he should be dealing 65k damage, and on Wave 3 John should deal about 121k damage neutral. This level of damage is frankly pretty awful, mostly because the need to hold back his two NP gauge charge skills for the second wave also takes away a lot of his damage steroids until they’re used. And even then, this damage output is hardly universal farmer material, oof.