MMM - Macarbre Maiden Metamorphosed, Making Mythical Monarch in Morgan Machination / Something Somewhat Smart Stood So, Sadly Since Sent Southward, Sayonara (Gray Lily)

With a base NP gain of 0.42% and two 4-hit Arts cards, Gray Saber is unsurprisingly following the high Arts hitcounts convention, with a base Arts gain of 1.68, pretty much dead on average. As is typical, this comes at the cost of the NP gain on her Quick and Extra card, with both providing very poor NP gauge in spite of their solid hitcounts.

And as for Gray Saber’s vaunted NP gain boosted Buster cards? Normally, without her passive in play, her Busters in an Arts chain would provide 1.26% NP gauge each, a mind-boggling 1/80 of a full NP gauge each. With her passive 10% boost, that becomes a world-shattering 1.386%... so yeah it’s an utterly insignificant improvement.

Putting that aside, Gray Saber’s star generation is solid in spite of her sole Quick card, with reasonably high hitcounts across the board. She can use the resultant crits to compensate for her less-than-stellar NP gain, if nothing else.

Skill 1

First for Gray Saber’s skill set is Mystic Code Seal Unleash (Holy Sword). In other words, you get to turn off Add’s mouthy personality in exchange for some offensive buffs! This is a straightforward dual-card buff skill, providing 30% Buster and Quick Up for 3 turns, as well as 2-time, 3-turn Debuff Immunity to Gray.

While it’s partially a bummer that Gray isn’t boosting both her main card types with this, given her sole Quick card, it’s still a solid offensive boost to her primary card type, and Debuff Immunity is a handy effect to have around in case you bring Gray into more difficult fights.

Besides that, there’s little to say. This skill is slightly underwhelming, but its power is more or less standard for a Welfare Servant’s dual-card buffing skill. The 8-turn base cooldown also fits that mould, in spite of this being perfectly balanced at a hypothetical 7-turn cooldown.

Skill 2

Next is Golden Fate, a skill that, besides being a partial series-wide title drop, proves my very point with the prior skill.

This is another offensive 3-turn buff skill, providing Gray with 20% Attack Up, NP Strength Up, and 30% Critical Damage Up for that duration. In combination with the prior skill this completes her trifecta of NP steroid buffs, providing a significant boost to her overall NP damage, but the Critical Damage boost is also worth appreciating, even if the buff value is fairly low.

It’s simple and to the point, and that’s very much how I’d like an AOE NP Welfare’s offensive buffs to pan out. As I mentioned earlier, this skill has a base 7-turn cooldown, which infuriatingly puts its cooldown out of line with her first skill’s, while simultaneously making me ask why the other isn’t a 7-turn cooldown, yet again. But hey, this skill is great, at least.

Skill 3

Last on the list, but much needed, is Blessing of Chaldenia (Surface). You couldn’t have a successful AOE NP Servant without some form of gauge charge, and this skill thankfully fits the bill.

Upon use, this skill provides Gray Saber with 30% gauge charge, as well as slapping her with both 10% NP gauge per turn and 10 Critical Stars per turn buffs, for 3 turns each. While the way Buster farming tends to pan out means the NP gauge charge each turn probably won’t be handy, having the 30% gauge charge immediately allows Gray to perform standard Koyanskaya Oberon farming with a 50% charge CE, so it’s a very essential component for her success.

The star generation gained from this skill probably shouldn’t be dismissed, either. Gray has some minor critical damage boosts lingering around, and a regular supply of Critical Stars gives her much better opportunity to capitalize off them, especially given the incredible boosts to Critical Damage Koyanskaya and Merlin can provide to her already. A great addition to her kit, especially given its 8-turn base cooldown makes it work fluidly in Koyanskaya farming without having to invest in the cooldown reduction append skill.

As I’ve already spoken about earlier, Gray Saber’s NP is Excalibur Logos, a Buster AOE NP. With the welfare free NP5 backing her and the right level of NP gauge charge, being able to farm with Gray is already a given, so I’ll get into the farming numbers in a bit. Before that, we can go over this NP’s effects:

Before dealing damage, Gray Saber removes all defensive buffs from the enemy. While this sounds great on paper, it doesn’t have as many applications as you would hope, with many difficult fights typically having their defensive buffs being non-removable, not to mention Gray is unlikely to be deployed often in such scenarios. A handy thing to have around regardless, she follows up by dealing her damage, with a +50% Super-Effective Damage modifier against Undead targets, scaling with Overcharge.

I would normally praise having such a built-in effective modifier to high heavens, given how it stacks multiplicatively with other offensive buffs, but the Undead trait is arguably one of the worst ones to target in the entire game. Exactly zero Servants in the game are classified as Undead, and the enemies that are, aren’t too common overall. Sure, big Ghosts, Skeletons, and the weird zombies from Salem will show up occasionally in event farming quests and so on, but Gray is unlikely to ever get this damage bonus in a scenario where the damage boost matters, since Undead often tend to be punching bag levels of strength when they’re put in farming nodes, short of the bizarre Skeleton King hunting quests we got a few years back.

So putting the disappointment of that Effective damage aside, Gray also gets a 10% NP gauge refund after using her NP. In combination with her skill kit that results in a respectable 20% gauge refund each NP on a 3-turn cycle, but said gauge refund doesn’t end up being useful in farming situations, the majority of Gray Saber’s use cases.

Let’s move on to the main topic, Gray’s damage output in farming setups. With double Koyanskaya and an Oberon switch-in with a 50% gauge CE, Gray is doing 80k damage neutral wave 1, 106k damage on wave 2, and, by the power of Oberon damage spikes, a hefty 328k damage on wave 3.

While Gray might struggle to net the damage output necessary to be a universal farmer on waves 1 and 2, her wave 3 damage is so intense that she might be able to manage backloaded farming quests, in spite of it. She’s generally only going to be a safe farming choice against class advantage foes, but there’s some worlds you can take her against a quest regardless of class boundaries.

The improvements over her Mirror don’t end there, either. With a BBAQQ card deck and 0.71% base NP gain, Gray Lancer’s base Arts gain on her 3-hit Arts card is a far more impressive 2.13. Furthermore, Gray Lancer has impressive 5-hit Quick cards that sum up to 3.905 baseline NP gain, very high for Quick cards. With reasonable hitcounts on her Busters and Extra card as well, Gray Lancer just has good NP gain across the board, in spite of packing few Arts cards.

As you might expect, the heavy focus on high-hitcount Quick cards means her star generation is also superb, producing a very tidy sum of critical stars on most chains she’s involved in.

Skill 1

For the skills, I will be doing a fairly abridged version of the evaluation, since the majority of the effects on Gray Lily’s skill kits are similar, with one or two differences in effects. As for Mystic Code Seal Unleash (Holy Lance), the dual-card buff is identically excellent, but this time it actually buffs both of Gray Lancer’s primary card types, and the debuff immunity becomes an arguably more useful 2-hit, 3-turn Invincible buff for Gray Lancer, providing a dependable survival tool instead of a more situational protection to debuffs.

And unsurprisingly, the cooldown is also the same. I won’t give the spiel about this skill’s longer cooldown again, but know that I’m not pleased by it.

Skill 2

Next is Black Crows’ Gravekeeper. While this is a separate skill in actual name, the effects are, as with the prior skill, very similar to Gray Lily’s other form’s.

In addition to the Attack and NP Strength buff this skill’s counterpart also provides, Gray Lancer gets a 20% Effective Damage versus Undead and Servants buff for 3 turns in place of the Critical Damage buff. While the numbers on this damage buff are pretty low, especially since it stacks additively with NP Strength Up buffs, unlike NP-tied effective damage multipliers, the fact Gray Lancer gets her bonus damage on Servants as well as the pitifully rare Undead trait makes it vastly superior on the whole.

We fight Servants a lot in this game, shockingly, so this skill’s offensive buffs will all be on the table frequently, especially since Gray Lancer has a ST NP - she’s going to be almost exclusively deployed to fight Servant foes. With the same cooldown as its counterpart, this skill is a very dependable offensive steroid.

Skill 3

Lastly for skills is Blessing of Chaldenia (Underworld). Like its counterpart, this provides the same all-essential 30% NP gauge charge and 10% gauge per turn for 3 turns, but in the first change I’d say is inferior to Gray Saber’s skills, you get a 2k Heal each turn for 3 turns, instead of the star generation.

It’s not that healing sustain isn’t useful in places, but you can compensate for healing often with Mystic Codes and Support Servant kits, while ideally you want Gray Lily, in her offensive role, to get the most boosts to her offense as possible. The skill is still excellent for enabling easy NP looping with the common Buster support brigade, but it just has a little less bite than I’d like, in this rendition.

Rounding out this kit is Gray Lancer’s NP, unsurprisingly a variant of the holy lance itself, Rhongomyniad Mythos. As a Buster ST NP, this will not be too useful in farming situations, but let’s get into the effects:

Before dealing damage, much like the Saber counterpart, this NP removes all defensive buffs from the target. Given ST NP’s are deployed more often for difficult content, you’ll find more opportunities to take advantage of this effect, but the truth remains that the buffs you want to remove most are often entirely immune to buff removal, on bosses.

More important here is the other effect before damage - a 10% NP Strength Up buff for 3 turns, scaling with Overcharge. The damage boost is minute, but it is ramping damage, and even the type of ramping damage that scales multiplicatively with Oberon buffs, enabling a particularly devastating NP on the end of a 3-turn loop. Gray Lily then dishes out her damage, with no special effects tied into it, and then gains the 10% Gauge refund this NP’s counterpart does, and finally slaps the target with a 1-turn Nullify Buff.

Now that’s where things get interesting. Nullify Buff is a notoriously powerful effect in FGO, going back to when running Mephistopheles in your party to tackle Goetia’s insane turn 1 buff skill was a plan. Most Servants with Nullify Buff on their NP have a 1-time variant, meaning it only blocks one Skill/NP’s worth of buffs, but a full-blown 1-turn Nullify Buff, meaning every single turn you slap a boss with this NP, any non-mechanics based buffs they try to apply simply won’t work. It’s like a preventative form of buff removal before a NP’s damage.

So yeah, the effects on this NP are fantastic, no notes. With that put aside, let’s look at the damage. With just Gray Lancer’s own buffs in play, this NP is dishing out 64k damage to a neutral target, 74k if they’re a Servant. Using my favourite yard-stick to compare, Jeanne Alter’s NP after strengthening is doing 71k in the same circumstances.

While naturally most of that power is due to the free NP5, this NP certainly has devastating force and the bonus effects to make it worthwhile.