MMM - Reckless Royal Rushes Revelry of a new Reign, Relinquishes his Realm with the Reciept (New Year 2025)

With a base NP gain of 0.56% and a BBAQQ card deck, Richard’s sole 4-hit Arts card produces a very mediocre 2.24 base Arts gain, more or less typical for a single Arts card deck. Bucking the trend of Servants with high Arts hitcount losing out elsewhere, Richard actually possesses good Quick cards, their 5 hits and his Riding passive allowing him to gain far more NP gauge than his base NP gain would suggest, and similarly his Busters are decent for NP gain, if nothing spectacular, while Richard’s Extra card is unfortunately the very standard 5 hits, which makes it more or less standard for NP gain

On the flipside, Richard has amazing stargen. The high hits across the board on his cards as well as his focus on Quicks and Busters means he’ll be dropping stars left, right, and center, even though he lacks more inherent boosts to star generation like a high base stargen or a passive to assist star generation (other than his Quick boost, of course).

In summary Richard’s generation capabilities are pretty good from the baseline, though he does end up being more dependent on his Quick cards for NP gain than most Servants.

Skill 1

First on Richard’s skill lineup is Lionheart (Godspeed). A meld of two of the skills conventionally on his stat block, this is a good ‘ol fashioned Charisma clone with some added spice, love me one of those. Providing a 20% boost to the team’s Attack, NP Gain, and Critical Star Generation for 3 turns, you get a little bit of everything out of this skill, and Richard even gets a bit more for himself.

Applying a 3-turn buff that gives himself a 30% Critical Star Generation buff for 3 turns before performing normal card attacks, he essentially gets to amplify his own star generation immensely for a little over a 3 turn cycle. Combined with the existing buff in this skill, he can get as high as +170% Star Generation at once, which for the record translates to a bonus 1.7 Crit stars on every hit of every card he uses, including NPs. Even if the buff only applies before normal cards, his NP reaps the benefits of the buff itself, so Richard can really drown the team in stars given enough time.

In spite of all that, boosts to star generation are ultimately pretty low power relative to other buffs, so the greater draw of this skill is bound to be the Attack boost and NP Gain boost, increasing Richard’s offensive might and speeding up the gauge charging of the whole team for the duration. The 8-turn base cooldown on this skill is…admittedly long for the lesser power of it, but it’s not as if Charisma clones haven’t been saddled with this cooldown before.

Skill 2

Next up is All Kinds of Talents. As the name might suggest, this skill is a grab-bag of benefits, providing a 20% boost to Richard’s Buster, Arts, and Quick cards for 3 turns, as well as providing himself with a 30% NP Strength Up buff for the same duration.

Those buffs alone are pretty great for his balanced card deck, improving his NP gain and stargen with every card type, on top of the significant boost to his NP’s damage with those buffs in combination. But on top of that, Richard also gets to reduce the skill cooldowns of a targeted ally by a turn. On paper it isn’t much of an overwhelming benefit, but in combination with other sources of skill cooldown reduction it can provide a lot of options for farming and difficult content alike. Worst comes to worst, you can use it on Richard himself to cut down the cooldown of his other skills.

Overall, this is just a simple and effective offensive skill, boosting Richard’s offensive output significantly while providing a small modicum of utility. The base 8-turn cooldown aligns with his first skill, and is probably fair given the value of skill cooldown reduction.

Skill 3

Last for Richard’s skills is Sword of Eternally Distant Victory, or his fake Excalibur in skill form. Of course, it has to be a gauge charge skill, given the icon for it is Excalibur.

Following the standards for a desirable New Years SSR, this skill is a…30% gauge charger? Wait, that doesn’t add up - it should be 50%, no? Not a mistake? Very real? Okay, well that sucks.

Admittedly the difference between a 30% gauge charger and 50% gauge charger in double Koyanskaya + Oberon farming teams is just the difference between needing level 10 Mana Loading or not, but it’s still an extra limitation to get through compared to many competitors in the game.

The other aspects to this skill are straightforward Buster Gorilla classics, providing a significant boost to Richard’s Buster card star attraction, as well as a solid +50% boost to his Buster Card Critical Damage. Adding in the 20 star bomb on use, he certainly won’t be lacking in Critical Stars, and he’s more than capable of bringing the pain using them.

The only real shame (besides the gauge charger value) is the fact those buffs only influence two of his five normal cards, meaning the actual effective damage boost is more limited, even if Busters ultimately hit the hardest. The cooldown of 8 turns at base is also a little disappointing, since this certainly isn’t nearly as powerful as many gauge charge skills with identical cooldowns, but what can you do?

Wrapping Richard’s whole kit up is his NP, Utopie Purgatoire. Like a true Middle Ages English King, he reveals the dreadful secret - he’s actually French. Dreadful, I know.

This is a Buster AOE NP, so we’ll be looking into his capabilities for farming, but before all that is the actual effects. Before dealing damage (though it’s not particularly relevant that it is), Richard buffs himself with an impressive +50% Critical Damage Buff for 3 turns, providing a scary level of ramping damage output on his normal cards, and one that pairs nicely with his existing strengths.

Following that, he deals normal AOE damage, then debuffs every enemy with both a 2k damage, 5-turn Burn debuff and 10% Resistance Down to the three card types for 3 turns, scaling with Overcharge.

While it’s something of a shame his NP itself doesn’t provide any boosts to its own damage output, the combo of a large Critical Damage boost as well as plastering the enemy with Buster/Arts/Quick Resistance Down can produce a scary ramping boost in damage in drawn out, difficult fights.

With the question of damage in mind, let’s look into it. With just his own buffs active, Richard’s NP deals about 24.5k damage neutral, not spectacular in terms of damage output, but better a deal than many get. Putting him into a more practical setup, the aforementioned double Koyanskaya Oberon setup he can manage, his wave 1 damage comes out to about 60k neutral, remaining identical for wave 2, and leaping to about 236k damage on wave 3, by the miracle of Oberon buffs.

While his wave 3 damage output is more than enough to put most farming quests down, his damage output, particularly for wave 2, is very weak, and he’ll likely struggle to manage farming outside of his class advantage. Unlike some Buster farming options out there, he has no potential to farm using Black Grail, so there’s no real way of patching up his damage output without the straightforward and costly ways of investing into your favourite Servant - NP level and Palingenesis.

He has a much better time of managing his damage output in difficult content, where he can lean on his superb star generation and NP gain (factoring in his NP gain and card booster buffs) to make continual NP spam easier, and similarly capitalise on his high critical damage.