MMM - Shameless Self-Insert Scrambles Selectively, Sojourning Straight-through Satanic Stratas of Suffering, Somehow Searching for Synthetic Seating (Dante)

With a BBAAQ card deck, and a base NP gain of 0.49%, Dante’s 4-hit Arts cards manage to coast along with a base Arts gain of roughly 2.06 in a very dirty-looking fraction due to his passive Arts booster. This places his Arts NP gain solidly above average, but as always, he pays a price elsewhere - his 4-hit Quick is very mediocre, while his Extra card is passable for NP gain at best.

On the other side of things, Dante’s stargen is decent for a Servant with only one Quick card. His Busters are relatively low on hitcounts, but his Quick is solid, as are his Arts cards, especially if they get a star generation buff from somewhere. With the Pretender class’s higher star weight, having any star generation is useful to fuel his critical damage and more NP gauge gain.

Skill 1

First on Dante’s skill set is Wandering of Three Worlds. This is an omni-card booster skill, providing a 20% boost to each of Dante’s card types for 3 turns, as well as a weak 1-time Guts buff for the same duration.

This skill might be rather simple, but it does provide an interesting implication. In the Divine Comedy, Dante wanders Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and this skill directly implies that each card type is assigned to each realm. His next skill confirms Buster and Arts are Hell and Heaven respectively (not particularly surprising, either), which makes Quick Purgatory. Certainly feels that way with their limited pool of good Support Servants.

By gameplay, this is a plain but solid skill, providing a modest damage boost to Dante regardless of card type, as well as a defensive safety net to bring Dante back from the grave should worse come to worst. Just remember to get the order right - Chain Link 1 Cir target Dante… That said, the 8-turn cooldown is pretty long even if it has a Guts buff tied to it.

Skill 2

Heaven or Hell, it’s time to rock with Stars in 100 Cantos. This skill drops a 20-star bomb on Dante before forcing you to choose between changing the field into Heaven or Hell for 5 turns, providing a trio of mutually exclusive buffs with each.

For Heaven, Dante gives the team a 20% Arts booster buff, 50% Critical Damage Up, and 1000 HP Regen per turn for 3 turns. While for Hell, Dante gives a 20% Buster booster buff, 30% NP Strength Up, and 10% NP gauge charge per turn for the same duration of 3 turns.

At the very least, these two buffs are pretty evenly balanced. Heaven might seem the best on paper simply for buffing Dante’s main card type of Arts, but Hell actually provides a stronger offensive boost from the NP Strength Up buff, plus the 10% NP gauge per turn will pan out to more NP gauge gain than a relatively minor Arts buff for NP refund purposes. But all the same, consistent healing and a notable Critical Damage buff can be great in difficult content, so the choice is really down to circumstance.

As for the field changing part, so far as I’m aware no other Servant interacts with these field types, so it’s more or less a thematic way of enacting Dante’s lore in gameplay, which I’m all for. It’s a flexible and strong team support skill, and also comes at a reasonable 8-turn base cooldown.

Skill 3

You know Dante wouldn’t be able to escape Hell without the Lasengle devs there handing him a 50% gauge charger, so here it is. All joking aside, Brands of the Seven Sins, besides the standard 50% gauge charge on use, hits Dante with 7 stacks of Mark of Sin, a unique debuff that tanks his Debuff Resistance by 10% for each, the thematic relevance pretty clear.

These aren’t all drawbacks, though. Dante also gets a pair of buffs on use for 3 turns that let him remove the Marks of Sin in exchange for a 10% Attack Up buff for 3 turns. If he attacks an enemy that has a buff then that attack will remove 1 buff and a Mark in exchange for the Attack buff, and similarly if he has a Guts trigger (whether his own skill or granted from other sources), then a Mark is also removed for the Attack buff.

Regardless of method this skill is pretty evidently designed around taking Dante to difficult fights where the enemy has time to cook up buffs for themselves, and in turn Dante can strip them of those buffs for a hefty max of 70% Attack Up, or simply take enough hits that his Guts triggers. It’s a shame such a high sum of damage can’t really be used in a farming context, but at the very least the drawback of this skill doesn’t matter for farming, either.

A unique and powerful skill, no matter how you slice it, and much like the previous, it comes at a generous 8-turn base cooldown.

Now we delve into the truest depths of Hell, or heights of Heaven. Lasciate Ogne Speranza Voi Ch'intrate, other than being a metal as hell phrase, is Dante’s NP, an Arts AOE one at that, so prepare for the NP refund math.

Unsurprisingly, this NP is modified based on whether the field is Heaven or Hell. Regardless, Dante gets a +50% Effective Damage buff against an attribute for 1 turn, but it’s…well, Heaven attribute for Heaven, or Earth attribute for Hell. Of those two, Earth attribute effectiveness is a lot stronger for farming as the attribute is extremely common among normal NPC’s, while Heaven attribute is often present on powerful story bosses. With the in-game feature to check attributes (something I may often forget myself…) you can adjust Dante’s skill choice to whichever attribute is present, but the two in combination cover a majority of enemies in the game, so it’s already doing superb damage.

In addition, before damage, Dante gets a 20% NP Strength Up buff for 3 turns, scaling with Overcharge. Pre-damage steroids on NP are great, but especially ones which last 3 turns, creating ramping damage, and especially especially those that give NP Strength Up, since it results in superb damage output in combo with fellow Pretender Oberon.

After that, Dante does his damage, following up by plastering every enemy with a 2k damage Curse for 5 turns, and reducing their NP gauge by 1 step.

Needless to say, the damage and effects of this NP are really great. With the number of offensive buffs at Dante’s disposal he can really bring the pain, and the NP gauge drain is also excellent in difficult content. On his own, with no effective damage, Dante is dealing a pretty pathetic-looking 21k damage neutral, but that becomes a more respectable 28k with his very common effective damage, and also nets a refund of 22%, going up to 32% after Hell’s gauge charge (as that’s the best for damage and refund, assuming the effective damage isn’t in play).

Taking that to a practical setup with a 50% gauge charge CE and double Castoria, Dante is dishing out 72k damage neutral wave 1, 81k wave 2, and 116k on wave 3 with a Mystic Code bolstering his damage. That may sound pretty mediocre, but those numbers aren’t factoring in his effective damage, which as I said, will come up unless the entire node is Human attribute. It’s rare that normal enemies are anything but Human, Earth or Heaven attributes. In the more common scenario, those numbers leap to 90k, 100k, and 140k respectively. And that’s before his Pretender class advantage you can leverage on all the Knight classes.

So naturally he can do good damage on class advantage and manage a very consistent loop doing so with Castoria support. He can also do Black Grail farming, and as you might expect, Oberon can go pretty hard with him. In such a setup Dante’s damage output with his effective damage active is 121k wave 1, 154k wave 2, and a hefty 315k damage on wave 3. For a Servant without class advantage, and a non-Buster NP, that damage output is really insane, though the peak I’m listing is only possible if you’re using the Hell buffs for Earth attribute effectiveness, the damage is slightly lesser with Heaven, though still high.