Modern Magus Magazine - THE END

With a BBBAQ card deck, Lord Logres truly reverts to the essence of launch FGO - Buster gorilla dominance. Her 0.58% base NP gain means her single Arts card is generating a solid 2.32 base Arts gain, a little above the bar for single-Arts card decks. Her 5-hit Quick card is similarly fairly good for NP gain, and her Extra card isn’t spectacular but has enough hits to not feel disappointing, either.

She might be kind of middle-of-the-road for NP gain, but her star generation is pretty fantastic with the high hitcounts across the board. The 5-hit Quick does good work, sure, but all of her Busters benefit from 4 hits apiece, and that really adds up when you get bonus star generation from overkill or crits, so she can supply a steady amount of stars when you let her cards do the work.

Skill 1

First for Logres’s skill lineup is Finis Dracon, the skill you get when you are the literal physical manifestation of Y Draig Goch - the Red Dragon of Britain. This skill provides a standard 50% gauge charge as well as a duo of 1-time Debuff Immunity and Buff Removal Resistance for 5 turns.

Hmm? That 50% gauge charger has a 5-turn duration? Well, that doesn’t make sense, nobody could possibly get a 50% gauge charge per turn ski- OH HOLY MOLY THAT’S A LOT OF GAUGE CHARGE.

Well, instead of the instant gratification of 50% gauge charge on use, Logres instead opts for a veritable flood of NP gauge over 5 turns, resulting in a total of 250% gauge off of one skill. That may leave open the question of how she starts firing her NP to begin with, but in return she gets the best NP refund a Buster Servant could ask for, getting half a NP gauge every single turn no matter what, and even packing Debuff Removal Resistance to ensure that buff sticks around.

This does come at the cost of 1000 HP for each turn the skill is active, but that’s well worth the cost when your support lineup can cover the HP burden paid in exchange for the power. In farming contexts the gauge charge of this skill essentially sums to 100% spread over a 3-turn battle, but for reasons I’ll get into later, that’s still more than sufficient.

The 10-turn base cooldown on this skill is to be expected for its power, but between the skill cooldown reduction from levelling it and append skills, you can get this thing’s cooldown much lower than it appears, and Logres has her own ways to compensate for this skill’s drawback.

Skill 2

Next up for skills is Rex Miroir. The true final form of the Charisma skill, this provides the standard 20% Attack Up for the team, as well as 30% Critical Damage Up and Critical Resistance for the same 3-turn duration, and a hefty 50-star bomb on use.

The damage boosts from this are pretty solid, as well as the fact it assures a full critical chain on the turn it’s used, but the Critical Resistance buff is also fantastic for difficult content, ensuring the team isn’t touched by stray crits.

In comparison to the rest of Logres’s skills this isn’t anything special, but the supportive boosts are useful and the 8-turn base cooldown is pretty damn short relative to Logres’s full kit.

Skill 3

Last for Logres’s skill lineup is Ynys Gutrin, a skill name that was one hell of an adventure to reverse engineer from “Ennis Guitlin”. Japanese, folks, a fun language.

The benefits of this skill are well worth tangling with the Welsh roots, though, as this skill provides Logres with the vaunted Anti-Enforcement Defense 2 times for 3 turns, as well as a thick 50% Buster Up buff for the same 3-turn duration. On top of that, she just outright reduces the team’s skill cooldowns by 2 turns, a blanket Koyanskaya cooldown reduction in other words.

It’s especially important since this skill essentially cuts all of Logres’s skill cooldowns on paper to 2 lower than they appear. So Finis Dracon’s hefty 10-turn base is in actuality a more manageable 6 turn cooldown once you have it at skill level 10, and similarly this skill’s displayed 12 turn cooldown cuts down to a still-long-but-managable 8 turn cooldown in practice. Add the skill cooldown append skill on top of that and you get the point.

Naturally, such absurd power doesn’t come without a cost. Since this skill is literally meant to be Logres retreating to the Isle of Avalon after the Battle of Camlann, she gets slapped with the Oberon-style eternal sleep debuff 3 turns later, essentially an un-removable stun that keeps her locked on the frontline until it wears off or she dies. Thankfully, the “eternal” part of that statement is a lie, since it has a duration that’s reduced by the skill level, becoming a somewhat-managable 2-turn sleep at skill level 10. Having your primary damage dealer out of action for 2 turns isn’t exactly great, but it’s not the end of the world either, and she provides more than enough benefits to make that drawback worth it.

With all this gauge charge and the stacked team buffs at Logres’s disposal, she needs a good output for it, no? Look no further - Excalibur Excelsus is the Sword of the Planet, and an AOE Buster NP.

Before dealing damage, Logres nets a desired combo of buffs, gaining a solid 20% NP Strength Up buff (scaling with Overcharge) for 1 turn, as well as Invincible Pierce for the same duration. With the damage buff trinity complete and the ability to ignore annoying defensive buffs, she dishes out her damage, with a +100% Effective damage bonus against Threat Against Humanity trait foes.

Back when this trait was first covered, I basically had to speculate on how important it would be since, frankly, we didn’t know how many Humanity-threatening bosses would be thrown in our way during the story. Thankfully, we have the answer - not that many. Fundamentally, every Foreigner with a connection to an Outer God, every Calamity from Faerie Britain, some Psuedo-Beasts (but no actual Beasts), and every single Fantasy Tree has this trait, but not much beyond that. Great for facing off Foreigners or the endgame of Part 2 chapters, but it won’t come up often compared to many other effective traits.

Thankfully, Logres provides more than enough other benefits to counteract the rarity of her Effective Damage trait - a 20% Attack Up buff and 1-time Overcharge boost buff to the team for 3 turns, 20% gauge charge for the whole team, and a 2k Heal slapped on top of that. It’s an absurd combo to have such a spammable NP and get a 20% gauge charge after use, not just for Logres herself but the whole team. And it goes without saying that the ramping damage and Overcharge boost is spectacular, too.

So Logres provides as much team support as some Servants get from their whole kit in one NP, great, but how does her damage output and farming capabilities pan out? With her own buffs in play, she’s dishing out a fantastic 28k damage neutral, more than above par for most AOE Servants.

But going beyond that, Logres’s performance in an actual farming setup is great. With a 50% NP gauge CE and double Koyanskaya, she’s dealing 70k neutral on wave 1, 96k on wave 2, and 137k on wave 3, certainly enough to farm class advantage, and with little effort, too - her gauge charging pans out to a clean 3-turn loop with the skill cooldown reduction append skill, as her 50% NP gauge per turn skill will go from 8 turn cooldown displayed to 7 turns after her append skill, 5 turns after using her third skill, 3 turns after the first Koyanskaya gauge charge on turn 1, then on turn 2 it’ll be off cooldown after the second Koyanskaya gauge charge, ensuring she can set up a 100% gauge charge for turn 3 with no further input.

Naturally, we can manage a 3-turn loop with Black Grail, too. Using both Koyanskaya’s skills on turn 1 then battlesuit swapping Oberon in, we can benefit from his NP Strength Up buff immediately (“wasting” the gauge charge), then use his gauge charger on turn 2, not having to worry about the drawback as Logres’s NP’s own 20% gauge charge effect will counteract the 20% gauge drain. In such a setup, Logres is dealing 102k damage neutral on wave 1, 143k on wave 2, then 370k damage neutral on wave 3. While she’ll be slapped with a unique d-d-d-double eternal sleep by turn 4, who cares if you clear the battle before then, right?

Those damage numbers might not be anything spectacular, but they’re more than enough to do universal farming, and unlike a lot of Servants with impressive Black Grail setups, Logres’s performance in high difficulty content also includes her superb team support, providing healing, cooldown reduction, and gauge charge to her allies, who can keep her safe while the 2-turn downtime period of her third skill runs its course. And during that time she’s going to get a LOT of gauge charge, so she’s ready to start firing that sword beam immediately once she’s awake again. Truly she’s worthy of the title “King of Battle”.