Rabbit’s Reviews #403: Tutankhamun (5* Archer)

22whiterabbit22
 To Lasengle’s credit, and in spite of the various problems FGO has had for the past while, this year has had a lot of mechanically unique and theoretically interesting Servants. These unique gimmicks have ranged from very successful and quite strong (Soujuurou, for instance) to very weak and largely pointless (such as BB Dubai). Tutankhamun falls towards the lower end of that spectrum. He’s an ST Arts Archer with a self-sacrifice NP. This has the potential to be valuable, and cycling Servants is often useful, but sacrificial Servants tend to either be able to opt out of self-sacrificing (Habetrot, Mandricardo) or have unusual strengths or advantages in exchange for the limitations that come with a sacrificial NP (Chen Gong, Arash). Tutankhamun has neither of these. He has moderately high steroids and a lot of self-charge, but without the self-sacrifice he would read as a decent if unremarkable ST Arts unit. Compared to other self-sacrifice Servants, who are given an increased power budget to account for such a severe demerit, Tutankhamun’s sacrifice appears to be considered at best a neutral, if not an advantage. This isn’t necessarily without merit—again, being able to cycle Servants for free is often useful—but it’s much harder to advocate for a Servant who can be summarized as “he’s fine and also he dies” than for a Servant who is “they’re amazing and then they die.”
Ultimately, Tutankhamun exists pretty much exclusively for farming. He provides some extra battery and NP damage to a primary DPS without consuming a support slot, and he can do a bit of damage with his NP before he dies. In exchange, inserting Tutankhamun into a farming team necessarily means you can’t run a full lineup of SSR CEs, and he’s mostly nonviable for CQs. Cases in which Tutankhamun will allow you to farm something you couldn’t otherwise are going to be exceedingly rare, especially considering other, better servants (like Soujuurou or Summer Chloe) can usually fill the same role more effectively. If Tutankhamun were free, or even, like, a spookable SR, he’d be a neat addition to the game. As an SSR, he’s just really not worth it.
Tutankhamun
loader-2
loader-2
 Tutankhamun has a defense-leaning stat spread, with low-ish attack and high-ish health relative to SSR Archers as a whole. This is both not particularly helpful to Tutankhamun as a DPS and actively strange given his self-sacrifice kit. Extra health is literally useless to Tutankhamun in most cases, so being oriented towards HP over attack functionally just means wasted stats. As a triple-Arts Servant, Tutankhamun is also not good at active star gen. His Arts card NP gain is low as well, and his Quick card NP gain is quite bad—though in most cases he doesn’t need multiple NPs, so this is mostly irrelevant.
Tutankhamun’s passives aren’t particularly interesting. Magic Resistance is the usual small chance to avoid debuffs, and Divinity is mostly just there for the trait. Tutankhamun’s Independent Action variant applies only to Arts cards, giving a 10% buff that wouldn’t be particularly impactful even if Tutankhamun could reliably follow his NP with critting cards. Boy-Pharaoh’s Curse is the most impactful passive here, and all it really does is let Tutankhamun’s curse ignore most Servants’ Magic Resistance.
Mana Loading is very important to Tutankhamun’s flexibility, but none of the other appends are useful to him. The non-Mana-Loading appends are in fact less useful to Tutankhamun than they are to most Servants, as his sacrifice gimmick means he’s unlikely to survive to a second buff cycle even with Skill Reload, and he’s almost never going to be critting or using his Extra card.
loader-2
 Tutankhamun’s mat asks are pretty friendly. He doesn’t need any bronze mats (outside of appends) and most of his mats come from early FGO. For established players especially he should be easy to max out.
 The most notable thing about Tutankhamun’s skillset is that all three skills are batteries. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.
loader-2
 Valley of the Kings is the skill that makes Tutankhamun mildly interesting for farming. 20% partywide NP damage and NP charge isn’t all that powerful—there are cheaper Servants with similar things—but pairing that with the Tutankhamun’s ability to remove himself from the field functionally means Tutankhamun provides a free extra 20% charge and NP damage to your main DPS in a farming setup. There aren’t that many cases where 20% extra charge on turn 1 or turn 2 makes looping possible where it isn’t otherwise, but those cases do exist, and they mark the primary situation in which Tutankhamun is valuable. This skill also grants 30 stars any time Tutankhamun dies or has a guts triggered, which is… decent? Tutankhamun doesn’t otherwise have any crit tools, so he doesn’t have a great way of using this, but it can help someone else crit after he dies, which might be helpful on occasion, I suppose.
loader-2
 Amarna of Annihilation is a typical 3-turn 30% Arts buff, and a 30% battery. Both of these are standard and useful; neither is particularly noteworthy. The skill also lets Tutankhamun inflict curse with his cards. Sadly, he can’t really loop his NP (and thus inflate curse damage), since he kills himself, and even if he could, he wouldn’t really be able to scale curse damage enough to matter in most cases… so the curse is mostly flavor.
loader-2
 Tutankhamun’s third skill is a combination of guts, debuff immunity, and a 30% battery. If you want Tutankhamun to remove himself from the field, you won’t use this skill, since it gets in the way of that. If you do want him to stick around, you probably need him to use his NP at least three times, and this lets him survive one of those three. You still need another source of guts to protect him on his second NP, and you probably need to make sure there are always invulns up so enemy-turn damage doesn’t kill him, but this at least helps him function as something approaching a generic ST Arts unit if you need it. Tutankhamun would be much better off if this skill did not have a guts, even if it didn’t get anything else in addition—and he’d be even better if the guts was replaced with something else useful—but I understand why this is here and it makes it at least theoretically possible to use Tutankhamun as a more conventional burst DPS.
loader-2
 Tutankhamun’s NP is… iffy. Setting aside the elephant in the room, it’s an ST Arts NP with a pre-cast damage boost but no ramp. It has niche damage, but that niche, Demonic, is one of the smaller and less reliable ones. It inflicts curse and curse damage up, which is mostly for flavor, and it also has a chance at Instant Kill, but the values on that are also not high enough to be anything other than flavor. This is the kind of NP that would be serviceable but unexciting on another Servant, and that could be an acceptable complement to a great skillset in other circumstances.
The thing is, of course, that this also kills Tutankhamun.
There’s nothing about this NP that’s obviously meant to make up for the demerit. It doesn’t have an unusually high multiplier, it doesn’t have huge buffs, it doesn’t inflict substantial debuffs, it doesn’t have a great niche… It’s just an underwhelming ST NP that also kills Tutankhamun. Sacrifice NPs are cool and useful, but part of the reason they’re cool and useful is they usually come with huge benefit. Without that upside, this is a lot more questionable.
 As a farming unit, Tutankhamun is pretty simple—you stick him in your frontline alongside another DPS, you use his first skill on whatever turn your DPS needs an extra 20% charge, and you have Tutankhamun NP on that turn. Since you can’t use Tutankhamun’s third skill, you have 70% battery available in-kit: 20% from Mana Loading, 20% from skill 1, and 30% from skill 2. You can make up the remaining 30% with a CE (if, say, there’s an event CE with starting charge) or with a Castoria Charisma. Since Tutankhamun’s NP also deals damage, he can help kill an enemy on turn 1 or turn 2 as well, though his unbuffed damage isn’t particularly high, so he won’t add that much to your damage ceiling.
There are two main drawbacks to using Tutankhamun to help with farming. The first (and smaller) issue is that it slows you down, since you’re adding an extra NP animation, two more skill presses, and another Servant swap into your farming rotation. The larger issue is cost—Tutankhamun is an SSR Servant, and even at max level, you can’t run five SSR Servants and six SSR CEs. You’re not likely to need Tutankhamun’s help farming unless you’re trying to farm a 90++ node, and those almost always need a damage-boosting CE on your DPS, so you’re capped at four SSR event CEs at most. At that point, you’re usually better off 6-drop farming the 90+ node, which is not all that hard for a developed box at this stage in FGO’s life.
This is to say, Tutankhamun is theoretically unique and theoretically useful, but in practical terms he’ll only rarely be “necessary” and the trade-offs for bringing him are such that you might as well just farm an easier node. There’s also the fact that if what you need is an extra push of ST damage, Soujuurou is free and outdamages an NP1 Tutankhamun even against Sabers, while if what you need is extra battery and buffs, Summer Chloe is an SR and does that better, too. Tutankhamun is only better if you need both of those things simultaneously, which is almost never the case.
As a primary DPS, Tutankhamun functions more or less like any other ST Arts unit, with the caveat that you need an extra guts in order to keep him alive for a full buff cycle. You can cover this need with a CE, a Mystic Code, or a Servant with targeted or partywide Guts. Each of these has drawbacks: relying on a guts CE means you can’t run Black Grail, while a Mystic Code guts or a support Servant with guts takes away your ability to bring a better third support Servant. Tezcatlipoca and Santa Night are both solid options as plug guts supports, but neither is as good a third support as someone like Tamamo, Lady Avalon, or Oberon—and then there’s also the fact that Tutankhamun cannot survive to a second buff cycle if you fail to secure the three-turn kill.
In exchange for all this awkwardness, you get literally nothing over using another ST Arts unit. Tutankhamun does have a lot of batteries, but so do Archuria, Hephaestion, Berserker Castoria, and so on. Tutankhamun’s base damage is a little higher than most other Archers, but Archers have low damage in general, to the point that Tutankhamun loses out to some neutral Servants (like Berserker Musashi) even before factoring in the support or CE limitations resulting from needing to find an extra guts somewhere. As a conventional Arts looper, he’s just… really bad. You’d genuinely be much better off bringing someone like Euryale or Tell.
If you’re farming, you probably want to give Tutankhamun an event CE, if you have one. Otherwise, Black Grail is your best damage CE, though yet again this runs into potential issues—your second guts source must provide a guts with more than 500 HP or else Black Grail’s demerit will just kill Tutankhamun anyway. This does have the mildly interesting side effect of triggering Tutakhamun’s star burst twice in a turn (once when the guts triggers and once when Black Grail’s demerit kills) but I doubt there’s any case where that would be practically useful tech.
While Tutankhamun doesn’t make good use of his cards, he has decent crit access on later turns if he’s triggering his own gutses, and he has almost no in-kit crit buffs, so crit damage CCs are a natural pick. He also gets a bit more value out of curse than most Servants do, so curse damage CCs are an okay option, though for the reasons mentioned earlier in the review curse damage is unlikely to make much of a difference in most fights.
 Archers don’t make great use of grails and extra health in particular is worth nothing to Tutankhamun. That said, more attack is more attack, so if you do find yourself using him a lot, increasing his stats won’t hurt. I don’t think he’s worth investing in in general, but increasing his base damage will at least help him be somewhat better.
 Tutankhamun is technically unique. We don’t have another SSR who sacrifices themself, and we only have one other ST unit who provides partywide buffs and then removes themself from the field—and that other unit (Summer Chloe) can’t easily access her NP in farming contexts. That said, there are going to be very few cases in which what Tutankhamun does is more useful than other, cheaper options, and even then he comes with meaningful drawbacks. He’s also just really really bad in any case other than farming. Since he doesn’t get anything meaningful in exchange for his self-sacrifice demerit, he’s only worth considering at all in cases where the “demerit” is an advantage.
I really can’t recommend this guy in any capacity, unfortunately. Even if there’s theoretically a case where he’s worthwhile, it’s such a narrow band I’m not convinced it’ll ever come up. You need a case where you need 20% extra charge for your DPS on turn 1 or 2, you also need about 40k extra neutral damage against an enemy (or you don’t have Chloe), and the cost-related CE loss doesn’t result in a lower-difficulty node being more efficient. Outside of that, Tutankhamun is either a small efficiency loss relative to better tools, or he’s actively bad. If Tutankhamun were free, this might be fine, but as a limited SSR, he’s a hard skip.