Rabbit’s Reviews #404: Van Gogh (Miner) (4* Lancer)

Van Gogh has very average base stats for an SR Lancer, which fits with her being an overall very average Servant. She would have preferred more attack, but her stats aren’t actively bad, so… it could be worse. Her internals, on the other hand, are actually quite good. She’s an AoE Quick Servant with 6-hit Quick cards, so she’s great at active star gen. For NP gain, she has a typical Arts card for a single-Arts Servant, but her Quick cards have unusually excellent NP gain, meaning she’s less reliant on batteries than most for NP access in CQ contexts.

Van Gogh has an interesting, albeit modest, set of passives. Redundancy is a unique buff that both slightly strengthens Van Gogh’s Buster cards and lets them drop a few critical stars, which isn’t normally the case. Entity of the Outer Realm further supports Van Gogh’s star gen, giving an extra two stars per turn, along with a very tiny chance to stave off debuffs. Self-Portrait, meanwhile, gives Van Gogh a solid chance at avoiding mental debuffs, which is fairly niche but valuable in the cases where it matters.

Van Gogh is a 30% charger, so Mana Loading is the most valuable append, as usual. Aside from that, she gets anti-Berserker attack up, which is always nice to have given that it applies on top of the usual class advantage. Van Gogh also has easy crit access and no in-kit crit buffs, making the crit damage append a solid choice. Additionally, the cooldown reduction append means Van Gogh can re-use her first skill as soon as it wears off, which might be helpful on rare occasions. Essentially, Van Gogh benefits from more-or-less all of her appends. Fortunately, given that Van Gogh is a welfare, unlocking all her appends is actually feasible.

As a welfare, Van Gogh only needs event mats for ascension. Her skill mats, on the other hand, are a bit of a mixed bag. She doesn’t need too many of any particular mat—no asking for 60 bronze mats per skill or the like—but she does need some of Ordeal Call 2’s gold mats, which could be tricky for players who aren’t caught up in the story.

Van Gogh’s skillset is very standard for an AoE DPS. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

Van Gogh’s NP is fairly nice by welfare standards, with a pre-cast damage buff and a fairly broad niche. The niche doesn’t scale with overcharge and the damage buff doesn’t ramp, but given that Van Gogh is a welfare this isn’t super surprising. The NP also has a 40% stun chance, which is nice for occasionally staving off damage, though the stun won’t land particularly often, as even moderate amounts of magic resistance will make it extremely unlikely that this hits.

The one other thing this NP does is set City field. Like Arc’s NP, this effect is applied directly to the battlefield, rather than to Van Gogh herself, which means things like buff removal don’t affect it (though it still fades if VG leaves the field). This doesn’t have a huge impact on anything, but it’s neat regardless.

In a double Summer Skadi team, Van Gogh refunds just under 10% per enemy. For farming, this means Van Gogh cannot BG loop under any normal circumstances, but she can loop with a 50% charge CE on any node where the first or second wave has 3 enemies, provided you also have a plug Oberon. After whichever wave has 3 enemies, you plug Oberon in and use his 20% battery, covering the rest of your missing charge with the three 50% batteries the supports have available. Van Gogh’s damage won’t be sufficient for high-level farming, but this should be workable for many easier nodes.

Outside of farming, the same general setups apply, though you might want to swap Oberon for a Caster Skadi if you don’t think Van Gogh can 3-turn a given fight. She’s just an extremely simple AoE Quick unit, and there’s no special tech to factor in—you use her NP, take her cards as they’re available, and hope for the best.

You could also try running Van Gogh with Foreigner Van Gogh, as Miner Van Gogh does have the necessary traits to benefit from Foreigner Van Gogh's buffs... but typically this will be inferior to running two Foreigner Van Goghs and a Castoria, and you're very likely to run into the crit cap and thus face diminishing returns on your damage buffs.

The one other thing to consider is trying to boost Van Gogh’s stun chance. Caster Gilgamesh, for example, brings the stun success rate up to a more reasonable 70%. This still isn’t enough to count on to protect you in an emergency, but it’s likely to stun all enemies once or twice in a three-turn buff cycle, which can be helpful for overall team survivability. Aside from that, Van Gogh’s good cards mean she’s reasonably self-sufficient, so you should be able to run her with budget supports without too much trouble.

Even with her various defensive tools, Van Gogh still wants to kill as fast as possible, which makes the Black Grail her best CE in CQ contexts. For farming, any full-attack 50% attack CE should be fine, especially if it also provides a functional boost to Van Gogh’s NP damage. Traces of Christmas and Golden Sumo are both solid picks.

Van Gogh has easy crit access and ample access to crit buffs, but in lieu of anything else especially meaningful crit damage CCs are still an obvious choice here.

Lancers are decent grail targets, but Van Gogh is so unremarkable I can’t recommend grailing her. She’d make good use of extra stats, but there are plenty of other Servants who’d benefit more from the resources.

Van Gogh is fine for a welfare. She has low steroids and weak NP refund, but she has good cards, some nice utility, a pretty good innate crit buff, and a battery. And, of course, she’s free. If you like her and want to use her for general content, she’ll do just fine, though she’ll never be able to handle top-end farming content. She’s not exciting, but there’s also nothing really wrong with her.