Rabbit’s Reviews #408: Richard I (5* Saber)

Richard has high attack and low health relative to SSR Sabers as a whole, which is a nice starting spot for a DPS. His two Quicks, high hit-counts, and multiple sources of star gen up mean he’s unusually good at active star gen for a Buster unit. His NP gain is fine, with pretty average gains on his Quick and Arts cards relative to his deck. For passives, all he gets are the stock-standard Magic Resistance and Riding. Riding is marginally more useful to Richard than to most Buster Sabers, as he has two solid Quick cards, but it still doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.

Richard is a 30% charger, and as such Mana Loading is essential to his functioning. His other appends don’t matter much—extra crit damage can be decent given his crit focus, but his cooldowns are such that Skill Reload does nothing in most cases, and the other two appends are marginal at best.

Richard has some annoying mat asks, taking a fair number of Great Knight Medals as well as 72 Ceremonial Swords per skill. It’ll likely take a fair bit of time to max him out, unless you haven’t been raising other Servants that need Swords, which is a pretty big knock against him given his lack of standout functionality.

Richard’s skillset is quite plain overall. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

Utopie Purgatoire is an unexciting NP. In farming contexts, all it does is damage. It does have overcharge-based ramp, but it’s post-damage and takes the form of a trio of card-resistance debuffs. This means the ramp can be resisted and doesn’t work in cases where you aren’t fighting the same enemies each wave. The values are pretty low, too. The most interesting part of this NP is that it gives Richard a ramping crit damage buff, which can let him hit pretty hard with his Busters in CQ contexts… but that’s about all this NP has going for it.

Oh, and it also inflicts, burn, which is mostly for flavor.

Richard is an utterly standard Koyan looper. With Mana Loading, a 50% charge CE, and a Koyan/Koyan/Oberon setup, he can loop anything, provided he has the damage. Unfortunately, without niche or an interlude, he doesn’t break a million damage against Lancers even when completely maxed out. Koyan’s anti-Man damage can get him there, but at the point you’re investing that heavily in a Servant, you might as well pick someone who doesn’t need the extra help. Richard will mostly be locked to 5-drop-farming 90+ nodes, which is a rough spot to be in when plenty of Servants can easily 6-drop such nodes.

In CQs, Richard favors the same sorts of burst-oriented teams as when farming, as looping his NP also lets him stack his crit damage buffs. The same setup as above applies, with the caveat that you may be able to run a better CE and rely on cards to help loop. He’s also a slightly interesting pick for Himiko/Castoria teams, as his Charisma helps to flood the field with stars and props up Himiko a bit, while Richard appreciates all the things Himiko brings, including extra Overcharge.

For farming, Richard needs a 50% charge CE—probably Aerial Drive or First Day of Filming. If you have an event drop CE that provides 50% charge, Richard may be able to use it to 6-drop farm 90+-or-lower nodes, which can be nice. For CQs, the Black Grail is always a solid choice, especially on a Servant like Richard who doesn’t typically want fights to go long.

Richard has plenty of in-kit crit damage and will get more from his supports, so crit damage CCs, while never bad, don’t add a whole lot here. You might consider star gen CCs instead, to further lean into Richard’s unusually good active star gen and to help him crit more reliably.

Even taking Richard all the way to 120 won’t make him 90++ viable outside of Man-attribute Lancers and Berserkers. If you want to use him as a pocket Lancer-killer for mid-difficulty CQs, 90 is fine for that, and the extra levels, while nice, don’t meaningfully change him. I’d skip this one.

As an additional note, though, with this New Year we’ve been informed that we’re going to have the option to promote some of our Servants to “Grand” status. We don’t know the full specifics of what this entails, but we have been told that it will require the Servant to be at level 100 with all non-append skills at level 10, that it will allow them to equip their bond CE in addition to a normal CE, and that they can only be deployed as a Grand in certain quests. This makes it sound like this bonus will only matter for certain story fights, perhaps in FGO’s story finale, so I wouldn’t make grailing decisions based on this until we know for certain how this works and how widely it applies. That said, if a Servant has a particularly good bond CE, this could be a reason to take them to level 100 even if you wouldn’t otherwise.

On this note, Richard’s bond CE increases the party’s Buster crit damage by 30% while he’s on the field. This is mildly useful to Himiko teams, but otherwise is mostly just a slightly weaker version of Richard’s crit append. Even if this were something that could be used anywhere, you probably have other Servants who would benefit more from being a Grand.

Richard has the minimum things you look for in an AoE Buster unit—good steroids spread across all three brackets, paired with Koyan-compatible batteries. Unfortunately, without an interlude, niche damage, or good ramp, he can’t compete damage-wise with the stronger members of his class, and he also doesn’t have anything else notable to offer. His selling point seems to be crits, but his crits are only good, rather than great. Most Buster units can crit well enough in a Koyan team anyway, so the actual value this brings is questionable. All Richard really needs to be solid is an interlude with either a good niche or proper ramp, but until then he’s pretty forgettable.