Rabbit’s Reviews #413: Metatron Jeanne (5* Ruler)

To her credit, Metatron has quite good stats, with the highest attack of the SSR Rulers by a fair margin, and not-too-bad health on top of that. Factoring in Rulers’ inherent attack bonus, this is a solid starting point. She also has very good NP gain relative to her deck and reasonably high hit-counts for incidental active star gen.

All of Metatron’s passives are unique to her, and they’re all pretty neat. Independent Manifestation (Angel) gives a small crit damage boost, as well as a permanent damage cut, which is particularly handy on a class that has defensive class advantage against nearly everything. Throne Creation gives a healthy 5 stars and 5% NP gauge per turn—irrelevant for farming but very nice for CQs. Archangel Divine Core gives the usual Divinity flavor bonus, and it also provides a small permanent NP damage buff, which is nice. Closing out the set is Metatron’s mystery passive, which makes her highly resistant to most mental debuffs, but vulnerable to sleep. Mental debuffs don’t come up all that often (and Metatron has debuff immunity on a skill anyway) but being less susceptible to things like terror and random charms is nice, even if in exchange fighting enemies that spam sleep might be more annoying than usual.

Due to Metatron’s cooldown spread and battery distribution, none of the append skills matter to her at all in farming contexts. For CQs, Skill Reload can be nice for getting to a second buff cycle faster, the crit damage buff is a (very small) damage increase, and Mana Loading can help Metatron get rolling faster without outside help. Even in CQs, though, none of these are all that valuable. If I had to pick one append for Metatron it would probably be Skill Reload.

Metatron is a Ruler and therefore requires a spread of pieces and gems for every class, and in exchange does not need many other mats. This is either really convenient or really annoying depending on how many other Servants you’ve leveled and how evenly distributed they are across classes. Her upper-level skill mats come from Ordeal Call 1 and Ordeal Call 4 respectively, which could make her annoying to max out at her debut… though if you’re not worried about having her maxed out asap she shouldn’t be too hard to take care of.

Metatron’s skillset is themed around utility: each skill gets a theoretically powerful piece of utility, although she has long cooldowns to compensate. Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.

Metatron’s NP has some theoretically nice stuff but isn’t all that impressive in practice. It offers partywide healing and NP charge, both of which are nice for stall, especially considering Castoria’s key weakness is that she doesn’t provide healing. This doesn’t usually matter in a Merlin team, but if you were to run Himiko/Castoria, it could be handy. Aside from that, it gets a 50% power mod effect against both Good and Evil. Power mod is worse than supereffective damage, as it scales additively with NP damage buffs (which Metatron already has). This effect also doesn’t scale with overcharge or NP level, limiting its power. The Good and Evil damage buffs do apply separately, meaning an enemy with both takes even more damage—but that mostly just means Metatron is particularly good at whacking Arjuna Alter specifically. Generally speaking, this is just a broad but not overly powerful niche.

The NP also gets pre-cast NP damage up. Unfortunately for Metatron, none of the damage buffs—not the niche damage and not the NP damage—lasts for more than a turn. This, coupled with Metatron’s limited skill-based damage buffs, means she gains very little damage turn-over-turn. While Metatron’s turn 1 neutral damage isn’t too bad—she has a 30/28 buff spread and solid attack—she’ll almost never get class advantage, her niche is weak, and her damage falls well behind the competition on later turns.

For farming, Metatron works like any other Buster AoE with a 50% battery: a 50% charge CE, two Koyans, and a plug support with a 50% battery will let her loop. Her damage is such that she won’t be able to farm 90++ nodes, but even at relatively low levels of investment she should be able to handle 90+-and-lower things. Pretty much any Servant who can loop is capable of that these days, but she at least meets the baseline requirements for functionality.

Metatron’s kit is very much oriented towards CQs, and towards stall specifically. Most of her utility is useless for farming and less-useful for short fights in general, but in longer fights, consistency, cooldown reduction, party charge, and party healing can all be helpful. Metatron is a particularly good fit for Himiko/Castoria teams, as she provides healing to offset incidental damage and can speed up the team as a whole with her cooldown reduction. Her passive star gen is helpful here, too, as Metatron and Himiko together can nearly guarantee the team crits consistently. Especially if you’re fighting a Moon Cancer, where Himiko and Metatron both get class advantage, this could be a worthwhile team.

To her credit, Metatron is pretty self-sufficient—she has charge, survival, antigimmick tools, good NP gain, and so on. This means she’ll do okay even in sub-optimal teams. If you don’t have Metatron’s preferred supports, you can stick her with whatever budget supports you do have and she should be fine. Mash and Hans are both solid options, as even with a little bit of external defense Metatron becomes quite bulky, and Hans’s crit tools fit nicely with Metatron’s.

For farming, Metatron needs a starting charge CE in order to loop. First Day of Filming and Aerial Drive are the usual suspects for this—First Day of Filming is very marginally better, but either is fine if at max level. For stalling, Metatron’s survivability and innate healing means she can afford to run Black Grail, meaningfully reducing the time you have to stall before Metatron can kill things. Alternatively, if you want to go for maximum stability, you could look at 2030 (for reliable crits) or Prisma Cosmos (for reliable NP access), both of which could be nice for Himiko/Castoria teams.

Metatron has pretty easy crit access and only okay crit damage buffs, so crit damage CCs are a solid pick. Alternatively, you can enhance her utility by giving her debuff removal or buff removal CCs.

Metatron is not particularly impressive, and even with grails she won’t be able to farm top-end nodes. If you find yourself regularly using her as a point servant for stall teams, you might want to grail her—Rulers do make good use of extra stats—but otherwise I’d skip this one.

Metatron is a standard AoE Buster unit who has a ton of stall-oriented consistency tools in exchange for having a very low damage ceiling. In a world where there were fewer good AoE options, she might have some appeal… but she’s really just outclassed all-around. Due to her low damage, Metatron isn’t really worth considering as a fastplay Servant, which means she has to lean on her utility for her value. Unfortunately, Castoria is so powerful that, while extra utility is nice, Castoria teams don’t really need the DPS to provide extra support, and you can do just fine bringing a DPS who doesn’t have Metatron’s level of utility and who deals more damage instead. If you compare Metatron’s stall utility to other damage-dealers, the situation gets worse, as what she offers is worth far less than what, say, Morgan brings. I’d argue that even Aoko is better—while she’s really awkward in fastplay, a stall Aoko brings a lot of the same things Metatron does while also being able to explode for a ton of damage every few turns. Aoko is not an amazing Servant by any means, so being arguably worse than her puts Metatron in a rough place, especially considering Metatron is far less unique.

Metatron is not fundamentally unworkable. She has a bunch of genuinely nice utility, and she has the baseline things required of a modern AoE Buster unit. The problem is that, while a lot of what she has is individually good, Metatron’s kit is missing a piece that ties the kit together. She doesn’t have the damage to be an appealing damage-dealer, or a killer supportive skill that makes her worth bringing as an alternative support pick. At the end of the day, she has a bunch of individually nice tools, none of which carries the overall kit, and so she ends up being overwhelming on the whole.