Rabbit’s Reviews #414: Ashoka the Great (4* Lancer)

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 Somewhat surprisingly, Ashoka is a Lancer, rather than a Ruler. He’s a straightforwardly strong AoE Arts Lancer, with very good steroids, a battery, and some nifty utility. He also falls into the bucket of AoE units who deals significantly increased damage in single-target situations—less than a proper single-target Servant would deal, but enough to let Ashoka function well in mixed AoE/ST contexts. Ashoka’s primary weaknesses are not really his fault: as an SR Servant, he needs high levels of investment to counterclass 90++ nodes and can’t hit top-end damage levels without class advantage at all, and he’s competing with several existing units who do basically the same thing. That said, a well-raised Ashoka can take on certain top-end nodes, which isn’t true of every SR, and the existence of Servants like Percival doesn’t make Ashoka bad, especially considering Ashoka is generally stronger than his direct competition offensively. He can’t keep up with Lancer Ryouma, but Ryouma is a limited SSR while Ashoka is a story-locked SR, so that’s to be expected.
In sum, Ashoka is fairly generic but has high enough numbers to be quite strong on the whole, especially as SRs go. Nothing wrong with that.
Ashoka the Great
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Ashoka has pretty good stats, with high attack by SR Lancer standards and reasonably good HP relative to his level of attack. His NP gain, meanwhile, is pretty much exactly average, and as an Arts Servant with only a single Quick card, his active star gen is not good.
Ashoka has Magic Resistance (for avoiding the occasional debuff) and Divinity (mostly for flavor and the trait). He also gets a unique passive, True Name Discernment, which slightly reduces the NP damage he takes from Servants. This usually won’t matter at all for a player-controlled Ashoka, but it may cause problems when Ashoka shows up as an enemy.
Appends-wise, Mana Loading is the most valuable to Ashoka, as it increases his farming flexibility and also pairs nicely with his 30% battery. Aside from that, none of the other appends are hugely impactful. Anti-Berserker damage is solid given that Ashoka already has offensive class advantage against Berserkers, and the crit damage buff can help offset Ashoka’s low in-kit crit buffs, but neither will make much of a difference in most cases.
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Ashoka mostly asks for reasonable quantities of old mats. He does need some of Ordeal Call 2’s cauldrons, but not until higher levels, and a bit of post-OC2 farming or a few events should cover his needs.
Ashoka’s skillset is pretty standard but also quite powerful. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.
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Hell’s Tactics is a great partywide damage buff, giving 20% Arts and Buster up, along with 20% NP damage up, for 3 turns. Even as a selfish buff this would be respectable, and being partywide helps Ashoka function well in multicore farming setups. The partywide Arts buff even provides a marginal effective NP damage buff for supports, which can be helpful in stall setups. Not a lot to say here, but it’s a very good skill nonetheless.
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Wheel-Turning Pagoda provides a straightforward 30% attack and crit damage buff. The attack buff is really nice, especially in the context of Ashoka’s other steroids. A 30% crit damage buff, on the other hand, is quite weak, but Arts Servants don’t tend to rely on crits anyway, so that doesn’t really matter. Aside from that, the skill lets Ashoka apply a one-time buff block with his attacks, including his NP. The debuff doesn’t stack—he can only block one buff application per turn no matter how many times he swings at an enemy—but especially if Ashoka is looping this is an excellent method of mitigating random defensive buffs and other annoying skill spam.
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Chakravartin is a 30% battery, and that’s mostly what you’ll use it for. It does offer some stars per turn, though Ashoka’s crit tools are insufficient to make this particularly meaningful. This skill also gives the whole team a 30% debuff resistance buff, which is too low in value to reliably block standard debuffs, but which can be useful against enemies that spam chance-based stuns and charm—because success rate is additive, cutting (for example) a 50%-success-rate stun to 20% makes your team a lot less prone to getting locked down, especially if any of Ashoka’s allies also have Magic Resistance. On top of that, this also gives a solid 30% received crit change down buff to the party, which effectively negates all crits unless the enemy has a crit rate buff—a very nice consistency tool.
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Ashoka’s NP is pretty strong! It’s a typical AoE Arts NP, and all of its secondary effects are damage-related. It starts off by granting a 30% power mod against both Evil and Demonic enemies (applying both for enemies with both traits). Neither of these effects is particularly strong, and power mod is worse than supereffective damage, but Evil is a pretty broad category and a fair number of Demonic enemies are also Evil, so this isn’t a terrible niche on the whole.
More interestingly, this NP also gives Ashoka a whopping 50% NP damage buff, but only in situations where there’s only one enemy on the field. Ashoka still won’t overtake an ST Servant in these conditions, but this does help him deal with situations where he has to fight a single strong enemy. This makes him a good choice both for farming nodes where one wave has only one enemy and for harder fights where one enemy is likely to outlast all the others.
Aside from that, the NP does have a respectable Overcharge-based ramp, though unfortunately it’s both post-damage and debuff-based, which means it won’t apply when farming. Ashoka’s steroids are good enough even without this ramp that this is forgivable, though, especially given that AoE SR Servants often don’t get ramp at all. None of the other AoE SR Arts Lancers have any ramp on their NPs, and a present-but-not-perfect form of ramp is a notable step up on that.
Ashoka uses the same farming setups as any typical AoE Arts unit: two Castorias and an Oberon. In this setup, Ashoka regains about 15% charge per enemy. With Mana Loading and no starting charge CE, Ashoka can loop 2/3/x and 3/2/x nodes with ease, but anything more restrictive than that will be beyond him. With an MLB Black Grail and when fighting Archers, Ashoka hits 90++ damage thresholds at around NP5 and level 100, which is actually pretty good for an SR. It’s not a given that an Archer-focused 90++ node will have a wave composition that enables Ashoka to loop, but if it does and if you have him at NP5, he can work well.
In harder fights, the same fastburn setup works just fine, and since you can make use of cards, you don’t even necessarily need to be swinging at three enemies at once. You can also run standard Arts stall setups, with Castoria and one of Tamamo or Lady Avalon or Reines. To these teams, Ashoka brings consistency in the form of buff block and debuff resistance—not all that impressive, but certainly not bad considering he also deals good damage.
At the lower-end, the usual budget supports pair nicely with Ashoka. Xu Fu is a particularly good pick, mostly by virtue of being the closest thing we have to a budget Castoria. If you happen to have Lanling, he also pairs nicely with Ashoka, giving good general-purpose buffs and helping to enable crits, which Ashoka can benefit from but normally has trouble getting reliable access to.
Unless you’re planning to stall out a very long fight, The Black Grail is Ashoka’s best CE option, as it provides by far the most damage. If you’re worried about the demerit or need starting charge, something like Painting Summer or Ocean Flyer is a good option.
Ashoka has a couple of crit tools, but his kit is very much incomplete in this respect. If you want to make Ashoke more likely to crit, star gen CCs can be a good pick. If you don’t have issues getting Ashoka to crit, however, you can give him crit damage CCs instead, offsetting his low innate crit damage buffs.
If you happen to have an NP5 Ashoka and don’t have a preferred method of taking care of Archer 90++ nodes, you might as well take him to level 100 so he’s ready in the event there’s a node he fits well. Aside from that, he’s a strong Servant in general and Lancers make good use of extra stats, so he’s definitely not a bad grail target.
While he has a few nice bits of utility here and there and a small gimmick in the form of his ST-specific damage buff, Ashoka is mostly an utterly standard AoE Arts unit who happens to have high enough numbers to be strong. He’s not the most exciting unit, but if you like him enough to want to use him, he’ll do quite well for you. If you don’t already have a good AoE Lancer, I might recommend pulling for him, but at this point in FGO’s life, the odds of that being true are somewhat small. The biggest knock against Ashoka is just how late in the game he’s arriving. He’s a good Servant all-around, it’s just unlikely that most players have a particular need for him.