Rabbit’s Reviews #420: Indra (5* Lancer)

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 Indra’s fine. He’s an utterly ordinary Quick looper with relatively low damage and relatively good loop specs. The thing about Indra is that (aside from his art) there’s really no reason to use him over other, better AoE options. He’s pretty generic. Looks great, though!
Indra
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Indra’s stats are great, with nearly the highest attack of the SSR Lancers, and pretty good health on top of that. His NP gain is mostly average for his deck, although many single-Arts Servants have high NP gain on their Quicks, which is not true of Indra. As an AoE Quick Servant with high hit-counts, he’s also very good at active star gen.
Indra has an impressive set of six passives. He starts with Riding, for a persistent buff to his most important card. He also has the standard Magic Resistance, Independent Action, and Divinity passives, offering small bonuses to debuff resistance and crit damage. Thousand Eyes is a unique passive that further improves Indra’s star gen and also increases crit damage a little more, while Heavy Drinker makes healing more effective on Indra and turns most forms of healing into de-facto 10% batteries, which gives Indra a little bit more loop flexibility.
For appends, Mana Loading enables a guaranteed CE-less loop setup involving Nero Bride, though Indra sacrifices so much damage to make it work that it won’t generally be worthwhile. None of the other appends do much for him, though—crit damage is somewhat nice given Indra’s easy crit access and low in-kit crit buffs, but that’s about it.
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Indra needs reasonable quantities of mats, but he also asks for a lot of Ordeal Call mats, including both OC4 gold materials. This makes him difficult to level for anyone who isn’t caught-up on story, and most people who are up-to-date in the story probably have their AoE needs met already.
Indra’s skillset is unremarkable and mostly unobjectionable. Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.
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King of the Gods is a standard 50% battery on a 6-turn cooldown. The one interesting thing here is that it brings Indra’s on-heal NP gain up to 20% for a single turn. It’s a little annoying that this only applies on the same turn Indra uses this skill, but being able to convert healing to NP charge is a neat trick, especially considering the newer of the two plug suit mystic codes offers healing, and thus functionally brings more charge for Indra.
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Mana Burst is a 3-turn 20% buff to all card types, which is kinda weak for being on a 6-turn cooldown. Still, card-type buffs are good in general. This skill also causes Indra’s Arts and Buster cards to give him a further Quick buff, and it causes his Quick cards to give a tiny crit damage buff. In farming contexts, this means you can guarantee an extra 20% Quick up by turn 3, and you can get 30% if you don’t draw all your Arts and Buster cards on the same turn. In CQs, on the other hand, this is sort of a limited form of ramp, slightly increasing Indra’s damage over time as long as you prioritize his cards. Overall, this skill is okay. I don’t love cases where you have to put cards before NPs, and I also don’t love cases where your damage output depends on when you draw certain cards, but it could be worse.
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Vritrahan is a 30% attack and crit damage buff that lasts for three turns. Both of these are fine, though I usually say crit daamge buffs don’t make much of a difference until they hit 50%. This also gives 30% power mod against Lamia, Dragon, and Demonic enemies for 3 turns. Power mod is an unideal form of niche and 30% power mod isn’t a lot, but these three categories collectively cover a pretty wide range of enemies, so it could be worse.
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Indra’s NP is alright. The biggest disappointment here is that while it has pre-cast NP damage up, the buff is both low (starting at 10% and scaling with Overcharge) and lasts only a single turn, precluding ramp. This NP also has no niche damage, something that’s mostly standard for AoE damage dealers at this point in time. The NP does have pre-cast buff removal, though, which is nice for consistency (and annoying when used by enemies), and most notably it heals Indra. This heal is functionally a post-cast battery, providing Indra with 10% extra charge every time he uses his NP, or 20% if he used his battery on the same turn. This makes him a much better looper than he would otherwise be.
In a conventional farming setup—two Summer Skadis and an Oberon—Indra refunds about 10% per enemy off his NP. Because he gets some charge off the plug suit’s heal and he also gets bonus charge from the heal on his own NP, he can loop CE-less with certain wave compositions. 
For a 2/x/x node, you use both Skadi batteries on turn 1. Indra refunds 20% and gets 10% from his heal. You use his battery for 50% more charge, and then you use the plug heal for another 20% charge, bringing you to 100%. Against a single enemy, the second NP refunds 10%, gets 20% charge from Indra’s heal, and then Oberon’s batteries secure the loop.
For an x/3/x node, you again use both Skadi batteries on turn 1. Against a single enemy, Indra refunds 10% and gets 10% from his heal. You use his battery for 50% charge, use the plug heal for 20% charge, and then swap Oberon in to use his 20% battery. Indra refunds 30% off the three enemies, plus 20% from his heal, and you still have Oberon’s 50% battery to secure the loop.
You can loop literally anything if you swap a Skadi for Bride and have Mana Loading. On the first turn, you use Skadi’s battery and Bride’s battery. On the second turn, you get 10% charge from Indra’s heal, 50% charge from Indra’s battery, 20% charge from Bride’s heal, and 20% charge from the plug heal. You refund 10% minimum from even a single enemy, you get 20% charge from the heal on Indra’s NP, and then you can swap Oberon in to secure the loop. This setup has a lot less damage than a double Skadi team, but it does work if damage isn’t an issue.
All of the above setups will work for CQs as well, provided you can clear quickly. Indra is a pretty ordinary AoE Quick unit, though, so there’s not much in the way of interesting strategies here, especially given that there aren’t really any Quick-oriented supports who offer healing. All the usual support suspects will do just fine for Indra.
In most cases, Indra will want to run The Black Grail. He has the loops specs to work around not having starting charge, and he has plenty of healing to offset the demerit. There’s not much reason to use other CEs.
Indra has relatively low in-kit crit damage and very easy crit access, so crit damage CCs are a natural pick. Healing CCs can also be interesting if you want Indra to be bulkier—the healing CCs don’t proc his charge-on-healing skills, but they’re still amplified slightly by his healing-received passive.
Indra’s relatively low damage means he can’t farm 90++ nodes at neutral, even with Black Grail, and even if fully maxed out. That said, at somewhere around level 100 and NP3 he can counterclass 90++ nodes with MLB Black Grail. This is… probably not worth the investment, considering other Servants can do similar things more easily, and better Servants can 5CE farm 90++ at neutral or can 6CE farm specific 90++ nodes. All this is to say, grails don’t really go far enough to offset Indra’s damage issues for me to recommend him. If you’re committed to using him already, he does need grails to be fully effective, but you’re offsetting a weakness rather than getting something particularly valuable from the investment.
Indra has quite good loop specs, but that’s the only thing he really has going for him. His damage is just too low for this to matter much, and he doesn’t really have any other notable advantages. He’s almost good, but there’s really no reason (other than art) to use him as-is. With the right buff, or a good new support, his kit might click. As-is he’s pretty skippable.