Rabbit’s Reviews #421: U-Olga Marie (5* UnBeast)

While Olga has a lot of things working in her favor, her stat line is not one of them. She inherits Rulers’ defensive stat lean, and even compared to the various Rulers she has relatively low attack and relatively high health—not a great start for a damage-dealer, though not terrible for a support. To add insult to injury, though, Rulers get an innate 10% damage bonus, which partially offsets their defensive stats. UnBeast does not get that benefit, leaving Olga with unambiguously low attack.

Internals-wise, meanwhile, Olga is pretty unremarkable. Her Arts card NP gain is totally standard for her deck, and her Quick card NP gain is at the low end of normal. She only has one Quick card, so she’s not great at active star gen, but she has high enough hit-counts that she can drop a few stars if she gets a star gen boost.

Olga has a mix of old and new passives, and they mostly don’t have a huge impact on her functionality. Territory Creation is functionally a small effective NP gain buff for Olga’s Arts cards, while Item Construction makes Olga’s various debuffs a bit more consistent. Divinity is mostly there for the trait, and Independent Manifestation does nothing—perhaps a lore consequence of Olga being an “UnBeast” instead of a proper Beast.

Olga’s unique passives, meanwhile, are both Guts related. Guardian of Human Order gives Olga a 5000 HP guts against Threat enemies, giving her a bit more bulk in certain fights. This seems situational, and it is, but it’s actually deceptively helpful here, as many Foreigners have the Threat trait. Olga is a good Foreigner counter, dealing double damage against them, but she also takes more damage from them. This guts effect lets her take on most Foreigners without having to worry too much about fragility. Her other unique passive, Backlight, also plays into this, giving Olga a Buster buff, an invuln, and a bit of NP gauge any time a guts triggers. As this is her only in-kit guts, this is mostly relevant to the anti-Threat guts, further helping Olga quickly take down Foreigners with the Threat trait.

Guardian of Human Order also happens to make Olga’s Extra card hit in AoE. As with other instances of this effect, it halves the damage of the card—but Olga’s has a special clause that negates that halving if there is only one target on the field. This makes the AoE Extra card pure benefit, only kicking in when it’s helpful. Most high-end farming nodes will feature enemies too strong to farm with a single AoE Extra card, but on occasion Olga will be able to clear a wave without using her NP at all thanks to this passive.

Skill Reload is Olga’s most important append. It lets her loop her skills with only a single Koyan, and it even enables a plugless loop setup that doesn’t involve Koyan at all. The Extra Attack buff is nice for supporting Olga’s AoE Extra card, and the crit damage buff plays nicely into Olga’s card rigging. Mana Loading isn’t usually necessary for Olga given her plethora of batteries, but in some specific cases it may enable you to add her third skill in when otherwise you wouldn’t have enough charge available. Anti-Pretender damage is the least important append, less because it’s bad and more because Pretender fights are pretty rare.

Olga asks for a mix of different mats in place of pieces and gems, much like Avengers and Foreigners and the like. Her mats range from very early FGO all the way to the recent Ordeal Calls. If you have a good spread of mats available, she shouldn’t be too hard to level, but if you aren’t caught up in story or if you have a deficit in a particular type of material you might run into a wall.

Olga has two completely separate skillsets, and I’ll address them separately. Like with Mash, though, you only have to level her skills once—both forms share the same skill levels. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

Planet Olga Marie is a very strong Noble Phantasm, offering just about everything you want from an NP. It starts off by applying a tricolor debuff before dealing damage. While this is only lasts a single turn, Olga still gets ramp, in the form of a partywide attack buff that gets applied post-damage. The attack buff also scales with NP level, giving Olga the unusual distinction of her ramp getting NP level scaling. This, on top of Olga’s overcharge considerations, makes NP levels particularly important for her, especially since the attack buff also doubles as a support effect. An NP5 Olga offers 30% attack up and a 20% card debuff for any NPs that follow hers on her turn—a very respectable bit of damage push for other Servants. Additionally, the NP gives 20% NP charge for all party members with the Man, Star, or Living Human traits (including Olga herself), and 10% NP charge to anyone without those traits. It’s slightly unfortunate that a support Olga has to choose between fully buffing other Servants’ NPs and providing them with NP charge, but being able to do either is still nice, even if Olga has to choose.

Finally, this NP deals supereffective damage against Man and Star enemies. Anti-Man damage on a Buster NP is quite powerful, as it stacks with Koyan’s anti-Man buffs, and Olga’s strong kit and ability to run the Black Grail means she’ll generally outdamage noted Man-killer Morgan, even before card rigging is factored in. She’s also only the second Servant with Supereffective damage against Star enemies, after Salieri. Star nodes tend to be among the most difficult to farm, so Olga’s NP sets her up well to be a silver bullet of sorts for some particularly tricky farming situations.

Oh boy.

Building around DPS Olga is complicated. There are a ton of different ways to use her, and it’s simply not possible to list out every different potentially-worthwhile party. Olga’s optimal setup is going to depend heavily on exactly what you’re up against. While I’m going to examine the different ways Olga can be used and will recommend a number of different things, your primary takeaway from this section should be that Olga takes creativity. If you want to use Olga—especially if you want to use her to farm—you’ll be best served by looking at the node and crafting a team that brings out Olga’s various strengths to clear it. In some cases, you’ll want to maximize her NP damage. In others, you’ll want to rely mostly on cards. Usually you’ll need to mix and match, leveraging both Olga’s NP and her card rigging, intentionally sacrificing damage on easier waves in exchange for additional damage stretch on harder ones.

To start off, let’s ignore Olga’s third skill. If you set that aside, Olga’s Buster loop setup is extremely simple: all she needs is 100% charge and three turns of cooldown reduction. On turn 1, Olga uses her second and first skills (in that order), on turn 2 you use the support batteries and apply your cooldown reduction, and on turn 3 you use Olga’s skills again.

This is, obviously, heavily abstracted, but I put it in these terms for a reason: Olga doesn’t need a starting charge CE, and, more interestingly, she doesn’t even need Koyan. Olga can loop plugless with the Atlas Mystic Code, the Skill Reload append, and any two 50% chargers (or with Oberon and a 30% charger). With a single Koyan and the Skill Reload append, Olga can use any other combination of supports, provided they bring a combined total of 50% charge. Hypothetically, if you had no SSRs other than Olga, you could still loop by pulling a Koyan off support and grabbing Xu Fu and Shakespeare as your other two supports. Olga is by far the most flexible AoE Buster looper—if you don’t care about skill 3 and you don’t need Olga’s card-rigging on turn 2, it’s absolutely trivial to make her loop.

This isn’t just relevant to budget- or speed-clearing teams either. Many of Olga’s best teams will involve only a single Koyan. In fact, assuming you’re bringing one Koyan and one Oberon, your third support doesn’t have to bring any charge at all, which opens Olga up to supports who bring a lot of damage but not a lot of charge, like Jinako and Santa Martha.

Koyan/Olga/Jinako/Oberon is a particularly interesting team, requiring Skill Reload on Olga and a maxed-out Mana Loading on Jinako. The strategy here is simple: you use Olga’s skills, Koyan’s damage buffs, and Jinako’s first skill on turn 1. On turn 2, you use Koyan’s battery, and then you plug her out for Oberon and use his batteries, letting Olga NP again. On turn 3, you use Olga’s skills again, throw in the plug buff, and finish with Jinako’s second and third skills. By turn 3, Jinako’s NP gauge is also full—she picks up 20% charge from Mana Loading, 20% from her own battery, 20% from Oberon’s, and 20% from each of Olga’s two NPs. Jinako also has 50% NP damage up and between 90% and 130% attack up, depending on Olga’s NP level. This means you can use Jinako’s and Olga’s NPs on turn 3, with Jinako’s NP providing solid additional damage and also dropping a nice 30% defense debuff before Olga NPs.

Setups like the above—where another Servant also gets to NP—can be powerful in the right circumstances, but they come with the drawback of preventing Olga from using an NPBB chain. This kind of setup will be ideal for cases where you need a relatively even distribution of damage. In a node where the final wave has three enemies, all of whom have moderately high health, this can be a good option, while in a node where the final wave has a single high-HP enemy, you’ll get more mileage out of letting Olga use both her Buster cards.

On that note, if Olga needs cards on all three turns—if, say, the second and third waves both have a single high-HP enemy—she might get more out of Summer BB as a third support, even though BB doesn’t inherently offer party damage buffs. BB gives Olga guaranteed card access on all three of her turns, where normally she only gets two, which in practice amounts to a massive ST damage increase on one turn in exchange for reduced damage on the other two.

Trying to use Olga’s third skill complicates things substantially. There’s only one setup that allows Olga to use her third skill regardless of node composition—and it’s Koyan/Olga/Oberon/Oberon, with Skill Reload on Olga. In this setup, you use Koyan’s damage buffs, Olga’s second skill, and then Olga’s first skill, and then you have Olga NP. She refunds 20% charge off her NP, so on turn 2 you can use Koyan’s 50% battery, then swap her for the second Oberon, and have both Oberons use their 20% batteries to let Olga NP again. On turn 3, you use both Oberon 50% batteries and Ends of the Dreams, and then you use Olga’s third, second, and first skills, in that order. Add in the plug buff, and then Olga NPs. This has the added bonus of getting skill 3’s power mod on turn 3, when you’re likely to need the most damage.

A level 100 NP2 Olga with MLB Black Grail deals around 650k off her NP in this setup—and she’s guaranteed an NPBB chain, which means she should be able to clear most 90++ nodes. With niche, she deals well over a million damage. With the right mix of cards, niche, NP levels, and grails, Olga should be able to clear the third wave of most 90++ nodes, and she might not even need Black Grail (and thus be able to 6-drop farm) in some cases. The catch to this is that Olga’s wave 2 damage is much, much lower. Without any way to get cards on wave 2, especially, high health thresholds on wave 2 may stymie Olga farming setups.

That said, while this is the only node-agnostic way to guarantee Olga can use her third skill, it’s not the only setup in which the skill can be used once you start taking specific farming nodes into account. Specifically, if Olga can use cards on turn 1 or 2, she can generate enough extra NP gauge to slot in her third skill in other teams. In the ideal case, she can even use it twice. Let’s take a look at the extreme example of this:

We start with a Koyan/Olga/Koyan/Oberon team. On turn 1, Olga uses her second skill, then her third, then her first. Both Koyans then use all their skills, and Olga uses an NPBA chain. Olga’s NP generates 20% charge, her Buster generates 20% charge due to the Koyans’ skills, and an Arts crit (which you’re guaranteed due to Olga’s star flood) generates 40% gauge, without relying on any overkill. You then plug Oberon in and use his 20% battery, bringing Olga to 100% gauge, allowing you to use Olga’s third, second, and first skills again. Olga uses an NPBB chain this time, refunding 60% charge, plus a bit more off her Extra. Oberon uses his 50% battery and End of the Dream to secure the loop.

This setup relies on Olga’s NP not killing in the first two waves—or, put another way, it works in cases where Olga needs cards to clear those first two waves. Olga’s turn 3 non-niche NP damage is ever so slightly higher than in the double Oberon setup, with the caveat that she won’t get extra overcharge and thus her in-niche damage will be much lower—just barely clearing a million at level 100 NP2 with MLB Black Grail. She also doesn’t get cards on turn 3, meaning she can’t stretch this damage further. That said, if turns 1 and 2 have very-high-health enemies, it’s very possible that wave 3 is more lenient, in which case this setup might be viable.

A more realistic scenario is for Olga’s NP to clear wave 1 but not wave 2. In this case, a Koyan/Koyan/Oberon team can still be effective. On turn 1, you use Koyan’s damage buffs and only Olga’s second skill, and then Olga NPs. On turn 2, you use Olga’s first skill and both Koyan batteries. You can also swap Oberon in and use his 20% battery—you don’t need the extra charge so you might as well get the NP damage buff up. Olga does an NPBB chain, gaining a bit over 60% charge in total. On turn 3, you use Oberon’s 50% battery and End of the Dream, then Olga’s third skill, then her second and first, plus the plug buff. This gets you both card rigging and Olga’s third skill on turn 3 again, along with the extra damage stretch you probably need on turn 2. It does slightly less damage overall than the double Oberon team, and it requires Olga’s NP not killing on turn 2, but this should work for some nodes.

Flawlessness also provides slightly more persistent damage buffs than Olga’s NP does, even if Olga happens to be NP5, so if Olga can kill a wave with cards alone—which is to say, if the wave is ST or has very very low health thresholds—you can simply opt to not NP and to use Olga’s third skill instead. In this case, you build around Olga as though you were not using her third skill at all, and you press that button instead of using her NP on one of the waves where you’re also using her third skill.

...At this point you can probably see what I mean about Olga being complex. There are all sorts of combinations that can work for Olga involving Servants from Reines to Merlin to Mash. The highest-damage Olga teams will generally be Koyanskaya, Oberon, and a third support, but neither Koyanskaya nor Oberon is absolutely necessary, and in certain nodes you may find that an unexpected strategy enables a clear that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The best advice I can give is to do a lot of theory-crafting and be open to experimentation. It is, in my opinion, really really cool to have a Servant for whom gameplay strategy is not easily solved. For most Servants, we can pretty easily say “this is the best team.” That’s not really possible with Olga, and that’s neat!

Olga can also, of course, do Ciel’s trick of rigging her own cards and then plugging out for another DPS, which can enable various farming setups. Aoko in particular benefits from this, due to her AoE cards, and Servants like Okita who have very strong crits can also benefit. These strategies generally involve summer BB and a crit support. I went over these in detail in Ciel’s review, and this review is long enough as it is, so rather than reiterating this in detail I’ll point you there if you’re interested. Olga functions exactly like Ciel in those teams except that she also guarantees all of your first-turn cards crit, which makes her strictly (if only slightly) better for these setups.

For CQs, DPS Olga is pretty self-sufficient, with very strong skills on reasonably short cooldowns. The only thing she’s really missing is survivability. If you aren’t aiming for fast clears—and sometimes even if you are—you’ll want to pair Olga with Servants like Merlin and Mash who can keep her alive while she whacks things. This applies both at the high end and the low end—even if you don’t have any other supports, you can pair Olga with Mash and Hans and probably have success.

It’s also worth noting that in CQs Olga should always have card access, meaning she can more reliably make use of card refund to stack her third skill while still using her NP. Something like the best-case-scenario Koyan/Koyan/Oberon team above, where Olga uses an NPBA chain and then an NPBB chain to stack her third skill while also looping, will be workable in almost any shortform challenge quest.

...Also, while I’ve been referring to this as Olga’s DPS form, you might occasionally want to use this form as a support. It has less supportive value than Olga’s other mode, but you still get the various supportive benefits on Olga’s NP, you have partywide Buster and crit buffs, and (most importantly) you can freely provide pierce invuln to your whole team. If you give Olga Kaleidoscope, you can use her third skill, use her second skill, and then still NP for the damage and the buffs it provides. For an NP5 Olga, this functionally gives 50% Buster up, 20% Arts and Quick up, and 30% Attack up on the turn Olga does this, which might be better than what you can manage with support Olga if you don’t need extra charge and are mostly in need of a single turn of damage push.

Olga has such easy NP access that, so long as you’re using her as a DPS, there’s little reason not to run The Black Grail. It’s a huge damage increase, especially at level 100, and it works well with Olga’s kit. That said, in some cases—especially if you have a maxed-out Olga and the node you’re trying to farm cooperates—Olga will be able to clear things while equipped with a random event CE, which is always nice!

For everything in her kit, Olga doesn’t have a lot of innate crit buffs, which makes crit damage CCs very appealing. You could also consider sticking Mage of Flowers on one of Olga’s Busters, which in some circumstances will enable her to hit NP gain thresholds with an NPBB chain instead of an NPBA chain. I suspect this won’t be worth the loss of a damage-boosting command code, but it might be helpful in some situations.

Support Olga is somewhat simpler to use than DPS Olga—you use her like you’d use any charge-and-damage support, leveraging her tools to facilitate a damage-dealer’s NP and damage output. She fits most naturally with Buster damage-dealers with strong Overcharge effects. Arjuna Alter, for example, is a natural partner, as a Buster Crit Servant with good overcharge scaling. Anyone who can splash NP charge to Olga is also handy, helping her to either use her NP more than once or to use both her third skill and her NP. Servants who have the Man, Star, or Living Human traits benefit more from Olga’s NP as well—Waver, Reines, and Jinako all make good supportive partners for this reason.

The big question for a supportive Olga is generally whether to use Olga’s third skill or her NP. Olga’s third skill facilitates active NP gain, crits, and Buster damage, while her NP provides more general damage buffs and some flat NP charge. Using Olga’s third skill will generally increase survival and stability, and if you time it right you can use it to deflect an NP. Generally, if you have a particular plan for how to make good use of Ultimate U, use that. Otherwise, you’ll never regret tossing out Olga’s NP.

The other question when using Olga as a support is whether to place her NP before or after an ally’s. Using Olga’s NP first increases the damage push she’s providing but prevents your DPS from benefiting from Olga’s NP charge. Using Olga’s NP second gives less damage push but provides NP charge. If the DPS isn’t Man, Star, or Living Human, it’s easier to ignore the NP charge—10% charge won’t usually be worth the damage loss—but otherwise, take stock of how much damage you need. If you’re going to break a bar regardless, use Olga’s NP second. Otherwise, you might want the extra damage.

Olga is broadly similar to Merlin as a support, offering attack, Buster, and crit damage buffs, a partywide invuln, a 30% party charge from skills, and more charge tied to NP. She’s a little less plug-and-play than Merlin is, but she also provides some utility he doesn’t, and she can deal damage herself. Olga won’t usually be a premiere support pick, but she’ll always be at least good, and for the right fight she might be worth bringing over alternatives. DPS Olga is the real prize, but Olga’s supportive kit is perfectly serviceable, and especially if you don’t already have a deep bench of supports she’ll be very nice to have.

Support Olga will often want to use Kaleidoscope in order to immediately access her third skill or her NP. With Kaleid, Olga can use her third skill and then immediately follow it with her second, providing party buffs and getting halfway to an NP. If you have enough spreadable buffs, Olga might be able to NP right away—and if not, a turn or two of taking enemy hits and using incidental cards can get her there. Outside of Kaleid, the usual support staples, like 2030, can work fine. Alternatively, you can give Olga a damage-oriented CE, like Black Grail or Golden Sumo, to let her function more effectively as a semi-support or a backup damage-dealer, rather than treating her as a pure support.

Olga’s two forms don’t set separate command codes, and personally I would prioritize command codes that will benefit Olga’s DPS form. If you want CCs that will work well for support specifically, though, Mage of Flowers is once again a good pick, as are healing and buff removal CCs.

Olga is really really good. Her innate attack is somewhat low, and grails can help to offset that. If you happen to get her to at least NP2, I’d strongly recommend taking her to level 100. Extra levels increase Olga’s effective NP damage and also make her cards hit harder, making her that much more likely to be able to clear whatever you throw her at. Any investment you put into her will return dividends.

Olga is a fascinating Servant. We’ve had a few Servants in the past year or so who can operate in either supportive or offensive modes—Mash, BB Dubai, et cetera—but Olga is the first who does this via two separate kits than can’t be swapped mid-battle. This is solidly to Olga’s credit; while she can do two different things, she specializes in whatever she’s doing at any given time, which avoids the sort of awkwardness that Servants like BB Dubai encounter.

As a support, Olga is pretty good. She provides a lot of party charge, some decent damage buffs, and a ton of utility. She’s not the best support out there, but she’s pretty good, and she absolutely has a place in the right team and the right fight.

Olga’s DPS form is the more exciting of the two, though. She has all the same card-rigging strengths as Ciel, paired with an instant-NP button and a powerful AoE NP. She’s a fantastic farmer, and she’ll be quite good for CQs as well. I wouldn’t say she raises the ceiling, per se—I think Ciel will be better in some cases and Olga in others—but Ciel is an excellent Servant and Olga is as well.

The best thing about Olga, though, is that she works well in a lot of different teams. There’s no one specific way to use her, and making good use of Olga will involve crafting the right team for any given fight. This is the kind of gameplay variety and team-building complexity that we rarely see in FGO, and it’s always exciting when a new Servant enables this kind of lateral thinking. Olga is excellent, and, more importantly, interesting. She’s very well-designed and is well-worth the pull. Highly recommend this one.