Rabbit’s Reviews #440: Flora (4* Alter Ego)

22whiterabbit22
Flora is a full support welfare, which immediately makes her more interesting than your average free Servant. She’s pretty powerful and pretty flexible for CQ purposes—comparable in power to the likes of Himiko, Tamamo, and Lady Avalon—and almost completely irrelevant for farming. She’s most notable for being a primarily stall-oriented support who’s aimed specifically at Quick Servants. Between Flora and Archer Tiamat, Quick stall is fully viable now, which is notable considering for a long time Quick was almost completely limited to fastplay
Flora is a fun and flavorful alternative to the existing SSR supports, who can be very effective for story fights and CQs. I wouldn’t bat an eye at seeing this kit on a Limited SSR, so the fact that she’s a welfare is crazy. I’d also call her the best execution on a form-swapping Servant to-date, in that not only are both of her forms useful, but she genuinely benefits from being able to switch between the two mid-fight. She’s also a great partner for Castoria stall teams, bringing essentially everything Castoria is missing. While she doesn’t do anything for farming, she opens up a lot of new options for CQ setups, and I think she’s a Servant every player would benefit from investing in.
Flora
loader-2
loader-2
Flora has low attack and high health relative to SR Alter Egos. Even so, she still has middling-to-good attack in the context of SRs in general, as Alter Egos tend to have relatively high attack stats. A defensive slant relative to the class is actually relatively nice for Flora, though, as while she can output decent crit damage, she’s mostly a slowplay-oriented support, and the extra health means she’s a little less likely to go down to chip damage or a stray crit. Flora’s NP gain, meanwhile, is fine—her Arts card NP gain is pretty typical for her deck, and her Quick NP gain is on the low end of normal. Her star gen is also fine—she has a non-damaging NP and middling hit-counts, but she does have three Quick cards.
Flora has a set of five passives, all of which are useful in different ways. She starts with Magic Resistance and Flower Goddess Core, which collectively give Flora a healthy 40% chance to avoid all incoming debuffs. Flower Goddess Core also slightly increases Flora’s damage, and it gives her a small chance of avoiding buff removal—not enough to rely on, but enough to save Flora on occasion. Embodiment of Spring increases all healing received by the entire party while Flora is on the field, which effectively makes one of her two NPs more powerful, and it also increases the effectiveness of any healing granted by the rest of your team. Neverending Budding provides a 10% charge to the whole party whenever Flora’s HP reaches 0 (including when a guts procs). This won’t likely have a huge impact in most cases—ideally Flora doesn’t go down at all, and even when she does, 10% party charge isn’t a lot—but on occasion this can enable an NP from someone in your party (possibly including Flora herself) in a pinch. Finally, Floralia for You passively increases the entire team’s NP gain by 10%, which is great for speed and consistency, all the time. It’s a small benefit, but the fact that it applies to the entire team is pretty unique, and it will occasionally save you by getting you a critical NP when you wouldn’t have it otherwise.
All of Flora’s appends are modestly useful, but none of them are critical. Mana Loading is probably the best append here, just by virtue of making it slightly easier to get to her first NP—in Castoria or Tiamat teams specifically, Mana Loading ensures Flora can use her NP on turn 1, regardless of her CE choice. Skill Reload can also be helpful for saving a turn in CQs. Flora is not a DPS, but she does have decent crit damage, so all three of the damage-oriented appends are passable, but none of them are going to have a big impact in most cases. The crit damage boost is the most generally applicable, but Flora has pretty large in-kit crit buffs already, so an extra 30% won’t do much. Anti-Berserker damage is great when you’re up against Berserkers but obviously irrelevant the rest of the time, and the Extra Attack Buff is a very small damage bonus when Flora happens to Brave Chain, which is probably not something she’ll do unless you didn’t draw any good cards from your other Servants.
loader-2
Flora is a welfare, so all you need to ascend her is to finish her event. For skills, she needs two full sets of Archer and Caster gems, which is mostly fine… although Caster gems tend to be in short supply (due to the plethora of good Casters out there), so it would be better if she asked for a different class’s gems. Her higher-level skill mats aren’t particularly notable—if you have the gems, Flora should be pretty easy to max.
Flora’s skillset is quite good by SR standards, and especially by free SR standards. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.
loader-2
Flower of Fertility is a nice, if somewhat generic, supportive skill. It gives 30% attack up to an ally for 3 turns, along with a three-turn guts effect. Additionally, it gives Flora herself a 30% battery. All of these effects are nice, but Flora would be much stronger if the guts were selfish and the battery were targeted—this would make Flora a 50% charge support and would let her potentially benefit from her on-guts passive while still giving her damage buff to an ally. It’s probably not an accident that this isn’t the case. The skill is still good as-is, though—you’ll usually use it for the attack buff, with the battery incidentally helping Flora NP and the guts not doing much. If the skill is available and Flora is just about to go down, though, it could be worth it to target Flora with this skill. In the worst case, it doesn’t ultimately save Flora, but the guts proc gets you an extra 10% party charge, and in the best case, the guts saves Flora and the 10% charge paired with defensive NP gain lets Flora use her NP for healing and enables your shell to survive a bit longer. Overall, this is a solid skill, even if it could be better.
loader-2
The West Wind is a really nice partywide buff skill. It starts off with a 20% partywide Quick buff. On the one hand, this isn’t very large. Flora has a 20/30 supportive buff spread before her NP, which is pretty normal for an SR support but weaker than SSRs (or even Hebi Nyogo). On the other hand, most of Flora’s core buffs are card-type-agnostic, which means she has potential even for non-Quick teams. That said, the rest of this skill does push Flora towards specifically supporting Quick teams. The skill gives a generic 30% crit damage buff—not enough to be particularly impactful—and a much more impressive 100% Quick-specific crit damage buff. This, more than the Quick buff itself, is the element of Flora’s kit that most strongly pushes her towards supporting Quick Servants: she massively increases crit damage specifically for Servants with lots of Quick cards. To further reinforce this, the skill gives the party a buff that gives a flat 10% NP charge every time they use Quick cards. Taken as a whole, this skill strongly incentivizes clicking on Quick cards for your whole party: using Quick cards gives NP charge and makes stars, which in turn make it easier to crit, and those crits do more damage, especially when they’re Quick crits, which continues the cycle.
loader-2
Flora’s third skill is interesting in that it gets a buff during her debut event. For the purposes of this review, I’ll only be addressing the post-buff version, since for all intents and purposes, that’s the “real” skill. This skill starts off with a 20% party battery. This is, of course, always great—it’s very helpful for getting your team rolling in CQs, especially for stall setups, and it speeds your team up a little every time it comes off cooldown. Flora has a total of 50% in selfish batteries without even taking anything away from the rest of her team, so it’s pretty easy to get her to her first NP. More interestingly, though, this skill gives a partywide one-level overcharge buff, and then it gives that buff again at the end of each turn for 3 turns. This is pretty cool for Flora herself, as her NP has useful overcharge scaling, but it’s also cool for any DPS with overcharge scaling—and it’s fantastic for Castoria teams specifically. In a “conventional” loop setup, this gives a small boost to your DPS every turn, often amounting to an extra 5-10% of some sort of damage buff. In the best cases, when your DPS’s overcharge buffs last for multiple turns, this can add up to a 30%-ish in total extra buff value by turn 3. This means for some Servants Flora’s damage buffs are much higher than advertised. Castoria, though, is by far the biggest beneficiary. A typical Castoria stall shell relies on setting up an NP chain every three turns. Getting Overcharge 3 on Castoria—three hits of defense per Servant, which is the baseline result of putting Castoria’s NP at the end of a three-Servant NP chain—isn’t usually enough to keep the team safe, which is why you want some combination of Overcharge buffs (to get Castoria to Overcharge 4 or 5) and healing (to compensate for cases where someone gets focus-fired and damage breaks through Castoria’s shield). Servants who bring Overcharge buffs on skills are nice, but usually they can only assist Castoria every other NP cycle—most such skills are on a 6-turn cooldown or so, which means the NP chain that falls between buff cycles doesn’t benefit from the overcharge boosts offered by any available skills. Not only does this skill get around that, it inverts the usual paradigm. On the turn this skill is used, Castoria gets a one-level overcharge buff, taking her to Overcharge 4 in a standard chain—and then, three turns later, Castoria has three Overcharge buffs. Not only does this make it trivial for Castoria to hit overcharge 5, it also means you can place Castoria’s NP before your DPS’s NP (but after Flora’s) without losing any defensive power. This is extremely unusual, and it means Castoria stall teams that use Flora are both extremely stable and deceptively fast, especially if your Castoria has a high NP level. Alternatively, if you want to have Castoria at Overcharge 5 every time she NPs, you can use this skill one turn before your NP chain, which ultimately means Castoria will have a two-level Overcharge buff every time she NPs. Despite being a free Servant, Flora is a better Castoria stall partner than Himiko, bringing just as much overcharge (assuming you time things right) and better overall party support. Himiko/Castoria teams haven’t really been in fashion for a long time—there are other overcharge supports now, and while none of them bring quite as much pure defensive safety, they typically offer higher velocity and/or healing, which usually works out to be more reliable and more fun to play—but it’s still remarkable for a welfare to outshine one of the most reliable stall supports. Aside from all that, this skill also lets Flora change between two forms, with two different NPs. Flora has two different supportive NPs, one of which is buff-centric, and one of which is debuff-centric (sorta). The buff-centric NP leans more in the direction of safety and survival, bringing healing and a bunch of NP charge, in addition to a little bit of damage, while the debuff-centric NP has less in the way of defensive utility but gives more damage push instead. The buff-centric NP is Flora’s default, and if Flora chooses to swap forms, she remains in her second form for five turns before automatically switching back. Because this skill is on a six-turn cooldown, this means you can more or less always be in the form you prefer, as long as you use this skill whenever it’s available. You can’t switch forms mid-buff-cycle, of course, so you can’t easily get both sets of NP benefits up at once, and you’re committing to a strategy when you pick a form, but for a long enough fight you may very well end up using both. The one thing to note about this is that if you somehow manage to use this skill again after changing forms but before the form change buff has worn off (thanks to cooldown reduction or the like), you can manually switch back to Flora’s default form, but you can’t extend the timer on the form swap—that is to say, if you use this skill twice in fewer than five turns, you’ll be forced into spending at least a few turns in Flora’s default form. ...Despite the fact that this skill only has a few effects, the implications of those effects are quite complex. This is a really good supportive skill on the whole—it just takes a fair bit of planning and consideration to get the most out of it.
loader-2
Flora’s two NPs set a number of effects to the field itself, rather than to any particular Servant. This is a pretty neat trick, and it makes these buffs a little better than typical buffs and debuffs. Buffs and debuffs placed on the field are functionally unremovable and cannot (currently) be blocked, and they apply to every ally or enemy (depending on whether it’s a buff or debuff) currently on the field. This means the effects aren’t lost when Servants change out—if you plug someone out, or an ally dies, Flora’s field buffs persist. Similarly, if an enemy dies and a new one comes in, the debuffs apply to the new enemies. While this isn’t relevant to Flora herself, field debuffs are in theory a way that a debuff-based Servant could ramp in farming contexts—I’ll be curious to see if we get an AoE Servant with a similar effect in the future.
The one small drawback to these effects is that buffs and debuffs stop ticking on Servants in the backline. There are occasionally cases where it’s useful to plug someone out while they still have buffs on them so that when they return to the front line they’ll still have those buffs. Flora’s field buffs can’t be used in this way. The benefits of this style of buff—the reliability, the flexibility, et cetera—outweighs this small drawback, but it does mean field buffs aren’t strictly superior to conventional ones, even if they’re usually better.
As I mentioned above, Flora’s first NP focuses on supporting the party. It starts by applying Heaven Field to the field (which doesn’t directly impact Flora herself but does have implications for one specific case I’ll get to later) and it applies a field-based attack buff that scales with overcharge. The attack buff starts at 20% and scales up to 40%. Because Flora gets 4 overcharge buffs every 6 turns, she’ll almost always be above the minimum. If she NPs on a 3-turn cycle, the value of this will be 30% on average, which is pretty solid in context of Flora’s other buffs.
Aside from that, the NP gives 20% charge to the party, which is decent, though it sets up the usual trade-offs that pop up whenever you have charge on an NP: if you use this before your DPS’s (or Castoria’s) NP, you increase the DPS NP’s damage and everyone’s overcharge, but you effectively lose the battery for everyone but Flora—but if you use Flora’s NP last, for the NP charge, you’re leaving damage and overcharge on the table. This isn’t a deal-breaker by any means, but it’s a bit awkward. Fortunately, Flora’s NP offers more charge in the form of an extra flat 10% charge when each ally crits for 3 turns. The NP gives a burst of 30 stars when Flora uses it, making it pretty easy to crit on the subsequent turn. Assuming you have a reliable source of stars to cover the third turn in the cycle, this averages out to another 20% party charge over the subsequent two turns (if you assume that every 3 turns each Servant uses their NP once and crits twice). Taken together, these effects help keep your team using their NPs consistently, which is useful for burst teams and critical for stall.
The last effect on this first NP is a party heal, which caps out at 4000 at NP5. Because of Flora’s healing received passive, this will actually be 4800 in almost all cases, which is really nice. That’s more than enough healing to take care of The Black Grail’s demerit and any incidental chip damage you receive in a Castoria team, and in a non-Castoria team it can still go a long way towards extending the longevity of your team, especially if Flora NPs more than once.
Flora’s second NP is a near-inverse of her first. It starts by applying Hell Field (which again is just flavor in most cases), and it applies a defense debuff to the field. The values are the same as the attack debuff on the first NP, and unless you’re running into buff or debuff caps, it has exactly the same impact in practice. Defense debuffs and attack buffs stack additively in the same buff bracket, so unless there are too many defense debuffs or attack buffs in play, adding (for example) 20% defense down or 20% attack up to your damage calculation results in exactly the same damage output.
Flora’s second NP loses the NP charge effects from the first NP in exchange for partywide NP drain. At first glance, this seems like a bad trade. NP drain is a decent survival benefit, delaying the thing that’s most likely to kill your party, but I would basically always take easier access to my own NPs over reduced frequency of enemy NPs. This is especially true considering enemy NPs often have high hit-counts, and if I can defend against them they actually make it easier to access my own NPs in turn. However, because of the slight awkwardness of Flora’s on-NP batteries (due to NP chain positioning and reliance on crits), you’re often losing less charge by switching to the debuff-based NP than it seems. Flora teams aren’t likely to have much trouble getting access to NPs anyway, so there’s a world where a little more defensive utility is worth slightly less reliable NP gain—and unlike Flora’s first NP, Flora’s second NP has no timing awkwardness and is unlikely to waste any of its effects. I still think the charge effects on Flora’s first NP are better overall than the drain effect on this second NP, but it’s not as clear-cut as it first appears.
Flora then also loses her party heal in exchange for a 20% field debuff to crit damage resistance and NP damage resistance. These are actually both pretty cool effects. Crit damage resistance down is a very rare debuff—only Gensai and Summer Crane have it. Summer Carmilla technically has a similar effect, but hers is “Defense down against critical attacks,” which actually applies to the attack bracket rather than the crit damage bracket, and so behaves slightly differently. NP damage resistance down is entirely new—Flora is the first Servant to have an NP damage increase that takes the form of a debuff. Because of these two debuffs, Flora’s second NP is solidly better than her first if what you want is increased damage and fast clearing. A 20% crit damage buff is barely anything on its own—I’ll always call that out—but with this NP in effect, Flora does boost all crits by a healthy 50%, and all Quick crits by a fantastic 150%. Furthermore, she has a 50/20/20 spread of NP-applicable debuffs for Quick Servants, with that 50 (in the attack bracket) actually being more like 60 in practice due to overcharge, and with many DPS Servants getting even more than that thanks to their own Overcharge effects. 60% attack up, 20% NP damage up, and whatever you get from Overcharge is pretty respectable even for non-Quick Servants—the extra 20% Quick up is just icing on the cake.
Losing out on the party healing is a genuine loss for stall teams, especially since healing is the core thing Castoria is missing, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you should always pick the first NP for stall and always pick the second NP for burst. A burst team might need a bit of extra charge in order for the DPS to NP consistently, or might need a bit of healing in order to survive an on-break damage onslaught. A stall team, on the other hand, might not need extra charge or healing (either because no damage is getting through Castoria’s shell anyway or because the DPS brings healing), in which case you might as well opt for the extra damage. Extra damage means you don’t have to stall as long, which is its own form of safety—in fact, I would argue that even in a Castoria team you probably want to opt for the second NP for your first buff cycle, and only switch to using the first NP if you’re taking meaningful chip damage by the time you hit a later buff cycle.
Oh, and the NP-scaling effect on Flora’s second skill reduces enemies’ resistance to Instant-Kill effects. This would be mostly useless even on a Servant who did have an Instant-Kill effect, but since Flora has no way to inflict Instant-Kill, it’s doubly useless here. This effect reads to me as “Flora’s second NP would be too strong if the other effects scaled with NP level, but something has to scale with NP level, so here’s something meaningless that technically scales.” Especially since Flora is a welfare, this doesn’t really matter, but for all intents and purposes NP levels do absolutely nothing for Flora’s second NP.
Flora is the rare form-switching Servant where both forms are genuinely useful and where you might actually want to switch forms to react to what’s happening in a fight. Most multi-form Servants either have one clearly superior form or want to choose a form based on your overall strategy and stick to that form for the entire fight (or, as is often the case, both). Flora is probably the most successful version of a form-changing Servant, in the sense that both her forms are about equally useful and she might use both in a single fight. She’s not just one Servant with a mostly-useless gimmick, and she’s not two slightly different Servants you use in different contexts—she’s one Servant with a unique mechanic that grants her extra flexibility and meaningfully inflects how you use her. And that’s neat!
The one other thing to note about Flora’s NP is that despite the lore implications you can set both Heaven and Hell field at the same time. This doesn’t really matter for Flora, except in that if you use one NP form and then Flora somehow NPs again on the next turn after having swapped forms, you’ll briefly have all of her buffs and debuffs up at once—using one NP doesn’t remove the effects of the other. This also has implications for exactly one other Servant: Dante Alighieri. Dante’s second skill lets him choose between Heaven and Hell, and it (and his NP) provides buffs depending on which he chooses. The thing is, the buffs aren’t actually contingent on the choice Dante makes—they’re dependent on which field is set. This means, if Flora uses her NP, and then Dante uses his skill to set the opposite field, he gets both sets of buffs. This was technically already possible in a double Dante team, but Flora, being a support, is a better overall partner for Dante than a second Dante is. This is currently the only context in which Flora setting Heaven or Hell field is anything other than flavor… but it’s a nifty little use case! Flora is one of the best support options for Dante in CQ contexts because of it.
I’ve alluded to this in several places already, but despite her Quick lean, Flora’s most notable role is as a secondary support for Castoria stall teams. She makes a good case for now being the best overcharge support for Castoria stall purposes, bringing about as much pure defense as Himiko and about as much healing and damage support as Lady Avalon. Lady Avalon in particular still has some advantages—cleaner synergy with Arts Servants, better overall NP charge support, a party invuln for emergencies—but there are fights and teams for which Flora will be superior, and I would pretty solidly take her over the likes of Himiko and Reines.
For a Flora/Castoria shell, you have essentially two main approaches. If everyone has Mana Loading, your various party batteries mean Flora will have 100% NP gauge (Mana Loading + Flora S1 + Flora S3 + Castoria S1), Castoria and your DPS will have 70% gauge (Mana Loading + Flora S3 + Castoria S1). If your DPS has at least 30% selfish charge and at least 10% party charge, everyone can NP on turn 1 no matter your starting CE—Castoria can use her 20% battery on herself, your DPS’s party charge brings her to 100%, and your DPS’s personal batteries bring them to an NP as well. This lets you run CEs like The Black Grail (for your DPS) and 2030 or Prisma Cosmos (for the supports) at no loss to tempo.
However, if you don’t have the batteries—or even if you do—you might consider using all your skills on turn 1 but waiting until turn 2 to do your first NP chain. This sets you on a cycle where Castoria gets two Overcharge buffs every three turns, ensuring she puts up five hits of Solemn Defense every time she NPs. Unless you’re dealing with AoE cards or buff removal, this will usually be enough to offer your whole team perfect safety, which means you can opt for Flora’s second NP instead of her first for increased damage push. This also has the added benefit of meaning your various skills will come off cooldown the turn before you use your NP chain, which makes it easier to (for example) use Flora’s guts or Castoria’s invuln to protect a teammate who’s been focus-fired and is low on Solemn Defense stacks, or to leverage any single-turn crit buffs your DPS might have.
Overall, a Flora/Castoria team will be both extremely safe and quite fast. This works best with an Arts DPS (especially if they have good overcharge scaling and a bit of healing), but because most of Flora’s buffs are type-agnostic, it would be fine (albeit slower) for Quick, or even Buster. Quick Servants in particularly have the advantage of having easier crit access and higher overall card damage, which may result in faster clears despite the reduced NP-applicable damage buffs. In any case, if what you want is a reliable way to stall out fights with your favorite Servants, Flora’s got you covered.
While it isn’t as overwhelmingly stable, Flora also pairs quite well with Tiamat. Both provide substantial crit buffs, and their survival and NP charge tools work nicely with each other. Tiamat can also safely place her NP before Flora’s, which both lets you get an extra overcharge level on Flora’s NP and give Flora’s first NP’s NP charge to Tiamat. Especially if you pair this with a Quick Servant—and ideally one with three Quick cards—you should have access to reliable NPs, consistent crits, and very high crit damage. In this team, you actually don’t have to worry about stringing together NP chains, necessarily—just use everyone’s NP every time they’re available to get the highest possible uptime on your buffs and burst enemies down as quickly as possible. As long as you can use Tiamat’s NP whenever a lethal enemy turn is on the way, this team should survive long enough to clear mid-length fights. You probably want to err on the side of using Flora’s first NP over her second for this team—at least until you’re within striking distance of clearing the fight—as you will be taking incidental damage on the turns Tiamat’s NP isn’t up.
Van Gogh and Alice Kuonji are both excellent point Servants for a Flora/Tiamat team, as their spammable terror effects will periodically stun the enemies and further reduce the damage your team is taking. In this setup, you can drop Tiamat NPs in whenever enemies aren’t stunned and count on them being stunned a good portion of the rest of the time. While this isn’t the near-guaranteed survival Castoria offers, it should be just about as effective, and probably both faster and more interesting to play.
Flora is less well-suited to traditional fastburn setups. Needing an NP to access her full buffs means taking away a damaging card from your DPS, which not only reduces your damage output but also makes it harder to loop. That said, she’s not a complete lost cause for this, especially if you’re running a Quick DPS with great in-kit NP gain. If Flora can access her second NP, she’s at least comparable to, if not better than, Caster Skadi for specifically fastburn CQs. A Ruler Skadi/Ruler Skadi/Flora team, for example, provides huge buffs for Quick Crits, Buster Crits, and NP damage. All you need is a starting charge CE on Flora, plus decent card draws, and your DPS should be able to NP three times for big damage, using crits to extend that damage runway further. Fastburn Quick CQ setups often don’t actually need all their Skadi (or Oberon) batteries, and running Oberon more or less locks you into specifically 3-turn clears. Flora is a nice alternative because she lets you transition to a slightly more defensive style of play if need be—and at the very least she’s a solid alternative to Caster Skadi if you only have Ruler Skadi natively and thus can’t run a triple Skadi team.
The one thing Flora really can’t do—or at least, not well enough to be worth considering—is farm. 50% ally charge is more or less table stakes for effective farming in this day and age, and Flora just doesn’t have that. She’s a really excellent CQ support—borderline top-tier—but she’s not worth considering for farming unless you truly have no other options and/or aren’t trying for optimized 3-turn clears.
Flora has five main CE options: 2030, Prisma Cosmos, an on-death CE (like Camlann), a Guts CE, or a charge CE (ideally with some other relevant benefit, like His Rightful Place).
2030 is nice because Flora brings a bunch of crit-related buffs, but she only provides stars when she NPs. An extra 8-10 stars per turn nearly guarantees your party crits after Flora uses her NP and also provides a nice baseline for the rest of the fight. Especially if your other support also has 2030, this can add up over time, bringing both damage and extra NP gain (via the bonus from the crits themselves and the flat on-crit charge on Flora’s first NP).
Prisma Cosmos, on the other hand, helps to alleviate one of Flora’s few weaknesses—that her card-based NP gain is only fine. Prisma cosmos gives 8-10% gauge per turn, which means Flora passively gets 24-30% charge between each NP. Making up the remaining 70%-ish every three turns should be pretty doable, especially if Flora uses her first NP instead of her second, since that provides a guaranteed 20% extra charge for at least Flora herself. Prisma Cosmos is probably Flora’s best option for Castoria teams specifically, where failing to build back to an NP every three turns can sometimes be catastrophic.
On-death CEs, meanwhile, don’t have obvious synergy with Flora’s defensive tools, but they pair nicely with her on-death passive. Camlann specifically provides 15% charge on death if it’s at Max Limit Break (which it should be, as a 3* CE). Flora’s unique passive gives a further 10% on death, meaning Flora’s death translates to a 25% battery to the rest of your team. This isn’t a ton, granted, but in burst contexts it ensures the rest of your team keeps moving once Flora falls, and in stall contexts it can push you to an emergency NP to finish out the fight once the enemies finally get through your team’s defenses.
Guts CEs operate on a similar principle—Flora’s passive charges 10% each time she dies or procs a guts, meaning a single permanent guts effectively gives you an extra 10% charge at some point during a fight, provided Flora eventually goes down. Notably, though, when Flora’s guts triggers, shell usually survive until the next turn—and that extra 10% charge might enable her to NP. Since her NP provides a bunch of healing (and your other support probably has defensive tools, too), even surviving at 1 HP might be enough to put your defenses back up, heal Flora, and continue stalling. If you aren’t having trouble keeping your NPs active, but you are dealing with more chip damage than you’d like, Guts CEs can be solid for Flora.
Lastly, charge CEs are nice for making it very easy for Flora to use her NP, especially in burst contexts. With a 50% charge CE and Flora’s own skills, Flora can NP right away. Tiamat and Castoria teams don’t need this, since those teams have enough party charge for Flora to NP asap even without starting charge—but Skadi teams (or Buster teams if you’re running Buster Flora for some reason) can benefit from letting Flora use her NP on turn 1 without extra help. There are 50% charge CEs that provide things like small passive NP charge effects or a few stars per turn, which nicely split the difference between charge CEs and options like 2030 or Prisma Cosmos—those are what I would recommend, if you need starting charge.
Flora should crit fairly reliably. She doesn’t really need more crit damage on her Quicks, but crit damage CCs on her Arts or Buster cards can be helpful. The best CC options for her, though, are probably star gen CCs—if Flora is using her cards, you want her to be generating stars to fuel crits for the rest of your team on subsequent turns. She’s a good candidate for flat star generation CCs, and CCs that increase star gen rate are okay for her as well.
Flora’s a really good support, and she benefits strongly both from extra attack (for more crit damage) and from extra health (for better sustain). It’s possible that you might have a setup where you want Flora to die quickly so her charge-on-death procs, and in that case you might prefer for her to be at a lower level… but overall I think she’s more than good enough to grail, and higher stats will almost always be better for her. I think it’s worth taking her to level 90 at the very least.
Despite being a welfare, Flora is a fantastic CQ-oriented support Servant. She doesn’t compete with the absolute top-end meta supports (unlike Hebi Nyobo), but she does compare favorably to the ones who are just off-meta. Flora is of a piece with Servants like Tamamo, Lady Avalon, and Himiko—Servants you wouldn’t bring for farming but who are quite good for hard fights. It’s remarkable to get a Servant of this power level for free. I strongly recommend investing in Flora.