Rabbit’s Reviews #446: Archer of the Apocalypse (5* Archer)

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At long last, we have a proper alternative to Castoria.
Archer of the Apocalypse is a meta support in the Archer class who functions as a hybrid of Castoria, Tiamat, and Koyanskaya. Like Castoria, Apocalypse provides a bunch of flat charge and powerful Arts buffs. Like Tiamat, Apocalypse offers charge per turn. Like Koyanskaya, Apocalypse gives cooldown reduction, which lets some Servants double-stack their skills. She’s not strictly superior to Castoria—she’s much weaker for stall, and while she provides more charge overall (70% charge to a DPS in farming contexts), her batteries are distributed in a less convenient way than Castoria’s. Her NP is also inferior from a supportive standpoint, meaning Apocalypse offers fewer steroids than Castoria if Castoria gets her NP and Apocalypse doesn’t enable your DPS to stack their own skills. However, Apocalypse brings more charge than Castoria does, and which, paired with her cooldown reduction, means she is often a better choice for farming and short fights.
Archer of the Apocalypse is, in other words, really good. She makes many of the best Arts Servants a little better, and she takes several Arts Servants who were in the bad-to-middling range and makes them great. She’s probably not a “necessity” if you already have Castoria, as she serves largely the same role, but if you happen to love an Arts Servant who Apocalypse specifically supports, she may have a lot of value to you—and she’s the kind of Servant I would say is a must-pull, if only to have her available in case she’s the preferred support for a future Servant you pull.
Archer of the Apocalypse
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Apocalypse has more or less average attack and health, which is fitting given her combination of supportive lean and damaging NP. Higher attack would make her marginally better when you choose to use her as a damage-dealer, but since her primary value is as a support, this doesn’t really matter. Apocalypse is a triple-Arts Servant with an Arts NP, so she’s not good at active star gen. Her NP gain is also quite bad, as her Arts card NP gain is well below average relative to her deck, and her Quick card NP gain is terrible.
Apocalypse’s passives are fairly simple, but they give her a nice spread of passive utility. Her special passive, The Engraver, gives 25% debuff resistance, which pairs with Magic Resistance A to give Apocalypse nearly a 50% chance of staving off standard debuffs. The Engraver also gives a minor flat damage buff, and it gives Apocalypse a 20% passive buff removal resistance buff—not enough to rely on, but still capable of occasionally protecting her from buff removal. Aside from that, she gets another unique passive, Primordial Rune, which gives 20% crit chance resistance—enough to prevent most crits from enemies without crit chance buffs—and she gets Independent Action for a tiny bit of extra crit damage.
None of Apocalypse’s appends matter all that much. Mana Loading is helpful if you’re using Apocalypse as a DPS, and Skill Reload can be decent for fights that are long enough to reach a second buff cycle, but for the most part you can ignore Apocalypse’s appends.
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Apocalypse’s mat asks aren’t bad. The only thing to note is that she asks for 24 of the new silver mat for her story chapter per skill, which means it’ll take some time after her launch for most players to be able to max her out.
Apocalypse has a fantastic, if somewhat straightforward, supportive skillset. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.
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Good Old Thread is most notable for being a Charisma variant, providing 20% attack up and 20% Arts up partywide. These are nice damage buffs, and the fact that they apply to the whole party can be helpful for multicore farming. Aside from that, this skill cleanses debuffs from the party—which is situationally useful for CQs—and it lets Apocalypse’s cards remove buffs and inflict a special debuff. Having buff removal on cards is a neat trick that can also be helpful in CQs here and there, while the special buff is used for Apocalypse’s scaling supereffective multiplier—prioritizing her cards can give her pretty high NP damage against a single target in CQs.
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Divine Rune is Apocalypse’s most important supportive skill, combining a 50% battery, a 30% Arts buff, and cooldown reduction, all in one place. A targeted 50% battery is always fantastic, and while it’s a bit unfortunate Apocalypse can’t split this battery up, she gets more party NP charge elsewhere, so it’s not really a problem in most cases. The Arts buff is also very nice—paired with Apocalypse’s first skill, this gives Apocalypse the same on-skill damage buffs as Castoria. The cooldown reduction, meanwhile, is perhaps Apocalypse’s most interesting feature. One turn of Cooldown Reduction doesn’t sound like a ton, but it’s enough that a team of two Apocalypses lets a DPS with Skill Reload re-use any of their 5-turn cooldown skills on turn 3, which is a small bonus to a bunch of Arts Servants and a huge buff to a small handful. Alternatively, with the Atlas Mystic Code, Arts Servants can double-stack 7-turn-cooldown skills, which gives Servants with huge batteries, like Avenger Nitocris and Ruler Melusine, 100% guaranteed plugless loop setups, making them the Arts equivalent of Buster Servants like Arcueid and Olga. Overall, this is an excellent skill that opens a bunch of new options to Arts in general.
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The Weaver is most notable for providing 10% charge per turn to the whole party. This means in a traditional 3-turn farming or burst setup, Apocalypse provides a total of 70% flat charge—50% on any turn from Divine Rune, and 10% on turns 2 and 3 from The Weaver. While Apocalypse doesn’t have Castoria’s NP gain buff, The Weaver’s flat charge is almost always superior, meaning Apocalypse is generally more likely to let a given Servant loop than Castoria is, especially with cooldown reduction factored in. 70% charge was historically the domain of Oberon, who pays for it via various demerits, so even with the slightly awkward distribution of batteries here, this makes Apocalypse extremely strong as a support. Aside from that, this skill also gives some passive healing—the one key defensive tool Castoria notably does not offer—and as long as Apocalypse remains on the field, this skill removes buffs from enemies, clears debuffs from allies, stacks Apocalypse’s Past Alteration debuff, and generates critical stars, every turn. What this means in practice is Apocalypse provides a ton of passive consistency benefits in CQ contexts, pretty much single-handedly taking care of most avoidable annoyances, as long as you keep her on the field.
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Apocalypse’s NP is the weakest part of her kit, but it’s still not bad. It’s mostly a damaging NP, applying a stack of Past Alteration (functionally serving as her ramp, as Apocalypse deals 10% extra supereffective damage per stack of Past Alteration on her target) and a small one-turn NP damage buff, before dealing damage. Since her ramp is debuff-based, Apocalypse doesn’t get to ramp in farming contexts, meaning she isn’t a great farmer when used as a damage-dealer—but due to the structure of her kit, she can still output okay damage with an NP in a pinch while supporting another damage-dealer. In other words, she works okay as a multicore farmer.
In CQs, this NP is a little more impressive, as Apocalypse has a controllable supereffective damage multiplier that she can pretty easily scale. Apocalypse needs to apply ten stacks of Past Alteration to reach her maximum damage. She applies one stack every time she NPs, plus one at the end of each turn from her third skill, so using five cards maximizes her damage against a single target on turn 3. You won’t always be able to do this in a single buff cycle, since it requires getting a bit lucky with card draws, but you can still reliably scale her damage pretty high.
The NP also drains enemies’ NP gauges, which means Apocalypse can stave off most enemy NPs as long as she’s looping—not a huge benefit, but still nice.
Apocalypse is primarily a support, but before I go into how exactly how she works in that context, let’s address her potential as a damage-dealer.
In a typical Castoria/Castoria/Oberon setup, Apocalypse can loop 1/1/x nodes, assuming she has Mana Loading. On turn 1, you use Apocalypse’s first and third skills, both Castoria Arts buffs and Charismas, and one Castoria’s 20% battery. Apocalypse refunds about 18% against a single enemy before overkill, and she gets to 20% with even the one hit of overkill that’s guaranteed from killing the enemy. She gets 10% flat charge from her third skill, so on turn 2 Apocalypse can use her 50% battery and the other Castoria can use her 20% battery to bring you to 100%. With the extra Arts and NP gain buffs, Apocalypse easily clears the 20% threshold again, after which she gets 10% flat charge, and Oberon can plug in to secure the loop with his 70% total charge. You can also slot in a Castoria NP on this last turn for a bit of extra damage. An NP2, level 90 Apocalypse with plug buffs, class score, and MLB BG deals about 480k at neutral on wave 3 in this setup, which is probably enough to counterclass 90++ in most cases, and comfortably enough at NP3 or level 100. Even if she’s fully maxed, however, Apocalypse only reaches 771k, so neutral 90++ clears are largely out of reach for her.
Unfortunately, while there are setups where Apocalypse can loop with Archer Tiamat, those setups involve either plugging a Tiamat out for Oberon on turn 2 or running only a single Tiamat, which means you can’t reliably benefit from the extreme card stretch Tiamat teams theoretically provide, which in turn means there’s not much reason for Apocalypse to farm with Tiamat instead of Castoria.
Apocalypse actually has slightly higher theoretical damage in a different team, though: Castoria/Apocalypse/Apocalypse/Oberon. Both Apocalypses need Mana Loading for this to work. On turn 1, the main Apocalypse (who has Black Grail equipped) uses all three of her skills. Castoria uses her Charisma and uses her Arts buff on the main Apocalypse. The second Apocalypse uses her first and third skills, and the main Apocalypse NPs. Apocalypse refunds about 10% against a single enemy and gets another 20% in passive charge from the two Apocalypses’ skill 3s. Castoria uses her 20% battery and the secondary Apocalypse uses her 50% battery, bringing the main Apocalypse back to 100%. She NPs again, refunds 10%, gets 20% in passive charge, and then Castoria swaps for Oberon, who uses all of his skill on the main Apocalypse. This also brings the secondary Apocalypse to 100% charge, meaning you can use the secondary Apocalypse’s NP, followed by the primary Apocalypse’s NP. This both gets an extra stack of Past Alteration for the main Apocalypse’s NP and gives you an extra NP’s worth of damage. Assuming NP2 with all the fixings, the main Apocalypse deals about 448k damage. If the secondary Apocalypse is NP2 and has no CE, she deals about 83k, which together means this setup deals more damage than the Castoria setup—comfortably enough damage to counterclass 90++. Even with both Apocalypses fully maxed out, this doesn’t let Apocalypse omnifarm, but it’s still marginally better than the double Castoria setup and therefore worth mentioning.
Mostly, though, Apocalypse is a support, aimed at boosting Arts Servants for short fights. At a high level, her use is pretty simple: you use her first and third skills on turn 1, plus her targeted battery whenever you need it. She provides a total of 70% flat charge across the first three turns of a fight, with 50% of that being targetable and the remaining 20% being 10% per turn partywide. You usually don’t need to worry about her NP, and even if you do, it’s only for a bit of extra damage. Apocalypse’s steroids are identical to Castoria’s before NPs get involved, so if you aren’t using a support NP and your DPS has good loop specs, Castoria and Apocalypse are completely interchangeable for farming.
The important things to consider, then are when one is better than the other. Apocalypse has two key advantages over Castoria: she provides more total charge, and she brings cooldown reduction.
Apocalypse’s increased party charge is mostly relevant to Servants whose loop specs leave them a little bit shy of reliable loopage with Castoria. Almost any Arts Servant with at least a 30% battery can loop 1/3/x or 3/1/x in an Apocalypse/Apocalypse/Oberon team: on turn 1, you use both Apocalypse’s first and third skills, plus the DPS’s battery (and Mana Loading if needed), plus one Apocalypse’s 50% battery. Most AoE Arts Servants will refund at least 10% against a single enemy, or 30% against 3, and you get 20% passive charge per turn from the two Apocalypses, so you can use the other Apocalypse’s 50% battery on turn 2, Oberon’s 50% battery on turn 3, and plug Oberon in to cover the wave with only one enemy via his 20% battery. Servants with better loop specs or split batteries can loop even more restrictive nodes with basically the same setup.
Apocalypse’s disadvantage as a charge support is that she can’t split up her 50% battery like Castoria can, which can mean wasted charge for some Servants, especially if those Servants already have a 50% battery. In these cases, the best team for loopage is often actually Castoria/Apocalypse/Oberon. This team offers 190% total charge (better than double Castoria’s 170%, but less than double Apocalypse’s 210%), but Castoria’s split batteries give you more flexibility to avoid wasting charge. This team has the added advantage of letting you potentially slot in a Castoria NP. Unless your DPS brings a ton of party charge (like Tez, for example), you’re likely only getting one Castoria NP off while farming anyway, so a Castoria/Apocalypse setup lets you benefit both from Apocalypse’s increased overall NP charge and Castoria’s NP-boosted damage.
Another subtle advantage of the Castoria/Apocalypse/Oberon team is that it gives you a ton of flexibility with which Servant you grab off your friend list. If you have your own DPS ready to go, you only need two of these three supports to run this team, since you can grab any of the three off your friend list. Alternatively, if you have all three, you can grab a DPS from a friend, potentially giving you access to, say, a level 120 NP5 damage-dealer without you needing to take the time and resources to get one yourself. This can be especially helpful during events where specific Servants either have passive damage boosts or are uniquely suited to specific nodes. In other words, if you have all three of Castoria, Apocalypse, and Oberon, you can probably efficiently farm any 90++ node in the game, as long as you’re willing to scour your support list for the right DPS for the job.
...And for added convenience, you can also use exclusively your own Servants, at which point you can take literally any Servant off your friend list, which can save time searching for the specific friend support you need. This starts to run into team cost issues, as you’re bringing at least three and probably four SSRs natively, but if you don’t have a full set of CEs available anyway and/or are most worried about time, this is a nice option.
All that said, Apocalypse makes the biggest difference to Servants who can leverage her cooldown reduction. Any Arts Servant who has the Skill Reload append can double-stack their 5-turn cooldown skills on turn 3 in a double Apocalypse team. This actually means 30% chargers tend to be the biggest beneficiaries of Apocalypse teams, as 30% batteries tend to be on 5-turn cooldowns. An Arts Servant with a 5-turn CD battery only needs 10% refund—on any turn—to have perfect loopage. Basically everyone meets that threshold.
Saber Shiki is a great example of a Servant who benefits massively from double Apocalypse teams. In an Apocalypse/Shiki/Apocalypse/Oberon team, Shiki has huge damage and also perfect loopage—which in fact puts her ahead of more modern AoE Arts Sabers in overall performance. Shiki needs Mana Loading and Skill Reload for this to work, but if you have those, the strategy is pretty simple: on turn 1, you use all of Shiki’s skills, plus both Apocalypse’s first and second skills, plus one Apocalypse’s targeted battery. Shiki NPs and gets 10% flat charge from her NP, plus 20% passive charge from the Apocalypses. The remaining Apocalypse uses her targeted battery, and then you plug Oberon in to use his 20% battery. Shiki NPs again, getting another 10% flat charge from her NP, and another 20% passive charge from Apocalypse. Shiki can now re-use all of her skills, getting 30% more charge and a bunch of damage buffs, and Oberon uses his remaining skills to secure the loop. An NP2 level 90 Shiki with Black Grail and such deals about 559k at neutral in this setup, which is comfortably enough to counterclass 90++ nodes.
Servants with 6-turn cooldowns can also theoretically benefit, though it involves not using Oberon and thus requires a very specific shape of kit for it to be worthwhile. Summer Shiki is the notable beneficiary here, as in a Summer Ibuki/Summer Shiki/Apocalypse/Apocalypse team, Shiki can swap to her AoE NP on turn 1 and then back to her ST NP on turn 3. For this setup, you start out by using Shiki’s second skill for 50% charge and to swap to her AoE form, and then you use her other two skills. Ibuki uses all of her skills, targeting Shiki with her second skill. Apocalypse also uses all three skills, targeting Shiki as well with her battery. Apocalypse then plugs out for the other Apocalypse, who uses her first and second skills. Shiki uses her AoE NP, getting 10% flat charge, plus 20% from the two Apocalypses. She needs to refund at least 20%, which she gets against two enemies, or against one enemy with two hits of overkill. The second Apocalypse then uses her targeted battery to bring Shiki back to 100%, and the cooldown reduction also brings Shiki’s first skill back off cooldown, so she can re-use it. Shiki NPs again, and with the extra Arts buffs, she trivially refunds 20%. She gets 30% passive charge (10% from her own NP, plus 20% from the Apocalypses). Shiki then re-uses her third skill, and then re-uses her second skill, changing back to her single-target form. At this point, Summer Ibuki’s NP gauge is also full, so you can use Ibuki’s NP, followed by Shiki’s, which lets Shiki deal a ton of damage to a high-HP enemy while Ibuki clears any low-health adds. An NP2 Ibuki does about 112k with class score and plug buffs but no CE, while an NP2 Shiki with Black Grail deals about 808k. These damage numbers are borderline for 90++ omnifarming—it’s not quite a million against the main enemy, and higher-HP adds could cause problems—but remember that these are NP2 level 90 numbers. With grails or higher NP levels, you can reach the point of comfortably clearing most 90++ nodes, which is remarkable for a Servant who was quite bad at launch and who hasn’t gotten any buffs other than this fancy new support.
Other Arts Servants with strong buffs on 5-turn cooldowns—Summer Ibuki, Space Eresh, Nero, et cetera—also benefit, with the end result being that Apocalypse takes a handful of Servants who were until now just okay (such as Shiki and Nero) and makes them very good, and she takes Servants who were already great (such as Ibuki and Eresh) and makes them even better. There are also a handful of setups where Apocalypse makes other Servants more convenient to use without necessarily raising their power ceiling—for example, letting Servants with huge batteries like Ruler Melusine and Avenger Nito loop plugless with the Atlas mystic code, or helping Aoko out with a damaging NP on turn 1 while still providing full meta-support-level buffs. These setups aren’t going to enable top-end farming, but they will let these Servants clear lower-tier nodes faster and with less hassle, which might be valuable if you’ve invested heavily in them.
As a rule of thumb, Castoria is better in cases where Apocalypse’s battery distribution causes problems for looping (which is pretty rare, actually, given her overall increased level of flat charge), and in cases where your DPS has no stackable skills or can enable enough Castoria NPs that Castoria’s attack buffs outweigh whatever they can stack. Tezcatlipoca, for example, can double-stack his own 40% attack buff in a double Apocalypse team, but since he can easily enable two Castoria NPs, he gets more damage out of a double Castoria team than from a double Apocalypse team.
Apocalypse works essentially the same way for quick clears of CQs as she does in farming, and all of the above setups will work for cases where you can clear a fight in three turns. The one caveat is that Apocalypse is low on defensive utility, so she’ll have trouble keeping the team alive after your initial burst window—and if you’re relying on her ability to double-stack skills, you typically won’t get that benefit on later buff cycles, as Skill Reload only applies once.
Apocalypse is also a handy CQ option for fights where you want to clear quickly but have to deal with annoying buffs or debuffs. If you would otherwise be running Castoria/Castoria, you can replace one Castoria for Apocalypse for essentially the same buff value while also gaining persistent buff and debuff removal, along with some healing. A Castoria/Apocalypse team is a bit less stable in the long term than a double Castoria team (and a fair bit less stable than, say, Castoria/Lady Avalon), but it gives you utility Castoria doesn’t have with basically no loss of tempo, which is nice. It’s also worth considering that you can run double Castoria with a plug Apocalypse (or vice-versa) for added damage push, functioning as basically the Arts equivalent of a triple Skadi team. While these sorts of teams will generally result in less turn-3 damage than an Oberon team, they have the advantage of not forcing you into a 3-turn clear. Something like a Castoria/DPS/Apocalypse/Castoria team, where you swap Apocalypse for Castoria on turn 1, gives you very high buff values throughout your initial buff window while also leaving you with a classic double Castoria team to carry you through to a second buff cycle.
As an AoE Servant with great supportive tools, Apocalypse does also have some multicore potential. Especially if your primary damage-dealer has party charge available, you might be able to splash enough charge to Apocalypse for her to NP in the right setup. She could be useful in, for example, 1/1/3 nodes, where you mostly want a single-target Servant as your farmer but need a bit of AoE damage on the final wave.
I doubt there are many new players at this stage in FGO’s life, and most established players have probably pulled for Castoria on one of her many banners, but I think the most valuable thing Apocalypse offers is that she’s a totally serviceable replacement for Castoria in a lot of contexts. I usually include a line or two in these reviews about using Servants in budget contexts, and it’s true that many of the comps I mentioned above assume you have other supports… but ultimately, Apocalypse is a meta support on-par with Castoria, which means she’s one of the best Servants in the entire game. There’s no “working around a weak box” with her, really—if you have Apocalypse, you can grab Castoria or another Apocalypse off your friend list, pick any of the excellent free Arts options available, and you essentially have a meta-tier team ready to handle almost anything the game will throw at you.
As a damage-dealer, Apocalypse wants the Black Grail to maximize her damage. As a support, though, you have more options. Since Apocalypse isn’t really reliant on having access to her NP, even in CQ contexts, usual standbys like Kaleid, Devilish Bodhisattva, and Prisma Cosmos aren’t really necessary here. Instead, you can look at other CEs that provide bonuses to the party, like Ideal Holy King (for extra max health) or 2030 (for passive star gen).
Since Apocalypse is mostly a support, supportive CCs are generally your best option. That said, one of my usual recommendations—buff removal CCs—is less relevant here, as Apocalypse gets buff removal on her cards by default. Instead, you’ll probably have the most success looking to star gen CCs, to help facilitate occasional crits, or to healing CCs, to make Apocalypse a bit more likely to survive to a second buff cycle.
Archers don’t make the best use of grails, and neither do supports. Having additional health can even be a disadvantage on occasion, if you want Apocalypse to be killed to make way for another support. Unless you expect to use her as a primary farmer, or you find yourself making use of her offensive NP for multicore reasons and wish it had a bit more damage, I wouldn’t bother grailing her.
Apocalypse is a fantastic support, exactly on-par with Castoria in many cases and superior in a handful of others. She’s a great alternative to Castoria if you don’t have Castoria for some reason, want to avoid using her for bond farming, can’t run doubled supports, or anything else of that nature. Apocalypse is also a massive upgrade to a handful of Servants—mostly AoE Arts Servants with short cooldowns—and a general buff to Arts as a whole otherwise. Castoria’s sheer defensive power means she’s still probably an overall better Servant, especially when you consider CQs… but on the other hand, most of the game is farming, and for most short fights—whether that’s farming or burst-oriented challenge quests—Apocalypse is better.
All this to say, Apocalypse is probably in the top-five Servants in the game. She doesn’t massively raise the power ceiling, but she does raise it, and she’s an important, useful, and convenient tool for Arts Servants of all stripes. Best of all, her NP is mostly irrelevant, which means you only need her at NP1 to have almost all of her value. I strongly recommend pulling for this one.