Rabbit’s Reviews #364: Aesc (5* Caster)

FGO’s 8th anniversary brings with it a surprise: Aesc, a major character from Lostbelt 6 who was prior to now relegated to NPC status (sorta). I won’t spoil exactly why she matters or how she ties into the overall plot of the chapter—if you haven’t read LB6 yet, please do! It’s a truly amazing story—easily the best FGO has had to-date—and it’s well-worth the time it takes to read through.

…At any rate, Aesc is a weird DPS Caster with some theoretical support potential. She’s one of the better offensive Casters in the game, but that’s not a particularly high bar, and what she does offensively can largely be replicated by a grailed CasCu if you happen to have one. She undoubtedly has some very very powerful tools, but they come with drawbacks too severe to let them work like you might hope.

She also turns into Summer Morgan in her third ascension. Yay?

Increase your Arts Card effectiveness by 12%.

Increase debuff chance by 6%.

Increase your Debuff Resist by 17.5%.

Increase your Critical Chance Resist by 12%

Aesc has the highest attack of the SSR Casters, which is good for her primary damage-dealing role, but Casters’ innate attack penalties mean she’s still not that powerful relative to SSRs at large. Her deck doesn’t lend itself to star gen, but her NP gain is solid, at least—she has slightly better-than-average Arts cards relative to her deck, and her single Quick is… not terrible, at least.

Aesc has a nice, if relatively standard, set of passives. Territory Creation is mostly useful here for increasing functional NP gain, Item Constuction makes one of her NP effects marginally more reliable, Magic Resistance serves its usual function of occasionally keeping debuffs at bay, and Fae Eyes gives a useful shield against incidental enemy crits—not enough to protect against enemies with crit buffs, but enough to prevent a lot of unbuffed crits.

For Appends, Mana Loading is probably the most valuable, although Aesc’s battery distribution means she’s arguably better off investing in Anti-Berserker attack—since Aesc hits Berserkers for double damage (as usual), the attack up applies to one of her meaningful use-cases. The Extra attack append is solidly the least useful of the three.

Aesc’s skillset is, in theory, very very powerful. Unfortunately, cooldowns get in the way and severely reduce her actual power. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Increase NP Gauge for all allies each turn (3 turns).Apply to self: Gain Critical Stars each turn (3 turns).Increase own NP Gauge.Increase own NP Strength (3 turns).

Fae of the Rain Clan is… well, a lot of things. It’s a self-battery, a damage buff, star gen, and passive party charge. These are all very good things—the 50% charge is integral to Aesc’s looping, the passive charge is technically a good supportive tool, stars are always nice, and the skill gives a persistent steroid that boosts Aesc’s NP damage. Unfortunately, this doesn’t come together quite as nicely as it might. It’s on a long enough CD that it’s not Koyan-stackable, either for the extra battery or for the extra damage. 10% charge per turn to the party is nice, but it’s a bit awkwardly spaced, and there aren’t many setups for which this particular battery spread is actually useful supportively. It does matter to Aesc’s ability to BG loop, so there’s that, but Aesc would be a better damage-dealing if this were on a shorter cooldown with the extra effect removed.

Increase ATK for all allies (3 turns).Further increase ATK for party by 10% (3 turns) at each threshold of their own HP (up to +40% additional):- HP ≤ 99%- HP ≤ 75%- HP ≤ 50%- HP ≤ 25%Apply delayed buff to self (3 turns): Gain 10 Critical Stars each turn if all allies' HP is at 100% (3 turns).

Charisma of Adversity is an interesting skill, starting as a base Charisma and growing in power the lower the target’s health. In theory, this skill can give a truly amazing 60% partywide attack up… but you have to have such low HP for that to happen that you won’t see it in most cases. Typically, this is 20% attack up, or 30% if you have a Koyan on your team. Still not bad, but not remarkable. The skill also gives 10 stars per turn if the party is perfectly healthy, which is kinda cool, but it’s pretty tricky to stay at full health unless you’re doing hard stall with Castoria, and even then once you take any chip damage that effect goes away.

* This skill starts at 5-turn cooldown.Increase NP Gauge for all allies.Increase NP Strength for all allies (3 turns).Apply Guts to all allies (1 time, 3 turns).

Last Resort is the centerpiece of Aesc’s kit. It’s a 50% partywide charge—far and away the highest of its type in the game, discounting Salome’s weirdness—that also comes with a 30% partywide NP damage buff for three turns, and partywide guts. Understandably, it’s on a very long cooldown, which it certainly merits. All this might make you think Aesc is a fantastic support Caster. With S1 taken into account, Aesc is functionally a 70% charger, matching Oberon, with good steroids and a defensive tool on top of that. …Unfortunately, here we run into the drawbacks. This skill starts on a 5-turn cooldown, which means without CDR you can’t get access to this skill until well into the fight. Fortunately, Aesc’s NP helps with this a little bit, but in most setups you won’t be able to use this until turn 3 at the absolute earliest, and that requires keeping Aesc on the field the whole time and using her NP at least once. This leads to Aesc being highly inflexible for any sort of shortform fight, whether that’s a farming context or a fastburn CQ one. It takes something that should in theory be amazing—70% total party charge in the first three turns of battle—and makes it a not-too-useful gimmick. In longer fights, with Aesc as your damage-dealer, this stops being as much of a problem, as Aesc can use her NP to use this repeatedly, providing its substantial benefits to the party each time. Whether this is valuable is somewhat open to debate—Aesc is probably the best point Servant for Himiko/Castoria teams, primarily due to this skill, but Merlin/Himiko/Castoria and Merlin/Morgan/Castoria are both better Buster stall teams, and the existence of Lady Avalon and post-buff Reines make Arts stall teams overall better in most cases where a random hit getting through your defenses isn’t likely to one-shot you. Altogether, this is an ostensibly ludicrously powerful skill that’s just “okay” in practice.

Apply Invincible to self (1 time, 1 turn).Deal damage to all enemies.Deal supereffective damage against [Evil] alignment enemies.Decrease DEF for all enemies by 20% (3 turns).

<Overcharge>

Increase own Buster Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first].Decrease Skill Cooldown of own 3rd skill.

聖剣遙か夢の名残

Apply Invincible to self (1 time, 1 turn).Deal damage to all enemies.Deal supereffective damage against [Evil] alignment enemies.Decrease DEF for all enemies by 20% (3 turns).

Increase own Buster Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first].Decrease Skill Cooldown of own 3rd skill.

Memory of Londinium is quite good as Buster NPs go. Most importantly, it’s an AoE Buster NP that comes with a fairly broad supereffective niche, and the supereffective damage scales with NP level rather than with overcharge. NP level scaling on and SE multiplier is generally a good thing. If you’re facing content difficult enough for niche damage to really matter—by which I mostly mean 90++ nodes—you pretty much need NP2 or higher to be functional, which in this case gives you what would be the equivalent of Overcharge 3 levels of niche damage on a typical Servant. This is a positive, and it very much works to Aesc’s advantage. An NP2 Aesc with black grail can mostly handle Evil Assassin and Berserker 90++ nodes, which is really quite good for that level of investment, even if it’s a narrow group of Servants. The NP also starts with a pre-cast Buster buff that scales with overcharge. It doesn’t last multiple turns, which is a shame, but the values on it are pretty high in exchange, so it’s a mostly fair trade. The NP also inflicts defense down after damage, which increases Aesc’s supportive value and lets her snowball a bit in CQ contexts. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to use Aesc as a farming support, Aesc needs to use this on turn 1 or turn 2 to have her third skill available on turn 3, which means the potential damage amp from the NP’s defense down can’t realistically be used on turn 3, when the damage is usually most needed. The NP also grants Aesc a hit of invuln, which only lasts a turn, but it’s decently nice if you aren’t running Castoria (in which case nothing will punch through Solemn Defense in time to hit this invuln, usually).

Alright, there’s a lot to unpack here. Aesc functions in essentially three different roles: farming/blitz DPS, stall DPS, and support. The way she works in each case is pretty distinct, with the arguable exception of stall DPS—but even there she has some unique considerations to keep in mind. With all this said, I’ll be approaching the three roles separately.

As a farmer, Aesc works mostly normally with a 50% charge CE. She can’t double-stack any of her batteries with Koyan, but she does get 50% charge on turn 1 and turn 3 thanks to her first and third skills. Plug in any 50% charger (though ideally Oberon) and you have a mostly standard loop. Aesc’s damage is pretty low if you do this, though—you need Black Grail to reach 90++ damage levels. Fortunately, she can loop with BG, though it takes an unconventional setup to do so.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to get Aesc to BG loop. The first requires Mana Loading, Koyan, Oberon, and either Waver or Reines. I’ll use Reines as the example, as her damage push is slightly higher, but you can swap Waver out for similar results. You run Koyan/Aesc/Reines/Oberon. On turn 1, you use Aesc’s self battery, plus 30% charge from Reines. On turn 2, you get 10% charge from Aesc’s passive battery, plus 50% charge from Koyan, plus the remaining 20% charge from Reines. You plug Koyan or Reines out for Oberon and use his 20% charge to secure the loop. On turn 3, Aesc’s third skill is available, so you use that and Oberon’s 50% battery to NP a third time. The biggest advantage of this setup is you aren’t running doubles of anyone, so if you don’t have one of the Servants involved, you can pull them off support—and if supports or duplicate Servants are blocked for whatever reason, you can still run this setup provided you have all the Servant involved natively, which can be nice for the occasional story fight or bursty CQ.

The other setup uses double Oberon and doesn’t require Mana Loading. You run Koyan/Aesc/Oberon/Oberon. On turn 1, you use Koyan’s battery and Aesc’s S1. On turn 2, you get 10% charge from Aesc’s first skill, and you use one Oberon 50% battery and both Oberons’ 20% batteries to reach 100% charge. On turn 3, you use Aesc’s S3 and the other Oberon’s 50% charge for the last NP. This setup results in more overall damage on turn 3 and is generally the better option if it’s available.

As a stall DPS, Aesc works mostly like other Buster DPS units, pairing with Castoria and either Merlin or an Overcharge support. The notable thing here is that Himiko is solidly the best third support for this team, for several reasons. Himiko’s enhanced Overcharge buff lets Aesc use her third skill that much more frequently, and she also provides nice damage buffs that speed up the team as a whole. Her crit buffs also pair nicely with Aesc’s star gen, and as Himiko teams are less likely to take incidental damage than the other alternatives, they’re also more likely to get the extra 10 stars per turn from Aesc’s first skill. Himiko’s and Aesc’s skills together can make 44 stars per turn, nearly guaranteeing you crit with every attack, which is quite nice. Furthermore, one of the usual disadvantages of this team—the lack of healing—is arguably a benefit to Aesc. If you take a little bit of chip damage and then get your shields back up, you lose a bit of star gen, but in exchange you effectively hit harder for the entire rest of the fight, thanks to Aesc’s second skill. Other teams are certainly workable, but Himiko has far and away the best synergy here.

Aesc’s support use case is the weirdest one. In order for her to be a valuable support, you really need her to have access to her third skill promptly—preferably within the first three turns of the fight. A single NP use on its own won’t get you there, which means she really needs either CDR or Overcharge in order to be a meaningful support pick. More than just about any support, she’s dependent on her CE choice. Devilish Bodhisattva is the perfect pick here, as it starts Aesc with enough NP charge to NP immediately, and it boosts her overcharge by 2, giving her exactly enough CDR to have access to S3 on turn 3. Assuming you’re in a CQ and not trying to farm, she brings 20% defense down, 20% (or more) attack up, and 30% NP damage up, in addition to 70% total party charge. That’s a lot of value! The catch here is that Aesc must be on the field the whole time for this to work, and you don’t get her full value until T3… and it’s only marginally more value than an NP1 Waver or Reines provides, without any of the drawbacks, and with the potential to be even better at higher NP levels.

Essentially what this means is if you don’t have many supports and you do have Devilish Bodhisattva, Aesc can be a good support for you, though her peculiarities and awkwardness are likely to cause problems you’ll have to work around. If you do have other supports or you don’t have Devilish Bodhisattva… I honestly wouldn’t bother. Use her as a DPS, or not at all.

I’ve more or less addressed this already, but you want Black Grail if Aesc is a DPS, or Devilish Bodhisattva if she’s a support. I normally recommend alternatives to Black Grail for Buster or Quick stall contexts, as the demerit can add up in teams without healing, but the demerit is arguably a good thing for Aesc, as having lower health indirectly increases her damage, and if you’re not taking hits, Aesc’s guts can potentially keep the demerit from killing you. It’s a bit risky, but probably worth it for the substantially increased speed.

Aesc has pretty easy crit access and no innate crit buffs, making crit damage up CCs an obvious pick here.

Aesc is one of the best offensive Casters in the game, but she’s not cleanly the best, and Casters are bad grail picks in general. Personally I’d advise against grailing her unless you’re going all-in—NP5, level 120, the works—but if you’re set on it, more attack can’t hurt her.

Aesc occupies a very strange middle-ground. By all rights, she has some of the stongest tools in the entire game. All three of her skills are strong, and her NP, while not perfect, is better than most Buster units get. Everything about her design speaks to a very careful intentionality, from the way her passive and active batteries combine to give her exactly the right charge amounts to loop CE-less, but only if you don’t use double Koyan, to the way her damage thresholds let her 5CE 90++ nodes, but only with class advantage and niche, to the way she has tons of supportive value, but only if you arrange your team and strategy perfectly to take advantage of it. With some Servants, there’s not a lot of obvious design intent—either they offer a set of very basic and straightforward tools that work basically the same way as most others, or the specific set of tools they have don’t work together clearly or cleanly. Aesc is meticulously constructed. She’s exactly as powerful as she’s meant to be, and she works exactly as well as she’s supposed to.

…The thing is, “exactly as powerful as she’s meant to be” is “fairly powerful, but only a little more powerful than a much cheaper unit in CasCu and arguably weaker than a much simpler and older unit in Da Vinci,” and “exactly as well as she’s supposed to” is “passably, with a lot of caveats and drawbacks.” She’s theoretically very powerful, but practically not especially great. As I said, strange middle ground.

There is, I think, a valid argument to be made that Aesc is quite good. You could argue that the demerits aren’t a big deal and can be worked around, that her power ceiling if you’re willing to make do with her weirdness is very very high, that partywide 50% charge is just that powerful… but personally, I think she’s not great in spite of these strengths. Interestingly, my thoughts on Aesc mirror my thoughts on Morgan, although they’re much more pronounced here. Morgan is very good at almost everything—farming, fastburn, stall, et cetera—but she’s not the best at any of it. She’s quite well-balanced in that respect, able to do almost anything you want her to without outshining specialists, but without being cleanly the best at anything I personally find her kit rather unexciting. Aesc, then, is okay at almost everything. She can farm, with caveats; she can stall, with caveats; she can support, with caveats… Personally, I just don’t see any real cases where I would bring Aesc over a Servant who specializes in whichever of those things I care about, and who can do those things better, without the asterisks.

I suppose this lends itself towards saying Aesc is best for players without especially developed boxes, as she can fill a range of roles decently well. This is a fair point, though needing LB6 mats cuts against that a little bit, and her teams tend to be weird and specific enough that Aesc can be hard to use well without an established enough box to have the right Servants to pair her with… at which point you’re pretty likely to have better alternatives.

Overall, Aesc’s individual tools are just too powerful for me to knock her completely. She’s a kinda mediocre overall servant with a bunch of really powerful weapons at her disposal—which is amusingly almost exactly the way Casters ostensibly function in Fate lore. What it comes down to is that Aesc is less than the sum of her parts, but those parts are good enough that you might be able to find use for her anyway. I don’t think she’s worth pulling, but your mileage may vary.

Overall: 7/10Single-Target DPS: 5/10AoE DPS: 8/10Survivability: 5/10Offensive Utility: 7/10Defensive Utility: 7/10Farming Usefulness: 8/10Castoria Likeness: 10/10