Talk:Artoria Pendragon (Lancer Alter)/@comment-120.188.87.32-20160917052840/@comment-29893250-20170121032553

I honestly wouldn't count on a NPBB chain with alter. Practically, this isn't too controllable. Sometimes it will happen and when it does, it does serious work. However, while brave chains with her are reasonable or buster chains, buster brave chains which deal massively more damage are much harder to control. Also, talking grail ascension is a bit iffy to me. With grails as such a limited commodity, I'd only personally be looking at GA stats if you or whoever in question has already decided to grail one and is just thinking about which. The main issue I have with your argument has to do with "usual". In a general 15 card rotation, if the buster cards aren't together in the same grouping when you have your NP, you will get less than half the damage from your attacking cards (not including NP). Admittedly, this doesn't show in your calculation because you haven't done the full buster calculation. For example, the third card in a buster chain on a normal, unbuffed servant but with a crit is going to be dealing 756% damage. To the argument about "at same level"... Well, duh? Are we really going to say that Hans Christian Andersen is better than all 5 star casters because he beats the pants off of them at level 65? Of course not, even though he's awesome and is totally and endgame servant. You compare the 4 star at 80 and the 5 star at 90. Or if you planned to grail them, you compare both at 100 or whatever you'd planned to grail them to.

Vanilla is definitely better for clearing mobs. I don't think any of us are disputing that. Now looking at bosses, consider the fact that alter needs to be placed on a pedestal that both generates some crit stars for her and feeds her NP gauge. She won't be firing off so easily on her own. Then you have to contend with rng to get nice timing for her to make that big hit. This hardly makes alter's time outclassing vanilla as "usual". If you want to count the NP seal as a "stun", this makes the chances of her getting that NPBB chain even more unlikely and you're disregarding the cases where vanilla's invincipierce makes you able to do a NP brave chain (much, much more common) on a turn where you'd normally not do damage at all, resulting in raw damage gain. This pops up much more often than the stars aligning for those ideal scenarios. Basically, if the boss has any kind of evasion, chances are it'll happen all on her own. Rather, if you coddle alter and are willing to wait for her to get her opportune shot, she hits like an ICBM. But it takes a lot of coddling and luck to get that off. And even when it does, you'll likely rarely get those 2 scenarios to coincide.

Looking at damage, what would you do to compare the team inflexibility of alter (which usually includes much lesser damage dealing servants to prop her up) as compared to the more rounded vanilla? Every round, you're losing damage simply by propping her up.

Now on the other hand, there's this one servant who can use hero creation on alter and helps charge her up. That'd make her stupidly scary :) General use, vanilla wins. Specialized use, Alter can potentially be better in some situations. She's a specialist after all. Just don't mistake that specialty for "most of the time" because it isn't.