Talk:Merlin/@comment-36128561-20180712200534/@comment-28209103-20180713013248

The short answer is as above.

The long answer is tied to one of team archetype mainly the existence of buster critical team. Mainly Merlin is akin to all-in-one solution for that team.

A simple introduction, Buster critical team as it's name is a team that focus on maximizing damage via buster crits. Buster critical team aim for one turn window damage burst that does absurd damage to close the match quickly.. and by absurd I mean something like destroying up to 500k enemy in one burst.

Ae a side note there exist Arts critical and quick critical team. Arts crit aimed for continous crit using combination of passive & active star generator to spam Np on top of the crit bonus. Quick is snowbally type aiming for even more consistent crit but had weakness here and there.

Anyway back to buster crit. Back then when buster crit is still an unknown territory they have 3 clear weakness.

1. Star supply, due to it's nature that relies on some precondition namely you need to have stars and the buff EXACTLY when you draw your buster weapon and even then the stars should go to the correct guy.

Old pre-Merlin team resolved this via 2030 and Anniversary blonde or to put it simply a passive star supply each turns and on demand stars via skill. As you can see Merlin NP simply gives you 2030 so he solved this problem

2. Healing and tank, the old team is a sink or swim, kill-before-killed team. It's main supporter is Waver and Hans but at best they can only hold on for 1 enemy nuke. Merlin simply solved this by combining Hans healing with party wide invul making it possible to sustain team for at least 2 nukes.

3.Np gain, while JAlter is an unique existence that can be called the pinnacle of crit hitter she is still an oddity in the sense that her NP gain is absurdly fast. If you switch her with someone else like Raikou or Rama you can't help but notice the differences. Usually Waver is da man for this but Merlin soles it too.

On top of solving 3 affrontmentioned problem, Merlin add a bonus in form of the single strongest buster critical support team which is 3rd skill. FYI crit doubled your final damage and 50% crit bonus will tripled it. 100% bonus will obviously quadroupled it.

Well a lot of player abused Merlin tho like double Merlin to extend survival indefinitely but that's a thing from the past. Atm multiple hp bar is the norm so it doesn't matter if you could do 1 mil burst in one go. Similarly invul pierce, Buster down, buff removal etc etc are increasingly common so Merlin are not tad broken in JP atm.

However he's still a darn good support tho..