Talk:New Year 2017 Summoning Campaign/@comment-85.118.8.150-20170104140018/@comment-29893250-20170105104254

So he can deal damage when coddled in an arts team. This is very replaceable by any number of servants with wider usage. There's 2 primary kinds of battles, farming and boss battles. In farming, he's automatically not the best choice because just about anyone with an anti army NP and an arts base will outdo him. This isn't a small list either but rather half of the gold servants in general as well as a number of the 3 star servants who put out enough oomph to do your basic farming in one shot. So here he is totally replaceable and outclassed by a pool so large that if I closed my eyes and pointed at a random servant near the top of your list, chances are, that servant would be better than Vlad for the job.

In terms of boss slaying, we're no longer looking at raw speed so much as ability to keep going. In this sense, he is shot in the foot by being a berserker. Due to this, he is once again typically outclassed by a great amount of the field but in the area of almost anyone that's anti unit and not weak to whatever particular boss you're going after. Arts teams have a gravitation towards survival and Vlad is just not that great a big gun for survival. This field is further narrowed by the "no Merlin" requirement which is sort of dashed due to the presence of support. If you have access to Merlin, the number of buster based high dps are far and wide. Thing is everyone has access to Merlin because of supports. So assuming someone already had a part of an arts team and had Merlin, it'd be an immediate reason to not go for Vlad. If they had Waver, it'd still be plenty reason to not go for Vlad because you can use any number of servants that have more wide places to use them and then just use support for Merlin or whatever. If you want Waver and Tamamo, this is a stall setup. So let's compare him with, say, Gilibaba. Gilibaba outclasses him in farming due to AOE NP (The stuff you're killing while farming isn't that strong. He can still clear it out just fine which will still come way faster than hitting each one individually with Vlad), helps keep the train going, isn't squishy due to class for boss battles, and actually helps you tank in an already survivalistic team. He also costs less to field. This is a ridiculous comparison but the point is that Vlad's excelling in where he does goes nowhere in any sense aside where you were already totally winning with any number of options and are just deciding how you want to do it but even then, he's typically not so efficient at it.

I mean, if you'd like to say that Vlad has this niche with very specific 5 star servants while lacking other very specific 5 star servants to kill mid level bosses that you can easily beat but you want to do it faster, then sure. I'll give you that he has that niche. That niche is just totally useless because he gets outclassed in each other major use left and right, leaving him to excel in a very small slice of the pie of your battles that doesn't come around all that terribly often (basically raid bosses that you can easily beat) while as far as most of the other battles go, it'd be most sensible to switch him out barring the fact that you'd have to take a few seconds to switch teams. The only thing I can think of that meets this niche is specific mat farming when you just aren't getting something from events and want to get it the hard way and that isn't even all mat farming. That is... if you have the team to coddle him. Outside of it, he's only worse.

So for boss slaying, he's outclassed. For farming, he's outclassed. In absence of a team to coddle him, Raikou outclasses him because she more or less spams about as well but has greater use in farming and crit receiving.

I never said that Vlad can't be used if you have him but consolation prizes would be the furthest thing I'd want in a paid gacha. It is one thing to say that he's fine to use once you've already rolled him. It is another to deny the questionability of choosing to roll where you have a very large percentage chance to get him. Let's not confuse "good entry level" with good. Is he good compared to many 3 stars when starting? Yes. Is he good compared to some 4 star berserkers? Yes. Obviously if you're new and you have this Vlad sitting there, of course you raise him. But if you have Waver and Tamamo like you suggest, should you go for Vlad? I don't think so. He is the Sumanai of 5 stars. Basically, looking at strictly gameplay, you roll. You see a gold ring. You see saber. You see sumanai. You sigh. You see rainbows. You see berserker. You see Vlad. You sigh. Obviously he's a 5 star and we don't really have this pool of bad 5 stars but he's one of the ones you'd want to see the least because for the average player, he is probably the lowest utility 5 star possible in term of combined usefulness of the two basic jobs in the game, farming and boss slaying.

To address what you said about skills, the reason for that is because Vlad's skills are rather weak. Yes, those others need significant dedication to reach their maximum use. Heracles definitely, definitely does. However, the others, I disagree with. Kintoki is really looking at level 10 animal dialogue to hit off his NP turn 1 with any number of 50% charge CE. The others don't really need to be leveled for him to do his basic task. However, he will still do more kinds of farming missions faster than Vlad even in absence of this and won't be that far behind in terms of killing bosses even without leveling his skills to make him do what he's supposed to do. When dealing with Cu alter, he may not have the raw cycling survivability but he survives a lot better than other berserkers at low level of skills even there. So in a specific arts team that really isn't that good at farming anyway, Vlad farms faster than him. In a specific arts team, Cu's survivability would still make him last as long as Vlad. Anywhere outside that, Cu blows Vlad out in both categories.

So IF you got lucky and have an arts team but not Merlin

IF you're still starting to the point that you can't push one skill up to 10

IF you're ok with a servant that does one not so important niche job and falls a bit short in the more common ones

And IF you're fine with a servant that may have a very small advantage at best over others for a very brief time (conditional upon you having Tamamo and Waver but not materials to level skills or patience to wait) till you quickly are able to push some skills up to 7 or 10 at which point those others will outclass Vlad in the most common aspects of the game even if you just jammed them into a team that was tailor made for him

Then you might be happy to purposely roll with a high chance of getting Vlad.