Talk:Main Quest: Babylonia/@comment-30470430-20161220014656/@comment-29893250-20161222081952

Kuro was a recent event servant. Artoria Archer can be gotten via support. Same as how you can easily have Euryale and get Waver by support. Many pieces are interchangeable. You don't need Kuro and Artoria archer. Simply one to act as a damage dealer that you prop up works fine. So forth and so on. Merlin may have a CE following to patch up disadvantages but tbh, only the whales or the extremely lucky are going to have a Merlin as good as the one you get to use in Babylon. He's NP5 with 10/10/10 skills at the end. Most of us are going to be lucky to get one. So can we really gauge this as the baseline for the average player and just say he's going to get a nice CE to go with it? I don't think we can. He was also displayed in a very advantageous situation. Tell me he wrecked by walling Tiamat and I'll tell you that's super easy anyway. It doesn't take much and the battle was stacked to make him look awesome. Tell me you used him to wall Quetzalcoatl and I'll believe he's harmful to gameplay. Note that unlike the Tiamat fight, the Quetzalcoatl fight is much closer to normal boss conditions. She may be harder to kill but her killing capacity is no different from a normal boss. But of course you probably didn't as most likely did not because using Merlin there is dumb. He doesn't wall her at all and it won't matter what kind of wall team you add there. A few hard hits concentrated on any single servant will kill just as well as the NP. It isn't like you have an extra 10k hp to make sure the opponent will probably never one shot you, enough hits done to you to spam NPs every other turn per servant, or a heal every turn to abuse the increased healing power. Without these elements (which reflects a normal situation), what you fear isn't present.

I heavily disagree about Merlin's engine just needing to start. Heal right off. Sure. But does he actually provide real protection in difficult battles? Not with his NP. He does provide incremental advantages but in difficult battles, you're typically threatened on any given turn, not only on a turn that your enemies have an NP up. He doesn't provide damage cut, defense up, hp up or anythng that helps that raw survivability chance. That heal may help some of the damage but if you're going from "hard" to "completely walling them" with a heal that comes a little earlier, then that battle wasn't very hard at all. What part of the survivability here isn't provided by Tamamo comparatively? The only thing is his team invincibility skill. Is this very strong in tandem with Tamamo? Sure. However, these things once again don't change the threat of hard hitting attacks on every turn.

Bringing up the concept of raids, how many raids have we had where it was necessary and most efficient to last the full usually 15 turns? I cannot think of a single one. I'm f2p and I've not had a problem killing the big bosses in Onigashima. To those who couldn't, they did the ones that were slightly smaller like the 3 mil or the 1 mil if you were pretty new. If you couldn't do the 6 mil, you'd have to average at least 4.5 mil damage on the 6 mil within 15 turns in order to have a greater damage to BP rate than just winning the 3 mil. So supposing you're worried about Merlin teams, what easy access non whale Merlin team are you imagining that would manage this without being able to actually kill the boss? Note that even if you did, the gain of damage to BP isn't that absurd. It is less than 33% (since if you were at that, you'd simply have beaten the boss, making turns irrelevant). Or perhaps you think that Merlin would make a team that would be otherwise smashed now all of a sudden capable of crushing said raid bosses? I disagree with this too. If the team is weak, they hit you and kill you regardless of if you have Merlin. A weak team can be carried by a damage dealer. A weak team cannot be carried by Merlin because he can't kill the boss that well and healing doesn't save them from heavy hits that they can't survive anyway or which exceed Merlin's healing capacity which isn't all that great on average. Compare him to Caster Iri who heals in comparative amounts and grants a big guts on her NP which will make them survive a NP. This is much more spammable than Merlin's invincibility skill and in an arts team which is required to utilize a supposed Merlin lock anyway, isn't firing off that every 2-3 turns comparably potent? Obviously Merlin's offensive support capacity is much greater but we're not talking about that. We're talking about walling capacity. Has her presence negatively impacted the game? I don't think so.

I think that Merlin has specific conditons for what he can stop under which he will work as a true wall and this is 100% ok to me. Is Hans + DaVinci unbalanced because they crush the 37 Hassans from the Nero event? No, they just happened to be strong against that particular kind of battle. Merlin will not lock out the average boss, only very specific kinds and with specific help. This is not a new thing and the presence of such lock possibilities haven't negatively affected the game yet. And there are many specific locks. More likely than locking enemies out, as is he'd be a support piece in a more controllish roster geared towards facilitating survival and making a third servant hit NPs. Kind of like a faster Hans or a slower Waver. Could he be adjusted by DW for gacha release? Possibly. However, I don't think he needs it and I don't think him being put out as is would negatively affect the game at all. We have plenty of servants who are strong in niche roles and plenty who act as strong generic support. Merlin being there won't all of a sudden make the holy grail of all servants, the pseudo 6 star that makes all your battles easy. And if you say he'll carry you in a bunch of battles as a support, hasn't Waver and Jalter been doing that for ages already? They're more generic than Merlin too.