Rabbit's Reviews #287: Amor (Caren) (5* Ruler)

Since the theme of the year so far seems to be “Servants lots of people actively wanted,” Valentine’s 2021 brings Caren Hortensia as our first-ever Quick Ruler. It’s kind of wild that after 5-and-a-half years of FGO there are still class/card type combinations we don’t have, but here we are. Maybe we’ll get the legendary Quick Caster this year, too.

Regardless, Caren is a weird Servant. She’s a lot of things all at once, and as a result she doesn’t excel in any particular role despite what is a pretty loaded kit. She has terrible NP refund and underwhelming damage, but in exchange she has powerful enough skills that she can actually loop with Black Grail in some very specific (and expensive) team comps—which would be impressive if Arts wasn’t so dominant at that already. She also has a ton of utility built into her kit, to the extent that it seems like she may have been designed with an alternative support or semi-support role in mind. Even in a supportive role, though, she has a fair number of annoying flaws that keep her from being much more than a Super Tristan when operating in a supportive capacity. She’s not bad, exactly—if you’re willing to put up with her weaknesses and build a team around her, she’ll probably feel solid if not outright strong—but almost everything she does comes with an asterisk, which makes it hard to recommend her as a gameplay pick.

Caren’s stat spread is generally offense-leaning, with the second-highest attack and the second-lowest HP of the SSR Rulers (slightly behind Sherlock, in both cases). Regardless of whether she’s functioning as a DPS or a Quick Semi-support, she appreciates the extra attack, as it helps her hit harder and move faster. Her star gen is pretty good in practice, thanks to her NP and her hit-counts, though her NP gain is just fine, with pretty aggressively average Arts Cards, underwhelming Quicks, and very weak NP refund.

Caren’s passives get their own two paragraphs, mostly because of Masochistic Spiritualist Disposition. Disposition is an odd passive that renders Caren more susceptible to debuffs (effectively canceling out Core of the Goddess) and gives her an extra 20% attack up while she’s debuffed in exchange. This is an important steroid for Caren, as she’s rather light on damage buffs otherwise. Fortunately, a couple of non-obvious sources can trigger it. You can run Caren with The Black Grail (which is a smart idea in general), as Black Grail’s demerit also counts as a debuff for this passive. The other option is running an Avenger—such as Angra—in your backline, as the Avenger passive takes effect even while the Avenger in question is in reserve, and the demerit from that passive triggers Caren’s attack buff.

As far as other passives go, Caren has Item Construction to add a little bit of consistency to her debuffs, along with Independent Action to prop up her crits a little. Core of the Goddess mostly exists to counteract Disposition and also provide a trivial bit of extra damage. Faith, however, is another unique passive, rendering Caren immune to terror and charm—very niche but occasionally handy—and also slightly reducing the damage she takes from Buster attacks, making her a little tankier than she would be otherwise.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Archer Piece x5 Caster Piece x5 Berserker Piece
3	300,000	x5 Saber Piece x5 Lancer Piece x5 Rider Piece x5 Assassin Piece
4	1,000,000	x5 Archer Monument x5 Caster Monument x5 Berserker Monument
Max	3,000,000	x5 Saber Monument x5 Lancer Monument x5 Rider Monument x5 Assassin Monument

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Archer x5 Gem of Caster x5 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	400,000	x5 Gem of Saber x5 Gem of Lancer x5 Gem of Rider x5 Gem of Assassin
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Archer x5 Magic Gem of Caster x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	1,600,000	x5 Magic Gem of Saber x5 Magic Gem of Lancer x5 Magic Gem of Rider x5 Magic Gem of Assassin
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Archer x5 Secret Gem of Caster x5 Secret Gem of Berserker
6 → 7	5,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Saber x5 Secret Gem of Lancer x5 Secret Gem of Rider x5 Secret Gem of Assassin
7 → 8	10,000,000	x12 Arrowhead of Atonement
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Rainbow Thread Ball
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

As a Ruler, Caren is effectively free to ascend, and her skills aren’t bad either provided you have gems handy. Even her capstone mats are just a handful of arrowheads and yarn, neither of which is particularly difficult to get ahold of. If you want to invest in her, it should be pretty easy.

For how busy Caren’s skillset is, it’s a little bit lacking on the offensive front. Still, Caren gets to run with a 50% total battery and a ton of defensive utility, so it’s not too bad a place to be. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

Alright, so, to start with the obvious, Caren is capable of looping in certain setups. Her skills and her weak refund mean she has relatively weird requirements, though. As a 50% battery Servant she can obviously tri-loop with MLB Kaleid, two Skadis, and any 50% charger—and she can actually do it with just a regular Kaleid and the 2004 Mystic Code if the Skadis happen to have starting NP—but her damage in this setup is Not Good. At NP2 in the 2004 setup, you’re looking at something like 60k on waves 1 and 2 (assuming you can run a backline Avenger for the extra attack buff), and 150k on wave 3. While this isn’t terrible for a plugless setup, the fact that it’s assuming NP2, it needs a backline Avenger for damage, it’s completely impossible if the Skadis don’t have accommodating CEs, it probably needs crits on wave 2 to drop a high-HP enemy, and it still doesn’t quite hit the general omnifarming threshold of 160k is somewhat telling.

Generally speaking, if you’re trying to farm with Caren, you’re going to be much better off with a CE that boosts damage and a plug buffer. If you run a 50% starting CE like Holy Night Supper or Traces of Christmas, you can get away with Reines or Waver as well thanks to Caren’s relatively flexible loop setups. For Waver, you want to have him in the front line, use all three of his skills, and then plug him out for Skadi—Caren will only get 10% in NP drains each turn, but between her batteries and Skadi’s, that’s enough (versus Knights, at least). With Reines, you want to have Caren use her own batteries on turn 1, and then plug Reines in on turn 2 (after one Skadi has used her battery) and use her AoE charge and one of her targeted charges to set Caren up for her second NP, at which point she’ll have the 10% charge on Reines and Skadi to drain and push her towards her third NP. Both these setups still have some damage issues, but they’re better than going plugless and they’re more reliable than trying to use Black Grail.

…Which, of course, brings us to Black Grail looping. Caren is unusual among Quick Servants in that she actually can loop semi-reliably with Black Grail, provided you have Castoria. With Black Grail, you can start with two Skadis, have the Skadis drop their Quick buffs and one Skadi use her defense debuff and her battery turn 1, plug Castoria in, and use Castoria’s batteries. This leaves Caren with plenty of NP to drain, and it lets her use her Quick buff and taunt on turn 2, and the other Skadi’s battery on turn 3. She needs a lot of overkill in order to do this—at NP2 and with MLB Black Grail, wave 1’s enemy HP values have to be less than 26k-ish and wave 2’s have to be 56k-ish (with some functional variance in the event of a high-HP enemy flanked by lower-HP enemies) in order for her to swing the loop, at least against Knights. These are fairly reasonable overkill requirements given recent event trends, and it gets Caren up to roughly 180k on wave 3—but it also requires plugsuit, which is relatively slow; it gets significantly less reliable with lower NP levels and a non-MLB Black Grail; and plenty of Arts Servants, along with old Quick standbys like Dantes, can hit omnifarming numbers much more easily and with much less overkill. Take that for whatever it’s worth.

That’s all assuming you’re farming, of course. For CQs, Caren is a lot more flexible, since she gets to rely on defensive NP gain and isn’t as pressed to optimize her turn counts. In CQ contexts, you can run Caren with two Skadis or in a Skadi/Castoria shell and she’ll do just fine, with her bulk and defensive utility helping to keep the team alive. Caren’s NP drains may be annoying in the Skadi/Castoria comp specifically, as it’ll make it harder for Castoria to protect the team, but aside from that she should be reasonably effective as a relatively generic AoE Quick point in CQ contexts.

More interesting, though, is her potential as a semi-support in cheaper Quick teams. While Caren is lacking in team offensive buffs (even relative to someone like Osakabehime and Jinako), she somewhat makes up for it with her defensive utility, and her plethora of batteries means you can more or less ignore her cards and focus on your DPS. You can run her in a team with one of the excellent Quick welfares—Ridetoki, Summer Yu, or Santa Karna—and either a full support (like Skadi or Castoria) or another semi-support (like Santa Night, Summer Carmilla, or Barti) for an unusually stable budget Quick team. That said, you still have the issue of Caren’s party NP drain being annoying—this is part of why I recommend welfares, as they can by default fill their NP gauges above 100% and all three of the listed Servants have batteries—and non-blitz Quick setups are one of the weakest team styles in the game, so your mileage may vary. Caren’s weak offensive buffs mean support Caren is probably more a curiosity than a practically useful Thing To Do, but if non-standard Quick teams are your jam, Caren may have some value to you.

I more or less covered CE options for Caren in the looping breakdown above, but to recap: your options are Kaleid for simple-but-low-damage looping, 50% charge CEs for a mix of consistency and damage, and Black Grail for maximum damage if you have Castoria and can swing the overkill. Outside of farming, Traces of Christmas is a great CE pick for both general-purpose DPS use and for support use, as it lets Caren NP immediately with just her own skills on top of boosting her NP gain some. Black Grail is also great for damage purposes in CQ contexts, especially since it functionally boosts Caren’s attack by 20% as well thanks to her weird unique passive. If you’re leaning hard into Caren as a support, Prisma Cosmos and 2030 are good picks as well—2030 for general crit consistency, and Prisma so you can pretty much just ignore Caren’s cards and focus on your DPS.

Command Codes that boost Caren’s crit damage will be nice picks in general, as Caren’s lack of innate crit buffs (aside from Independent Action) means they’ll have a more noticeable impact than they do on a lot of other Servants. Healing CCs are also especially nice on Rulers, as the healing is effectively doubled unless you’re fighting a Berserker or some such.

Rulers are good grail targets, and if you’re investing heavily in and planning to actively use Caren, she’s an unusually strong grail pick. This is less because Caren is particularly strong in and of herself, and more because higher stats make her more likely to hit overkill thresholds, and given how tight Caren’s Black Grail looping requirements are, every little bit of extra damage helps. This is a Servant where an extra thousand attack really can make the difference between looping or not in practical situations, so I’d strongly recommend grailing her—if, again, you’re already committed to making use of her.

Caren is an odd Servant in that despite how busy her kit is, she’s relatively straightforward. She’s an AoE Quick Servant with a 50% battery and lots of utility but low innate NP refund and relatively low damage in exchange. Regardless of the intricacies and minutia of her kit, that’s what it boils down to: good utility and reasonable loopability, with a set of asterisks. It’s annoying how much her kit undercuts itself, and she would actually be stronger with a simplified skillset in some places—the AoE NP drain on her second skill hurts more than it helps, for instance, especially since the skill’s cooldown was likely penalized for it—but the fact of the matter is that she has enough generic good tools that even if her kit isn’t as cohesive as it could be she’s still likely to be generally useful provided you account for her flaws.

Overall: 7/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 8/10
Offensive Utility: 4/10
Defensive Utility: 8/10
Farming Usefulness: 8/10
Wealth: 10/10