MMM - Waylaid Wench Wings Workaround to being Washed, Wields Whale With Worrisome Whimsey (Valentines 2024)

Table of Contents

The Modern Magus Magazine
Introduction
Servant Data
Overview
NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion
Outro
Links

The Modern Magus Magazine

There’s a pink-like aroma in the air, readers. That aroma, one intoxicating and enrapturing all the same, the true element of Love which floats in the air only at this time of year! Indeed, I speak of the very scent of…chocolate! I have no clue why we as a human race decided to gorge on our inner decadence for this day alone, consuming chocolate like ravenous beasts, but surely it is an activity we shall all partake responsibly in the confines of our own homes, alone, preferably in the company of our big tiddy anime figurines.

No, no convincing shall tell me otherwise. Why else would supermarkets be selling all this chocolate at a discount rate? Nothing shall distract me…from the couples outside the window…

Introduction

I have to say, Greek Mythology is often a lesson in “fuck around and find out”, but even more often it’s a lesson in “someone else fucks around and YOU find out for no goddamn reason”. Case in point is Andromeda, whose mother’s hubris leads to Posiedon getting mega pissed and in the end Andromeda is the one who has to take the fall, getting chained to a rock as a sacrifice instead of, y’know, the one talking smack to begin with.

What I’m saying is if I lived in the ancient ancient Greek mythological era (this is pre-Heracles, after all), I’d be a Cassiopeia hater. At least in the end Andromeda somehow managed to snag the one Greek hero that doesn’t preface tragic in front of it, getting saved and living happily.

And now she’s swinging the whale-dragon thing that she was saved from as a ball-and-chain weapon. Nasuverse, man.

Servant Data

Rider

QQAAB (Archer)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

Attribute	Earth
Alignment	Lawful Good

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

Max HP 15,120

HP Rank

Max ATK 10,085

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,558	Base HP	2,217
Max Atk	10,085	Max HP	15,120
Grail Atk	11,040	Grail HP	16,565

Traits

Riding A+

Increase your Quick Card effectiveness by 11%.

Magic Resistance C

Increase your Debuff Resist by 15%.

Heroic Wish C

When Guts triggers for self, increase own ATK by 10% (3 turns).

Swimming Skills B

Increase NP Gauge by 5% each turn for yourself while on a [near water] battlefield.

Overview

Riders, even at 5*, don’t have exactly an amazing reputation for base stats, and this unfortunately does manifest in Andromeda’s position on the base attack chart - right at the bottom. Sitting under even Medb for base attack, Andromeda hits like a noodle, and her one saving grace is that she isn’t a Caster. Poor Scheherazade. At the very least, Andromeda is compensated with an obscenely large HP stat, by Rider standards, having the highest in the class by a good distance. And in general, her base stat total isn’t too bad, having slightly less attack than Medb in exchange for far more HP, but it’s just a shame it’s put into HP, rather than offense.

Andromeda does, however, have a pretty good passive lineup. Her A+ Riding is typical for the class, providing a moderate 11% Quick boost to her primary card type, putting it to good use, while her Magic Resistance is also solid, providing a passive defense against debuffs.

Of note are her two unique passives, Heroic Wish and Swimming Skills, the former providing her with a 10% Attack buff for 3 turns whenever she revives from a Guts buff, and the latter giving a very potent 5% NP gauge charge each turn if she’s near water for a battle. While both are fundamentally situational, you’ll find that she’s more than capable of setting up her own Guts buffs to be used, and a pretty good number of significant locations in the game, whether farming or main quest content, are near water, so she has plenty of chances to put both to good use.

NP Generation

Card Hits	4	3	4	5	6
Per Hit	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%

	NP per Hit (%)	0.62%
NP when Attacked (%)	3%

	Star Absorption	204
Star Generation per Hit	9.0%

Servant Skills

Critical Star Gain

Daughter of Cassiopeia A

Gain Critical Stars.
Apply to self: Gain Critical Stars each turn (3 turns).
Apply Damage Cut to self (3 turns).
Increase own NP Gauge.

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Stars +	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	15
Stars per turn +	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	15
Damage Cut +	500	550	600	650	700	750	800	850	900	1000
NP +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

First on Andromeda’s skill lineup is Daughter of Cassiopeia. Given what I said earlier, I’m not exactly thrilled to see her just be labelled as “the daughter of that idiot”, but hey, skills sometimes don’t manifest in ways you like. Just ask Hans.

This skill is something of a grab-bag, providing a 15-star bomb on use as well as a 15-star per turn buff on Andromeda for 3 turns, a 1000 damage cut for 3 turns, and a 30% gauge charger.

As always, having a gauge charge is fantastic, but the other buffs in the skill are an interesting combo, providing a very dependable supply of critical stars for its duration, on top of a potent damage cut buff that will significantly drop the damage Andromeda takes from regular attacks, especially if she’s pairing it with defensive class advantage or other defensive buffs.

None of these are direct benefits to her damage output, but a gauge charger can be seen as one by proxy. 30% isn’t an ideal amount of gauge, but it’s better than nothing, and in most cases the deficit between a 30% gauge charger skill and 50% can be made up for by the Mana Loading append skill. So ultimately it’s a solid gauge charge skill with a smitten of defensive and critical damage utility loaded in. The base cooldown of 8 turns is pretty normal given the overall power of its effects, too.

Taunt

Sacrificial Maiden A

Apply Target Focus to self (3 turns).
Apply Guts to self (1 time, 3 turns).
Apply buff to self: Increase own NP Gauge and increase own Critical Strength by 10% (3 turns) when taking damage.

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Revives with HP	2000	2100	2200	2300	2400	2500	2600	2700	2800	3000
NP (taking damage) +	5%	5.5%	6%	6.5%	7%	7.5%	8%	8.5%	9%	10%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Next on the skill lineup, and the reason that Andromeda has this weird defensive lean to her kit, is Sacrificial Maiden. This is pretty simple to grasp - the skill provides a 3-turn Taunt, a 1-time, 3-turn Guts buff, and a 3-turn buff that provides her with 10% NP gauge and 10% Critical Damage Up for 3 turns whenever she’s attacked. It’s a very direct defensive taunt skill that also reaps some incredible benefits over time.

The numbers speak for themselves - most enemy formations will attack 3 times each turn, albeit minus 1 or 2 attacks if they start skill spamming. Even being harsh, and averaging it out to 1.5 attacks each turn, this adds up to 45% NP gauge and 45% Critical Damage buffs over 3 turns, on top of the benefits of having a bulky Rider with a 1000 damage cut buff luring in all the attacks for that period. Accomplishing two things at once, this skill compensates heavily for Andromeda’s sub-par NP gauge charger as well as allowing her to capitalise off of her star generation, and that’s on top of the obvious benefits of protecting her team from stray attacks.

Heck, the NP gauge charging effects are even better than on paper, since Andromeda will also reap the defensive NP gauge charging she gets from being attacked. In practice, a turn of 3 attacks against her can produce as much as 75% gauge charge instead of the expected 30%, depending on the hitcounts of the attackers.

So yes, this skill is very good, if unconventional. It may sadly not have much application for farming situations, but in any case outside of that it makes for a formidable defensive and offensive engine in unison, at a relatively short 8-turn base cooldown (for a Guts skill) to boot.

Quick/Arts Up

Oracle Chain - Nereides EX

Increase own Quick Card effectiveness (3 turns).
Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (3 turns).
Increase own NP Strength (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Quick +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
Arts +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
NP Damage +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Last on Andromeda’s skill list is a much, much needed offensive skill in Oracle Chain - Nereides. Embodying the fact that she managed to use Nasuverse bullshit magic to turn the rock and chains that bound her in legend into a friggin ball-and-chain weapon, this skill provides the offensive buffs she needs to avoid being immediately dumped in the trash as an offensive Servant.

This skill provides a threefold combo of 30% Quick, Arts, and NP Damage Up for 3 turns, improving her primary card types in all aspects as well as providing a very solid offensive steroid for her NP. This buff alone elevates Andromeda’s NP gain to a much more reasonable level compared to her regular mediocrity, but also gives her a horse in the offence race outside of her weird tanking becomes damage gimmick which, while cool, isn’t applicable to conventional farming, while this skill very much is.

The plainness of this skill is a boon, in a way, as it provides straightforward buffs to the region Andromeda desperately needed shored up. Paired with its 8-turn base cooldown coinciding with her other skills, it rounds out her kit very nicely.

Noble Phantasm

Aethiopia Cetus C+

Deal damage to all enemies.
Inflict Skill Seal on all enemies (1 turn).
Increase own DEF by 50% (1 turn).

<Overcharge>

Decrease DEF for all enemies (3 turns) [Activates first].

Show Info/Video

Aethiopia Cetus

The Waters Where the Slumbering Dragon-Whale Lies

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
	C+	Anti-Army	6

Effect	Deal damage to all enemies. Inflict Skill Seal on all enemies (1 turn). Increase own DEF by 50% (1 turn).

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Damage +	600%	800%	900%	950%	1000%
Skill Seal
Def +	50%	50%	50%	50%	50%

Overcharge Effect	Decrease DEF for all enemies (3 turns) [Activates first].

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Def -	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%

Rounding it all off is Andromeda’s Noble Phantasm, Aethiopia Cetus. A Noble Phantasm name that can be translated very hilariously to the actual name of the country of Ethiopia, due to them sort of being the same place, but technically not.
In terms of gameplay, this is a Quick AOE NP which means we’ll be getting into all the fun farming calculations in short order, but let’s run over the effects first. Before dealing damage, this NP slaps every enemy with a 20% Defence down debuff for 3 turns, scaling with overcharge, providing a vital on-use damage steroid and also providing ramping damage in high-difficulty quest scenarios.

Following that, Andromeda dishes out her damage, with no special modifiers to it, then applies 1-turn Skill Seal to every enemy and gains a 50% Defence buff for the same duration.

While those latter two effects may seem pretty haphazard at first glance, they’re in fact a very nice ribbon to finish off her abnormal tanking-becomes-damage gimmick. Skill Seal has few practical applications, but a notable one is ensuring enemies spend all their turns attacking, meaning Andromeda will always get the maximum buffs from taking attacks instead of the enemy sitting around spamming skills on themselves. While more obviously, having a colossal 50% Defence buff on top of her existing defensive buffs makes her more or less immune to regular attacks for a turn, and can even shrug off NP’s if she has other defensive buffs to pair with her own.

And with that very cool and unique speciality she packs in mind, let’s throw it out the window as we look at her farming applications, which do not care about such slow gameplay styles and simply aim for sheer speed.

With just her own buffs in effect, Andromeda’s NP nets a fairly decent 15.7% refund from a typical NP on three targets. In a more practical scenario with a 50% gauge CE and double Summer Skadi, that refund jumps up to 34.5%. While that’s certainly respectable, it’s a similar level of gauge refund to Ushi Gozen, where she’s barely not getting enough to make 50% gauge setups convenient in terms of setup. That problem is resolved if she fights Casters for their positive defensive NP gain modifier to her refund, or gets sufficient overkill but neither is something I’d like to count on for these calculations.

So for her “typical” setup I’ll be turning to ‘ol reliable, otherwise known as Summer Da Vinci, to shore up her missing refund / gauge charge issues while supplementing her damage output.

In this 50% gauge CE setup, Andromeda dishes out 95k damage on waves 1 and 2, with a bump to 113k damage neutral on wave 3. More than enough to farm class advantage comfortably, though a little short for most nodes when hitting neutral damage.

You would think given how much I’ve had to supplement her refund that Andromeda is incapable of Black Grail farming no? Well, funnily enough, she just barely has enough refund to perform a consistent farming loop with Reines on battlesuit swap with a Kaleidoscope, so I’ll run over the damage numbers for that - dealing a huge 177k neutral wave 1 (due to the Reines NP def debuff and Overcharge), then 147k on wave 2, ending with 170k on wave 3. Definitely enough to be a universal farmer, but the investment for double Summer Skadi and a Kaleidoscope Reines in terms of both time and setup is pretty rough. Did I mention Andromeda needs lvl10 Mana Loading, too?

So yeah, in most cases Andromeda will be sticking to Casters and Berserkers, which is frankly fine. It sucks that she’s in the class with the most accessible budget farming options in the game, but her main strengths are difficult content-focused, and thankfully looping capability still translates well to that - she won’t be struggling for extra gauge charge when she’s getting a stupefying amount of gauge just from being hit, that’s for sure.

Conclusion

So how is Andromeda overall? On the one hand, she’s having a whale of a time flailing about like Summer’s come early:

Like most Quick AOE Servants nowadays, Andromeda makes for a competent farmer, if only with class advantage. While that may not be a particularly notable accolade for a Rider especially, she at the very least has a pretty high damage output due to her trio of offensive steroids applied on each NP use, and the inherently high damage output of Quick farmers due to the way their NP damage modifier maths pans out and Summer Skadi’s offensive might. She’s also a solid option even if using slightly less optimal setups with Kaleidoscope for a CE, though obviously her damage output will take a hit.

Andromeda’s true place to shine is in high-difficulty content, however. With her unique niche of drawing in enemy attacks with her taunt skill and gaining offensive benefits, she’s capable of protecting her support lineup from attacks while simultaneously wielding a much greater offensive profile than she has when farming. Even a boss enemy with a 3-hit attack will usually end up filling her NP gauge to full after her NP due to how the defensive NP gain pans out, and in turn she gets even more critical damage buffs to leverage with her NP’s high star generation to really crush. Combined with the obvious benefits of reducing incoming damage to the team and being able to blank single-target NP’s, Andromeda is really useful in the right kind of fights.

However, Andromeda is also chained to her past, doomed to be consumed by crimes she didn’t commit:

While Andromeda is capable as a farmer, the amount of investment necessary to get her to universal farmer levels of damage on top of her vastly more convenient competition in the form of Nemo Santa and Habetrot makes it really hard to justify using her over competitors. It feels bad to drag down a Servant just for sitting in the Rider class due to this, but it’s still the truth - there’s little tangible benefit to farming with Andromeda when the welfares are usually an option.

Andromeda’s unique game plan for difficult content is certainly cool, but to be valuable over other Servants, it requires a fairly specific opposition which doesn’t happen all too often - multiple high-HP boss enemies in classes / gimmicks that won’t obliterate Andromeda in an instant if they focus fire on her. She still performs fairly well versus a singular boss or different scenarios, but compared to single-target damage options she may begin to lag behind, in both damage and capability for NP spam (which is the same thing, I suppose). When she can leverage her speciality she’s amazing, but in other scenarios it’s possible for her to get overwhelmed by a stray Berserker crit or have all her buffs stripped by buff removal on-attack or some similar gimmick.

I have to admit, it’s slowly getting really infuriating having to evaluate Rider AOE Servants who, on paper, can perform capably as farmers but get slapped with the caveat of being in direct competition with accessible welfare options.

Thankfully, unlike Takeda Shingen or older additions, Andromeda does have more to her than just “punch hard and be capable of farming”, which helps differentiate herself from Santa Nemo or Habetrot. Her taunt-tanking gimmick is unconventional, but thematic and pretty effective when it can be put to use, converting into a weird hybrid of defensive support and critical damage dealer, utilising the Rider class’s naturally high star weight and her potent star generation efficiently, while also having a relatively low-cooldown Guts buff to maintain a safety net in case she fucks around a little bit too much and, as a result, finds out.

A Master using Andromeda won’t be able to actually utilise her in that cool speciality that often, sadly, due to how much farming disproportionately takes up the play time in FGO, but like many other Servants who pack unique play-styles and kits to mess around with, she’s supremely fun to play with when you get the chance. And it’s not like she suffers much for it, either. Even taking the taunt-tank buffs away from her, she still does good damage and refund in any situation you can leverage AOE Rider class advantage. She’s just very solid overall, if nothing overwhelmingly good in the grand scheme of things. Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Outro

I find it funny how it seems Greek Servants specifically always get 1-off implementation SSR’s in the strangest places. Whether it’s Galatea, or Odysseus, or Europa…well, I guess some of those are technically LB5 inclusions, but they weren’t part of the big chapter-release gachas so far as my memory goes.

Andromeda makes for another name to the pile, and embodies that good ‘ol fashioned Nasuverse ad-libbing of legends to make someone who could actually fight instead of being a damsel in distress. Makes me wonder if Perseus would be shocked to see her buddy-buddy with Cetus and kicking ass in Heroic Spirit form.

As always, I’ll finish by turning my eyes to the future, 1 month in the future, exactly, as we’ll have whatever White Day brings to look forward to. More chocolate-based celebrations with no relation at all to my romantic status? Wonderful, see you all then!