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Players often wonder which characters are stronger in gacha games. Particularly when it comes to high rarity rolls that can be extremely hard to chase. Grand Order has a bit of an interesting relationship with this as we don’t have nearly the power creep problem other games tend to have. It does exist. It’s just not in the same magnitude. So where other games make tier listing a necessity so you don’t invest in a character that just can’t do content, here it helps you understand who’s weaker, though most characters are still viable. It’s a question of how hard you want to work or how efficient you want your clears to be, not whether you can at all. The best Extras in Fate/Grand Order are Katsushika Hokusai, Sesshoin Kiara, and BB. The Extra Classes are fairly varied on a base level, but they tend towards fairly good characters on the whole. It’s important to realise with some of them that the class base stats are pretty out of balance with the baseline and this can lead to kits that look pretty overstuffed (Alter-ego) or light (Foreigner) because the base stats and affinities can be a bit unusual on the newer ones. There are also very few low-rarity characters in the Extra classes, but combined as they usually are in game, they have about the same amount of gold that all the other classes do. Extra Class Tier List Methodology A lot of tier lists cause arguments because their authors don’t make clear what does and doesn’t influence a placement decision. Here, we’ll cover the broad decision making principles for the list. This helps you to understand what was and wasn’t under consideration when placing characters and avoids troubled understanding when different people want lists that focus on power in a vacuum, others consider teams and whether there is a use for the character, etc. It’s not really feasible to make a list that ranks the way everyone would like, and many lists try to strike a balance between multiple concerns without explaining which things they weighted more heavily. Here is a list of key points for this list. Assumption of Good Play: Many lists dock characters points for being harder to use. Here, we’re going to assume you know what you’re doing when using a character. A player can learn to count cards or align/desynch their skills effectively, a character’s placement should be based on their usefulness not how well they do when used suboptimally.No Points for Splashability: It’s a common question whether a character should be considered better because they fit into a greater number of teams. This doesn’t really help understand a character’s quality on its own, and while self-sufficiency is valuable, the ability to fit into numerous mediocre teams isn’t really all that relevant. Characters will still be ranked accordingly if they virtually require a particular expensive setup but as almost every character in the game can be used in a viable composition with a bronze character and a friend support selection, this usually isn’t the case.Usefulness over Raw Strength: Some characters are very good at things you just won’t really ever need. Tanks are a good example in GO. Several characters try, and theoretically succeed, at being strong tanks but the game doesn’t really support tanking as an archetype because most threatening encounters feature AoE damage. Because of this, it makes more sense to grade characters on how useful they are rather than how strong they are in a vacuum.Niche Evaluation: Some tier lists like to severely over or under evaluate niche characters by either only considering them with the niche on with the assumption you’ll never use them otherwise or merely evaluating the niche ability as if it were not on a niche, and then deducting a bit to make up for it. Here, we’ll spend time evaluating how useful a niche is rather than applying a blanket solution. Not every specialist is created equal.Farming vs. Challenge Quests: It’s impossible to avoid that far more time is spent farming in GO, but CQs are still important. Generally, most CQs favor Crit/Single-target characters, while farming is an NP game, but the opposite has been true in the past. Many tier lists cap characters at a certain tier if they cannot do both effectively and this inflates the position of mediocre characters who do two things okay over those who do one thing well. A character will only receive better placement here if they’re exceptional in both categories.Granularity: GO just isn’t the sort of game where large portions of the characters are unusable. Many GO tier lists try to tier like other games creating gridlock at the top because by the standards of other games where any character who can participate in hard content is a high B or low A, almost every character in GO qualifies. Here, a C is still a viable character, just one who doesn’t bring much to the table you can’t get better elsewhere.NP5 for Welfares and Friend Point Characters: While it’s sensible to rate gacha characters as if their NP level is low, free characters are rapidly going to stack up for consistent players and most will have access to them at NP5. Three-star characters who are not part of the friend point gacha will be considered without NP5 like any other gacha character. Extra Class S-Tier No Extra Class servants manage to make it to this level, which can best be defined as ‘so good they can heavily change the viability of several other characters.’ Extra Class A-Tier Katsushika Hokusai - A+ Hokusai never disappoints, she farms well with a 30% battery and a niche that hits one of the most common traits in the game, she can hit single target quality NP damage within a bravechain, she can crit like a monster, her recharge is nuts. There’s not a lot here to dislike other than the complexity. Knowing when to use your arts cards before the NP is a bit strange and the answer would pretty much be never on anyone else. It’s a little hard to get used to the ways Hokusai but the rewards are potent. She can hit a priority target with a 60% defense down assuming only a single deck cycle and NP. In most circumstances it’s very possible to get it to 80%, and with luck 120%. Of course, it’s also important to remember that each of your stacks lasts 3 turns, but that means you only get one turn of that insane 120% stack. We still haven’t even talked about her middle skill which stops her from having her buffs removed or being debuffed and provides a 3 turn Arts Buff. Hokusai is insane, there are no two ways about it, just realize that if managed poorly she’s not going to pile on the damage and make sure when using her to farm rather than kill bosses you’re aiming at Man Attribute enemies. Sesshoin Kiara - A An arts character with a 50% NP battery should naturally turn heads, and Kiara does exactly what you might expect after hearing that. She farms hard in a way that can’t really be replicated without expensive loop comps. It’s fairly trivial to make Kiara NP twice in one node, and as with all 50% charge characters, she has her own particular sort of loop available if you have the pieces available for it. In many cases, the sheer amount of NP spam she can do makes up for her NP/AoE focused kit and opens the door to fighting bosses with her. She’s certainly tanky enough to try with all of her healing floating around. She even has the insane Goddess Metamorphosis skill but without that pesky self-stun other characters feature. The fact that Kiara hasn’t completely broken the game over her knee is testament to just how lackluster Alter-Ego’s default. BB - A- BB does great crit damage with a utility filled kit and a nod to NP spam teams with CCC’s AoE Recharge attached. She’s not likely to come out super frequently thanks to the fact that she’s primarily a utility character, but when Avengers are enemies she really shines. Combine with how much she takes certain characters over the top (Frankenstein comes to mind) and how hard she wrecks certain enemies with timely stuns and denial of their invulnerabilty and she’s exceptional a lot of the time. It isn’t hard for her to tick multiple of her boxes at once. Check out these other classes and their Tier List! Archer Tier ListLancer Tier ListSaber Tier ListBerserker Tier ListAssassin Tier ListCaster Tier ListRider Tier List Extra Class B-Tier Jeanne d’Arc - B+ Jeanne is hands-down the best stall character in the game with easily recycled invulnerability, healing, defense, a stun, you name it. She’ll clear almost any content you can think to throw her at if you can get the ball rolling on her NP shenanigans. However, while she can, it’s hard to recommend that she should, as oftentimes these sorts of clears can take hundreds of turns and can be lost to going on autopilot for even a few of them. It’s uncommon for someone to not have a significantly more efficient boss clear available to them than stalling with Jeanne. Jeanne is just safe. Meltlilith - B+ Melt is the epitome of selfish characters, but her NP damage is great and her ability to refire it is huge thanks to piles of crits and huge hit counts. Repeatedly NPing with Melt results in insane star production and damage because the buff she tacks at the end of her NP stacks. She’s another one of those examples of a character whose kit would probably be completely and totally broken if it wasn’t on an Alter-Ego, but on one it results in a character who is good despite their class. Jeanne d’Arc (Alter) - B Jalter is a jarring example of how much hype can warp the perception of a character. She’s very, very rarely the best character for a given boss and Self-Modification, the skill that was previously her killer app, isn’t as meaningful as it used to be. Lots of characters have 50% crit buffs, and plenty more can outpace 240 star weight internally. Jeanne Alter basically defined the core of what a good character would look like with the original Charisma+/Mana Burst/Flex kit, but that design has been copied so many times by now and been overshadowed by more unique designs with a higher ceiling that it’s just not all that impressive anymore. She does still have an insanely high base attack stat and can NP extremely hard (usually just once) but given she scarcely ever gets class advantage, even mediocre characters can outpace that, and in the neutral race she’s now competing with Hokusai’s 3 turn 40-120+%/34% with her 20%/60%. She’s great, but temper what you’ve heard, she’s not even close to the best character in the game. Edmond Dantes - B The count of Monte Cristo is pretty mediocre if you don’t have access to Skadi Looping, though he’s got pretty lackluster damage outside of a single turn and this can make him touchy when overkill hits are paramount to his success. Sometimes he works great, other times he has trouble accomplishing much at all. He’s a bit like fellow quick AoE superstar Lancelot in that he should probably be lower if you don’t have Skadi and much higher if you do, but he’s not quite as bad as Lancelot is if you lack a Skadi of your own. Sherlock Holmes - B Holmes is frequently misunderstood and misplayed, and this causes people to place him a lot lower than he should be. He’s a support that just looks on the surface like a damage dealer, and if you try to use him as a DPS, you’ll likely find that he’s clunky and just okay. If, instead, you treat his kit as a way to get a turn of crazy output from your support and let him fade into the background afterwards these problems clear up. It seems like an issue that he needs to use his single-turn buffs as a way to set up his NP at first, but embrace that and you get a support who can hand out 30% Defense down to enemies and 50% Crit up to allies while spiking very hard the turn he sets this up. Use him as a main DPS and he’s got meh starweight and 50% crit on everything except one turn, with an added 30% defense if you haven’t cleared that wave. It’s just not inspiring; play into the fact that his long lasting buffs are all AoE. If you choose to use him as a boss-spike DPS I’d put him at C. He can do a lot of damage on one turn but then just folds to break gauges. Saint Martha (Summer) - B Martha is defensively canted and works out a bit like the survivable Berserkers in reverse in that she uses a triple buster deck and a recurring NP-based single turn buff to squeeze out damage while she is otherwise focused on not dying, and she really does not die. A 3000 HP heal would be good on a normal class, but on a Ruler who is almost always taking half damage, it’s like healing for 6000 on a 5 turn cooldown. Martha is at her best in endurance quests and mixed nodes where her solid neutral damage and stubborn refusal to let any damage stick shines. If a CQ features just one class of enemies or can be killed really quickly, she’s probably not the best choice. Antonio Salieri - B He can be quite hard to get your hands on outside of Extra Class Banners, but Salieri is extremely real. He lives somewhere between a full three turn character and single turn burst thanks to his hit based buffs but you can manage those well to make him put out very respectable damage across multiple turns (And most commonly through using his NP very frequently). He can vary pretty heavily with the stats your CEs are giving him because low rarity leads to low base stats but Salieri grails extremely well, so you can get around this if you’re willing to spare the resources. Very solid, and it takes only a single ten roll on average to NP5 him on Extra Class banners. Mecha Eli-Chan/Mecha Eli-Chan MKII - B- These two are mechanically identical, in case you were worried, they just have different appearances. I’m usually pretty low on characters whose primary schtick is a single turn burst, but Mecha Eli has at least a little upside in that it’s not impossible to get multiple NPs out of her and each leaves a lingering defense down that can stack to make for some reasonable off-burst damage with the crits that Innocent Kaiju sets up. This is a bit based on having things go right and her quick and arts cards lining up for you, but it can happen and she’s one of the better one-turn wonders even if it doesn’t. Passionlip - B- Passion is probably among the best tanks in the game (though she only has one turn of taunt which is a huge limiter) but tanks are largely pointless and more so without a multi-turn taunt. What makes Passion still fairly good despite this is one of those traditionally overstuffed Alter-ego kits. She can do pretty respectable damage for an Alter-Ego if set up for it, and that makes her quite a bit nicer than the average tank. She also ties a non-tank benefit to taking damage which means that she’s getting something else as an upside when her tanking is an unnecessary luxury. Extra Class C-Tier Gorgon - C+ Gorgon has an upcoming buff that will help her quite a lot, but until then she’s a damage and crit focused character...with 30 star weight. You pretty much have to spend her CE slot on something to solve her star weight or she has one turn of doing any sort of reasonable damage and even that isn’t spectacularly high. With her star weight squared away she ends up doing okay, but a one turn attack up isn’t exactly exciting, so for the most part you just have 50% crit up. That’s quite good, but plenty of characters have it and don’t need to find external star weight. Ultimately the better answer is probably to just produce 40-50 stars every turn but that’s pretty reliant on multiple Innocent Monsters with 2030 backing her up or Merlin. Exactly Hans/Merlin with double 2030 can make her go off, but that setup would also work with every other buster character, and largely better. Her NP comes with AoE recharge and that much plus her best-case scenario is enough to make her better than the bottom of the viable barrel, but not by much. Majin Okita Souji (Alter) - C A pretty solid example of what Alter-Ego is like when their kit isn’t way over the top. She’s a switch hitting NP specialist with some star weight benefits but her best case scenario with class advantage falls in the realm of neutral damage for other AoE specialists. She can find her uses, particularly if you’re light on switch hitters or AoE in general but it’s hard to find a node where she wouldn’t be outpaced by just using someone else on neutral and definitely by just using a Berserker who can switch hit. If we have a reasonable amount of nodes with multiple Foreigners in a wave in the future she might be worth more looking into, but Kiara is a huge roadblock to that idea, as she’s still the far better dedicated AoE Alter-Ego. Abigail Williams - C If I had to describe Abby in one word, disappointing would be it. There’s a lot of potential here, and she was reasonably nice when she first came out since Foreigner is just a good class and she was the only one, so she had uniqueness on her side in a strong class. Then Hokusai came out and was a good character without factoring the strength of Foreigner into it and no longer could Abby lean on just having good affinities and Archer star weight. The long and short is that Prayer of Creed is good, and kinda-sorta the highest AoE NP charge in the game (though the NP damage falls off before you get all 30%, so it’s a bit disingenuous to count it higher than the standard 20%), Mass Hysteria is terrible, and Witch Trial is mediocre leaning on bad thanks to its long cooldown. Qliphoth Rhizome is good and hits pretty hard but a good NP and one skill don’t make a good character. Abby’s not bad enough to live among the worst SSRs, but she only barely escapes. Extra Class D-Tier Angra Mainyu - D Angra’s not really worth talking about at all, but he has a huge amount of mystique as the super rare friend point roll. He’s literally just a trophy, or a way to show off by completing nodes with an abjectly terrible character. He has pitiful base stats, an NP that has been useful a number of times you can count on one hand in the entire history of the game and one skill that’s all that impressive and it kills him until bond 10. Even grailed to 100 his attack is still scarcely higher than Salieri’s ungrailed attack and this makes the seemingly huge 200% Quick effectiveness he can get for a single turn a lot less exciting. You can spend a lot to make him have a few turns of medium effectiveness, or you could just use anyone else with no investment whatsoever and get better performance.

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