Perhaps chief among missed opportunities for FGO players is that of using Fous to upgrade their servants. Many character’s main weakness is in low base stats, and this commonly leads to arguments over whether or not they’re overrated. These often boil down to one side having invested in stat upgrades for the character while the other wants to see results before they invest, causing their testing to look far worse.
Fous are available from numerous sources and you should always be doing your best to make sure the characters you use have their 1000/1000 from them. If you worry over whether or not you should use them, the next set will be harder to get! Grails are far less common and you should more heavily consider whether or not to spend them.
Why should I upgrade stats?
The simplest answer is because it’s the single cheapest way to get more power out of your roster. Even leveling your servants will cost you more than Fous will. More importantly, your stats are the basis for every calculation that follows. The lower the initial stats of the character, the more these splashes help, so make sure to invest when using low-rarity options.
To get a better idea of how helpful these bonuses are, consider Arash. He’s a one-star character, but among the most useful farming characters in the game. To top it off, he lacks damage skills entirely. However, his NP features an unusually high multiplier, and this means his base attack is very important to his damage. With base stats only, he does around 23k damage with his NP. Including just Fous and an attack CE, that number shoots up around 30% to 30k. This is despite that Arash has a fairly high attack stat for a low-rarity character. These results only get more impressive when factoring harder resources.
Fous
The first and simplest source of bonus stats are Fous. They come from the monthly Mana Prism shop, event rewards, the friend point gacha, and even occasional log-in rewards. Up to silver Fous can be rolled in the Friend Point Gacha. Gold Fous, a more recent addition to the game, are from events only and are significantly more scarce. Consider your gold spending carefully as it takes a little over twelve events fully cleared to get enough gold fous for one character. Silvers, on the other hand, are plentiful and should be applied to characters you
use as soon as you get them; a single event or monthly set will get a character to the cap.
Using them is as simple as fusing them into your Servant the same way you would an EXP card. Keep in mind that Friend Point Fous are locked to a single class. The type you get from the mana prism shop or events work for all classes. Depending on the rarity of the fou they’ll increase the corresponding stat by 10, 20, or 50 points. Bronze and Silver max out at +1000 to each stat.
Gold fous, on the other hand, can only be used once a character has reached the +1000 cap. They function as a limit break allowing you to reach a new cap of +2000 on each stat and are used in the same way. Each one only gives 20 points in its respective stat, so they are a significantly higher investment. However, +2000 moves the needle even on already high stat characters. This means you can heavily improve your favorites with them, no matter who those favorites are.
Grails
Grails are a lot harder to understand on the surface, and they’re less frequent too. You get them exclusively from completing story chapters. Each main story release contains at least one, while event stories only sporadically reward a grail. If you already have the grail from the original run of a rerun event, it rewards a crystallized lore instead, so the total amount stays fairly low, all things considered.
Instead of directly adding to your Servant’s stat totals, grails instead raise their level cap beyond what their rarity should allow to a universal maximum of Lv. 100. You still have to level them up from there, and they don’t necessarily receive a clean, consistent amount of stats. The total will remain similar across all characters grailed for a certain number of levels, but how that total is divided between HP and attack will roughly match their ungrailed stats. Every 10 levels gained from grailing results in a total of roughly 2000 stat points which are then divided between Attack and HP.
Using them has its own menu in the Enhancement screen called “Palingenesis”. Your target character must be at their current max level to receive a grail and will have their level cap increased by between 2-10 levels. The lower their current cap is, the more levels are added by each grail. A level 60 cap Servant gains 10 level cap from their first grail, while an SSR at level 90 only gains 2. This makes grailing low-rarity characters not only more relevant due to their lower initial stats, but more efficient as well. Keep in mind that the QP cost of grailing is very high, and be planned for it when you decide to grail someone. The best use of grails, mechanically speaking, is bringing non-SSRs to a Lv. 90 cap. Lv. 100 is largely used just to show off a player’s favorite character and pretty much never makes or breaks a unit.
Craft Essences
While more than just a source of stats, Craft Essences do provide another chunk of base stats that players often overlook. A pure Attack SSR CE can provide upwards of 2000 attack when fully leveled. This is very potent, but overall I wouldn’t recommend picking your CEs exclusively for stats. They are sourced both from the gacha and as event rewards, but they are cards of their own you equip to your servants. Their overall mechanics are out of the scope of this guide, where we will consider how they level and affect stats.
You level up Craft Essences in the same way as enhancing a Servant, but EXP cards for CEs are rare, event-only rewards. Their equivalent to ascension involves fusing in duplicate copies, and after four ‘limit breaks’ as they are called the CE’s passive effects are upgraded in addition to its level cap. Leveling them is best done by fusing in friend point CEs, but it can be very tedious. The rewards are technically pretty high relative to the difficulty if you can stomach it though, as getting the friend points you need to level your CES is essentially passive. You should absolutely get your Gacha SSR CEs to their default (Lv. 20) cap. It’s extremely cheap and helps your Servants squeeze out a bit more power.