Fate/Grand Order Lancer Tier List

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 lancers in Fate/Grand Order are Artoria (Lancer), Karna, Parvati, and Scathach.

Lancers feature a harsh split between their AoE and single-target options and several characters who have significantly lowered their quality since break gauges were introduced. Overall, they’re a solid class with many still-excellent single-target options. Their AoE offerings usually heavily lean on either NP batteries or loop farming capability to stay relevant due to fairly low damage across the class’s AoE offerings. Many also exemplify an off-support playstyle that uses a single big hit followed up with support abilities for the rest of the party.

Lancer 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.

Lancer S-Tier

No Lancer manages to make it to this level, which can best be defined as ‘so good they can heavily change the viability of several other characters.’

Lancer A-Tier

Artoria (Lancer) – A

50% NP batteries are just plain solid, and when paired with a further 20% recharge as a part of the NP it begins to get silly. Lancer Artoria’s damage on her own isn’t stellar outside of the mana burst turn, but that hardly matters when she just keeps going and going. The cost of setting her up to completely farm a node is lower than you’re getting with any other character. Just a Kaleidoscope will set her up for two waves with a friend Waver. She’s the gold standard for brute-force Lancer farming.

Karna – A

Karna’s not really any competition for Artoria in using his NP frequently, but he does take the cake for damage; at least once. However, he’s an excellent switch-hitter who delivers one bursty NP followed by consistent crits or vice versa which makes for a potent overall setup. He’s got some excellent utility to go along with it in locking out enemy NPs and overall Karna is very strong. He’s a bit less singularly excellent than you might see from some of the game’s other high-end characters, but he’s the correct sort of multi-purpose character in that he’s great at many things rather than just good at them.

Check out these other classes and their Tier List!

Lancer B-Tier

Parvati – B+

Parvati’s very solid by her own merits, and can loop with Skadi at a tie for the lowest investment among the available options if the nodes work out. It’s worth noting her attack stat is fairly low so when not going all-in on the loop plan, you should probably use her as an off-support who gets in for a big chunk during the Ashes of Kama turn and uses Blessings of the Goddess and her own NP’s party-wide charge to help her allies pick up the slack when Ashes of Kama is on cooldown. A lot of the other high-end options for Skadi looping are pretty poor without her, though, so Parvati’s still-good performance is pretty great for her archetype.

Scathach – B+

Scathach is an easy A in a world where she always hits the crit benefits on Wisdom of Dun Scaith. As each of them is an 80% chance, sometimes she ends up being a one-turn niche character and just doesn’t line up well against her competition. The damage is usually quite a bit more valuable than the star weight, though, so her ranking didn’t take too much of a hit for this as she really only needs to hit that one to be excellent. When she misses, she does at least have one turn going for her, which is better than some chance-based characters who have pretty much everything tied up in their chance buffs.

Brynhild – B

Brynhild is like a bit of an upgraded and single-target version of Liz just below, in both fashions. Her NP hits fairly hard, but she’s unlikely to do it more than once thanks to a single turn buff fueling it and a poor deck for the purpose. However, her other skills are supportive in nature, so she’s quite good at coming along, taking out a priority target, and letting someone else shine afterward. She can technically buff herself with Hero’s Bridesmaid, but it’s a bit smaller than the usual self-buff of its type would be; it was a lot more viable before Break Gauges, now I would always recommend she uses it on another Servant if possible.

Elizabeth Bathory – B

There’s not a lot to Liz, she’s just got a huge attack buff (60% for 3 turns) that she can apply for a female party member and benefits from 40% of it herself. She’s pretty much the archetypical off-support, providing piles of damage for the team while doing a reasonable amount herself. She’s a little simple and light on utility, but sometimes simple doesn’t have to be bad.

Cu Chulainn – B

He’s the original anchor, and still excellent at it. Some other options for your final slot in challenge quests bring more damage, but it’s uncommon for any to even get close to his survivability. His face card damage is his weakest feature, with Gae Bolg still spiking reasonably hard despite his purely defensive kit. It’s questionable whether he, Nero, King Hassan or Bond 10 Herc are the best anchor, but he’s definitely in contention and he’s the cheapest to boot.

Vlad III (Extra) – B

Military Tactics is a letdown, but everything else about Vlad is generically great. At least he wasn’t likely to use his NP all that often anyway, takes a bit of sting out of the glaring bad skill in the middle of an otherwise good servant. One could rattle off several different Skills that could go in that slot and make Vlad an A, but we have to settle for a world where he’s great rather than spectacular. If anyone even remembers that he exists, that is.

Minamoto no Raikou (Lancer) – B

Raikou is essentially a slightly worse Lancer Alter but with one more of her buffs being three turn. In exchange, it has longer cooldown, but being active on a greater number of turns makes up for lesser magnitude and her star production being tied to her NP rather than on a skill. Overall, she’s always been quite solid, and while she may have slightly weaker buffs than the character her kit is cribbed from, longer is better than stronger in GO.

Artoria (Lancer Alter) – B-

A meaty AoE NP and huge crits used to make Lancer Alter a strong contender for the best in the class, but with far more 50% chargers available in the Lancer category she’s been pushed out from contending much as an AoE character and Break Gauges seriously harmed her standing as a boss-killer.

She still does reasonably if you break apart her skills to be used one at a time as long as you’re confident of your damage control it’s possible with solid skill levels and comps to break a gauge with each, making her capable of doing a Musashi-style two turn kill on bosses who lack a third gauge. She’s worse at it, though, reflected by a slightly lower placement. She’s still quite the toolbox to handle many different situations, and if you’re newer that can be quite meaningful before the break gauges start to kick in.

Tamamo (Lancer) – B-

Essentially a more selfish Brynhild. She’s actually quite a bit better at spiking bosses on average, with three turn skills fueling her to work through multiple gauges and the huge spike of Goddess Metamorphosis handling the biggest damage gate. Unfortunately, you do have to play around Goddess Metamorphosis’ downside to get the optimal performance out of her and that leaves limited team compositions to work with or else playing around it. Strong, but not impossible to outdo if you can’t meet her particular team-building requirements.

Valkyrie – B-

Excellent with Skadi, but their anemic attack leaves Ortlinde, Thrud, and Hildr feeling a bit soft when you can’t provide them with premiere supports. They’re solid for farming regardless, but may disappoint at times by not killing relatively weak waves if they aren’t under a lot of external buffs. Still quite hard to argue with all that NP regen flowing from multi-hit AoE NP and skill-based regen. They also make an excellent grail or gold fou target as they have an excellent kit hampered only by poor base stats; you can easily build a better character than you think out of Valkyrie once you factor in external stats.

Lancer C-Tier

Ereshkigal – C+

Ereshkigal features a 50% NP battery tied directly to a mana burst so how can you go wrong? Well, mostly by leaving her with little damage even after it. She’s, in most senses, a worse Lancer Artoria, but does have extreme chops specifically when you can brute force her NP repeatedly. That begins to stack up a huge attack buff and can make her do pretty exceptional damage. That’s just hard to manufacture compared to the possible 90% charge in Artoria’s kit, and if you can’t hit the absolute top end she’s mediocre.

She almost certainly has the widest gap between best and worst-case scenario on Servants who don’t feature success chance on their core buffs, and she even has random success chance on some of her utility buffs to boot.

Nezha – C+

Nezha’s not the sort of character who inspires much to say. You could manage to describe what she does in her own stilted manner of speech if you tried. Ultimately she just crits solidly and has some defensives, her NP looks great on the surface, but it works out to be among the lowest damage among Lancers, only managing to beat out Hektor if you don’t count him as NP5 for being a Friend Point Character. She’s alright, overall, but you could do much better.

Kiyohime – C

I rate debuff based damage about the same as one turn damage since it inherently goes away when the target dies, and Kiyohime features a debuff based damage skill that isn’t largely than buff based ones and has a downside for some reason, a first skill that is in its entirety often stapled onto other skills as a bit of added utility, and then one great one. Characters with one good skill are bad, so a servant with one great skill still manages to be okay. At least if you kill the target the downside on her third skill doesn’t matter, but then its upside is gone, too.

Medusa (Lancer) – C

She really needs to loop her NP to look good, and she’s not set up amazingly to do that by default. When she can’t, she’s a one-turn only character who isn’t even especially great that turn. It’s not especially hard to do so, though, and once you do then she can pick out multiple targets over a series of turns or begin to stack up the pain on a boss. That’s a good trick, and it gets better and easier with each subsequent pass as the quick resist downs begin to stack up.

Li Shuwen (Lancer) – C

The prize for character most nerfed by break gauges goes to Li Shuwen. He can do the Musashi and manage two okay turns by splitting up his Arts Performance and Crit buffs separately, but this former powerhouse is hard-pressed to handle his one-time specialty of deleting bosses. He was built to explode an Arts brave chain but like many characters designed before Break Gauges he lines up poorly now. Unfortunate for a servant that was among the best pulls in the class at the time.

Jeanne d’Arc (Alter) (Santa Lily) – C

Other than winning the award for the most things appended to her name, Janta is just okay. She has a token heal, a little NP battery, and a beefy mana burst. She’s at least AoE and well-suited to fire-and-forget farming where you use starting NP CEs and Plugsuit to farm a node with three separate AoE damage dealers and a single support. It’s not amazing, but making some budget farming comps a bit easier isn’t awful.

Enkidu – C-

A one-turn wonder whose card-type buff is chance based to hit four out of six of their cards. Presence detection is neat, and when things go right Enkidu does just blow down the doors for that one turn. Ultimately one turn is one turn, though, and Enkidu is pretty bad when things go wrong and gets destroyed by anything that locks out NPs. Not a good place to be.

Lancer D-Tier

Fionn Mac Cumhaill – D+

We’re gonna hedge here and call Fionn slightly higher than he really is right at the moment, because right at the moment he has Stheno to thank for keeping him from being the literal worst SR in the game. He has an upcoming buff that will take him from that place to among the better farming options for the class, though. At this stage, do not burn Fionn, meme status or not. He will be legitimately good very soon, even if he’s abysmal right now.