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 Sabers in Fate/Grand Order are Nero Bride, Artoria (Altria) Pendragon, and Mordred

Sabers suffer a bit from being fairly similar in large part. They come in a few basic varieties and tend to hew very safely to those designs. This means that you can expect Sabers to be good, but usually not amazing. You’re likely to use them when they have class advantage, and not super frequently otherwise. There are some examples that escape this pattern, but it’s not common. They also have very, very few low rarity characters, rivaled only by the Extra Classes for how little non-gold representation they have.

Saber 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.

Saber S-Tier

No Saber 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.’

Saber A-Tier

Nero Bride – A+

Nero Bride is multipurpose, being both an excellent option for boss DPS and hands down the best non-caster support in the game. She can’t do both simultaneously due to the targeted nature of her buffs, but that hardly matters. She can compete with Musashi and Okita very well thanks to the short duration of their skills and her strong ability to repeatedly NP, though she looks worse when break gauges aren’t part of the equation because she can’t crit as hard which drops the needle on her single-turn burst quite a lot.

However, she’s one of the core enablers for arts-based NP looping in addition to all of that and all said she’s exceptional in multiple categories where a lot of Sabers struggle to break out of being the same-old same-old.

Artoria (Altria) Pendragon – A-

Artoria functionally has a 50% NP Charge between the 20% free on her NP’s use and the 30% on her skill. Reasonable AoE NP damage and a 50% charge is a recipe for extremely solid farming and Artoria makes no exception. She used to be pretty significantly behind Mordred prior to her buff, but now she has a slight edge in doing more damage off of Mana Burst turns, but they are otherwise mostly identical in usage.

Mordred – A-

She’s almost exactly just Artoria, but she trades Charisma for a niche against…Artoria. For the most part you just won’t notice a difference between the two at all. See above for why she’s so solid.

Check out these other classes and their Tier List!

Saber B-Tier

Okita Souji – B+

Okita’s where you really want to be for a dedicated single-target Saber. Her crit damage lasts three turns and the defense down from her NP lingers for three turns, which opens Okita up to much better performance than Musashi over several turns. Her deck is undeniably a bit softer, so she’ll likely feel a bit weaker when everything is on cooldown between the two.

Miyamoto Musashi – B

Somewhere along the line Musashi picked up a reputation as the premiere Saber, and I’ll admit, I’m not sure how. She can undeniably put together extremely high burst, but she can find it difficult to translate that to long-term damage. One turn is easy to push huge damage, two is doable, but sacrifices a lot. Once you’re trying to do damage over three turns, Musashi just won’t stack up very well which is exacerbated by being single-target. Doing huge damage in the short term is more permissible for AoE characters who are less likely to run into break gauges.

Lancelot – B

Lancelot’s pretty crazy in how self-sustained he is, and his loop of using his NP as a mini-mana burst to support silly crits that ready his NP again is really good. He doesn’t scale quite as well externally since many of his buffs are already covered and his base attack is quite low, but it’s just hard to go wrong with him. Big crits, insane star absorption, an NP battery, the only thing he could really want is lower cooldowns, and fortunately the support for his primary card type lowers his cooldowns. He’s great.

Frankenstein (Summer) – B

Continuing the trend of SR Sabers with very solid repeat performance on single target, Fran is a Quick NP-focused powerhouse. All of her skills come with some sort of downside, but Summer Galvanism is hard to argue with as 80% NP Regen will keep her repeatedly NPing to abuse her three turn NP damage buff. Fran’s an excellent choice to burn through multiple break gauges in quick sequence, particularly since she pairs so well with Skadi covering all of her missing buff categories. She’s a great option.

Nero – B-

Nero’s quite reliant on proccing her chance-based Imperial Privilege to be great, but Thrice-Setting Sun alone is just nuts. Guts does some unintuitive things when a character is solo. If a character is alone, enemies end their turn when they proc a Guts stack. Very few characters can have more than one, but Nero gets three which buys her a total of four turns unconditionally alongside all of her healing to potentially get more, all of which feeds into itself as the cooldowns on Migraine and IP are only 5 turns and you can turn the guts on early to line up your last stack with the heals coming off of cooldown.

If computers could be annoyed, an anchor position Nero would be the way to do it; she just refuses to die when used well, and does good damage with the proc from IP, which you’ll live long enough to try to fish for. With a little help from a Mystic Code and good skill timing it’s not even impossible to stall through Thrice Setting Sun’s cooldown for another four free turns. If her damage were better she’d be an easy A.

Saber Alter – B –

You’ve probably heard it said several times that Saber Alter is just Artoria, but better. This isn’t true and basically never has been. She does extremely similar (within 2.5%) NP damage but is much worse at refiring (10% on NP vs. 20% on NP and 30% on a skill) and has far worse face cards thanks to 1,000 less attack and a worse charisma. If your only measure of a character is their NP damage, Saber Alter is Artoria but cheaper on team cost. In other capacities she’s just worse.

Saber C-Tier

Yagyu Munenori – C+

I give Yagyu some extra points over the usually poor fate of single-turn burst characters because he can pretty easily overcharge his NP in the same chain he uses it and while the second one does not hit with anything close to the same potency, it wouldn’t be crazy to see an enemy with 60-80% attack down after two uses of his NP. If the enemy can’t hurt you at all while your skills are on cooldown it’s like they aren’t on cooldown. Still, a traditional 3-turn DPS would probably just have them dead before his cooldowns cycle around again, so as hilarious as it may be to watch him do that trick, it’s mostly just that; a trick.

Arthur (Prototype) – C+

He’s fairly similar to Artoria but he’s got worse prospects on his NP than even Saber Alter and in exchange he’s got a niche against large enemies. He’s just kind of meh, and when you’re already part of a class where many of the characters are ‘Artoria, but they do this thing’ being the one who is ‘Artoria but pretty much just worse’ isn’t a great spot.

Chevalier d’Eon – C+

I’m not a fan of tanks for anything except very new players, but if you want one d’Eon is probably the best at doing so in a dedicated fashion. They sport one of the only multi-turn taunts in the whole game. I’d still largely recommend going with the “tanks” that get it as an incidental bonus while doing reasonably in another category but it’s hard to argue against d’Eon still being contested only by Leonidas for dedicated tanks. Bad character archetype, excellent execution of that archetype.

Rama – C+

Rama is a victim of the game valuing very different things when he came out. His short cooldown crit bursts were amazing for making him good not just against one boss but the sort of nodes where you might face two without sacrificing basically anything against nodes with only one. He does still feature a shorter cooldown than other burst characters with only four turns to wait for another use as opposed to the five to seven common for other characters, which is enough to give him an edge, but as you’ve no doubt gotten used to, one great turn is vastly worse than three good ones for boss-killers in Grand Order.

Suzuka Gozen – C

Suzuka’s a bit troubled in that she falls into a very similar niche to many other Sabers and isn’t really better at it than the others in almost any case. Her passive NP regen skill is nice but works out to be worse for spamming than the fairly common recharge after use overcharge that many Sabers sport. She can make an interesting Archer-style switch hitter thanks to her lingering crit buff though just be sure to bring enough star production.

Bedivere – C

A very notable R, though as a story lock he’s pretty hard to NP up. However, he puts a lot of much rarer options to shame. There are a lot of Sabers who follow the one-turn wonder pattern and Bedivere at NP2 is competitive for single turn burst with pretty much all of them. He used to arguably be better than Okita before break gauges came out, but now his focus on burst is a lot less solid. I’d still place him higher than many of the other one-turn only Sabers as he’s just much easier to use and his NP battery assures he’ll be ready way more often.

Sigurd – C

Sigurd is basically a one-turn character. He can theoretically space out Primordial Rune attacks across multiple turns but doing so naturally requires him not to brave chain which leaves him in a situation where Dragonkind Modification is mostly wasted. His NP does good damage against Dragons, but otherwise he’s just not very good. He’s an excellent choice for the bragging rights ‘most damage in one turn’ memorial quests, but those have no rewards and he’s pretty ho-hum in actual common game situations.

Altera – C-

Altera does above average NP damage once and then she basically fades into unimpressive territory. She traded a tiny bit higher attack buff compared to most Sabers for losing the majority of her utility. She’d need to have a much better showing of outpacing the rest of her class on damage to make up for the fact that she doesn’t refire well at all and has mediocre crit access. Ultimately not great.

Elizabeth Bathory (Brave) – C-

I’d be tempted to put her even lower as a one-turn burst character with lower burst than Silver options in her class and virtually no utility, but Legend of the Crimson Heroine does technically have nothing but hugely powerful buffs available as a “Second NP”. I’ve rated her here on the basis that technically all five options are good, but their value can vary wildly and you’re unlikely to ever want more than two of them simultaneously, giving it a greater than 50% failure rate. I’d honestly just use Caesar instead, and he’s a FP unit.

Ryougi Shiki (Saber) – C-

It may look a bit unusual given how solid the free four star version was, but Saber Shiki just doesn’t bring much to the table. Her NP Damage is mediocre, her face cards aren’t great, she spends a lot of power ‘budget’ so to speak on instant death which pretty much never works against meaningful enemies. She does self-heal like crazy, though, so she has some applications as an anchor. It’s also reasonably possible to use her as a debuff clear, but there are a lot of otherwise good characters who can do that instead of shoehorning a Servant in who is otherwise bad.

Saber D-Tier

Saber Lily – D+

She’s not great, and basically delivers a single NP or brave chain of damage before doing very little follow up. Her AoE NP Generation buff is interesting and theoretically a useful ability but it’s quite small in magnitude and several other welfares and silvers (enough to fill a team) feature it with either greater magnitude or a second effect attached.

Gawain – D+

Gawain is field reliant and rather than being okay when not on his proper field and excellent on it, he’s just below par when he’s not under sunlight and is above average when he has it. He has a future buff that will make him fairly usable by guaranteeing sunlight. For now, don’t bother, you could just get similar damage out of characters who have far better utility than he does. He doesn’t really outpace silver options, and those have the added benefit of easily accessible NP5.

Siegfried – D

He’s just not good. Most dragons aren’t Lancers so even within his niche he isn’t amazing, since many assassins will outdo him thanks to having class advantage while he doesn’t. Many people try to defend Siegfried by pushing the fact that St. George can apply the Dragon trait with his NP.

Ignore those people, George is single target, which then downgrades Siegfried to single target for the purposes of his niche, if you pick any pair of reasonable single target characters they will do more damage than Siegfried+George. In fact, picking the two lowest NP damage ST Sabers still results in similar damage, besides the fact that one of those is a crit character and another uses her NP as set-up for her cards rather than the other way around. He doesn’t even have meaningful utility.

Fate/Grand Order Saber Tier List