Fate/Grand Order: Should You Roll on the Scathach-Skadi Banner?

This one’s a doozy, and you’ve probably been hearing about it for weeks already. You don’t have to go farther than in-game friends list messages to find someone talking about Skadi. The thing most people fail to mention is just why she has that mystique. You’ve probably heard ‘Quick Merlin’ but that’s a pretty bad comparison, honestly, if you want to compare her to an existing Caster, she’s far more similar to Waver.

Yes, you should roll for the Scathach Skadi banner. There’s pretty much no way to argue against her value. Yes, even if you have no quick characters, Skadi is still valuable for numerous other characters. Her generalized farming capability is second only to Waver in addition to her usefulness in supporting Quick characters.

Banner Composition

This banner is hard to really cover in significant depth. In addition to Skadi and the Anniversary 3 Craft Essences, the banner also rotates through the featured characters of Part 1’s previous story chapters. The combined days for previous chapters are pretty poor to roll on, though, due to the dilution of the SSR pool. While some of the featured Servants are quite powerful, when the rate-up is shared it is split evenly, and the story SSRs receive far more availability.

There are generally two to three runs of the “singularity-based” summon each year; those are better options to pursue story characters when they might have a proper solo rate-up. Overall, focus on the Skadi solo days. There is a single rotation that features last year’s anniversary character Sherlock Holmes. He’s a reasonable character, he’s not can’t-miss but it’s by far the best duo day to roll on from an availability standpoint. Holmes isn’t available amazingly often.

As for the new CEs, all are limited. At SSR we have A Tale of Love and Hope featuring +100% Star Weight, 10% increased critical damage, and 50% starting NP charge, it’s solid, and good for farming Switch-hitters but ultimately nothing you need. At SR we have a very solid general-purpose Quick CE in Greatest Journey, it gives 10% Quick Performance and 5% increased NP Gen, aim for an MLB if you want to use it frequently. At R, we have TEAM Phoenix, which is, like most R CEs, bad. Don’t bother keeping it around except for completion’s sake if you’re that type.

Scathach-Skadi Details

Class: Caster
Rarity: ★★★★★
Attribute: Sky

Stats & Internals

Scathach-Skadi	Attack	HP
Lv. 90	10,753	14,406
+Grails/Silver Fous	12,771	16,782

Skills and NP

Primordial Rune
Increase one Ally’s Quick Performance for 3 turns (30% at Lv. 1 → 50% at Lv.10)
Increase one Ally’s Quick Critical Damage for 3 turns (50% at Lv. 1 → 100% at Lv. 10)
Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Shivering Blizzard B
Reduce all Enemies defense for 3 turns (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)
Reduce all Enemies Crit Chance for 3 turns (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)
Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Wisdom of the Chief God B+
Charge one Ally’s NP Gauge (30% at Lv. 1 → 50% at Lv. 10)
Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Noble Phantasm: Gate of Skye
Increase’s all Ally’s Critical Damage for 3 attacks over 5 turns (30% at Lv. 1 → 50% at Lv. 5)
Apply one stack of evasion lasting 3 turns to all Allies
Apply one stack of Instant Death immunity lasting 3 turns to all Allies
Overcharge: Reduce damage taken for all Allies for 3 turns (500 at 100% → 1500 at 500%)

Passives

Territory Creation EX
12% Increased Arts performance

Item Construction A
10% Increased Debuff Success rate.

Goddess’ Essence A
Increase damage by 250
25% Increased Debuff Resist

Is it worth rolling for Skadi?

Yes, absolutely. Wisdom of the Chief God alone is probably enough to make Skadi extremely potent. It’s not to say she’s without her weaknesses, hype is going to sell her as far better suited to challenge content than she is, but she more than makes up for it by opening the door to piles of new teams by her existence alone.

Prior to Skadi’s release, only Waver could 50% charge a targeted NP, and that capability has been extremely potent for the game’s lifetime. So-called Waver Systems could pair with a 50% charge character and a decent CE to provide an easy answer to two waves of enemies. With Skadi, it’s possible for top-end setups to ‘brute force’ nodes, a strategy wherein a singular 50% battery DPS unit is charged from 0-100 every wave of a node. This only gets better when pairing with actual quick characters as quick NPs recharge themselves, creating scenarios where a single DPS and the Skadi System (Yours and a friend’s Skadis in one team) can ‘loop’ a node. If you’re looking to ease your farm grind, look no further.

Moving past the obvious skill, this rendition of Primordial Rune is what draws all the Merlin comparisons. On the surface it looks pretty exactly like a Quick-swapped Hero Creation, but it’s got quite a lot different going on. To start, its uptime is just different, you could get massively more crits out of the second half, to the tune of double or even triple with a reshuffle, crit benefits. However, this is by no means consistent.

Hero Creation’s crit benefit working on all card types means it can on-demand buff a brave chain, Primordial Rune can only do the same if the target has a QQQ deck. In an RNG-free reading of the skill, it at best buffs the same number of cards as Hero Creation and they’re weaker cards. For most characters with only two quick cards, it buffs fewer crits without relying on RNG.

For the Quick buff half, this is pretty much what you expect from a support card performance buff. It’s 50%, it’s solid, and card performance is extremely good on Quick cards because they provide damage, stars, and NP charge simultaneously. This is gonna be a big part of the calculations for looping a given node, and in general it’s an extremely solid skill. In this case it is functionally Hero Creation, just remember that the top end on the damage on Quick cards has to work harder; thankfully break gauges make this a little less painful. Insane top-end just isn’t really useful all that often.

Last among the skills is a defense debuff that would probably be a highlight on anyone else; on Skadi it looks a little shabby just comparatively. 30% defense down is quite a bit weaker in most cases than attack up because as soon as an enemy dies it’s gone. However, this is a stellar skill in challenge quests since it makes an enemy take more damage and deal less. It sort of speaks for itself though. Pump damage for one wave, basically. Cooldown is, unfortunately, like the rest of Skadi’s skills, a turn higher than the average.

Gate of Skye is a little contentious because on the surface it’s very good, but using an actual card slot is a serious downside. A decent number of supports have an NP that is essentially a 4th skill. Most, however, have a relatively unique effect attached, like Tamamo, or are positively overloaded on strong effects like Hans or Merlin. Here, we have something that isn’t all that unique and pairs one useless and two decent defensives with a fairly standard attack up. Instant-death immunity is insanely niche and the damage cut needs to be heavily overcharged to be strong on its own. At 100% charge, it’s only going to help all that much when paired with traditional defense up, which Skadi doesn’t bring.
The evasion is great if you’re facing down an AoE NP from the boss but otherwise is a pretty small reduction in incoming damage. The crit’s at least nice and makes Skadi a little less reliant on quick characters or her NP battery but this honestly would only be stretching what would be okay on a skill by a little bit. When it takes one of your cards for a turn, one expects the power level, or at least uniqueness, to be a little higher. Higher NP levels and higher overcharge make this a lot better, but I’d hope for a little better out of an SSR and I think Hans, an FP character, has a better NP than this.