NP Gain & Looping Explained - Overkill, Different Systems, and Display Bugs

[@Khadroth]

Edit: We messed up with the lead arts card bonus and overkill bug descriptions. Arts lead bonus is 100% not 50%, and the overkill bug can be triggered with the multiple cards not just one. Hey guys we figured this would be a good topic to go more in depth on with NA headed more towards the future of easy looping. I tried to cover everything relevant I could, but its hard to extensively cover everything in a video, so if you have questions about the systems feel free to ask! Lastly, thank you guys again for the support, if you're new to channel make sure to like and subscribe as it really helps drive growth and make all this worth it! Thanks 🙏

[@Herrsch_]

Don't let this video distract from the fact that Khad feeds off your salt and adds it to his gacha luck.

[@Khadroth]

Dont tell them my secrets...

[@bernardchan181]

Hi Khad, great video. Coming in 2024 after you explained this again during stream.

[@TheMCMaffyx]

Great and helpful Video. I heared that you get more NP Gain against special class, but never found something which explained this. I wished for a Looping Video and you make one. Thank You very much :)

[@jeth2517]

Thanks for this great vid mate Easy to see how your day job, aside from the obvious financial benefits, helps you in making this kind of explanation/guide vids

[@Lonemelt]

Khad you make the best guides in the entire fgo community

[@leonesenpai]

So you also fought for Jerusalem, I mean the helmet is proof enough my friend.

[@MrArrino]

Great guide, as always. As for NP looping, it is somewhat sad that in year the current quick meta on NA will disappear. It is understandable, that DW want to sell us new servants and so on, but if they unleashed Jalter banner with Shinjuku Night dress outfit or something like that players would throw piles of money at them. Those 90+ nodes with strange amount of enemies make me think: "Ok they gave us Servant (Skadi) that make farming quite fun and efficient and now they try to make it back into chore". I know that games like FGO are constantly evolving and meta changing, but sometimes I wonder what is the direction of this game? In case of quick looping you didn't mention the stars. Normally quick NPs drop so many stars that if you won't kill enemies with NP they will be killed with crits - and quick or arts crits can generate a lot of NP gauge. I won't say it is more beneficial to have lower NP level, but if your cards are good enough, with crits you can get even to 100% gauge. The 99% mechanic is quite nice and convenient. Technically it is possible to have 99% of gauge, but it needs some effort form the player or enemies (like ghosts NP drain or Archuria healing at the cost of NP). And also... it is somewhat ironic that there is mechanic "to make sure you didn't get really angry when you ended up with 99%" in a game with such abysmal summon rates :)

[@Khadroth]

Quick looping doesn't totally die out. There's a couple of instances that it still is useful and makes more sense then arts. But they're almost all event driven.

[@cordellstevens7995]

JetMan goes Arthur with two ladies in the background great video

[@torappuda]

Overkill is a bit more complicated than that, but what you said can be a general guideline, although it doesnt have to be 50% in just a single card (can be 20% and 30% on two cards and third card in the chain will get overkill bug). Also note that using an np breaks the chain for overkill bug so it wont ever work after an np even if it does above 50% of their hp.

[@Khadroth]

This is not correct. An NP does break the logic but can still act as the trigger, I've confirmed this. But yes we did goof on "first card" issue. Multiple cards can trigger it.

[@torappuda]

@@Khadroth I just tested it, and you're right. NP into card does work. I thought because Np after card didn't work it would be the same in reverse.

[@Khadroth]

@@torappuda Yeah np's are always the weird one, from my understanding of the what causes the overkill, im not surprised it doesn't affect them.

[@sopadumacacoumadelicia5]

Hey, I got Moriarty to loop with no Castoria, Tamamo or Paracelsus. This video comes in handy to make that team perfect.

[@ivanbluecool]

Buster mains:clearly this video is for me right? Quick and arts:who should tell him? Yeah speaking of Nero bride I can't wait until na gets the buff for jarcher to spam. It looks so much fun and I wanna try for Gil fest farming Same with space ishtar and castoria. Mains for the years

[@illiasaugustus2026]

What buff does Jarcher get? I rolled her on a whim and thank god I did. My life is 300x easier with her around

[@ivanbluecool]

@@illiasaugustus2026 her buff is Nero bride as together they get 100 percent charge turn one so looping is much easier to do. Jarcher has no buff directly but she does well enough without one. I would like to see her get a buff to np to help would be fun.

[@torking7813]

That comparison between Lancelot and Jeanne archer was painful

[@Khadroth]

most of the time its better than displayed, but yeah... that was with his 3rd skill popped.

[@CharlesChaldea]

I learned stuff! Thanks.

[@LightishRed]

Is card effectiveness and NP gain calculated additively or multiplicatively? When I have [50% Arts up] and [50% NP gain up] is that [50% + 50% = 100%] 100% additional NP% generated or [1.5 * 1.5 = 2.25] 125% additional NP% generated?

[@Jamessavoy]

The comment: "DW needs to address Buster" aged well. Now we know, skill cool down reduction combined with hefty NP charge skills was their solution.

[@ivanbluecool]

Only way buster can "loop" is kscope mlb with double waver and another 50 Percent charger or if you can't get the mlb kscope artoria and lartoria can do this with a normal kscope funny enough. Wish they make a 50 Percent battery for a buster support or just buff Merlin for it.

[@justine7870]

wish granted

[@ivanbluecool]

@@justine7870 yeah Morgan the vitch system and passives.

[@HelplessFangirl]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks Quick is lacking in comparison to Arts, who is very reliant on Noble Phantasm, and Buster, who can generally use their face cards to do big boy damage, and how they both can generate decent stars.

[@ivanbluecool]

It's always been this way even when skadi came out. Arts always got a steady stream of support in 1 star to 5 star range as they didn't treat arts like a powerhouse before and castoria is basically everything great about arts in one unit. Same with units. While quick needs double skadi. Arts doesn't necessarily need double castoria as options are everywhere is why Arts shot up so fast after castoria when they did fine enough before. Also castoria can get her np fast in 3 turns to do extra damage the last turn which is which skadi lacks as quick can't get np charge same as buster.

[@Khadroth]

It's mostly an efficiency issue. I've talked about this on stream a couple times, but imagine all 3 card types in a race. Arts has reached the finish line now as its capable of perfect efficiency (6 CEs) while still putting out good damage with not a terrible amount of investment. Quick can be decently efficient (5 CE in most cases) with arguably the least investment, but hinges entirely on limited units and isn't as flexible with charge. And Buster requires the most investment by far and can still at best match Quick for efficiency. That's sort of why I don't really ever see arts falling out of favor now. It reached that finish line, all they can really do is design content to be anti-arts, pro the other cards, or buff the other card types to hit that efficiency capability as well. Then other cards might become more meta at the moment, but arts itself will still be capable.

[@sopadumacacoumadelicia5]

@@ivanbluecool "Quick needs double Skadi" Whatever you say, bucko

[@ivanbluecool]

@@sopadumacacoumadelicia5 yes it does. Castoria isn't needed for arts as melt lancer can loop without her same as space Ishtar and jarcher. Quick needs skaid so thank you for bringing it up. Difference is skaid is needed. Castoria and Tamamo aren't so arts is better

[@sopadumacacoumadelicia5]

@@ivanbluecool Oh I thought you meant in general. Yeah, for looping I kinda agree. Trying to loop without double Skadi it's possible 100% but it's a nightmare to do, I don't recommend it.

[@Paurlt]

soo before I learn, does this explain why my waver first skill, gave my support S.ibuki 31NP charge, while she had 69NP, also with Ushi first and 2nd skill on her, turn 3?

[@TheCheeseman1983]

The bonus for an arts card lead is +100%, not +50%. That's a +100% to each card's base NP generation modifier. There is also a bit of an error with how the overkill bug works. Once you have dealt more than 50% of the HP value the enemy started the turn with, the hit that broke the 50% threshold, and all subsequent normal card hits that turn, will get the overkill bonus. This stacks with normal overkill from reducing their HP to zero. However, note that this does NOT work for NP cards. Without getting into too much detail about how the bug works (and yes, it was definitely a bug), NP cards cannot benefit from the bug, regardless of where they fall in the attack chain. You don't have to deal 50% of an enemy's HP with a single card, if your first two normal cards combined deal more than 50% damage, the final normal card will benefit from the bug. However, an NP in second position will prevent the third card from benefitting.

[@Khadroth]

Yes we messed up there with the explanation, thanks for the clarification. However I do not agree with it being a "bug". At worst its a developmental relic they've left in the game because they decided it was good feature to retain. Calling it a bug is a bit of misnomer with how its always existed, its a combat feature that can be 100% reproduced, and they haven't done anything about it after years. They probably didn't intend for it to exist, but they've probably never done anything because it not really game breaking. Also while the NP can't benefit from the bug the NP CAN in fact trigger the bug. I've confirmed this myself.

[@TheCheeseman1983]

@@Khadroth An NP can trigger it for subsequent normal cards if used first, yes. The bug is basically an omission in the code that tracks damage dealt to the target for calculating overkill. Basically, there is a variable that doesn’t get correctly reset when the system begins resolving the next normal card. The reason that NPs don’t work is because the relevant code is there to reset the variable when the next card is an NP card. Starting with an NP is fine, because it’s a bug with how the game transitions into the following card. You’re welcome to call it whatever you like, but was obviously a bug, originally. They’ve chosen not to fix it, probably because it would negatively affect too many different servants and amount to a pretty major nerf, so I guess you could call it an “unintended feature”, but that’s just semantics.

[@Khadroth]

@@TheCheeseman1983 It's not an omission, it double tracks damage, hence the 50% threshold. And the reason it doesn't work on np is because its specifically the coding for card attacks. The NP also doesn't need to be the lead card. It's merely a check against the starting value of hp at the beginning of the turn, and the remaining value. Sure, I don't think its a huge deal, just that the semantics of calling it a bug make people think it might get fixed when it likely never will. It doesn't really break any servant as its too specific a set of circumstances to really factor into a servant's value.

[@TheCheeseman1983]

@@Khadroth It double tracks damage because the damage tracking variable to determine overkill doesn't get reset between cards, so it counts the damage of the previous card when calculating how much damage the next card does. The reason this variable doesn't get reset is because of an omission in the combat logic coding. The NP doesn't have to be the first card, but an NP card will execute different logic that will correctly reset the damage tracking variable, causing the damage from the first card to no longer be tracked.

[@7jaws7]

Waifu reasons aside, this is exactly why I'm so committed to getting Jarcher to NP5 when Summer 3 returns: her base attack is really low for a 5*. Alas, you don't screw your waifu in gacha games, your waifu screws you >_

[@Khadroth]

The good news is a lot of lottos have a starting charge CE or a damage CE to help you out. But I definitely feel you on the gacha part 😂

[@ivanbluecool]

Good luck. Hope it doesn't take too much

[@Rasarui]

For the Arts loop, how are the Black grails effect against more Np lvl?

[@ivanbluecool]

Black grail gives the np more damage but higher np is better as it's not limited to the CE. But it's good to have both but the np is better. For example black grial mlb gives 80 Percent damage up on np and 2400 attack up but np 2 any servant and thier np damage goes up by a ton more than black grial can give. Long story short. Higher np levels is better than black grail which is a boost more so than the main use.

[@Rasarui]

@@ivanbluecool Thanks for the info, was wondering if I could use my mlb black grail to compensate for the np lvl for a more stable farm. Since in some cases I wouldn't want to roll for more np lvl just for farming purposes.

[@ivanbluecool]

@@Rasarui it all depends on the servant you are using if you want to give me your list. Mlb black grial with any arts unit like jarcher for example only need to get to 100 and they will be able to spam more easily when Nero bride gets her buff that makes an easy 100 percent together. Even someone like sieg with np gain up from Dr and damage from Tamamo can loop well if you time it well. But yeah it's better for higher np levels. All you need is np 2 for arts and you are set basically and any low star aoe arts can do the work if you have the proper support. Even sieg is beyond great when you can set him up

[@Khadroth]

Black grails are an option for some loopers but i've found its more theory than practice. I rarely loop with 0% starting charge CE's anymore due to the odd makeup of nodes, so black grail has been relegated more to when something must die in 1 turn or something longer than a 3 turn (CQs). They can certainly help offset your need for higher np levels, but NP levels are going to help you no matter the situation or node. Black grail is going to be dependent on your goals. In both cases they'll help you get potentially more overkill hits and thus np generated.

[@zayjh3948]

I thought I was insane cause the berserker node os SW 2 wasn't giving as much np gen as I thought it should.

[@median_max]

shoutouts to Squirtoria

[@agearmaster1]

The lowering the hp for more overkill on the np is a crazy 200IQ tip or maybe i'm dumb.

[@originalsun5206]

This needs to be updated with the new cards rework on 7th anniversary.

[@radicool21]

Now that I'm getting a handle on how to use my new Astraea, this is perfect timing! Super helpful video, thanks Khadroth

[@NazarusGG]

Buster looping when?

[@ivanbluecool]

Mlb kscope double waver skadi with a 50 percent charger like ereshkigal and that's a 3 turn.

[@Khadroth]

Buster "looping" is always just a 50% charger with a superscope and 3 50% charge supports. There's a couple exceptions to that but im more interested to see what they do with buster cards in the future. Perhaps a new support is coming...

[@ivanbluecool]

@@Khadroth her name was crane and I feel she was gonna be the unit to be the buster one but didn't pan out well as it's wacky to use her. Honestly my set up of units works with artoria and lartoria with a normal kscope as they get refund to be more flexible just needing one kscope and the 3 50 Percent chargers. Bur yeah buster deserves someone

[@Khadroth]

@@ivanbluecool Nah crane isn't the buster support. Crane is useful entirely because she's a party swap on demand without an artificial limiter (cooldown) or killing a party member (arash, chen gong, mandricardo). She wont be the most meta thing, but she's going to be really strong for certain CQs and story fights.

[@gudakoalter]

Squirtoria best looper

[@DietSeltzer]

Bug? more like Feature