Several Servants get hit with this, whether it's due to their poor stat growth, movesets, rarity, or combination of the three. Be aware that some of these entries were Rescued from the Scrappy Heap though.
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General
- Servants with the Instinct/Intuition skill have been looked down on, as players see the skill as wasting a slot, providing minimal utility and having an unnecessarily long cooldown for what it does. The Clairvoyance skill suffers from a similar, if less intense, dislike, since a combination of high cooldowns and low benefits similarly limit it. As such, it got to the point where all of the Servants that have such skills were given Strengthening quests to give them additional effects, and since around the release of Arthur (Prototype), Instinct has stopped appearing in general on Servants.
- Quick-focused Servants in general originally, due to Quick-cards' rather middling ability to amass together a reliable amount of critical stars (Quick Chains aside) and often being slaves to the RNG more than any other type of Servant, thus making them unable to live up to how they were advertised. Quick attacks were later patched to make them more useful for gaining stars and damage, but they used to lack good Quick-focused supports to make them good damage dealers in general like Merlin with Buster-focused strategies or Tamamo with Arts, at least until Scathach-Skadi came out, which finally allowed them to keep up with the metagame. The closest they used to have was Osakabe-hime, but her support abilities were weak and she really only functioned well when by herself. The only ones have escaped this fate prior to Scathach-Skadi's introduction were Jack, Okita, Scáthach and Rider Kintoki, who are just so completely bonkers on their own that they still do their jobs well (and even then, Okita and Scáthach suffered more than the other two). To a lesser extent, Cu Chulainn, Ushiwakamaru, Billy the Kid, and Kojirou escaped this fate as well though they either work best with Palingenesis and/or when the player focuses more on their NPs and critical damage than on their Quick cards.
- Of all the Append skills, many agree that the third Append skill happens to be too situational (such as Anti-Class Damage Aptitude being assigned towards certain classes who either weren't designed for dealing damage or attempting to increasing the damage against the class they weren't supposed to face such as Anti-Saber Damage Aptitude being assigned towards every class except Archers and (thankfully) Lancers) with the exception of, humorously enough, Stheno who has her own myriad of problems described below or downright useless (such as Anti-Class Critical Attack Chance Resistance since there are much better ways to avoid Critical Hits). Additionally, some Alter Ego servants as well as Oberon even have their third Append skill be against enemies where those servants have a class disadvantage against. The first and second skills have at least some value such as Mana Loading providing an extra NP battery and Extra Attack Finesse Improvement is often considered an additional appetizer especially towards Space Ishtar, whose NP improves her Extra Attack damage. Common advice from players is that the third Append Skill should be prioritized after Mana Loading, Extra Attack Finesse Improvement and Palingenesis unless it's Kiara Sessyoin, since it improves on her "Avenger in Alter Ego's clothing" niche, Okita Souji (Alter) which essentially turns her into a dangerous Glass Cannon against Casters, Passionlip for the same reasons but with Assassin servants instead, Hephaestion for similar reason to Okita Alter and Passionlip but with Lancer Servants in her case, Abigail Williams, Katsushika Hokusai and Mysterious Idol X (Alter), since they actually capitalize on their Anti-Berserker niche and Mash Kyrielight, since it gives her additional damage against all Extra Classes Which includes..., and even then they're often prioritized after Extra Attack Finesse Improvement.
Free Units
- Altria Pendragon (Lily) is considered the worst four star Servant in the game due to her abnormally low statsnote and a skill set that sadly doesn't have much synergy with a team nor plays to what little strengths she has outside of Mana Burst for her Buster NP. As a result, essentially no one uses her at all outside of "waifu" factor. The only advantage she has over other 4* Sabers is that her NP scales slightly better than normal and can easily reach NP5 since she's a free Servant, with a Strengthening Quest that allows her to be a somewhat passable farmer, but even still the amount of Sabers that can do similar things as her means she faces stiff competition from better units, and rarely is used.
- Scathach (Assassin) stands out as one of the weakest Free To Play units despite her good stats, due to terrible skills. She has a one-turn taunt that increases her critical strength, and a targetable heal that applies a damage cut for one turn, seemingly so she can combine their effects to act as a tank of sorts, but the damage cut is not very high, and her middling hitpoints mean doing so puts her at high risk of being killed or badly-injured. She also has mediocre star generation for an Assassin thanks to an E rank in her class's signature Presence Concealment passive skill, the weakest in the game at a mere 2% increase. Even though she has good hits on her Quick and Extra attack, she'll typically generate very low amounts of crit stars compared to more-common, lower-rarity units like Cursed Arm and Fuuma. While she briefly had niche farming uses, it quickly fell off as the game evolved, especially when Kiichi Hougen, a 4* Quick Free Assassin from the Little Big Tengu event, came out and can basically do everything she did but better, as her skills are viable for farming due to it allowing her to Spam Attack her NP while also generating a huge amount of Critical Stars, essentially making Summer Scáthach redundant and useless to use. She did get a bone thrown her way when she was added to Evocation Shop and her taunt skill received a Rank Up Quest that added many new effects (such as three-turn crit damage buff and damage up against Divine enemies, plus an NP battery), but by then it was too late, and she's still considered bad.
- Mash herself is a great servant with a spot on the Game-Breaker page, but her Ortinax Mash Costume Dress changes up her kit to become a Buster-Crit offtank servant with mixed results. Not only is her original skin and the abilities that come with it still usable outside of the mandatory Lostbelt story nodes, but Mash isn't really suited for being a Buster-Crit servant due to her low damage stat and weak facecards. Her first skill has been replaced by an enhancement to her Buster cards (which only lasts for one attack), giving up the best skill of her original kit and leaving her Noble Phantasm as the only option for giving allies a defense boost. Her last two skills are both taunts that help her fulfill a taunter niche, but they don't help her fulfill her new intended Buster-Crit role to make up for her first skill's short duration, lack the targetable benefits of her original second skill and the high NP-gaining potential of her original third skill, and the new second skill's lack of defense buffs upon activation plus her third skill's health demerit (which caps at one HP so she thankfully can't kill herself this way) set her up as a suicidal tank that needs to spam her NP to last long enough to stall effectively. Though she's certainly capable of dishing out the hurt and not considered terrible per se (Ortinax Mash is more of a significant nerf to a once-potent skillset that still has good usage rather than flat-out bad), it's universally agreed her original form is far more useful, much easier to use, and significantly more effective than her Ortinax set. The developers seemed to realize this issue, and since Lostbelt 5.2, story chapters/events often give Mash some kind of buff while in Ortinax, seemingly to try and get the player to use her, but this only makes her niche in that context, and eventually by Avalon La Fae the developers seemingly gave up on forcing Ortinax by allowing deployment of her non-Ortinax form onto the battle, meaning players pretty much have very little reason to use Ortinax Mash anymore unless they need a designated taunting tank, the game forces them to, or the buff she gets is enough to warrant using it (such as in the Tunguska Sanctuary event). Her Ortinax form was finally given a patch-up by having her receive a buff to her third skill which now gives 30 Crit Stars on activation, though this mostly changes her strategy to "stuff her with an CE that also gives out Crit Stars and then swap her out".
- While most versions of Elizabeth have divisive gameplay, they do have at least one niche that at the very least, has some justification for using them, especially after their Strengthening Quests. Nine-Tattoo Dragon Eliza proves to be the exception to this rule. Her first skill is highly situational and not good enough, as the buffs are rarely meaningful enough to make any difference, her second skill doesn't have enough NP charge for her Buster NP and Max HP rarely matters, with her third skill barely holding her together. Even her own status as the game's first 4-Star AOE NP Pretender couldn't save her, as Tlaloc later came out and proves to be a better farming option compared to Eliza, as she can at least farm nodes well, and if you really wanted a 4-Star AOE Buster NP Pretender, Cait Cu Cernpriestess does everything she does but better, as she not only has a serviceable NP Charge, but also provides even better support for Buster Teams, especially stalling compositions.
Three-Star Or Lower
- Gilles de Rais (Saber) has low stats compared to his fellow 3* Sabers, skills that are situational (most famously, he has Tactics to buff NP damage... when his own doesn't do damage), and an NP that gives him great buffs, but the short duration means he can't take advantage of it and his deck isn't specialized enough to allow him to spam it or to get a lot of damage out of it. Part of the problem is much like Siegfield and the Caster of the Nightless City, his stats lean more towards him being a Stone Wall, but his skillset is supposed to indicate that he's meant to be a damage dealer, and he hasn't been given satisfactory buffs to compensate like those two have. He was one of the most frequent Servants to appear in the gacha during the initial launch of the game, making him even more loathed.
- On the other end of the spectrum of rarity is Gilles de Rais (Caster), one of the only story-locked three-stars who isn't given to you for free upon completing his chapter. This makes him among the rarest in the game, so obviously he has to be one of the best, right? Nope! Two of his skills are basically worthless, being a single-target NP-damage reducer that barely reduces NP damage and a mental-debuff buffer when Gilles didn't initially have any mental debuffs himself. His third skill, one of the few to inflict Terror, is pretty unique, and is a mental debuff but it can only be accessed once you've gotten him to his 4th Ascension and Strengthening, and Terror's mechanics (enemy has a flat chance to get stunned every turn until the effect triggers or expires) mean that, while perhaps more likely to trigger overall, it isn't reliable next to stuff that can just stun the opponent off the bat, and means that you can't try to prevent actions on specific turns. On top of all that, he has about the worst Noble Phantasm he could ask for: an AOE damaging Buster. It runs off his bad attack stat, can't chain with his triple-Arts deck, isn't boosted by his skills, gets its damage reduced further by his class, is difficult to upgrade because he's rare, and puts him in competition as a low-star AOE Caster with Shakespeare, Babbage, Caster Cu, and Mephistopheles, not to mention the four-star welfares Caster Elizabeth and Sieg. Literally the only good thing about it is that Gilles is so forgotten by the devs that his animations haven't been updated yet, meaning its casting time is pretty short. Most tier lists put Caster Gilles on the very bottom, with only maybe Boudica coming close... and Boudica has actually received a few Rank Ups. His second and third Rank Up Quest provides some hope for him by providing him a Support Party Member niche with his second rank-up buffing his NP-damage reducer to party-wide and giving it decent stopping power as well as adding a party-wide three-turn Arts and Buster Resistance Down, and his third rank-up adding a defense down to his NP while increasing the NP Gauge of all Foreigner allies by 30%.
- Angra Mainyu is the game's resident Joke Character, and even advertises himself as "the world's worst Servant." He's the rarest non-limited Servant in the game by a pretty wide margin, with 1% the appearance odds of a five-star. Despite this, his stats are on par with a two-star and two of his skills are weak debuffs. His third angles towards him being a star-generator with Quick cards, but between his Archer deck and the poor base stargen of the Avenger class, he ends up outdone by most Assassins—and this is with a skill that kills him after a few turns. His Bond Craft Essence boosts his damage against Beasts, but as they're all extremely powerful bosses, chances are you won't bring Angra to fights with them anyway. His Noble Phantasm is an Attack Reflector, but it lacks a Taunt, so it's a gamble if the enemy will even target him, and if they do, there's a good chance they'll kill him because he's made out of paper, and if they don't, chances are the reflected damage isn't very high. That said, it does give him a niche use in certain challenge quests against enemies with damage-reduction effects, due to its flat damage formula bypassing this, and he eventually received an upgrade to pair his third skill with a Guts buff, which, on top of the other Guts buff his Bond CE gives him, makes him a lot less likely to self destruct... once you've ground him to Bond 10. Admittedly, all of the above is completely lore-accurate.
- Hektor as a character has numerous passionate fans for his role in the story. As a Servant, however, he's considered low tier. He has one of the highest HP stats amongst 3* Servants, but his attack is only average for his rarity and on the low end for 3* Lancers. He has a useful party-wide NP-buffing skill and a powerful NP that ignores defense, but the skill's one-turn effect and his QQABB deck means he struggles to take advantage of it or gain charge. His other two skills don't have much synergy and only provide a medium chance to stun and/or reduce an enemy's NP gauge and provide a minor heal while removing his debuffs respectively, offering some defensive utility early in the game but falling off later as his low stats make sustain less viable and enemies with stun immunity become more common. Even his Bond 10 CE only makes him useful as a NP buffer. His Rank Up Quest does provide extra utility by increasing his Tactics' effect to three turns and adding party-wide Damage Cut to two attacks, but once again this simply reinforces his use as an NP buffer, hardly the image of the man Achilles claims as his rival.
- Diarmuid (Lancer) tends to be regarded, sadly, as the worst of the game's 3* lancers, which is unfortunate for a character of his popularity and generally codified his Memetic Loser status. His access to an evasion skill, a female-targeted Attack Down, and a single-target Quick NP immediately provokes comparisons to the Cus... but his skills don't come close overall to the near-broken durability of standard Cu, and he lacks Prototype-Cu's anti-Wild Beast niche. He also suffers from the common issue of a star-generation boosting skill, but very little ability to generate stars, what with his two-hit Quick cards. Offensively, his NP hits reasonably hard post-interlude and has a buff-removal... but his NP gain is awful, meaning that if you want a buff-remover, Medea does that job much better because she can basically remove buffs on command, and if you want raw damage, then Jaguar Warrior with her buffs up does more damage at NP2 than Diarmuid at NP5. The result is a guy who tries to do too much and doesn't end up doing anything particularly well, such that many see his infinitely superior four-star Saber version as an apology for his poor performance.
- Geronimo. His three skills boost Buster, Arts, and Quick cards respectively... but only for himself, for one turn. The Quick boost is in particular considered wasted, because he only has one Quick card for it to affect. He, along with Boudica and Caster Gilles, tends to be considered one of the absolute weakest characters in the game for this reason. And despite his fans' pleas, he's never gotten a Rank Up. The only real advantage he has is in his NP upgrade, which noticeably buffed its AOE damage to values comparable to Arash's, meaning when combined with his Arts buff he can actually unleash powerful wave-clearing potential for one turn, but then he's effectively spent and taking up a slot while waiting for the skill cooldown and charging his NP back up.
- Poor Romulus, though not irredeemable, has to deal with a similar "this guy should be at least a star higher" situation to characters like Cu or Heracles, but without the atypically high usability they boast to the point the fact he is in fact the Grand Lancer and they released said form after Olympus for a 5* Lancer with appropriate stats and skills comes across as the long-overdue apology. He has a clumsy skill layout, with one being a weak heal, one being very random, and the third and best only coming after a Rank Up. With bits of buffing, farming, and healing, he ends up as a Master of None overall, and his healing-based sustained survivability causes him to stack up unfavorably to that of the Cu Chulainns in his rarity bracket. Add in his rather silly design and animations and his status as a silver despite being the founder of Rome, and you have a big-time recipe for disappointment. One Rank Up did boost up his charge rate, though, which makes him a solid farming Lancer, but there are plenty of better options to use, so he doesn't really have any value besides that.
- Rider Medusa. Despite her popularity as a character, she's generally agreed to be one of the worst Riders in the game due to a lack of focus from the developers. On paper she looks like she'd be perfect with the rise of Skadi as a support Caster thanks to her triple Quick deck, and having an NP battery and gain buff, but Rider Medusa is saddled with an AOE NP that only hits once, meaning she has no real value as a looper.To clarify why Beyond that, Rider Medusa has infamously only ever received a single buff since the games launch besides a Rank Up Quest to receive a third skill, that being a buff to her NP damage, while pretty much all the other AOE Quick Riders of her rarity or higher have since gotten buffed in some way. This leaves her with a weak stun, attack buff, and an okay NP gain/battery that doesn't cap out at a high enough value to be worth investing in, especially when a player can use other Riders like Marie or Alexander. Worse, her Lancer and Avenger alts have since gotten their weaker skills (a charm and weak attack buff) buffed, while Rider Medusa has the same kit since launch. All of this makes her one of the weaker Riders, especially after the release of Altria Caster, who reinvigorated the Arts meta and made other Riders more valuable. She still has some usage as a light farmer in conjunction with a Kaleidoscope, but that's hardly a hard position to claim. It's gotten to the point that her 5* Saber self is considered to be an apology for leaving her in the dust.
- Henry Jekyll & Hyde is one of the most unique characters in the game. Essentially, he starts out as a very weak Assassin, but his Noble Phantasm turns him into a Berserker, and it also vastly buffs up his skills, heals him fully, and sticks some permanent buffs on him for good measure. Unfortunately, being unique isn't always a good thing. His BBQQA deck means it takes forever to bring him up to his full charge unless he's backed up by a Kaleidoscope or Waver, so you're stuck using his terrible Assassin version for at least a few turns, and most of the starting NP gauge CEs don't offer enough for his Berserker form once he's got his NP lined up either. Once he's turned into Hyde, he is quite the powerhouse, but his NP becomes blocked off, so he relies on his face cards to do damage. He has skills and Quick cards to crit, but as a Berserker, his star weight is nonexistent, which is even more problematic when he can't rely on Buster Brave Chains. And on top of all that, while his buffs are permanent, they aren't irremovable, so some enemies can simply turn them off and instantly transform Hyde into a second-rate Lu Bu, and since Hyde can't use his NP, those buffs are gone for good. When given his maxed skills, team support, and a way to charge his NP, Jekyll can do a lot of damage for a three-star using face cards... but at that point, you could probably get the same result with any low-cost Berserker. There's sadly a good reason he's the only one of his kind. It says a lot when people's reaction to Jekyll getting an 80% NP Charge through a Rank Up quest is that it would be a great effect on almost any other Servant except him as while it removes Jekyll's need to gain NP Gauge, it doesn't fix the problems his Noble Phantasm has.
- Musashibou Benkei is designed to be a stalling tank, with abilities that seal the enemy's skills and Noble Phantasm or stun them and a targeting ability to redirect enemies to him. Unfortunately, as a tank, he ends up hilariously outclassed by Georgios and Leonidas, who share his rarity but have better redirection abilities and back it up with healing and party-buff abilities that mean they can actually do things while acting as tanks, not to mention sturdier defensive skills. On the other hand, Benkei's other skills are RNG-dependent and have long cooldowns, meaning most of the time, his attempts to seal an enemy's skills or NP just don't work, and Skill Seal is generally seen as a niche and mediocre ability anyway. His Balance Buff does give him a niche in that his Noble Phantasm now has a guaranteed party-wide Buff Removal, a rarity among even higher-ranked Servants.
- Charles-Henri Sanson has the potential to be a strong Assassin for his rarity; he has a healing and debuff removal skill, a Noble Phantasm that debuffs the enemies defenses, and a skill that buffs his damage against Evil-aligned enemies. Unfortunately, his third skill gives him a buff that allows him to do extra damage to enemies with the Human trait. Not Humanoid, but Human. This trait only appears on three Servants, and they are encountered well into the Lostbelt period where he cannot hope to compete with his rarity. Almost all enemies with the Human trait are not Riders, so he cannot capitalize on his dual buffs most of the time, and most of them are pretty weak anyway. And while there are plenty of enemies that do have the Evil trait on them, only five of them also have Human trait, and none of them are usually Riders. Most agree that if his third skill were buffed to target Humanoid and not Human, he would be incredibly strong for certain fights, but he has not been given much attention save one Interlude and Rank Up quest. On top of all of the above, his low rank of Presence Concealment and two-hit Quick cards mean that he can't generate stars very well, meaning the most common low-rarity Assassin backup plan of poking away and hoping someone stronger crits is beyond him.
- Phantom of the Opera is generally seen, somewhat mockingly, as the budget Stheno. His main skill is his Siren Song, which paralyzes a female enemy for a turn, but its success rate caps out at only 90%, so it tends to miss. To solve this, his Mental Corruption boosts debuff success rate, but this essentially just means that he now has two skills dedicated solely to stunning one enemy every seven turns, and all this only works on female enemies. Outside of that, he has some of the worst damage output in the game, which is equally bad for a guy with an AOE Arts NP, and despite having a triple-Quick deck, his star generation is poor at best. He has Innocent Monster to put a slight bandage on that, but it also causes him to take a hit to his defense when he struggles to survive already. He did have a niche for a while as the only AOE free Assassin, but then Fuuma Kotarou came out, rendering poor Phantom nearly obsolete. His last true niche is the stupendous length of the Debuff Resistance debuff his upgraded Noble Phantasm imposes... and even then, there are generally easier ways to weaken enemies to debuffs. A Rank Up Quest gave him a much-needed shot in the arm by upgrading Siren Song to affect any single enemy as well as guaranteed Buff Removal, but his other weaknesses mean he likely won't be doing much more than support.
- Of all the weak low-star Assassins, Mata Hari tends to be regarded as the weakest, to the point where the only question in her Joke Character status is how intentional it is. She has the dubious honor of being the sole character in the game with no personal skills whatsoever, not even Presence Concealment, which is supposed to be her class's main skill. She backs this up by having the fourth worst HP and ATK in the game, when every other character in those brackets is at least a Stone Wall or Glass Cannon; Mata Hari is neither. She also has the common disease of early Assassins of having a triple-Quick deck with low hit counts, only while her fellows had Presence Concealment to fall back on, she has to use Espionage A++ to boost up her star generation, raising it by up to 30%—for comparison, this puts her on par with an unbuffed Kojirou, and he has a skill to boost his by 90%. Her other skills and Noble Phantasm both rely on Charm, which has a 60% chance at most to hit and only works on men—meaning it usually won't. For all her faults, though, she does have a small niche in that she has a skill-seal baked into her third skill, making her a very cheap and usable stopgap against bosses that rely on skills, and while you'll usually want her off the field afterwards, she can throw out some pretty hefty Defense Down debuffs. Of course, even she's given up on any hope of victory. ...But a later Rank Up Quest provides some hope by buffing her first skill's star generation from 30% to 100% and making it party-wide. This alone turns it into a strong skill comparable to Caster Gilgamesh's first skill, with a shorter cooldown and added effect of increasing the party's critical damage by 50% (something Cas Gil needs to use his buffed Noble Phantasm to accomplish) suddenly give Mata Hari potential as a crit support, especially combined with her other damage-amplification abilities.
- Caligula has the unfortunate honor of being considered the worst of the free-to-play Berserkers, and a fine example of how a single missing link can doom the whole chain. With high Attack for his rarity, two strong attack buffs, and a Buster buff, he seems poised to be a budget Glass Cannon—but then his NP, inexplicably, is an Arts NP that does no damage and seals enemy skills. This means that all his buffs gets consigned to his face cards, which constrains his damage output horribly next to his fellows. On the other hand, those wanting to seal skills will find that he struggles to get up his NP due to lack of Arts cards and his natural frailty. Neither group will appreciate the fact that using his NP successfully will cause enemies to attack more often when they can't use their skills, and they'll probably kill him in one shot. To make matters worse, he was a forced support servant against a brutally difficult fight against Miyamoto Musashi and Sherlock Holmes, making him even more loathed.
Four-Star
- Stheno has very good NP gen and okay skills, but she also has weak stats and possesses a Buster NP that deals no damage with a mediocre Defense debuff and a poor chance at instant death that only works on Male enemies. Even worst is that despite how instant-kill mechanics do not work on enemy servants and major boss fights (making the mechanic more suited for minor enemies), her Noble Phantasm is a Single Target one so she can't even clear a wave of minor enemies. Throw her against enemies that aren't male, and suddenly, she effectively has only one skill. Her only real major use is based on gimmicky charm lock strategies against male bosses and providing a big attack steroid for Divine Servants (which, admittedly, is an ever-growing list, but still doesn't quite help enough). Not for nothing is she considered the archetypical "spook," showing up in the gacha instead of another Servant you really want. Her sister Euryale by contrast is Boring, but Practical because her Noble Phantasm and role as an anti-Male Archer, while Medusa, herself a victim of this trope, at least has some potential. Making matters worst is the fact that she is in on the tutorial rolls; making it very likely for new players to get her as their first SR servant (and while there are other Low-Tier Letdowns in the tutorial roll, they are nowhere near as badly gimmicky as Stheno).
- Assassin Emiya, aka Kiritsugu Emiya. While he has a fairly strong NP, great hit counts, and being a single target Arts focused Assassin when there weren't many of them, his horrible NP gain has him ranked very low. This is because he was given a powerful single target Arts NP on top of high hits on all his cards, but was given low NP gain to seemingly balance his kit and hit counts. This results in him underperforming even with Caster supports, like Tamamo or Altria Caster, because he doesn't have enough base NP gain to consistently use his NP even when buffed. He also has only ever received one buff, that being his NP via Interlude, leaving him with the very weak Magecraft skill despite it being a cornerstone of his skillset and often cited as being the most needed buff he could get. Not only that, but he also came out right after Assassin Shiki, who has the same single target Arts NP playstyle as him, but with a self-charge, unique role with her instant kill mechanic, and significantly better gain rate, meaning unless you are missing her, you have someone with a better use in the same field, and even then, Hassan of the Serenity, can be used instead for a similar, if slightly less powerful, niche, and Hassan of the Hundred Personas is outright great at it.
- Yu Mei-ren is a prime example of a good Servant who is ruined by a single demerit. At a glance she appears pretty good; she has lower attack, but incredibly high health for a 4 star Assassin, a NP gauge booster with a debuff immunity buff thrown in, a self-healing skill with a buff removal resistance buff, and a decent unique variation of Vampirism; all these combine with a Buster AOE NP that buffs her Buster damage, removes debuffs on her and curses the enemy. She is very strong at NP spamming due to her skills, which for a Assassin, is a very welcome addition. However, all her advantages fly out the window because of a single demerit in her NP: it removes her own buffs. This demerit made her almost unusable because she basically only works on stall teams, as she has to use her abilities to try and prevent the demerit. Players will eventually face a dilemma when using her: trying to spam her NP without the benefit of any buffs, or wait until she casts her buff removal resistance for at least every 5 turns, risking her life in the progress? This is especially bad because said demerit means players have to form teams around her heavily to use, and even then, because of her demerit, she can't synergize well with supports like Merlin. While she later got a buff that made the buff removal resistance go for three turns instead of one on top of giving her a solid damage buff for that time, it merely acts as a band aid for her issues, and since she has low attack for her playstyle, even with the rise of Buster focused characters that fit her playstyle, Yu is not able to stand out or offer enough to justify using her.
- Tamamo Cat has a lot of things going against her. For starters, she is in the Berserker class even though her stats and skills are meant to be for a Stone Wall character. Her second skill also has a small chance to lower her NP gauge, and even at max levels, that chance is nowhere even close to 100%. A Balance Buff tries to make the skill more useful by providing an one-time invincibility buff, but that arguably makes the skill worst as players are better off putting invincibility/evasion on a servant right before an enemy uses their Noble Phantasm, and if Tamamo Cat manages to lower a NP gauge down and you don't have a taunter (or somebody that can stun/charm the enemy) with you, then you better hope and pray that nobody ends up targeting Tamamo Cat before an enemy's Noble Phantasm gets used. Her Noble Phantasm also has some issues. Not only it is a Quick Noble Phantasm within a triple Buster deck, it also stuns her for two turns after using it. While they are also issues for Frankenstein, she makes it up by being able to perform a three-turn Skadi-loop (as long as you have either Nightingale or BB in which the latter is a welfare servant that many players have access to) while Tamamo Cat lacks the capability to perform a three-turn Skadi loop (at least not without the help of Oberon and the Hachiyou no Kagami command code
...assuming that the card with said command code shows up within the first two turns). While later upgrades try to migrate this by buffing her NP damage/overcharge effect as well as adding Debuff Immunity in one of her skills....for one turn which can bring similar issues to Yu Mei-ren prior to the Assassin servant's Rank Up Quest. All these issues led many fans to decry her as one of the weakest SR Berserkers if not the weakest. - In spite of being hyped thanks to his appearance in GUDAGUDA Yamataikoku 2020, Yamanami Keisuke set an extremely low bar for underpowered 4*s. While his skillset is at least decent enough, much like Caligula, his NP is an good example on how a terrible NP can downright kill the viability of a servant: It merely gives an ATK buff alongside a Crit Star Regen buff and also boosts the Crit damage of Shinsengumi allies. While the list of Shinsengumi allies are just good enough for him, it doesn't compensate for the fact that his kit is all over the place: Not enough viability to justify using him as a Support Party Member and not enough damage to use him as a damage dealer, not to mention, Miyu Edelfelt (who was once a letdown before her upgrade) can do his job better... and she has actually gotten a Strengthening Quest once.
Five-Star
- Orion & Artemis are often held up as one of the worst Archers in the game, primarily because both bad design choices, and being outclassed by better units at lower rarities. Artemis' main role is as a single target Arts Archer, who can buff her damage against male enemies to do more damage. While her actual damage is good between that and having a general damage buff skill, the issue is that said buff comes from a skill that only lasts one turn, not something tied directly to her NP, meaning she can do one round of good anti-male damage, before becoming weaker until said skill is ready again (5 turn cooldown). In an age where enemies have Break Bars, a single turn buff as the crutch of her skillset makes her unable to shine, made worse by her awful NP gain because of only have one hit on her Arts cards, preventing her at least having a potential refund aspect to make up for it if given dedicated Arts supports like Tamamo, Caster Altria, or Lady Avalon. Her niche is out done by Euryale, a 3 star with an anti-male NP, meaning while she's lower rarity and thus weaker, she's more consistent and able to do Artemis' job easier, with less deployment costs and resources needed by contrast. Even then, other Archers outside her niche do her job better, such as Robin Hood, Chloe, or William Tell, meaning she doesn't have a truly special role that justifies using her over someone else. All this is capped off by her infamously only ever having received one buff since her release, leaving her almost exactly as weak as she was at day one, meaning she has almost no actual role to justify using her.
- Mysterious Heroine X. Her first skill is delayed buff that stuns all enemies on the field, and it's not always going to guaranteed that all the enemies will be stunned at max ranked (and should the buff be removed, all enemies die before the end of the round, Mysterious Heroine X be killed on the field, or the stun fails, she pretty much screwed herself over) and stun chance is poor to boot. She also shares the same Instinct skill that her Alter version has (although she's given a buff where it is replaced with a skill that gives her Invulnerability). Her noticeable quirk is her third skill that allows her to deal bonus damage against Saber enemies, but she's an Assassin, meaning she deals and take normal damage when facing Sabers. Her Noble Phantasm is super niche as it deals bonus damage against a specific class of servants with a "Saberface" trait, and there are only 5 Berserkers/Riders that she can exploit her Noble Phantasm on note . Across from that, her Noble Phantasm damage is very low even when her third skill is factored when facing Saber enemies. At best, she's a good critical star generator for Archers when facing Saber enemies, and she does have the same base stats as Jack the Ripper under her awful skillset, but most of the time, the player is better off bringing another Archer to take advantage of the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors triangle. It wasn't until literally EVERY PART OF HER TOOLBOX was improved (increased NP damage, a groupwide Defense Down on top of the stun chance, an Invulnerability for a turn, and a general attack buff on her NP and respective skills) that she became a decent enough general use Assassin who can really put the hurting on her favored prey; the nature of the game is such that anti-Saberface is never going to be a bad niche to have.
- Osakabehime was presumably released as an attempt to provide a decent Quick support to match Merlin or Tamamo, but because of her stat layout, low NP gain, and oddball/weak skills, she's unable to really do much of anything for the team. Her kit doesn't really work for support because she only has one support skill, a targetable NP buff and crit star gen but it only maxes out at 20%, and while she provides a Quick buff, its tied to her Noble Phantasm instead of a skill, meaning you have to get her NP out just to have her play her intended role. Assuming she was intended to be Quick support, DW eventually gave up and released Skadi to fill the role instead. She's a popular-ish character, but sees almost no use due to being considered one of the worst SSRs in the game. Later buffs gave her NP a Buster buff and made her Shapeshift provide a teamwide crit damage buff, which did make her somewhat helpful as a purely Assassin support (a class that has trouble with Caster supports due to the class triangle), but it only made her go from useless to niche. Ironically, she works best as a solo character due to this, but even then, she's not strong enough to be worth using as a solo character unless you get more NP levels. As if to lampshade her new purpose as a solo-servant, she lost her role as a support-unit when the release of Koyanskaya of Light arrived, who not only is an Assassin, but has a powerful skillset for Buster supports, meaning that Osakabehime no longer has to serve the role of a support-assassin any longer, and giving her not only no role to play in battle, but practically admitting that using her doesn't help much.
- Nightingale is a support unit whose job is to heal, buff, and debuff with her NP (and on paper her skills and NP are such that she could be a top-tier support) but she's heavily hindered by being a Berserker, meaning she's unlikely to survive long enough to get more than one use of each of her skills out. She really needs a tank for her support to do any good and even as a Berserker and with a skill that boosts her damage, her damage is mediocre. Worse, her most useful effects eventually fell into Power Creep as her Buster buff was made completely obsolete by the addition of Merlin, who can also do a three turn Buster buff but also boosts max HP and offers a one-turn critical damage increase at the same time, to say nothing of the rest of his powerful support skillset, and her role as a servant to go against enemies with either Pierce Invincibility or buff removal on their NPs with an NP of her own that could seriously neuter enemy damage for a turn and really reduce NP damage would also be power-crept, first by the introduction and proliferation of Buff Removal Resistance, then by Caster Altria, whose Noble Phantasm applies a unique form of Invincibility that Pierce Invincibility can't penetrate. Not helping matter is that most bosses come up with debuff removal/immunity skills or ability, making it much more preferred to bring Caster Altria out instead of her (especially due to Caster Altria already having an excellent kit in the first place).
- Amakusa Shirou is disliked because players were expecting more from him after his role in Apocrypha, but he got hit hard with Redemption Demotion, and players mostly dislike his mediocre attack (which doesn't benefit from any aspect of the Class triangles outside of a very particular edge case) and one hit AoE NPnote . Even his personal Bond CE couldn't help him. He's only considered useful if you need an AoE buff removal. However, the meme regarding his inability to clear EXP hands on his own was countered when he received an NP interlude and a multi-turn Buster buff, allowing him to deal enough to clear them. Also, as the game has progressed, his true strength has started to shine in challenge quests with his ability to clear all enemy buffs, deal neutral damage and resist most enemy classes... but most of the time, he'll still be warming the bench, and the same AoE buff removal that made him powerful and unique is now unfortunately much more common (though to be fair not all of them strip all buffs on their foes before landing the NP, but removing defensive buffs before landing hit has become a more commonplace).
- Ruler Altria from Summer 4 suffers from being a Master of None. Her skills make it seem like she's supposed to be a powerful Critical Hit Class due to two of her three skills being focused on buffing her damage in some form, but her stats are that of a Stone Wall (with her attack being on par with Jeanne), making her offensive power incredibly low in spite of her buffs. Furthermore, her second skill, the most unique part of her kit, allows her to randomly change the current Command Cards to a new set, which seems like a powerful tool, but the results are totally random, can result in an okay hand being replaced with a worse one, and work against card-counting strategies, leaving her unable to use her buffs to their full potential. Even with a buff to it later that removes a selected party member's cards from appearing, on top of giving an NP gain effect for the party, she can still end up in situations where she is unable to get a good hand. In effect you have a Servant who wants to be both the main attacker and support, which results in her not being good at either. Other Rulers do her job better as well, such as Himiko and Jeanne as supports, and Summer Martha and Qin Shi Huang as attackers, while Summer BB fills a better niche as a card hand manipulator thanks to Faceless Moon's stronger effect of locking the current hand on top of crit stars per turn, and her having a better offensive kit to boot.
- Abigail Williams (Summer) had many fans of her cute design and cool animations before she came out, but in gameplay terms she's seen as the weakest from that Summer, and even in the game as a whole. From inheriting her original incarnation's weak NP gain in a single-Arts rather than a triple-Arts deck (making it harder to make up the difference with Arts chains), to low-damage area Noble Phantasm, to a weak and schizophrenic set of skills that try to make her a simultaneous damage-dealer and support but succeed at neithernote . And interest in her newly-introduced Sleep debuff fell off when people realized that a stun that's broken by damage is a fairly-weak effect in the game, and even creates anti-synergy with her Noble Phantasm. One of her only upsides is that due to having a NP battery, she actually performs well as a farmer with a double Koyanskaya of Light team and maybe with Waver/Reines post-strengthening/Oberon, and her Noble Phantasm removes defensive buffs ensuring that she deals high damage, it's still not enough to save her, as multiple units who wield defensive buff removals also exist, and they can hit harder than her.
- Captain Nemo is a useful and effective, if unremarkable, support/single-target anti-large Arts damage servant... on a water or Imaginary Space stage. Otherwise, more than half of the effects in his kit, including most effects of his Noble Phantasm, don't trigger, leaving him mediocre to bad. While it makes sense that Nemo is dependent on water, he's often seen as the nadir of stage-based design choking a character to death. While Summer Meltryllis and Zhang Jue have a skill that turn the stage into a water stage, he still gets hit with the trope since he basically needs them to function well outside of water or Imaginary Space stages while many other multiple single-target Arts Riders aren't so dependent on another servant to function well like that. Not helped by the fact that other servants with Geo Effects at least have a skill to transform the stage to match those Geo Effects completely by themselves.
- Konstantinos XI was unfortunate enough to set a new low bar for SSR Servants with undertuned kits. The majority of his power only comes through with Roman allies, which are rather rare and generally not worth building around without Romulus=Quirinus's assistance. And even then, the values of his buffs for said Roman allies aren't high enough (save for the hefty 5000 Damage Cut) to properly compete with previously existing support Servants; moreover, his defense buffs from his NP also last for a single turn (albeit with a base rate of 100%), which is obviously underwhelming, while his Skill 1, which at least can help him pumping out the NP, also only has a 1-turn effect but a 6-turn cooldown. His other main problem is that his overall skillset is rather unfocused, to the point where it asks: do you want Constantine to buff, to tank, or to die? If you want a Servant who can do the later two, you can just use Leonidas, a 2-star Servant who is much easier to roll and develop compared to Constantine being a limited 5-star.
