Fate/Grand Order: the class chart, and the Berserker exception

Fate/Grand Order's class chart is usually drawn as a wheel, which is a good picture and a bad reference. The underlying data is a plain matrix of attack multipliers — attacker down the side, defender across the top — and reading it as a matrix makes two things obvious that the wheel obscures.

The table

The first thing the matrix shows: there are two triangles, not one

The top-left block is the knight triangle — Saber beats Lancer, Lancer beats Archer, Archer beats Saber. The middle block is the cavalry triangle — Rider beats Caster, Caster beats Assassin, Assassin beats Rider.

And the two blocks are entirely neutral to one another. Every knight-versus-cavalry cell reads 100%. A Saber against a Rider is a plain fight, with no advantage in either direction.

Half of the chart is empty. The class you bring only matters against the three classes in its own triangle — and against Berserkers.

This is worth internalising because it changes what "wrong class" costs. Bringing a Caster to a Saber node is not a mistake; it is neutral. Bringing a Lancer to a Saber node is a real mistake, because you are attacking into a 50% wall.

The second thing: Berserker is not on the chart, it is a trade

Against the ordinary classes Berserker deals 150% to everything and takes 200% from everything. It has no advantage and no disadvantage in the ordinary sense; it has a fixed exchange rate. The exceptions are all in the Extra classes: it deals only 50% to Foreigner and to Beast (Sodom’s Beast/Draco), 100% to Shielder and Beast (Ereshkigal), and it takes 100% rather than 200% from those same two. Berserker against Berserker is 150%, not 200%.

Look down the Berserker column and every class above it deals 200%. Look along the Berserker row and it deals 150% to all of them. So a Berserker attacking a Saber does 150%, and that Saber attacking back does 200%.

That asymmetry — you hit for 1.5×, you get hit for 2× — is the entire design of the class. It is a damage class that is losing the exchange on paper and wins anyway, because in most of the game you kill the enemy before the exchange completes. Which is precisely why Berserkers stop being safe in fights that last, and why an enemy Berserker is the single most efficient thing you will ever face.

The practical corollary

Against a Berserker enemy, every class in your box is equally advantaged (200%). So the class-advantage question disappears entirely and the choice collapses to raw damage output and survivability. This is the one node type where you should ignore the chart and bring your strongest servant, not your best-typed one.

How the roster distributes across the classes

The seven core classes are supplied remarkably evenly — 47 to 59, a spread of twelve servants across the whole chart. That is deliberate: an uneven supply would make one triangle corner structurally harder to fill.

The interesting number is the last row. One hundred and four servants — roughly a fifth of the roster — sit outside the seven classes the chart above draws. The Extra classes run their own relations, and the seven-class triangle does not describe them. It is no longer the end of the story, though: the full matrix we carry is sixteen classes wide, covering every class the roster actually fields — Shielder, Ruler, Alter Ego, Avenger, Moon Cancer, Foreigner, Pretender and both Beasts. If you are looking at an Avenger or a Foreigner, the class affinity page has your row; this guide explains the seven-class core the rest is built around.

What the chart does not decide

Class advantage is a flat multiplier on damage. It sits alongside — not above — attribute affinity, Noble Phantasm cards, buff stacking and the specific traits an enemy carries. A 200% class advantage is large, but a servant with the right trait bonuses and a well-built damage stack will routinely out-damage a class-advantaged one that has neither.

The right way to use the table is as an elimination tool: it tells you which servants are attacking into a 50% wall, and those should come out of the lineup before you compare anything else.