I actually don't think this is a hot take lol. I think what you're saying is right. A hot take going off that would be what is even the point of this game outside of the story when you can use the same 3 servants to pretty much do everything? I'm not saying I particularly agree with that take, but it was the first thought that came to my mind after reading your post.
Listen, I'm trying not to get in trouble here.
3 would probably be inconvenient, but 5? Get a Castoria, Koyan, Oberon, your flavor of Merlin or Reines and a universal AOE with decent skills/NP and now you're cooking. :X
I don't know that I would be that harsh, I appreciate the fact that it's really difficult to balance a game with literally hundreds of playable characters where each player is going to have vastly different resources available to them at any given point in time. I think they occasionally do a good job of making content that incentivizes certain approaches and types of servants more than others. If the player chooses to fall back on the same strategy over and over again, even when it might not be the optimal option, that's kind of on them at that point.
Sts and even non offensive np servants have their place still in shit.
While yes I do take Junie for a lot of content, I also always have my 120 Kintoki or QSH ready to take over just in case Junie bites it, which usually he does because he's a zerker even with a built in guts lol.
My Goghie has also put in more work for me than some aoes against zerker bosses as she was how I beat Morgan.
Not to mention even with aoes you can't just brute force some fights like all the memorial cqs have been way harder even with meta units like Junie.
My main point of contention atm in regards to STs isn't that they're bad per se, but simply that the types of content where they excel at aren't plentiful. I'd liken it to how some items were designed in pre-BOTW Zelda games where their usage falls off immensely after the one dungeon they were designed for. Like, sure, you can still use the twilight princess beyblade at a couple other spots outside the Arbiter's Grounds, but it's so few and far between compared to the items you'll actually be using frequently on your journey that it feels severely underutilized.
If we were to categorize FGO into different modes such as "farming", "story", "bosses", "CQs" and "Grail Front", then the distribution between AOE and ST-centered modes would look roughly like:
Farming - AOE centered, small niche for ST.
Story - Not particularly centered towards either in theory. In practice, most nodes contains trash mobs that are more efficiently disposed by AOE servants.
Bosses - Used to be ST centric, bit of a toss-up these days. I'll be generous and say, like, 7 to 3 in favor of STs but this is by no means a rigorous appraisal lol
CQs - Same as above, though I feel like they lean slightly more AOE nowadays. Looking at teslafest we have: 4 quests that don't favor either, 11 that are better suited for AOE, 9 for STs, 6 that are debatable... Let's call it 50-50 and leave it at that. I'll leave the additional note here that, in my experience, AOEs have an easier time clearing ST-centric CQs than STs have clearing AOE quests, but that's largely anecdotal.
Grail Front - Depends on the layout of the map and how you approach it, as there are cases where AOEs can break multiple servants in a single turn, and HP pools are small. But STs perform naturally well here with the 1-on-1 approach so I'll throw them a bone and say Grail Front incentivizes ST for the most part.
As it stands in NA, 4 of those modes are temporary and in very limited supply. Farming is the only permanent mode of game we have, and it is AOEs' home turf. Events are largely farming centric with laughably easy story fights, and fests happen only once every year. The one CQ we get for the usual event is, as argued above, a toss-up on whether or not it'll cater to single target units. You mentioned using ST servants as the clean-up crew, which can be a legitimate use case for them, but it doesn't feel like a very desirable role to be stuck with. Ideally I want to use them as the main stars, not as the emergency Herc that comes out at the last second to deliver the finishing blow or clutch it out. These days I tend to rely more on 1 DPS with a conga line of supporters, but in the specific cases where I do bring up a clean-up servant just in case, often times they don't even come out to play :T
So their niches are much more limited than AOE servants.
It's not so much a balance issue as it is a content design problem. Start making more modes and quests that encourage using single target servants regularly and the problem disappears. Emphasis on
regularly. Dantes 2 just released and he seems extremely strong for high difficulty quests, and yet, I was checking some JP-language discussions and I saw a lot of comments from people complaining that he doesn't offer "optimal performance" and saying that he's disappointing... Because he's not good at farming. I even saw someone specifically mention that "hard content is only once a year", therefore there's no reason to roll for him unless you like him. Which, I mean... It seems insane to call a servant like him "not good enough", but they're not wrong if you're looking at it in the perspective of "does he excel at 99% of FGO's actual content?". That's the game Lasengle has been making for a long time. For these players the count isn't good enough in a world where Kintoki exists, not because the latter is a CQ beast with an insane kit or whatever, it's just because he is extremely efficient at the one job you'd most need a ST servant for in JP, which is 90++ farming lol
I find that hard to believe if you're talking strictly NP...
A super whale Muramasa with the best supports barely beats out an average Saito with 1 support Castoria, a welfare and a 3 star.....
NP5 Level 120 Muramasa vs
NP3 Level 90 Saito in the first 90++ we get during Summer 7. (And this is with a 50% charge damage CE)
Muramasa (Double Castoria & Oberon) vs Saito (Support Castoria, Hohenheim & Summer Da Vinci)
Wave 1 485k vs 823k
Wave 2 607k vs 895k
Wave 3 1.3m vs 1.1m
Try it yourself this Summer, a Saito that is invested nearly as much as the above Muramsa can clear this 90++ node without the damage CE or Black Grail....
Anyway Muramasa is not really a good example of a strong aoe servant in this day and age... and even Godjuna NP5 is well under Draco NP1 against any 7 servants bosses. And Single Target matters a lot more now in 2024 versus 2022, plenty of 90++ Event nodes, multicore, Ordeal Call 90++ nodes/cqs, a lot more advandced quests etc.
People aren't rolling Draco, Summer Castoria and in 30 odd minutes the newest FGO servant just because they're waifu's or husbando's, they're top tier for a reason.
I was talking about CQ performance, which isn't strictly tied to NP damage. Obviously Saitou deals higher numbers at that (but less on face cards factoring in Muramasa's 100% crit mod). I can only tell you that I used both in two CQs from last year, and specifically noted that Muramasa cleared them in less turns much to my surprise (something like 11 or 12 turns vs 7 for one of the quests, I don't remember the gap for the other). I couldn't tell you which quests those were because I've forgotten, it's been a while and I've barely been paying attention to FGO this past year. That might've been a fluke, RNG or just bad prep, but the fact it was that close when comparing a best-in-class ST against a "not really strong AOE servant these days" seems a little damning to me. This isn't to say Saitou is bad or whatever, he's my favorite shinsengumi dude, I'm just saying his job as a single target boss slayer has been put in jeopardy twice by a guy who isn't even tuned for that lol. And Muramasa already has a
much broader use case as a regular in my farming comps whereas Saitou only comes out to play every once in a while.
I can't speak about the state of JP because I don't play it, so my complaints are for the state of the game in NA as is. I'll see in two years if it gets better because I would really like to have an excuse to use my single target servants way more often than I do.
