MMM - Adumbral Apostle Assassinates Auspicious Adversaries in Approval of Anniversary, Albeit As An Adolescent Angel of the Afterlife (Azrael)

With a BBAAQ card deck, Azrael unsurprisingly follows the current trend of having 4-hit Arts cards at a base NP gain of 0.49%, resulting in a base Arts gain of 1.96. While that’s reasonably above average for a BBAAQ card deck, his 5-hit Quick is fairly average for NP gain in spite of its high hitcount due to this, and the same goes for his 5-hit Extra and admittedly-good 4-hit Busters.

Conversely, his star generation is pretty fantastic, both due to the Assassin Class’s fantastic base star generation and his high hitcounts across the board, in spite of a lack of Quick cards. Between his above-average NP gain and superb star generation, triggering criticals will be an easy way for him to get large sums of NP gauge at once.

Skill 1

First for Azrael’s skill lineup is Angel’s Flesh. Immediately following the legacy of Anniversary Servants needing to be cracked, this skill is frankly absurd, providing a 30% Attack Up buff for 3 turns, and a plethora of defensive perks - Debuff Immunity 1 time, a 1-time 5k HP Guts, and a 2-time Evasion buff, all for 3 turns, ON TOP OF a colossal 80% gauge charge, allowing him to immediately have his NP ready regardless of CE choice with level 10 Mana Loading Append Skill.

While the gauge charge alone is fantastic, and having a damage boost is great when you’re presumably focused on dealing damage, the defensive perks on this skill are fantastic. Debuff immunity might not be as impactful given Azrael’s already great resistance to them, but having both Evasion and Guts built into the same skill means he’ll be hard to put down, and the Guts is even high enough in HP value that he might live one or two hits after coming back from it.

Given the sheer power of this skill, it unsurprisingly has a hefty 10-turn base cooldown, though said cooldown’s length is a little deceptive, which we’ll discuss very shortly.

Skill 2

Next up for his skills is 30 Birds, a bizarre skill name until I looked into the description and found out that the divine bird of Persian Mythology, Simurgh, has apparently a pun in their language that means it can also be read as “30 Birds”. The fact they put this in his skill kit is pretty hilarious, but it does mean this skill is the Divine Blessing of Simurgh, giving it far more weight.

This skill is an ally-target skill, and one whose effects diverge depending on whether it targets Azrael himself or an ally. Regardless of target, this skill will provide him with a 2-turn skill cooldown reduction and 30% Arts Up buff for 3 turns, but if it targets an ally it will provide that ally with a 30% Attack buff and 1-time, 5k HP Guts for 3 turns, as well as a 30% gauge charge. Meanwhile if used on Azrael himself it will provide a 50% Critical Damage Up buff to himself for 3 turns, and a 50-star bomb on use.

Even just the baseline effects of this skill are fantastic, the skill cooldown reduction, as I noted earlier, reduces the perceived drawbacks of his first skill, while the Arts boost is a great improvement in damage and NP gain to his primary card type. As for the divergence in his skill’s effects, you will likely use the ally targeted form of this skill most of the time - a 30% gauge charge for an ally and a boost to their survival/damage outstrips providing Azrael with more critical damage most of the time, especially if that gauge charge enables the use of a supportive NP that keeps the team alive or provides similar damage boosts to the Azrael-targeting form. Regardless, both are great benefits, depending on the exact situation.

Much like the prior skill, this has a hefty 9-turn base cooldown, but as this skill itself includes a cooldown reduction, it’s a 7-turn base cooldown in reality, so it will come off cooldown surprisingly fast.

Skill 3

Last in this skill kit is The Zaqqum Tree, a tree described in the Quran to contain torturous fruit fed to the souls residing in Hell. Lovely.

This is a debuff skill on the entire enemy, inflicting the Thirst for Death status on them first and foremost. This is a countdown-type debuff that, after 3 turns, attempts to inflict a 100% Instant Death effect on those affected, and if the Instant Death fails they are given a 50% Defense Down debuff for 1 turn. Wonderful, an Instant Death effect that is useful even if it doesn’t work. Can they do this for every other Instant Death NP and Skill in the game? No? Drat.

The more important parts of this skill are the other debuffs - a trio of other countdown debuffs that apply 3-turn Terror (40% Chance to Apply Stun at the end of each turn, then expire), 20% Defense Down for 3 turns, and 50% Death Resistance Down for 3 turns every single turn for 3 turns.

So to break that down, the affected enemies will gain a Terror debuff every single turn, which each can individually proc to Stun the target (or fail to) at the end of a turn, as well as a stacking 20% Defense Drop and 50% Death Resistance Down, adding up to 60% Defense Down and 150% Death Resistance down by the 3rd turn, at which point the Instant Death effect will apply.

It’s a complex stack of debuffs, but it’s a significant boost in damage dealt to the afflicted foes, as well as a high chance of Stun-locking them over multiple turns, if they have no Debuff Resistance.

And you want to know the really scary part of this skill? The one even I’M afraid to admit? The Instant Death chance isn’t negligible. Usually when a Servant focuses on this gimmick they have very minor boosts to the Instant Death chance, and the effect of Instant Death itself might be a 80% or 60% chance at base. A 100% application rate that’s boosted by 150% Resistance down, plus the 30% that Azrael can apply multiple times with his Arts cards? Even again Gold rarity NPC targets, that results in a death chance that could…actually happen. The baseline death rate of 20% that Gold rarity enemies will have is multiplied by usually 180-210%, becoming a roughly 40% chance of instant death, while enemies of lower rarity will assuredly die. Meanwhile, “miniboss” type NPCs tend to have a Death Rate of 1%, meaning you have a roughly 2% chance of killing them. It’s not likely, but hey, that’s about the odds of rolling an SSR in the gacha, it’ll happen eventually, right?

…You still will never land Instant Death on a Servant enemy, but in those cases the Defense Downs are probably more important regardless - Gauge Breaks prevent Instant Death from being that impactful anyway.

Considering the long-lasting impact of this skill, its 8-turn base cooldown is pretty scary. At max skill level with Azrael’s 2-turn skill cooldown reduction factored in, it’s a 4-turn cooldown, meaning it only has a 1-turn downtime for the first skill rotation, or no downtime at all if you max his Skill Cooldown Append Skill. And boy, is that important because…

Azrael’s NP, Malak al-Mawt, is very dependent on the Thirst for Death debuff being live. This is an Arts ST NP, so I’ll be covering his capability for NP looping, but I’ll get into the effects first.

Before dealing damage, Azrael gets a 10% NP Strength Up buff for 3 turns (scaling with Overcharge), then dishes out his damage, with a Super-Effective +50% damage modifier against targets with Thirst for Death active. After that, he applies a 200% Instant Death Chance, and if it succeeds, he gains 50% NP gauge.

The most notable components of this NP are the ones that don’t touch the Instant Death mechanic at all - a ramping damage boost to his NP that even gets Overcharge scaling, and an inherent effective damage modifier that goes gaga in the damage calculator and it’s basically always going to be active, due to how long the uptime is on the Thirst for Death debuff. While the instant death stuff is probably useful in ST farming nodes where you won’t always be hitting Minibosses or Servants with absurdly low Death Rates (though Azrael’s focus on debuffs isn’t really oriented for farming at all), it’s really there because it’s thematically cool and the Grand Servant Duel version of Azrael also had that effect.

So let’s examine the damage output and refund a little - on the first turn, an Azrael with no outside support is dishing out 66k damage on a neutral target, very impressive for a NP1 Servant with no NP upgrade. On subsequent turns, the damage output starts building up significantly, becoming 82k on turn 2, and 100k on turn 3. Even when Azrael’s normal 3-turn buff period expires, the defense drops and NP Strength Up buffs he has from repeated NP’s will linger, meaning his damage output remains scarily consistent.

On the matter of refund, his NP with just his own buffs live will refund around 11% NP gauge, a reasonable amount for a single-target NP. Between the supportive buffs of Castoria and/or Archer of Apocalypse (whose skill cooldown reduction synergizes very well with Azrael), you can get something in the range of 25-30% gauge refund from his NP, depending on overkill/overgauge.

And needless to say, Azrael’s capability to run Black Grail in all circumstances due to his gauge charger means his damage output starts getting absurd with a proper supportive setup and fou/append skill investment - his NP starts hitting in excess of 400k damage against neutral targets, and he’s one of the few Servants who can hit in excess of 1 million damage with class advantage on the regular, without relying on Oberon buffs. He’s just that absurd.