MMM - Wicked Waterside Wastrels use Womanly Wiles to Weave Weird Wants unto Witless Wizards (Summer 2026 Part 2)

With a BAAQQ card deck and a base NP gain of 0.54%, Lilith’s 4-hit Arts cards produce a well-above-average 2.16 base Arts gain - nothing spectacular, but definitely more NP gauge off her Arts cards than most Servants of the same card deck can get. Her other cards are also great for NP gain, with her 5-hit Quicks providing a lot of NP gauge in concert with her Riding passives, and her Extra card of the same hitcount being roughly average in spite of her high hitcounts across the board, usually a sign of a poor Extra card.

As you might expect from a Quick-focused Rider with such high hitcounts, Lilith’s star generation is superb, with all of her non-Arts cards contributing a notable sum of stars to quickly be absorbed back by her Rider Star Weight to become crits. The combination of the Rider class and strong star generation causes a domino effect that results in significantly better NP gain, since Lilith is almost guaranteed to get the lion’s share of critical stars produced by the party.

Skill 1

The first of Lilith’s skills, Dreaming of the Rampaging Storm, is a rather simple one overall. It fills the standard checklist for an SSR Servant, providing a 50% gauge charge to Lilith herself on use, but it also has two more abnormal effects to find an offensive Servant.

Of those two, the 2-hit, 3-turn Evasion buff to the team is the more conventionally useful, protecting the whole team from potentially-lethal damage for a dependable sum of time. I don’t often talk about this, but due to the nature of the top supportive units (Castoria, Merlin, Tiamat Archer, ect.) providing Invincible or Anti-Enforcement Defense as their defensive tool, providing Evasion to the team as an offensive Servant is technically optimal, as defensive buffs like these of the same type won’t stack. Being able to place this Evasion buff behind Tiamat Archer’s Invincible buff and have it persist for the full 3 turns means it’s particularly great, even if it’s more likely the enemy can ignore it via Sure Hit.

The other effect, applying a 3-turn Confusion debuff to every enemy, is far more unconventional. I often call Skill Seal the most useless effect in player hands in the game, due to how it doesn’t really provide much of an advantage, just preventing enemies from expending their turn firing off a skill, and instead attacking you for a potentially more dangerous result. However, more recently, I find it’s not as bad as I’ve made it out to be. And funnily enough, that’s due to the powercreep of FGO on the whole. In 2016, if an enemy story boss spent a turn using a skill, the worst case was, say, Berserker Cu using their Protection From Arrows skill, a nuisance that can slow you down, but can also be played around, but the best case was someone like Caster Gilles using their un-upgraded Aesthetic Appreciation, a skill that literally did nothing impactful.

Back when the biggest danger to your party was eating a Buster Critical from an enemy Berserker, giving them more attacks in a turn to get that chance was objectively bad. But in the modern state of FGO, enemy bosses will often have skills that charge their NP gauge to provide a level of unpredictability, gain a wide array of annoying buffs, or plaster your entire party with crippling NP gauge reductions, NP Seals, and so on. As the power of individual Skills, especially those unique to boss encounters, goes up, Skill Seal becomes much more handy. With all that in mind, Confusion isn’t useful MOST of the time, but when you do want a target slapped with a Skill Seal on the regular, it’s great to have.

The more important part about this Confusion debuff, though, is…well, we’ll talk about it soon enough. The bottom line is, this is an 8-turn base cooldown skill that provides a handful of useful effects, so it’ll be back online to assist once more rather quickly.

Skill 2

Next up is Smiling at the Descending Night. This skill takes the form of Lilith’s dual-card buff skill, but it’s also a team support buff, huzzah!

This skill provides a trio of 20% Quick and Arts Up, as well as 30% Critical Damage Up, to the team for 3 turns. This alone is a fairly standard, if underpowered, form of team buffs, but it also has a bonus effect, providing a 20% Attack Up buff to the team for 3 turns if the field is Darkness. You’re unlikely to find a way to set up this field effect yourself, given only Louhi is capable of making the field Darkness at will, but on the plus side, it’s one of the most common field types in the game - any time you have a quest at night, or in a dark cave or building, this field type applies, so you’re often likely to get the benefits, especially in climactic story battles where the surroundings are likely enveloped in darkness. It’s just a recurring trope.

So it’s a decent team buff, if not as strong as I’d like it to be. With the correct field type it certainly pulls its weight, but without that it is a bit mediocre. The base 8-turn cooldown does mean it comes up at the same time as her prior skill, but it’d be nice if it had a shorter cooldown for its power level.

Skill 3

Rounding off Lilith’s skill kit is Fading into Ephemeral Love. As you might have noticed, this skill kit has a rather poetic wordplay theme, and I just think it’s neat.

First and foremost, this skill provides you with an option upon use, a question that I think everyone has asked themselves at some point - “Should I kill myself?”

…Okay, maybe not everyone, but just don’t ask that question to LowTierGod…or Mashu, given whose skill this is. If you select yes, Lilith slaps herself with an unremovable 1-time, 3-turn (de?)buff that kills her after she uses her NP.

As I’ve said in prior MMM’s, the ability to kill oneself and take yourself off the playing field is actually something of a positive, especially when it’s optional like this one. If you only want to land a single hard-hitting NP with Lilith and tag her out (which can come up in farming scenarios), you get a means to do so for free.

But the more significant part of this skill is, y’know, the sheer positives, so let’s look into them. First of all she has a 100% Chance to apply Charm to every enemy for 1 turn, an exceptionally useful defensive tool that can steal a full turn from the enemy if the debuff lands. Paired with that, Lilith provides a host of excellent supportive effects - a 20% NP Strength Up buff to the team for 3 turns, as well as 20% gauge charge and a 1-turn Skill cooldown reduction for the team.

Even putting the self-killing gimmick out the window, this skill provides some absolutely insane supportive utility, providing further offensive steroids for Lilith’s NP, as well as improving her overall gauge charge to 70%, on top of accelerating the whole team’s skill cooldowns.

It’s part of the reason why I’m not entirely sold on the self-sacrifice play being the best option for Lilith. Unlike Arash or some other similar Servants, Lilith has some excellent team support tools that you lose for good if she gets yeeted out to bring in a fresh Servant, especially since her skill cooldowns are all 1 turn shorter than they appear. All-in-all, this skill is incredibly good, providing new avenues to utilize Lilith, as well as providing an excellent array of supportive effects on a 9-turn (essentially 8-turn) base cooldown.

To round off this entire kit is Lilith Rider’s NP, Siara Naarat Fullburn. I spent a good few minutes digging through wikipedia and translating stuff to and from Hebrew to figure out what this means, but I ended up stumped, so take it as it is. Well, besides the “Fullburn” part, that’s clear.

This is a Quick AOE NP, so naturally we’ll delve into the looping potential, but the effects here are very important, so let’s dig through them first.

Before dealing damage, this NP applies both Invincible Pierce and a 50% Effective Damage buff against Confusion-inflicted foes to Lilith for 1 turn. Given her ability to slap Confusion on every enemy from her first skill, this is an absurdly good damage boost if she’s continually striking the same array of enemies…which seems to be a common theme for Servants this Summer. The Invincible Pierce is also naturally superb for difficult content, ensuring her most important damage turns will strike past the most important defensive buffs bosses might have packing.

Following that is the damage, with a +50% Effective Damage modifier (scaling with Overcharge) against Charmed foes, yet another directly beneficial effective damage bonus, and one that stacks multiplicatively with other buffs, and is boosted further by Overcharge. Somehow that’s not all, either, as Lilith also applies a 20% Defense Down debuff to all enemies for 3 turns, further adding to the narrative that this Summer is just the debuff-stacking for ramping damage Summer.

The very notable thing I immediately caught because of this NP’s effects is that Lilith Rider has an incredible synergy with Jeunesse Crane, the Summer form of Miss Crane from the prior Summer. While Lilith herself can only benefit from the Charm and Confusion damage bonuses for 1 wave of enemies, Jeunesse Crane not only provides a secondary source of Confusion and Charm for her to take advantage of, but also boosts the success rate of Mental Debuffs, provides some supportive buffs to further improve Lilith’s damage output, and even provides further healing, critical stars, and NP gain from her passives. It’s a match made in heaven, and certainly worth considering if you’d like a lower-cost supportive option for Lilith.

Tangents aside, let’s inspect Lilith’s damage output. With all her skills used on the first turn, her NP is hitting for 44.5k damage neutral. Yeah, that’s…essentially the damage you would expect from a single-target NP, not an AOE one. Putting it this way is a little deceptive, since the Charm effective damage is doing a lot of heavy lifting - without it, her NP is dealing 30k, and without that or the Confusion bonus damage, it’s a rather pitiful 21k neutral. That will certainly matter for farming scenarios, but at the very least the Confusion bonus damage will be persistent in difficult content, so her damage output remains high there.

As for the refund, it’s a much more modest 13% with just her own buffs in play. Far from the best Quick AOE Servants can get in refund, but it’s likely enough to work, as I’ll show with the farming numbers now.

In a standard double Summer Skadi setup with a 50% NP gauge CE, Lilith will get sufficient refund to perform a 3-turn farming loop if you bring a 20% gauge charge Mystic Code, or better yet, Atlas Uniform for its skill cooldown reduction with the Skill Cooldown Reduction Append skill to get her first 2 skills off cooldown on the 3rd turn of the loop, which also completes the farming loop. I’ll be doing the latter, since the reliability is better. In such a setup, she’s dealing 88k damage neutral on wave 1, 105k on wave 2, and 107k damage on wave 3. The damage output is oddly consistent because you’re trading between her various Effective damage bonuses on each wave (Confusion on wave 1, Charm on wave 2, Confusion again on wave 3), and never getting both at once.

While I do think there is a way to get a consistent Black Grail setup with Lilith, it requires a lot of busywork with a combo of Summer Skadi and using Tiamat Archer’s NP in a way that isn’t likely enough damage to be worth the time and effort, but I figured I should mention it exists. With that in mind, the damage output from her standard setup isn’t sufficient for universal farming, but is more than enough to farm class advantage farming nodes, and that is pretty impressive given her kit is so clearly focused on tackling difficult content to begin with.

Packing a base NP gain of 0.71%, the singular 3-hit Arts card in Alter’s deck combines with it for a base Arts gain of 2.3, after her Territory Creation is factored in. This edges a little above average for a single-Arts card deck, but Alter’s NP gain on her regular cards really excels on her other cards. Her 5-hit Buster cards actually are reasonably good for NP gain, producing 3.5% NP gauge apiece with the Arts chain bonus, while her single Quick card with the same hitcount is similarly excellent. Alter’s Extra card is also above-average, meaning she doesn’t really feel the drawbacks of her Arts/Quick-lacking card deck on the whole.

As you might expect from those hitcounts, Alter’s star generation is also superb. Her class’s base star generation is abysmal, but the high hitcounts she has across the board more than compensate, resulting in, yet again, her not really feeling the drawbacks of her card deck.

Skill 1

First in order for Alter’s skills is…Mounting Menu! Once again, this skill is making me shout its name!

A mirror of the Summer Kingprotea’s skills, and that’s a theme you should get used to, this skill takes up the alignment Effective Damage that her sister missed out on, as Alter provides an Effective Damage buff to the team against Neutral Alignment foes, 30% for herself, and 20% for the rest of the team over 3 turns. She also applies a 20% Attack buff at the same time to the team for the same duration.

Any alignment-based effective damage is solid to have, though Alter does get the least ideal of the options, as Neutral is the least common of the 3 alignments on the Good-Evil scale, while also being very uncommon on NPC-only enemies compared to the other two. The odds of running into said alignment when fighting any Servant is still roughly 25%, and it’s great that Alter’s teammates also get to reap the benefits, but it’s not the greatest trait to target in the world. The Attack buff at least provides a damage boost that will always be live, though.

With those caveats out the way, the real benefit to this skill is a 50% gauge charge, as if an SSR Servant would ever lack it. So Alter gets to have her NP ready in a flash as well as provide the team with a bundle of offensive buffs, it’s a fairly good skill. The 8-turn base cooldown is typical given its overall power.

Skill 2

Continuing with that mirrored skill theme, we have Insect Steal next. This one is genuinely quite interesting on a number of levels, so I’ll get right into it.

For the more standard effects, this skill provides a 20% Buster Up buff and 15-stars per turn buff to Alter herself for 3 turns, as well as a 15 star bomb on use. The immediate boost to her Buster cards’ damage and fuel for crits synergizes well with her focus on Buster crits, and remains a solid boost to her overall NP damage.

The first of the more interesting effects is Protection of the Giant, a special buff Alter applies to herself for 3 times, 3 turns, that acts as a team Invincible for all allies but herself. While that means it’s great for blocking AOE attacks (and it should, on paper, stack with other Invincible buffs?) It also leaves Alter herself vulnerable to those same attacks - and her death means no more protection for the team. I’ll also make note that a 3-time Invincible buff for the team sounds great, but since this is a singular buff on Alter herself, it will count down once for each individual attack against EITHER other ally. So compared to say, a 300% Overcharge Castoria NP, this is blocking essentially half as many non-AOE attacks as that would.

Meanwhile the other interesting component to this skill is a NP gauge drain against every enemy, and one that provides Alter with 20% gauge charge for each gauge drained that way. While the idea of hypothetically using this in a 6-enemy battle for 120% gauge charge tickles me, it’s harder to reap a heavy benefit from this skill than you’d think, especially outside of difficult content. Few enemies enter the field with their gauge already charged, and never in farming scenarios, so even getting a benefit out of this effect means leaving enemies alive for at least one turn. On top of all this, this skill has clear offensive benefits you want to net immediately on the first turn, at which point no enemy would have a NP gauge to drain. It’d naturally be far better on the second and successive uses in a drawn-out battle, but it remains hard to use regardless.

Putting those gripes aside, this is a team support skill with a decent degree of offensive boosts for Alter herself, so it remains a useful tool, especially with its 8-turn base cooldown.

Skill 3

Lastly is easily the more intriguing skill of Alter’s kit - Tyrant Baby. Okay, maybe not the baby play implications, but certainly the game-play ones.

This skill provides Alter with an impressive 3-turn Debuff Immunity, yet again like her counterpart, but also gains an array of buffs that encourage her to go absolutely beast mode on the opposition.

Gaining a 20% Effective Damage against non-Supergiant foes (so basically everything) for 1 turn, she also reshuffles the card order to only contain her own cards for 1 turn, similar to U-Olga Marie or Ciel. This all also comes with a buff that provides her with 5 Critical Stars whenever she uses a Buster card for 3 turns, so the writing really is on the wall to use these benefits to unleash a devastating Buster crit chain, and fuel future ones with the continual star supply.

The actual offensive boosts from this skill on paper aren’t really that high, but the value lies in the ability to set up the fabled Buster Crit chain whenever you’re ready for it, while also getting a decent damage boost on that turn. The Debuff Immunity effect is also fantastic, and just cements how this skill is really to be used in the more difficult, single-target fights that this game has to offer. With an 8-turn base cooldown, this skill is perfectly aligned with the remainder of Alter’s skill kit, ensuring that all three can be used in sync.

Wrapping up Alter’s whole kit is, naturally, her NP. Rakshasa King Pit is a Buster ST NP (the first non-looping NP of this Summer, praise be to Alaya), with a number of effects to run through.

This thing does a lot before dealing damage, but the most interesting of which is its unique effect - before damage, Alter will “use up” all of your Master Skills (your Mystic Code skills, if it weren’t clear), putting them on a 2-turn cooldown if they were not on cooldown already, and gaining a 20% NP Strength Up buff for 1 turn for each Skill put on cooldown this way, to a maximum of 60%. This creates an interesting dynamic, given that continually using Alter’s NP will essentially turn off your Mystic Code skills on repeat, or at least on a 3-turn cycle until you decide to use their actual effects.

The damage boost provided is probably stronger than the offensive benefits actually using those skills could provide, especially at the frequency Alter can re-use them, but for utility-based Mystic Code skills, having them on cooldown at an important moment to use a gauge charger or defensive effect could have devastating consequences. I suppose it’s also of note that in the numerous difficult pieces of content where your Master Skill cooldowns are accelerated (I think Grand Duels have this, for example), then the “used up” Skills will be available on the very next turn, I think? This is a very abnormal effect so I can’t really anticipate how it works on more niche interactions.

Point being, it’s a big and frequent damage boost at a bit of a hefty cost. And it’s hardly the only damage boost on this skill - Alter also gets a 20% NP Strength Up buff for 1 turn if at a Near Water or City battlefield, further improving her damage output in somewhat niche scenarios beyond this exact Summer event.

The remaining effects are thankfully more generalistic - Alter gets a 30% Critical Damage Up buff for 1 turn before dealing damage, scaling with Overcharge, and her NP itself ignores enemy Defense buffs, after all which she finally applies a 20% Attack Down debuff for 3 turns to the target.

The specific mechanics of this thing are abnormal, but the general goal is much the same as what Alter’s kit has built up for - generate critical stars, set up a huge Buster critical chain, use her NP to make it punch even harder. With her own buffs in play and getting that hefty 60% NP Strength Up buff, her NP is dealing 68.5k damage neutral, very much in competition with the better ST Avengers out there. What’s harder to measure is how often she’ll get the anti-Neutral alignment Effective Damage or benefit from a hefty Buster Critical chain, but when the time comes those will certainly hurt, too.

With a base NP gain of 0.48% and a BAAQQ card deck, Komachi’s 4-hit Arts cards produce a base Arts gain of 1.92. A decent bit above the average for her card deck, Komachi’s Arts cards may be good, but it comes at the cost of her Quick cards - the 3-hit cards producing a really pitiful quantity of NP gauge, while her very average 5-hit Extra card hardly helps matters either.

In a similar vein, Komachi’s star generation is very mediocre. Her Quick cards’ low hitcounts (relatively speaking) also hampers her capability for stargen, so only really Brave chains from her will produce a solid quantity of stars. As an Archer she’ll be able to easily absorb the stars that do crop up from her attacks, but there’s a limit to how far that will take her.

Let’s get into the skill kit, shall we? First up is Midsummer Shoujo Manga Fair, a team support skill that is as straightforward as you can get.

This skill provides the team with 20% Quick Up and Arts Up for 3 turns, on top of a 20% gauge charge for the whole team. That’s it, that’s all.

For an incredibly simple skill, those are some great effects to have, providing a boost to Komachi’s primary card types, and 20% team gauge charge is always fantastic team support that she can also reap the benefits of. Simple but good is fine by me, and the 8-turn base cooldown, as my only complaint, is maybe 1 turn longer than this skill could easily be.

Keeping with the theme of team support, Komachi’s next skill is Summertime Lovers (Assist), the best skill for playing cupid while dad offers some specialty assistance.

This skill is another straightforward but potent supportive skill, providing a 20% NP Strength Up buff and 10% NP gauge per turn buff to the team for 3 turns, both getting them to their NP’s faster and improving their damage output as they do.

And if those two perks weren’t enough, Komachi also provides a +100% Overcharge buff to the team for 1 time, 3 turns, allowing you to use the potent boosts from NP Overcharge at the same time. Between this skill and the prior one, Komachi is already bringing a whopping 50% gauge charge to the team from her array of buffs, as well as a notable boost to the offensive power of Quick/Arts NPs. Those benefits on an SR’s deployment points are great to have at your disposal, and Komachi naturally can use them for her own offensive capabilities, too. This skill also comes at a base cooldown of 8 turns, matching her prior skill’s cooldown.

Last on the skill list is not just a Skill, but also a mantra to follow - All Things in Moderation is, funnily, anything but moderate.

The first selfish skill in Komachi’s kit, this skill provides her with a 3-time Invincible buff, 50% Critical Strength Up, and 15 Critical Stars per turn for 3 turns, a combo of benefits that improves her durability to an absurd degree, provides a heavier payoff to her Critical Attacks, and the fuel for those crits to happen.

If it were just those benefits, this skill would be great for rounding out Komachi’s damage output and durability, but this skill also has a 30% gauge charge for Komachi herself tied to it, bringing her overall gauge charging capabilities to absurd levels for an SR Servant - 50% gauge charge for the whole team, and 80% for herself. In combination with some of the stronger support options and their own gauge charging skills, the whole team will not have to worry about charging their NP with Komachi around.

It’s frankly pretty shocking that this skill is also on a 8-turn cooldown, given its power. Having all of Komachi’s skills on the same cooldown is great to ensure her skills come back online at once, and their overall power is solid for that length of downtime.

Bringing Komachi’s entire kit to a head is her NP - Akugou Shoukan - Enma Hou-Ou. A mouthful of a NP name to be sure, but turning your own papa into the Judge of the Damned is metal AF, and I’m all for it.

This is a Quick AOE NP, so we’ll have to assess Komachi’s farming capabilities, but the effects are very worth delving into:

Before dealing damage, Komachi gets a duo of very useful offensive buffs - 10-30% NP Strength Up (Scaling with Overcharge) for 3 turns, and a 50% Effective Damage against Evil Alignment buff for 1 turn. Having a ramping damage buff built into your NP which scales with Overcharge is great on its own, but the anti-Evil effectiveness is also fantastic. Evil alignment is probably the best alignment to target in the game given how common it is in story boss fights, and any given Servant has something like a 35% chance to be Evil, meaning you’ll benefit from this bonus often in farming scenarios, too.

Following that, Komachi dishes out her damage to all enemies, with a +50% Effective Damage modifier built in against Human attribute foes. As I often like to say, Attribute-based effective damage is the best reasonable Effective damage bonus in the game, and of those, Earth and Human attributes are easily the best to target. While Earth attribute has the lion’s share of NPC-only foes, and particularly those used as “miniboss” foes in farming waves like dragons, Human attribute is the one to go for if you want to slaughter Servants, with roughly 40% of Servants in the game being Human attribute. Between those two effective damage boosts at her disposal, this NP will hit very hard against a wide portion of Servants in the game, though the specific overlap of Human attribute and Evil alignment is surprisingly small.

That’s hardly the end of her NP’s effects, though, as she also inflicts a 1k Burn debuff and Spreading Fire (+100% to Burn damage) to all enemies for 3 turns. The actual bonus this provides to damage output is rather minor, but it might add up over prolonged fights with multiple shots of this NP in the mix.

With that all in mind, let’s inspect the damage output and refund. With her own buffs active, Komachi’s NP is doing a pretty miserable 17.2k damage neutral as a baseline, her own lack of an Attack Up buff hampering her overall damage output. With the Evil alignment damage bonus, it jumps to 23.6k, or 25.8k with her anti-Human attribute bonus, and a very respectable 35k if you hit both.

The refund is a more contentious point. With her own buffs active, the refund against 3 foes comes out to only 8% NP gauge, a pitiful amount to work with, even when you have supports improving her refund.

So let’s look at the farming performance. I’ve done a rough number crunch and I believe Komachi, in spite of her poor refund, can perform a farming loop with double Tiamat Archer and a 50% starting NP gauge CE. And the damage output is…something. On wave 1, she’s dealing about 48k neutral, followed up by 61k on wave 2, then around 92k on wave 3, depending on your Mystic Code option. As you can probably tell, this damage output is pretty abysmal, and only functions against enemies whom Komachi has class advantage.

However, it’s a bit of an unfair take, given I’m not factoring in Komachi’s effective damage. It likely won’t come into play against the wave 1 and 2 NPCs, but for the Servant boss of a farming node, hitting a Human-attribute Servant will boost her wave 3 damage to 138k neutral, a much more devastating level of damage. The problem remains that the way her NP loop pans out, she has to prioritize getting maximal NP gauge charging at the cost of damage output, so she can struggle to kill the first 2 waves without class advantage.

With a base NP gain of 0.67%, Habetrot’s BBAQQ card deck and 4-hit Arts card leads to a base Arts gain of 2.68, very good even for a Servant with a singular Arts card. Her Quick cards with the same hitcount and Riding boosting them are similarly great for NP gain, and her 5-hit Extra card is more or less average, too, resulting in a solid NP gain profile in spite of her card deck lacking Arts cards.

In the same vein, Habetrot’s star generation is pretty good. With the Pretender class’s high base star generation, all of her cards have solid stargen, with her Quicks being particularly good with Riding also boosting them. She’s hardly going to drown you in critical stars, but anybody who has done the Kaiju battles in the story has seen how effectively she fuels her own crits with brave chains - she’s not bad at all.

Skill 1

First on Habetrot’s skill roster is Guardian Divine Beast. As the name might suggest, Habetrot is a noble guardian of the Southern Sea, and she’s fearsome, I tell you!

This skill’s primary benefit is a 1-turn Taunt effect, paired with a 1-turn buff that provides Habetrot with a 30% gauge charge every time she’s attacked. In most circumstances, that results in 90% gauge charge during the enemy’s turn as the 3 typical enemy actions attack her, though that can be randomly stopped by skill usage. It’s also worth noting in some cases versus Berserker Servant enemies (a very old thing coded into FGO to prevent single Berserker enemies from wiping teams with sheer offense) or lower-rarity NPC foes numbering 2 or fewer won’t take 3 actions in a turn, either, though such situations won’t come up often when you care about this effect.

Given Habetrot will be taking a lot of damage from this, she gets a 1-time, 3-turn Guts buff to ensure she doesn’t just drop where she stands. On top of that, she also gets a 15-star bomb upon use to immediately fuel the team’s critical damage output.

The scope of this skill is ultimately limited, since every single effect is largely beneficial only in difficult content, but it is fantastic in those scenarios - drawing enemy fire to a single Servant for a turn and getting a full NP gauge (factoring in defensive NP gauge gain) for your troubles, while also having a Guts buff to fall back on. Using it to its full capabilities as a way to draw in and survive a deadly ST NP may not come up often, but even as a gauge charger by proxy, it’s great. With an 8-turn base cooldown, this skill will also come back online regularly by the standards of a Guts/gauge charge skill, too.

Skill 2

Next up is Yanamun Reversal. So far as I know, Sasaki Kojiro does not claim this “reversal” technique, but that dude does some bullshit with a sword so I won’t say anything for certain.

This skill encapsulates a real menagerie of buffs, so I’ll divide it up a little. First, Habetrot provides 30% anti-Undead and 30% anti-Demonic Effective Damage buffs to the team for 3 turns. While those traits are certainly the enemies of justice, they aren’t particularly common, with there being no Undead Servants and only a modest selection of NPCs, while Demonic is incredibly common across NPC enemies, particularly stronger “miniboss” type ones, and a small selection of Servants. Habetrot is pretty likely to face Demonic foes from time to time, but the Undead buff is pretty darn useless overall. At least the whole team gets to benefit from them.

The next perk of this skill is Ailment Immunity and a 3k Max HP Up buff for 3 turns. Ailment Immunity is a new effect so far as I know, but it’s essentially a lesser form of Debuff Immunity that only blocks the DoT-type debuffs - Poison, Curse, Burn, and variants of them. In player hands this isn’t too bad of an effect - there are a number of difficult content bosses who use these debuffs as a way of taxing the player’s healing, with the infamously difficult Cernunnos fight being a prime example. At the same time, Max HP Up buffs are essentially healing with a future insurance tied into them, so they’re also great for keeping the team alive.

The last combo of benefits are the most familiar - a 15-star bomb upon use, a 20% Debuff Resistance Down debuff to every enemy for 3 turns, followed by a 1-turn Skill Seal for all enemies. These may seem innocuous, but the Skill Seal especially has great synergy with Habetrot’s existing kit, ensuring the enemies she will be tanking with her Taunt won’t waste a turn using skills, in turn securing more NP gauge charge with little-to-no random element. There’s still a chance the Skill Seal misses, but the Debuff Resistance Down debuff increases the consistency greatly, and also supports Habetrot’s allies’ own debuffs if need be.

Given all these excellent, if narrow, effects, this skill is fantastic, though the potency of its benefits vary from fight to fight. It’s great team support all the same, and comes at the same, relatively-short 8-turn cooldown as her prior skill.

Skill 3

The decisive last skill in Habetrot’s kit is, well, Decisive Battle of the Southern Sea. This skill truly gives the vibes of charging up a beam to finish off a dangerous foe, and you’ll see why right now!

This skill provides Habetrot with her standard dual-card buffs, a 30% Quick and Buster Up buff apiece for 3 turns, but the real payoff is in its two supplementary effects - a 5% Attack Up buff for 1 turn for every 10 Critical Stars you have upon use, capping out at 99 Critical Stars for a hefty 50% Attack Up buff, as well as 10% NP Strength Up for 1 turn for every Max HP Up buff on Habetrot.

So with just her own skills fired off before this one, she’ll get 15% Attack Up from the 30 Critical Stars, and 10% NP Strength Up from her sole Max HP Up buff. A neat boost for her immediate NP, but if you have support options who can load up on Critical Stars or Max HP buffs, the damage boost from this skill rises dramatically. Getting a load of Critical Stars is relatively easy, by various means, but the Max HP buffs is a little more difficult. Besides Merlin’s Hero Creation, there’s not really one that you would buff Habetrot with on the regular.

Thankfully, there IS a way to easily stack up Max HP Up buffs - Command Codes! This skill only cares about quantity, not quality, so the minute Max HP boosts from Guardian Beast of the Tropics (a Command Code given by this very Summer event), and Nobbu Tea, an older Command Code with a similar effect, can build up that bonus NP Strength very easily, albeit not on the first turn of the battle. Those huge damage boosts might only last a single turn, but the impact they’ll provide to Habetrot’s NP will be very…decisive.

Much like the rest of Habetrot’s skill kit, this skill has a moderate 8-turn base cooldown, aligning all of her skill cooldowns together.

To finish things off, we have Habetrot’s NP - Chibirasan Habetrot. Yet another likely reference I have no clue what it means.

What I do know, however, is that this is a ST Buster NP, so I will only be covering the effects and how hard it hits, which is a thankful breath of fresh air.

Before dealing damage, this NP provides a 10-30% Buster Up buff (scaling with Overcharge) to Habetrot herself for 3 turns, as well as a 10% times the number of enemies on the field NP Strength Up buff for 1 turn. So far as before-NP damage steroids go this is fantastic, getting a guaranteed ramping damage boost from the Buster buff, as well as the more situational NP Strength Up buff, but that will always at least provide a 10% boost, given you can’t NP without an enemy in front of you.

After those boosts, Habetrot does her damage, with a +50% Effective Damage modifier against Supergiant foes. While this trait is rare among Servants, Supergiant is a very common trait across a variety of main story bosses, so it’s a very useful trait to target when clashing with the various calamitous giants whom Chaldea often has to contend with.

That’s all the effects to this NP, but given they’re all focused on giving it a heavy punch, it’s rather impactful. With just her own buffs active (and the Welfare Servant free NP5, of course), Habetrot is dealing pretty much dead on 60k damage neutral, leaping up to 70k if she’s facing a wave of 3 enemies, or 90k if she’s tackling a single Supergiant foe. Given the benchmark I typically use for single-target NP’s, Jeanne Alter, hits for 71k damage neutral, Habetrot is hitting under that by a modest margin in normal conditions, but easily surpasses it with some of her Effective damage (or other conditional boosts) active.

While I did say I wouldn’t cover looping, I do have to make mention that Habetrot can “loop” per se, but only in cases where you’re fighting the same wave continually and getting hit. With double Koyanskaya and the Skill Cooldown reduction append skill active, you can use her Taunt skill for 2 successive turns, getting the initial 100% gauge from those foxy maidens, then earning 90% for the first two turns from taking hits with the Skill Seal to ensure those attacks go through. The remaining 10% will usually be filled by Habetrot’s defensive NP gain, but if she’s facing enemies with 1-hit attacks she might end up hitting 99% gauge on the spot, though a Mystic Code skill can easily fix that. I feel the need to point this out since Habetrot lacks a traditional “gauge charger” skill, but her Taunt essentially acts as a 99% or more gauge charge on a 1 turn delay, so she’s very capable at spamming this NP.