Rabbit’s Reviews #425: Miyu Edelfelt (4* Lancer)

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Miyu is probably the least exciting of the Summer SRs this year, but she’s still very good relative to her rarity. She’s mostly “just” a typical Arts looper, though she has some multicore utility as well. Her most notable trick is that she has perfect loopage—she’s capable of looping even 1/1/x nodes provided she has the damage. Her damage output is good but not remarkable for her rarity, so this won’t matter much to most players, but a well-invested Miyu should be able to mostly handle Archer farming should that be something you need, which is nice!
Miyu Edelfelt (Lancer)
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Miyu has an excellent offensive stat spread, with the second-highest attack of the SR Lancers, in exchange for low health. High attack helps with damage output, so this is very much appreciated given Miyu’s role. Miyu’s Arts card NP gain is completely standard for her deck, while her Quicks are quite bad from an NP gain standpoint. Fortunately she has enough batteries to compensate, so this isn’t much of a problem in practice. For star gen, on the other hand, Miyu is a bit better than your typical Arts Servant, as she has two Quicks and they have decent hit-counts.
Miyu gets the usual Magic Resistance passive, along with a special version of Territory Creation. Territory Creation provides a small buff to Miyu’s most important card type, and it also gives a mostly-negligible crit damage buff to Miyu when there’s an Illya on the field (which there should almost always be, due to Miyu’s active skills). Her passive suite closes off with Infinite Mana Supply, which gives a nice 5% charge per turn to help with Miyu’s recursion.
None of Miyu’s appends really matter. She doesn’t even need Mana Loading for her perfect loop setup. If you want to pick an append, Mana Loading gives some extra loop flexibility if you aren’t using Oberon, Skill Reload is sometimes helpful for getting to a second buff cycle in CQs, and the various damage buffs all provide some marginal benefit… but honestly you can just ignore Miyu’s appends and she’ll be about as strong.
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Miyu’s mat asks are mostly fine, except for the fact that she needs 60 bells per skill. Large quantities of bronze mats are always annoying, and that’s just as true here as ever.
Miyu’s skillset falls mostly into the category of “generically powerful DPS tools”. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.
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Playing Alone is your typical 30% 3-turn card-type buff. It applies to both Quick and Arts, making it a functional boost to Miyu’s overall NP gain in practice (though her Quick cards are still quite weak even with Miyu’s various buffs up). On top of that, the skill gives debuff immunity and passive healing, both of which are nice for consistency in CQ contexts. This is a pretty straightforward skill, but it does what it needs to.
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Shrine Maiden is an excellent skill. It gives 30% NP charge at base, plus another 10% per Illya on the field. This would make it functionally just a 30% battery… except for the fact that Miyu’s third skill turns everybody else into Illyas. Assuming you use skill 2 and skill 3 on the same turn, this is at minimum a 60% battery, and it can scale even higher if there’s more than one enemy. This skill plays a large role in Miyu’s perfect loop specs. It also provides partywide NP damage up—good for Miyu’s NP damage and also nice for multicore strategies—and it gives the party buff removal resistance, which is occasionally good for consistency reasons. To top it all off, this skill is on a very reasonable 6-turn cooldown, even though it can potentially provide very high levels of charge. Excellent skill overall.
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Illya-ism gives Miyu a bunch of useful things all in one place. A two-hit invuln is always great, NP gain helps Miyu’s loop specs, and star gen up is… well, star gen up is also there, I suppose. 50% star gen up amounts to about two stars per card on average so it’s not a large effect but it also certainly doesn’t hurt anything. This skill’s main purpose, though, is turning everyone else into Illyas. This both facilitates Miyu’s battery and lets Miyu’s NP charge her allies’ NP gauges more effectively. You generally want to use this on turn 1, if you can, in order to maximize Miyu’s party charge and NP refund, but you may occasionally prefer to delay this to turn 2 or 3 so Miyu can use her battery to its full extent at a more opportune moment than the start of a fight. If you’re going to use Miyu’s battery on turn 1, or if every character on the field is going to stay there, you can use this right away. Otherwise, you might want to save it till the turn you plan to use Miyu’s battery.
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Miyu’s NP doesn’t have much going on relative to most other new Servant NPs these days—it has a small niche, deals damage, and provides party NP charge, and that’s it. Both the niche and the NP charge are somewhat unusual, though. The NP charge effect gives 10% to everyone, which is nice, but it gives an extra 10% to Illyas, which means Miyu can provide 20% charge to her allies every turn she NPs, provided she uses her third skill first. This means Miyu has trivial access to Castoria NPs when farming, and it makes her a bit more flexible for some multicore setups. The niche damage, meanwhile, takes the form of anti-Evil power mod with relatively low values. Evil is a decent niche, but power mod is inferior to supereffective damage due to stacking additively with NP damage buffs. Miyu is a bit of a special case, though, as her power mod lasts three turns, and therefore it ramps. By turn 3, Miyu will have 90% or more in the power mod bracket. Supereffective damage would still be better, especially for farming, but this is pretty solid and it does give her nice anti-Evil damage output.
Miyu’s perfect loop setup is fairly straightforward. I’ll be assuming you’re facing a single enemy on waves 1 and 2, though of course this also works if there are more. You start with the usual Castoria/Castoria/Oberon setup, and on turn 1 you use Miyu’s third skill (to apply the Illya trait) and then use her battery for 60% charge. Both Castorias use their 20% batteries, and with all three Servants’ Arts and NP gain buffs in play Miyu refunds 22% off one enemy before overkill. You’re guaranteed one hit of overkill if the NP kills, which brings Miyu to 25%. She gets 10% from her NP and 5% from her passive, for a total of 40%. On turn 2, both Castorias use their Charismas, taking Miyu to 100%. This also brings both Castorias to 100% NP gauge if they’ve maxed Mana Loading, so on turn 2 you do a Castoria→Castoria→Miyu NP chain. Miyu again ends up with 40% charge, at which point you plug Oberon in to secure the loop.
With two Castoria NPs, Miyu has enough damage to counterclass Lancers at NP5. In ideal conditions—level 120, MLB BG, niche, etc—Miyu can even reach a million damage at neutral… but that’s too much investment to be practical considering she still needs niche to make that work. Most SRs can’t 90++ farm at all, though, so a universal loop setup that has the damage for counterclassing 90++ nodes without grails or niche is pretty neat. At level 100, she can get away with NP3 or so, and with niche she needs even less. There are better Archer farmers at the SSR level, but for her rarity Miyu is the best you’ll get.
The same setup can work for fastplay CQs. Miyu’s loopage is in fact overkill if cards are allowed, but since she doesn’t really suffer for it damage-wise this is more or less fine. More interestingly, though, Miyu’s party charge and consistency tools make her a strong pick for Arts stall teams. She has particular synergy with Servants who let her put her own NP last, since she can then help those Servants get access to extra NPs. Lady Avalon and Summer Tiamat are both great partners for this reason—they can place their NPs before Miyu’s without you losing out on any notable benefits. Tamamo, on the other hand, fights with Miyu a bit, since both Servants provide NP charge on their NPs. Castoria is always excellent, of course, but she does have a bit of antisynergy with Miyu in this regard, as both Castoria and Miyu want to be the last NP in a chain.
At the lower end, Servants who support NP recursion and who provide damage buffs are helpful. Xu Fu, Lanling, Mozart, Waver—all the usual suspects are good for Miyu. At the end of the day she’s just a solid DPS with great recursion.
Because of Miyu’s excellent loopage, there’s little reason not to give her The Black Grail. She benefits a lot from its NP damage and bonus attack and doesn’t care much about its drawbacks. As an SR Lancer, she’ll struggle to hit top-end damage numbers without BG’s help, but as long as you’re willing to use it, Miyu will do great.
There’s nothing Miyu specifically needs that CCs can provide. Crit damage is always a solid fallback, and healing or buff removal can be nice for stability in CQs, but you can safely give Miyu whatever sounds fun to you.
Miyu is a very good Servant, and if you pull her and are in need of someone who can handle AoE Archer nodes, grailing Miyu is a solid idea. She gets a solid chunk of extra damage for the relatively reasonable cost of two grails, and taking her to level 100 further reduces the number of NP levels she needs for counterclass farming. Somewhat counterintuitively, grails matter less to Miyu the higher her NP level is, as an NP5 Miyu more or less has enough damage for what you’ll want to use her for even at level 80—but she’s a good investment in general and will make good use of any extra stats you choose to give her.
Miyu has respectable damage relative to her rarity and she has perfect loop specs—and on top of that, she provides a bunch of party charge and has some CQ-oriented utility. Her only drawbacks are her rarity and lack of interlude, really, but when you consider that she’s theoretically cheaper than a typical SSR, her overall balance feels quite good. She won’t usually do anything for you if you already have a great Archer-killer ready to do… but her loop specs are actually better than most of her direct competition, even at the SSR level, so even for players with well-developed boxes a high-NP Miyu might have use cases.