Rabbit’s Reviews #428: Larva / Tiamat (5* Archer)

After a very long time of Quick being the weakest card type overall, we finally get Tiamat, a new meta support perfectly positioned to fill in the gaps without completely negating Quick’s unique elements. She is in many ways comparable to Koyanskaya, in that her baseline steroids are a bit lower than her direct competition, her power depends on the exact shape of the kit of the DPS she’s supporting, and she demands a different way of thinking about team composition from existing supports. Properly used, she’s very powerful, and she can enable slowplay and fastplay Quick setups that exceed what the card type has historically been capable of and that roughly match optimized Arts and Buster teams. She does not raise the overall power ceiling—Castoria and Oberon as still the best supports in the game—but she does mostly fix Quick’s lingering problems, which is very welcome.
Tiamat does four important things: she enables several Quick Servants to loop who could not loop before, she lets Quick farming teams increase their turn-3 damage output via card stretch, she provides Quick teams with a high-end stall option that doesn’t involve taking Castoria and therefore sacrificing damage, and she’s the single-best support in the game for non-Buster multicore setups. I’ll address each of these things in the body of the review, but the big takeaway here is that unlike Ruler Skadi (and many other lower-value supports), Tiamat enables fundamentally new approaches to building Quick (and occasionally Arts) teams. While there are situations where Ruler Skadi will be the better pick, I would consider Tiamat to now be the premiere Quick support overall. If you like running Quick teams, she’s an extremely important pull.
Tiamat has an offense-oriented stat spread, with relatively high attack and relatively low health by SSR Archer standards. This is slightly odd for a support, and especially for a support with strong defensive tools, but it actually works out in Tiamat’s favor. Tiamat has deceptively good damage output, as she’s flush with crit buffs and all of her damage buffs are partywide. In CQ contexts, she can operate similarly to Van Gogh, able to output good damage with all cards, and in farming contexts, Tiamat’s card-based crit damage functions as a meaningful form of damage stretch. As such, having high attack is beneficial to Tiamat, and her offense-leaning stat spread supports her overall kit.
Tiamat’s NP gain is slightly better than average for her deck, and she has both solid Quicks and solid Arts cards. Her active star gen is okay—she has a pair of five-hit Quicks, but her NP is non-damaging, so she does have to rely on those two normal cards for active star gen.
Magic Resistance and Core of the Goddess collectively give Tiamat 50% debuff resistance innately, making her pretty good at avoiding incidental debuffs. With her NP factored in, Tiamat will almost never get hit with non-guaranteed debuffs, making her unusually consistent as supports go. Independent Action gives a tiny bit of extra crit damage—kinda nice considering Tiamat’s easy crit access and strong cards, but not likely to be noticeable given the degree of crit damage up present elsewhere in Tiamat’s kit. Metamorphosis, meanwhile, is a big survivability boost, reducing all damage Tiamat takes and also helping her to avoid incoming crits.
Mana Loading is Tiamat’s most important append, and in fact she is not fully functional as a support until Mana Loading is at max level. If you pull only a single copy of Tiamat, make sure to get her to bond 6 ASAP, as she won’t work properly without Mana Loading. Aside from that, Skill Reload is nice for mitigating Tiamat’s biggest disadvantage—her long cooldowns—in CQs. The crit damage buff technically increases Tiamat’s damage potential in farming and CQs, but the impact will be extremely marginal in context of Tiamat’s existing crit buffs. The other two appends are mostly irrelevant.
Tiamat’s mat asks are extremely reasonable, with the most recent material she asks for being OC2’s cauldrons. She doesn’t take anything in unreasonably high quantities and none of her materials tend to be in particularly short supply.
Tiamat has a strong supportive skillset as a whole. It does exactly what Tiamat needs it to, though it’s held back slightly by low in-skill buff values and long cooldowns. Recommended skill order is 2>3>1.
Azure Summer Clothes is an across-the-board buff. It starts off giving 20% Quick and Arts up to the party, which is nice, albeit not all that remarkable. This does start a trend, though, which is that all of Tiamat’s buffs are partywide, and she buffs Quick and Arts equally. Arts Servants don’t typically need what Tiamat offers, but she can support them if you’re lacking in Arts Supports, and somewhat more interestingly this means Quick Servants in Tiamat teams deal pretty good damage with their Arts cards, instead of just with their Quicks and Busters. This skill also boosts the party’s overcharge by 2, which makes this a bigger de-facto buff for Servants with Overcharge-based ramp. In farming contexts, you can also sometimes save this until turn 3 for increased damage on the final turn (which is most relevant to Servants with overcharge-based Supereffective damage), though this means you lose out on damage and refund on earlier turns, and you also probably lose crit damage from Tiamat’s NP, so it likely won’t be worth it in most cases. Aside from the damage-related bonuses, this skill also grants a one-time buff removal resistance buff, which is great for challenge quests. None of the other meta supports offer buff removal resistance, so historically in cases where you’ve needed this form of utility you’ve had to slot in a weaker support. Archer Nightingale is the typical choice for this, and her buff removal resistance is single-target, so Tiamat is a huge upgrade as buff removal resistance support goes.
Housekeeping Virtuoso is a 50% battery for Tiamat and a 30% battery for Tiamat’s allies. 30% partywide charge is always very strong, and this is exactly enough battery that in a double Tiamat team where both Tiamats have Mana Loading, both Tiamats are guaranteed access to their NP. No other meta support can reliably use their own NP without either spending targeted batteries on themself or getting extra charge from a DPS, and this is the crux of how Tiamat’s kit works: Tiamat’s skill-specific damage buffs are relatively low, but she will almost always have access to her NP, and thus she will almost always provide her NP’s buffs as well. There are drawbacks to this, of course. Many double Tiamat teams need to save one Tiamat’s Housekeeping Virtuoso for turn 2, meaning you don’t get your Tiamat NPs until that turn. In CQ contexts, using an NP also means you’re sacrificing a card, reducing your potential damage output and NP gain on the turn Tiamat NPs. Overall, though, this works well for Tiamat. This skill also provides a small attack buff—important to Tiamat’s overall buff values but otherwise unremarkable—and a bit of healing for some extra sustain. As with Azure Summer, this is on a long cooldown, which can be a problem in CQ contexts.
Summer Mirage is the skill that completes Tiamat’s kit. Tiamat does not have the typical instant-50%-charge-on-skill that’s usually necessary for a top-tier meta support, but between Housekeeping Virtuoso and Summer Mirage she does still have an effective 50% charge. In exchange for having less flexibility with charge timing, all of Tiamat’s charge is partywide. In practical terms, Tiamat provides a single DPS with the same amount of battery as most meta supports, just split across multiple turns. One of Quick’s traditional problems is that its main supports can’t split their batteries, which keeps several Servants from utilizing Mana Loading, and consequently prevents them from looping. Tiamat’s battery spread—10% on turn 2, 10% on turn 3, and 30% that’s flexible—is exactly what many of those Servants need to be able to loop. The partwide nature of this buff also makes Tiamat the best support at providing charge to two Servants in a multicore context, and it helps Tiamat herself access her NP in some situations. This passive charge works very well in the context of Tiamat’s kit—and it’s not the only valuable thing on this skill. The skill also applies an 8-stars-per-turn buff to the whole team, functionally generating 24 stars per turn assuming no one swaps out. In a double Tiamat team, this means you generate 48 stars per turn. With a mere two stars from elsewhere—active star gen, your DPS’s skills, etc—you are guaranteed to crit. This has interesting farming implications, which I’ll elaborate on in the usage tips section, but for both farming and CQs, having guaranteed crits is great. On top of that, the skill provides a solid 50% crit damage buff to the whole party, making sure everyone can make use of the stars this skill provides. To make this skill even better, it’s on “only” a 6-turn cooldown at max level, avoiding the long cooldowns that afflict Tiamat’s other two skills.
Nammu Marineheart is a very good supportive NP—every single effect on this NP is valuable. That said, at this point it’s important to address one of the biggest problems with Tiamat: her value as a support is strongly impacted by NP levels, to a degree that isn’t true of the other top-end supports. Tiamat’s NP provides Quick and Arts buffs that are essential to ensuring Tiamat’s buff value keeps pace with her direct competition, and both of those buffs scale with NP level. Tiamat needs to be NP3 for her NP-inclusive buffs to match Summer Skadi, and at NP4 or 5 her buffs are solidly stronger. Tiamat doesn’t need to be higher than NP1 to be great, but every NP level meaningfully buffs all of your Quick Servants (and sometimes Arts, too), which means I can’t safely say “you can pull for NP1 and then stop” like I would for Skadi or Koyanskaya. Sometimes NP levels will matter.
If the scaling were attack or NP damage, that would be one thing, but because the buffs in question are Quick and Arts, a higher NP level Tiamat functionally gives the Servants she’s supporting increased NP gain as well. 20% Arts or Quick up won’t often make the difference between looping and not, but it will sometimes reduce the amount of overkill needed, which means a high-NP Tiamat will allow some Servants to loop some nodes a low-NP Tiamat will not. Alice Kuonji, for example, has a theoretical 1/1/x setup with Double Tiamat. If both Tiamats are NP1, she needs five hits of overkill against the first enemy in order to loop. If both are NP5, she needs only one—which is impossible to fail as long as Alice kills.
For better or worse, there’s no particular sweet spot for Tiamat’s NP levels. She’s very good even at NP1, but every additional NP level will enable slightly more things. There’s also the fact that you’ll usually also be pulling a Tiamat off support. For cases where NP levels matter, you can try to find a high-NP Tiamat to supplement your own—but on the flip-side, that also means you’re reliant on someone else having a high-NP Tiamat up, which is far from guaranteed.
This NP also gives the party debuff resistance for three turns, and this, too, scales with NP level. At NP1, it gives 50% debuff resistance—just enough to bring Tiamat herself to 100%, and a solid consistency buff to the party. You can’t rely on a single Tiamat to protect the party from debuffs, but in a double Tiamat team you can pretty much count on any non-guaranteed debuffs failing against your party. An NP5 Tiamat can do the same thing all on her own, and in a double Tiamat team any extra NP levels give you some insurance against enemies with debuff success rate up buffs.
The overcharge bonus on this NP is a partywide crit damage buff that scales from 50% to 150%. At base, this is decent-if-uninspiring, but because Tiamat gives a 2-level overcharge buff, this will often give 100% crit damage up—and in a double Tiamat team, you’ll get 150%. A double Tiamat team provides a total of 400% universally-applicable crit damage up to the entire party, at the cost of needing to use two NPs to get there. This is enough to make Tiamat arguably the best crit support in the game. Double Merlin, for context, gives 100% crit damage up for three turns and 300% for one—with the one-turn crit buffs only going to a single Servant. The Skadis each offer 100% crit damage up, but only to one card-type each and only for one Servant. The only Servant with comparable partywide crit damage buffs is Van Gogh—and hers are mostly locked to Entity of the Outer Realms Servants.
There are a lot of cool things that this enables, which I’ll get to in the next section, but suffice it to say this is a very good NP for boosting damage—and then as an added bonus Tiamat’s NP makes the whole party invincible for a turn. Ruler Skadi has almost no defensive utility, and Caster Skadi’s defenses are locked to an NP she can’t easily access. Tiamat’s defenses are also mostly NP-locked, but her partywide invuln is usually superior to Skadi’s partywide single-hit dodge and she can access her NP without taking charge away from a DPS. This makes Tiamat functionally the only top-tier Quick Stall support, and the only good way for Quick Servants to stall without losing out on damage by virtue of bringing a Servant intended for Arts or Buster. Tiamat isn’t going to be as effective defensively as Castoria in most cases, but bringing Castoria in a Quick team slows you down substantially. Tiamat won’t replace Castoria for endless stall, but if you’re looking at a dozen-or-so-turn fight where you only need to live to a second or third buff cycle, a double Tiamat team offers plenty of sustain without meaningfully sacrificing damage.
Taken as a whole, Nammu Marineheart is one of the best NPs in the game, especially if you have Tiamat at higher NP levels. It brings a lot of offensive benefits, all of which are partywide, along with powerful and generically useful CQ utility. This isn’t quite the centerpiece of Tiamat’s kit—that honor goes to her various batteries—but it’s certainly an important part of her functionality.
Single-core Tiamat farming setups typically involve starting with double Tiamat and swapping to Oberon on turn 3. The exact skill timing needed depends on the specific Servant, but in the abstract this is most useful for Servants who for one reason or another waste batteries in a traditional Skadi/Skadi/Oberon setup.
Assuming a typical 50% charger, you can use one Tiamat’s battery on turn 1, plus your DPS’s battery, plus Mana Loading, to enable your turn 1 NP. You also use both Tiamats’ first and third skills, giving you increased damage and passive NP charge, as well as boosting your DPS to overcharge 5 on turn 1—which is a functional damage boost for anyone with ramp. On turn 2, you use the other Tiamat’s battery, and both Tiamats NP alongside the DPS. On turn 3, Oberon switches in to secure the loop.
If your DPS has a 20% battery, you can use both Tiamat batteries on turn 1, alongside your DPS’s 20% battery, enabling you to use both Tiamat NPs on turn 1 in order to get her full buffs online sooner. In this context, you might want to save one of the Tiamats’ first skills for turns 2 or 3 to avoid wasting overcharge.
These setups are not exclusive to Quick teams—Tiamat provides just as much buff value to Arts as to Quick—but Arts’s premiere support already has split batteries and also provides an NP gain boost, so bringing Tiamat results in weaker loop specs. The drop off is severe. To take Space Ishtar as an example, Spish can loop with double Tiamat, but it involves plugging one Tiamat out for Oberon on turn 2, which results in losing one of the Tiamats’ NPs. Essentially, single-core Arts farming with Tiamat should be fine for level 90-and-lower nodes, and it might sometimes work for 90+, but it won’t usually be 90++-viable and will pretty much always be inferior to using Castoria.
There is exactly one (situational) exception to this, and that exception is Tez, who provides so many party batteries that he can enable a single Tiamat to NP twice in a Tiamat/Castoria/Oberon team as long as there are three enemies in the first wave. In this team, Tiamat and Tez need Mana Loading, but Castoria does not. On turn 1, you use Tiamat’s first and third skills, all three Tez skills, and all three Castoria skills, using Castoria’s Arts buff on Tez and her 20% battery on Tiamat. You use Tiamat’s NP, followed by Tez’s, and he refunds 15% per enemy before overkill, which clears 50% against three enemies with the one hit of overkill you’re guaranteed. He also gets 10% from Tiamat’s passive battery, plus 10% from his NP, and Tiamat and Castoria both also get 20% charge. Tiamat uses her second skill, which brings both Castoria and Tez to 100% charge, so that you can use Castoria’s NP followed by Tez’s. Against a single enemy, Tez refunds 15%, bringing him to 35% with the various passive charges, at which point Oberon plugs in and uses all his skills on Tez. Oberon’s partywide 20% battery also brings Tiamat to 100%, letting you use Tiamat’s NP before Tez’s again. This deals somewhat more damage overall than a conventional Tez team in which you have two Castoria NPs, assuming your Castorias and your Tiamats are the same NP level.
For the most part, though, Tiamat’s single-core farming relevance is reserved for Quick Servants. Alice Kuonji is one of the biggest beneficiaries, as she’s able to loop almost everything in a double Tiamat setup, provided she has both Mana Loading and Skill Reload. On turn 1, both Tiamats use all their skills, Alice uses her second and third skills, and all three Servants NP. Alice needs to refund 10%, which she gets with Tiamat NP levels, or some overkill, or two or more enemies. This brings her to 30% total with the Tiamats’ passive charge, at which point she can use her 50% battery and re-use her 20% battery. On turn 3, she’s guaranteed the 10% refund she needs, and you can plug Oberon in to secure the loop. Technically you can do this without Skill Reload by plugging Oberon in on turn 2 and re-using Alice’s 20% battery on turn 3, but this results in a functional damage loss, for reasons I’ll address in a bit.
A handful of other Servants have similar setups that either improve their loop consistency (enabling them to loop more restrictive nodes) or let them loop when they couldn’t do so at all before—Ushi Gozen, in particular goes from being completely unable to loop CE-less with Skadi to being able to loop 2/3/x or better nodes with double Tiamat. Some Servants do still prefer Summer Skadi for farming, though—Sei, for instance, already has an optimal battery distribution and therefore prefers Skadi’s increased damage, while Summer Majin Saber has such high base refund that she gets more out of Skadi’s on-skill Quick buffs than Tiamat’s charge-per-turn—but by and large Servants who don’t play nicely with Tiamat are also not great loopers and therefore aren’t well-suited to 90++ farming.
There are a very small number of Servants who actually want both Ruler Skadi and Tiamat. Takasugi, for example, needs unreasonable amounts of overkill to loop with double Ruler Skadi and doesn’t have the appropriate batteries to loop with double Tiamat but has a realistic 3/3/x loop setup with Skadi and Tiamat together. Louhi, meanwhile, has exactly the same loop specs with double Tiamat as with double Skadi, and she gets more damage from Tiamat than from Skadi on account of having a strong overcharge effect and benefitting from crits—but she can also loop 2/1/x or 1/2/x nodes by combining Ruler Skadi and Tiamat.
It’s not feasible to list out every single Quick farmer’s ideal loop setup and strategy, and unfortunately the math for Tiamat farming is quite a bit more complicated than for other supports. Some Servants want double Tiamat, others want double Skadi, some want Tiamat and Skadi, Tez wants Tiamat and Castoria… and then there’s also the fact that the optimal loop setup varies depending on how many enemies you’re facing and what NP level your Tiamat is. There are a lot of factors to consider! To close off this analysis of single-core loop farming, I’ll just say that calculating NP gain and damage in FGO isn’t particularly hard, and you’ll get the most value out of Tiamat by running the numbers yourself for whichever damage-dealer you want to support. Be creative, think outside the box, and don’t assume that the traditional “two of the same support plus an Oberon” team will be the best thing available to you. As of Tiamat’s release, that’s no longer a safe assumption, at least as far as Quick is concerned. Which is cool! FGO has been largely a solved game for a long time, and a new Servant who adds complexity and nuance to which setups are best in any given context is, in my view, a good thing.
There is one other thing Tiamat brings to single-core farming, though: crit damage.
It’s a bit unintuitive to factor cards into farming. Usually this is something we just ignore, because card stretch is so unreliable. Setting aside Ciel, Olga, and Ishtar, you can’t guarantee you’ll draw your DPS’s cards when you need them, and even if your damage-dealer has solid card damage, your supports do not. If you’re relying on card stretch to farm and you happen to draw a hand full of (for example) Castoria cards, you’re out of luck.
...Until Tiamat, that is.
In a team with two NP1 Tiamats, you have 100% Quick up, 100% Arts up, 40% attack up, and 400% crit damage up partwide, even if your DPS brings absolutely nothing to the table. On turn 3 you probably also get an extra 20% attack up from the new plugsuit buff, and if you haven’t plugged Tiamat out early, you are effectively guaranteed to crit. Unless your DPS is very weak or entirely unselfish, the lowest-damage cards available to you will actually be Tiamat’s Busters, which have no card-type buffs applied. There’s no situation where you get stuck playing two Tiamat Busters (in fact it’s literally impossible, as you draw five cards and there are only two of them in the deck), but for the sake of argument, let’s use Tiamat’s Buster crits as a worst-case-scenario:
A second Buster Crit from a level 90 Tiamat, assuming a non-Buster lead and no Mighty chain, deals 82k damage. A third Buster crit deals 95.5k. These can both be increased further with things like Class Score and appends, but even without those extra boosts, a double Tiamat team functionally gets just shy of 180k damage worth of card stretch at the absolute minimum. This isn’t anywhere near what Ciel and Olga get with their card-rigging, but it’s very much nontrivial. In practical terms, this means double Tiamat teams only need to hit about 800k off the DPS’s NP on turn 3 in order to clear 90++ nodes, instead of the usual 1 million, making damage thresholds much more achievable for many Quick Servants. This does come with the caveat that it doesn’t fully work against Lancers or Rulers, but it’s a very real benefit for Tiamat farming.
The one thing to keep in mind here is that Oberon will have your typical squishy support card damage. If you wait until turn three to plug Oberon in, you’ll never be forced to use Oberon’s cards, as you can choose which Tiamat to swap out and you can choose to swap out whichever one doesn’t have the cards you want to use. You’ll never be forced to use Tiamat’s Buster cards—but you might be forced into using your DPS’s Busters, which will likely be better than Tiamat’s but might be worse than Tiamat’s Quick or (especially) Arts cards, depending on the selfish buffs your DPS brings. The exact minimum card stretch afforded by a double Tiamat team will vary based on your DPS’s kit and the degree to which you’ve invested in things like Class Score and Tiamat grails, but for purposes of napkin math 200k is a safe assumption.
If you can use both Tiamat NPs on turn 1, you functionally benefit from this on turn 2 as well, which might actually be even more impactful given the number of farming nodes that have annoyingly bulky second-wave enemies. On the flip-side, if you have to plug a Tiamat out for Oberon on turn 2, you can’t count on this card damage at all for turn 3, as you then run the risk of drawing all Oberon cards.
Using Tiamat for multicore farming is simultaneously simpler and harder to outline than single-core farming. Multicore setups typically involve bringing both an AoE and an ST DPS, using the ST Servant to deal with high-HP single enemies and the AoE Servant to deal with low-HP adds. Tiamat is probably the best support in the game for multicore because everything she provides is fully partywide—and on top of that she buffs Quick and Arts equally, meaning your two damage-dealers don’t necessarily have to share a card type. Typical multicore teams require carefully spreading your buffs and batteries across the two Servants, while Tiamat can just do her thing.
The biggest thing to keep in mind for multicore Tiamat setups is that Tiamat doesn’t actually buff damage much unless she can use her NP. She needs 30% external charge in order to access it, so she pairs particularly well with Servants who offer party charge. Tezcatlipoca solves this problem all in one place, and he is himself perhaps the best AoE DPS for multicore teams. Any combination of damage-dealers that lets Tiamat NP should be effective for multicore farming, though.
As with most Servants, the farming-oriented setups that involve Tiamat also work for fastburn CQs. Tiamat is slightly disadvantaged in these settings relative to Ruler Skadi, as needing to slot her NPs in is more of a hassle—losing out on cards in order to use Tiamat NPs meaningfully reduces your damage and NP gain on that turn—but she’ll still do plenty well. Tiamat burst teams also have the added benefit of having a much easier time surviving to a second, or even third, buff cycle, as you can use Tiamat NPs to buy yourself turns of survival while you wait for skills to cool down.
This points at the type of CQs Tiamat is best-suited for: mid-length fights. Tiamat isn’t the best Servant for pure fastburn, and she isn’t the best Servant for indefinite stall, but she strikes a very nice balance between the two, able to speed up a DPS during her buff window and draw out the fight the rest of the time. In a double Tiamat team, you should be able to more or less alternate Tiamat NPs to keep the team alive while prioritizing your DPS’s NP and cards when the team’s buffs are active.
Because Tiamat buffs both Arts and Quick, she can work as a support for more conventional Arts stall teams as well. Tamamo is a particularly good partner for her, as Tamamo reduces skill cooldowns and thus helps to alleviate Tiamat’s biggest weakness. Tiamat can work as a support for Castoria stall teams as well. On paper, she provides most of the things those teams want: Overcharge, healing, party charge, buffs, etc. Her synergy isn’t as good as it seems, though, as Tiamat’s invuln will be mostly wasted if you use Tiamat’s NP to overcharge Castoria’s, and Tiamat’s cooldowns are a bit too long to cycle nicely with Castoria’s tools. She’s not a bad pick for Castoria teams, but Tamamo, Lady Avalon, Reines, and possibly even Waver have a bit more synergy.
Tiamat also works well in Van-Gogh-style crit-focused teams, usually involving two Tiamats and a third support or a defensive DPS for consistency. The general idea here is to use Tiamat NPs whenever they’re available to amplify crit damage for the whole team and then prioritize Arts and Quick cards to consistently gain access to NPs. Castoria works well as a third support in this team for the same reason she works well for Van Gogh. Tamamo is also a deceptively good pick thanks to her healing and cooldown reduction—shorter cooldowns means more turns with plentiful stars and high crit damage. DPS-wise, Alice Kuonji is a solid pick, as her NP damage benefits from Tiamat’s tools and the terror she provides can help mitigate enemy damage.
And speaking of Van Gogh, Tiamat is one of the best supports for a double Van Gogh team. Van Gogh doesn’t benefit much from Tiamat’s crit buffs, as a double Van Gogh team already runs up against the crit cap, but Van Gogh teams do benefit from Tiamat’s partywide invuln, as well as from the partywide Arts and Quick buffs. A typical Van Gogh team is somewhat reliant on Van Gogh’s Buster cards for big bursts of damage, but Tiamat levels out the team’s damage output by ensuring everyone has solid buffs on their Quick and Arts cards as well.
Ultimately, Tiamat is an extremely flexible support who works in a wide range of teams. When trying to build around Tiamat, look at the Servants you want to pair with her and think about how you can leverage Tiamat’s mix of utility to best amplify those Servants’ strengths. There’s no one right answer for how to use Tiamat, and that, more than anything, is why she stands out relative to the competition.
Tiamat’s preferred CE depends on how you’re using her. For farming, you’ll generally want to give her whatever drop CE is most relevant, of course, but for CQs you have options. 2030 (like other star gen CEs) is generally irrelevant to double-Tiamat teams, as you flood the field with stars by default—but in a single-Tiamat team, one 2030 takes you to a baseline of 32 stars, and two takes you to 40, which may be worth it for crit consistency reasons. Prisma Cosmos is a great choice for longer fights, facilitating consistent NP access. In short fights, you might consider giving Tiamat Kaleidoscope, as she may be able to use her NP twice in quick succession, amplifying the party’s damage and providing extra turns of nearly-guaranteed survival.
Tiamat’s in a slightly odd place CC-wise in that she’ll usually have so much crit damage available that crit damage CCs are mostly irrelevant, but they do technically raise her CQ and farming power by virtue of slightly increasing the damage her various cards do when critting. Crit damage CCs are at the very least not a bad choice, even if they’re of marginal benefit. Aside from that, you can opt for any of the usual supportive options—party NP damage boosts, buff removal, and so on—which will mostly be limited to CQ value but might occasionally come in handy.
Tiamat is a very strong Servant, and unlike most supports, giving her higher attack meaningfully increases her value, as it both enhances your minimum card stretch while farming and makes Tiamat teams faster in CQ contexts. Tiamat is also very hard to intentionally kill, as most of her buffs are on her NP and using her NP makes the team invincible. This makes sacrificial Tiamat strats less viable and thus keeps an increased health pool from being a situational liability. Especially if you think you might use crit-oriented Tiamat teams—whether that means using Tiamat with Van Gogh or using Tiamat as Van Gogh, so to speak—I think she’s a worthwhile grail target.
It’s been a long time since we’ve gotten a support who’s both on-par with top-end meta supports but also fundamentally different in function. While simple on the surface, Tiamat’s kit is deceptively complex. There are so many different ways to use her, and the optimal approach will vary substantially depending on the team and the fight.
At minimum, she gives Quick teams two things they’ve been sorely lacking: split batteries and sustain. In addition to that, though, she brings out Quick’s inherent flavor by still being oriented towards relatively fast teams and by facilitating powerful crits, even in farming setups. Tiamat takes a handful of unremarkable Quick Servants and makes them great, and she also takes some formerly unviable Quicks and makes them passable. She’s potentially excellent for multicore farming, a solid component of Arts stall teams, and a key part of strong and stable Van-Gogh-esque CQ teams. This is one of those Servants where the only real limit is how creative you can be with your team setups.
Tiamat only has two major drawbacks: her long CDs cut against her potential slowplay value, and she very strongly wants NP levels to be fully effective. She’s an atypical support in many ways, and while that’s mostly beneficial, it does also make her indirectly more expensive and less plug-and-play than her direct competition. If you’re willing to work with her, though, Tiamat will pay dividends. She’s not stronger than the other meta supports, but she absolutely deserves her place alongside the likes of Koyanskaya, and she similarly reshapes the way we’ll think about Quick teams moving forward.
Tiamat is, in short, an excellent addition to the game, and a very positive change to FGO’s overall game balance. At long last, Quick is up to par.
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