Rabbit’s Reviews #434: Elisabeth Bathory (5* Lancer)

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After countless welfare versions, Liz finally gets a summonable SSR counterpart. She’s pretty solidly the best ST Buster Lancer in the game, with great steroids, a ton of battery, and some party utility that works well in multicore setups. She also has two very slightly different NPs—one is usually better than the other, but this does let you tailor her functionality slightly depending on what you need. At the end of the day, though, Liz pairs easy NP access with high damage, and everything else is just a nice bonus.
Elisabeth Bathory (SSR)
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Liz has an offense-oriented stat-spread, with high attack and low health relative to SSRs as a whole—in fact, she has exactly the same stats as Melusine. This is a great starting point for a DPS. Her NP gain is pretty unremarkable, with an average Arts card and below-average-but-not-awful Quicks relative to her deck, and she’s pretty good at active star gen due to her high overall hit-counts. Her only passives are Magic Resistance (for occasional debuff resistance) and Independent Action (for a marginal crit damage buff).
Mana Loading is Liz’s most important append. She doesn’t actually need it maxed—even a level 1 Mana Loading is enough for Liz to immediately max out her NP gauge. Skill Reload is the second-most important append, enabling guaranteed plugless Black Grail setups. This isn’t as important to Liz as it might be, as she’s an ST Servant and so you aren’t often going to be tri-looping with her in a case where you can’t afford cards and don’t want to plug in a third support, but it’s there. The crit damage buff is alright, too, as Liz has fairly easy crit access and relatively low crit damage buffs. Anti-Foreigner damage and Extra Attack Up are both fine, but they’re by far the lowest priority appends.
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Liz’s mat asks are pretty unremarkable. As long as you’ve finished Ordeal Call 3, she should be easy to raise.
All three of Liz’s skills are very strong. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.
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Inheritor of the Planumpkin is a generically useful damage buff, giving 20% attack up partywide and 30% buster up to Liz herself for 3 turns. The partywide damage boost is nice for multicore setups, and taken as a whole this is a very good steroid for Liz herself. In addition to that, the skill offers a small selfish crit damage buff. 30% crit damage up isn’t enough to be particularly impactful, but it doesn’t hurt the skill to have it there. Similarly, the skill causes Liz’s cards to inflict burn, which doesn’t really matter but also doesn’t make the skill worse. For the most part, this is just a strong damage buff that also happens to be partially AoE.
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Elisabeth Evoluzio is a 2-hit invuln, which is nice for defense. It also causes Liz’s Buster cards to grant a one-time only overcharge buff. This is deceptively powerful, because it also applies to Liz’s own NP, meaning every NP after the first in her buff window should get an overcharge boost and thus will deal more damage. Since this is partywide, it also plays well with supports that have strong overcharge-related functionality (like Castoria) and in multicore setups it can also functionally increase the damage of your other damage-dealer. The most interesting part of this skill, though, is that it charges Liz’s NP gauge by 10% for every instance of the Elisabeth trait on the field. The wording on this is important—it doesn’t give 10% per unit with the Elisabeth trait, it gives 10% per trait, so a unit with multiple stacks of the Liz trait (such as by having the trait innately and also getting it from Liz’s second skill) procs the NP charge multiple times. In practice, assuming there are no Lizzes on the field other than SSR Liz and that you use S3 first, this skill gives 40% the first time it’s used, and 70% the second time—because Liz’s S3 can stack with itself, giving every allied Servant two stacks of the Liz trait, in addition to the one Liz has innately. This is a very powerful battery and functionally gives Liz better-than-perfect loopage in a lot of cases. The one drawback to this skill is its long cooldown—in order to fully leverage it, Liz does need Skill Reload mastered.
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Eliza Particles is a typical 50% battery that splashes 20% to allies. This is very nice for multicore farming setups and solid for CQs as well. It also gives some critical stars, but the most notable part of this, though, is that it applies the Liz trait to the entire party, which facilitates elements of Liz’s second skill and NP. It’s very nice that Liz has the ability to support her own gimmicks, and the small demerit on this skill—making allies more vulnerable to mental debuffs—is well-worth the other benefits this skill provides.
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Liz’s NP is quite powerful as single-target NPs go. It doesn’t have ramp, but it does have pre-cast NP damage up, giving Liz solid buffs in all three buff brackets. It also deals supereffective damage to Dragon enemies—not a wide niche, but not a terrible one either—provides partywide NP charge for Lizzes (which everyone should benefit from in practice thanks to Liz’s third skill), and it drains the target’s NP gauge, helping to keep single targets under control in CQs. There’s also a curse effect here, mostly for flavor.
Somewhat interestingly, the NP is slightly different in stage 3 versus stages 1 and 2. The lower-stage version gives 30 stars, but the higher stage version gives 20% NP charge (instead of 10%) and its NP damage buff is doubled. The stage 3 version is almost always better, but if you’re relying on crits for one reason or another there may be cases where you’d prefer the lower-stage version.
Liz has some interesting farming potential. She is first and foremost a great pick for multicore setups, as her substantial party charge and party buffs help prop allies up, and she has so much self-charge that she can afford to let your supports channel their batteries to the other DPS. Multicore setups have to be crafted to match the specific node, but generally you’ll pair her with an AoE damage-dealer and a pair of supports and let her go to town.
More interestingly, though, Liz has so much charge that she doesn’t actually need Oberon (or any third charger at all) to loop. 1/1/1 nodes are pretty uncommon, and in those cases you’ll likely want a plug Oberon regardless for damage—but Liz can also theoretically do certain x/1/x nodes with the help of Ciel or (ideally) Olga.
The way this works is you start with Koyan/Olga/Koyan, with Mana Loading on both Koyans and also on Liz, and with Liz in her stage 3 form. On turn 1, Olga uses all three of her skills (giving her Buster buff to the Koyans and rigging her own cards) and then plugs out for Liz. Liz uses S3, S2, and S1, and the Koyans use their damage buffs on Liz. Liz uses a BNPB chain if the first wave has three enemies, or an NPBB chain if it has two, to clear the wave with a mix of NP and cards. On turn 2, both Koyans use their batteries, and Liz uses her first skill a second time, and then she NPs to clear the solo enemy. On turn 3, Liz uses her third and second skills again—which, if the Koyans have Mana Loading, lets everyone NP. You can do a Koyan→Koyan→Liz NP chain, and both Koyans have solid damage buffs in play thanks to Olga and Liz. ...Unfortunately, even with those buffs, an NP1 Koyan only does about 40k damage in this setup, meaning this only works in cases where any wave 3 adds are very weak, and Liz still needs a combination of Black Grail and NP levels and grails and class advantage to hit 90++ damage thresholds, and this assumes a native Ciel or a native Olga, at which point you’re probably better off just using them instead... But it’s possible! Which is neat!
...Okay, so, the above farming setup is mostly trivia, but it stems from the fact that Liz has an absurd amount of battery, which makes her deceptively flexible for farming teams. You probably won’t use her for single-core farming, but she’s very good for multicore setups and can work in a lot of teams.
For CQs, Liz is pretty straightforward. You can burst with two Koyans and an Oberon, or you can stall with any of the usual Buster stall setups—Merlin and Mash is a classic and works as well here as ever. Liz is also a very good DPS for Castoria stall due to her ability to boost Castoria’s NP charge.
Because Liz has so much charge—290% charge over three turns, setting aside the fact that some of this will be wasted due to timing—there’s basically no reason not to run The Black Grail. If you’re stalling and don’t have healing, you might not want to deal with the demerit, but otherwise it’s Liz’s best CE.
Liz has pretty easy crit access and two Buster cards but is low on crit damage buffs, so crit damage CCs are an obvious pick for her.
Liz is a very good single-target Lancer, and Lancers benefit more from grails than most classes do. If you don’t already have an ST Lancer you favor, she’s a good grail pick.
Liz has good damage, tons of batteries, and utility that’s helpful for both CQs and farming. I wouldn’t even call her generically good—she does lots of things that even a standard strong ST doesn’t—but at the end of the day she NPs a bunch and hits hard, just like every other good ST unit. She is, to be clear, very good at this! But with FGO’s main story nearly over, I hesitate to say it’s worth investing in a strong new ST who doesn’t do much other than be a strong new ST. Even a year or two ago she would have been a 10/10 Servant, I think, but this late in the game’s life cycle she’s just a little less appealing.
Very good Servant overall—if you like Liz and want to invest in her, she’ll feel great to use—but not a must-pull otherwise.