Rabbit’s Reviews #435: Elisabeth of the End (4* Avenger)

22whiterabbit22
Liz is a truly phenomenal Servant. Her value can be summed up as: she brings Merlin-tier buffs, and she self-cycles. She’s the best self-cycling support in the game—better than Crane, better than Summer Chloe, better than Nobukatsu, etc. Even if she were a banner SSR, she’d be an easy 10/10, a borderline must-pull. Instead, she’s a free SR, which is just silly. She’s even a passable damage-dealer in her own right! I think Liz is the single strongest welfare we’ve ever gotten, with her only meaningful drawback being that she’s mostly locked to Buster teams.
Elisabeth of the End
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Liz has middling stats as SR Avengers go, which means she’s still fairly attack-oriented relative to all SRs. Higher attack would make her a better damage-dealer, but most of her value comes from support, so her stats don’t really matter. Her NP gain is decent relative to her deck, with slightly above-average Arts and Quick cards, while her star gen is mostly weak, though her single Quick does have a high hit-count. Her only passives are Oblivion Correction for marginally more crit damage and Self-Restoration for some passive NP gauge—again, neither of which matter much, as they only help Liz as a DPS and most of her value comes as a support.
None of Liz’s appends matter at all to her effectiveness as a support. Mana Loading can occasionally enable Liz to NP for a little extra damage, but usually you’ll just want to use the card slot on your DPS’s cards instead. If you want to use Liz as a DPS or a farmer, Mana Loading is important because she’s a 30% charger, and Skill Reload lets her double-stack her buffs on turn 2 instead of turn 3 (though she can’t usually use her third skill twice without dying). The other three appends are all fine, but any benefit they provide is marginal—and, again, none of the appends do much for Liz as a support. You can safely ignore them all in most cases.
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Liz is a welfare, so she doesn’t need any ascension mats other than the special materials from her own event. For skills, she needs the Avenger-standard spread of different mats at each level. Most of her mats come from late FGO, which can make her difficult to max out if you aren’t caught up on story.
All three of Liz’s skills provide useful supportive value. Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.
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Shrine Maiden is a 30% self-battery that also gives 10% charge per turn to the whole party. The party charge isn’t a lot, but since she cycles herself out, Liz is functionally free—that is to say, you get the extra 10% charge per turn on top of whatever your other supports are bringing. For some Servants and in some situations, an extra 10% charge per turn is the difference between looping and not, which makes this pretty neat! The skill also gives 10 stars per turn per Servant, or a very solid 30 stars per turn across the whole team. Assuming Liz dies, which she usually will, this drops to 20 stars total in practice, but that’s still enough to help facilitate crits on an ongoing basis.
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Pumpkin Planet is functionally a Charisma variant. It gives 20% attack up and a measly 20% crit damage up to the whole party, for 3 turns. The skill does give more crit damage—an extra 30%, for a more respectable 50% in total—on Halloween fields, but those are so uncommon that effect might as well not exist. This would be an underwhelming skill normally, but the fact that Liz can remove herself from the field makes this basically just free damage for any DPS, and that’s great! The skill also generates 30 stars, which in conjunction with Liz’s third skill should pretty much guarantee your DPS crits—not hugely impactful in the grand scheme of things but certainly nice.
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Ruler of the Stars is the skill that makes Liz worth talking about. It’s a Hero-Creation-adjacent buff, giving 50% Buster up, 50% crit damage up, and 5000% star weight up to an ally for three turns. This is of course an excellent damage buff for any Buster Servant, and it makes it easy to access crits and makes those crits more powerful. The real star of this skill, though, is actually its demerit—it reduces Liz to 1 HP and causes her to take 1000 damage per turn for three turns. This has obvious drawbacks for a DPS Liz, but it’s great for her as a support, because it means Liz can use all her buffs and then go away. Getting 50% Buster up, 20% Attack up, 10% charge per turn, and several crit buffs, all without sacrificing a conventional support, is truly phenomenal. Assuming you can slot her in, Liz makes every Buster Servant drastically stronger with zero fuss—you don’t have to rely on enemies to kill her, you don’t have to feed her batteries, you don’t have to use her NP, you don’t have to keep her around for more than a turn. She just shows up, uses her buffs, and then at the end of the turn, she dies. I cannot stress enough how powerful this is. ...That said, there is one other special thing about this skill, which is that unlike most damage-over-time effects, this will kill Liz even if all the enemies are dead, which means if Liz uses this skill and then kills all remaining enemies, and all your other Servants are dead, the demerit on this will kill Liz and you will lose the fight. This should almost never happen, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
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Liz’s NP is fine. It’s an AoE Buster NP with ramp, which is always nice, and it also removes offensive buffs, which is alright for survival. Unfortunately, Liz has no innate NP damage buffs, which means she has weak Oberon synergy, and she has no niche and no Interlude, and she can’t farm with Black Grail, so despite being an Avenger with good steroids and ramp, she can’t ever reach 90++ damage thresholds. You can farm with Liz—but you’re pretty much limited to 90+ and below.
This NP also inflicts burn and curse, but those don’t matter much. Since this NP doesn’t have any supportive value, the only real use it has is in low-end farming, and for the rare case where you’re using Liz as a support and can toss her enough batteries for an NP for a small amount of extra damage. When I say small, I do mean small—if Liz doesn’t use her targeted Buster buff on herself, her steroids are very low, and she’ll almost never get class advantage. This isn’t a bad NP in and of itself—on another Servant with another kit it could be pretty good—but it just doesn’t do much for Liz herself. And that’s okay! It’s honestly preferable for all of her major value to be on her skills, since that means you don’t have to worry about slotting in an NP.
Setting damage aside, Liz is an AoE Buster Servant with a 30% battery, which means the usual Koyan farming setups apply—start with Mana Loading and a 50% charge CE, use Liz’s battery on turn 1, Koyan’s batteries on turn 2, and Liz’s battery again plus Oberon batteries on turn 3. The one problem here is that Liz’s third skill will kill her prematurely if you use it before turn 3 and don’t have at least 2000 HP worth of healing available.
...Fortunately, the newer of the two plug suits offers 2000 HP healing off its second skill at level 6 or higher, so this is not a problem. You can’t stack Liz’s third skill on turn 2 even if you have skill reload, because the demerit will kill her, but otherwise this works just fine. Again, Liz’s damage isn’t sufficient for 90++ farming (outside of gigamax setups with class advantage against Man-attribute enemies) so this isn’t hugely useful, but it’s technically there.
More relevant, though, is Liz’s support usage—which is actually quite simple. You plug her in, you use all her skills, and then she dies. It’s free damage, and free charge. This is mostly relevant for Buster units, but even Arts and Quick aren’t hurt by an extra 10% charge per turn and 20% extra attack up. Anyone who’s 10% charge shy of looping loops with Liz, unless they specifically can’t afford to plug their supports out early for some reason.
…We have, however, recently gotten a support for whom plugging out early is a problem. Tiamat teams lose a lot of power if Tiamat has to plug out before turn 3, and Liz must be swapped in before turn 3 in order to work properly, which means Tiamat teams (which are by definition non-Buster) are uniquely bad fits for Liz. Castoria-centric Arts teams or Skadi-centric Quick teams can still benefit from her, though—although Summer Chloe may be better for those if the timing lines up—and most fastplay Buster teams are massively improved by plugging Liz in, usually on turn 2 after both Koyans have used their batteries.
The only reasons not to use Liz in every team ever are the same reasons Servants like Crane and Summer Chloe don’t get used constantly despite being ostensibly optimal: the extra time it takes to plug a Servant out in farming, the weaker backline you end up with when you sacrifice a Servant in CQs, and team cost restrictions. That last one is the biggest problem: given the current cost cap, it’s not possible to run an SSR DPS, three SSR supports, and also an SR support, with a full set of SSR CEs. If you aren’t running full SSR farming CEs—if you’re using lower-rarity event farming CEs or have an empty CE slot or something—using Liz is pretty much always better than not using her, at least for farming… but between team cost issues and the added time swapping her out takes, you won’t generally want to use Liz for farming unless you absolutely cannot clear the node without her. She is strictly optimal in many cases, though, setting team cost aside.
Support Liz doesn’t care about CEs since she’ll usually want to die right away regardless. For farming, she can take whatever farming CE you want to give her. For CQs, on-death CEs are a great pick. Her bond CE is particularly excellent, charging the party’s NP gauge by 30% when Liz dies. A DPS Liz typically needs a 50% charge CE, for which things like Aerial Drive, Golden Sumo, and First Day of Filming are the usual picks.
Liz won’t often stick around long enough for CCs to matter, but if you’re using her as a DPS she’s a triple-Buster Servant with easy crit access, making crit damage CCs a reasonable choice. You can also give her supportive CCs—for buff removal, party healing, partywide NP damage up, and so on—if you want to lean into her support capabilities, but those CCs will generally be better used on other Servants.
Liz is a great Servant, and Avengers are usually good grail picks… but 99% of the time, stats just don’t matter to Liz at all. Even if you’re using her as a DPS, grails don’t let her hit meaningful farming break points. She’s not the worst grail pick in the world—a few extra levels would make her more reliable for 90+ nodes and better when you need a bit of extra damage push from her NP—but I would say you’re better off saving the grails for someone else.
Liz is a big power boost for any Buster Servant if you can afford to slot her in. She’s just completely and strictly optimal in pretty much any fastburn Buster context, including farming, assuming team cost isn’t an issue. High-power free Servants aren’t anything new to FGO, and in some respects Liz is matched to the game’s current power level in the same way that, say, Chen Gong was matched to the game’s power level on his release: very high theoretical ceiling, part of several top-end setups, comes with a few drawbacks, still requires having the best premium stuff in order to be fully effective, etc. But still—I’m amazed that we got a free Servant with this level of buff value who cycles out without even needing an NP. Liz is excellent, and she’s better at what she does than any other Servant in the game. Phenomenal welfare.