Rabbit’s Reviews #441: Demeter (5* Lancer)

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Years after her appearance as a Lostbelt boss, Demeter is finally summonable. To be honest, I thought we’d never get the Olympians as playable Servants. There aren’t a lot of lore rules that FGO won’t violate to make someone summonable (which I don’t think is a bad thing, to be clear), but it seemed like the proper Olympians, at least, were out of reach. But now we have Demeter!
...And she’s not very good!
Demeter is a utility-centric AoE Arts Servant. She’s fairly bulky and has a bunch of different forms of support, she has a lot of potential for multicore teams, and she has perfect loop specs with Castoria… but her damage output is quite low. She’s extremely dependent on swinging against Earth enemies—without her anti-Earth niche, she has remarkably low in-kit damage buffs, and while her other utility is good, it’s not so good as to offset having very low damage.
Demeter
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Demeter is tied with Vritra for having the highest attack of the SSR Lancers, and her health is relatively high for her attack stat, giving her a very good stat spread overall. Her NP gain is fairly typical for her deck, with average Arts and low-average Quicks, while her star gen is better than average for an AoE Arts unit, thanks to her two five-hit Quick cards.
Demeter has a ton of passives. She starts with Magic Resistance, which, as usual, isn’t reliable but will occasionally let you avoid a debuff. She gets Independent Action, which provides a tiny crit damage buff that’s mostly irrelevant to Demeter’s kit and playstyle. Territory Creation is deceptively important here—an 8% Arts buff isn’t a lot, but it has an outsized impact on Demeter due to applying to her most important card type and due to her otherwise low steroids. Demeter’s other three passives are unique to her. Divine Core of the Great Land provides a negligible selfish damage buff, but it also slightly reduces incoming damage for your whole team—it’s a small effect, but it’s neat and might occasionally save a Servant from death. Production Manager gives Demeter 1000 HP in healing per turn, which goes a long way towards making Demeter resilient against incidental chip damage. Emergence of Erinys increases Demeter’s debuff success rate, which makes some of her NP effects slightly more reliable in CQ contexts.
Mana Loading is necessary for Demeter to loop 1/1/x nodes reliably, so that’s her most important append. Skill Reload is decent for getting you to a second buff cycle faster in CQs, but aside from that none of her appends really matter.
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Demeter’s mat asks are pretty manageable. She does need some Ordeal Call mats, so she can be tricky to level if you aren’t caught up on story, but aside from that there’s nothing particularly challenging here.
Aside from the fact that most of Demeter’s skills can flex supportive, this skillset is fairly underwhelming. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.
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Mother’s Authority combines a bunch of moderately useful partywide utility. It starts with a 20% Quick and Arts buff for the whole team. Demeter seems to trade buff value for party support—her overall buff value is very low, but in exchange, all of her damage buffs apply to everyone. While this could theoretically be useful for multicore teams (and it has some Tiamat synergy in CQs), it comes at the cost of Demeter herself having low damage, which isn’t a good trade. The other effects of this skill are all CQ-oriented. Debuff removal and debuff immunity are both handy for consistency reasons, and the huge partywide Max HP buff is nice for party stability, especially in Castoria teams, but none of these effects make up for the fact that Demeter just doesn’t hit very hard.
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Imitation Immortality is a nifty targeted skill that gives a guts, passive healing, passive NP charge, and a damage cut. Demeter will usually want to use this on herself, and in farming contexts this solidifies Demeter’s perfect loop specs. In CQs, you can toss this to a teammate if you have a support who’s struggling to access their NP or who’s in danger of going down. Assuming Demeter uses this on herself, she becomes extremely resistant to chip damage and is only likely to drop if she gets hit by an NP or a particularly nasty crit. This is a pretty solid skill, though it’s a bit unfortunate that for all her other bulk the only real defense Demeter has against NPs is a guts.
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Grieving Mother is a Charisma variant paired with a 50% battery. This is objectively a fairly powerful skill, combining multiple useful effects, but, again, Demeter’s damage buffs are pretty low, and it’s slightly unfortunate that Demeter has a damage buff tied to her battery—you may have cases where you want to save the battery for loop reasons and you lose out on early-turn damage because of it. The skill also gives a 30% power mod effect against Earth enemies. This is a decently broad niche, but power mod is the weaker form of niche, and 30% is low by power mod standards. However, Demeter also gets Supereffective damage against Earth, so Power Mod being the weaker form of niche isn’t as relevant—and this buff applies to the entire team. In multicore setups, if you’re fighting Earth enemies, Demeter provides a 20/20/30 buff spread partywide, which is comparable to what you’d get from a full support. If Demeter doesn’t need to use her second skill on herself, you even get some NP charge for your other damage-dealer on top of that. Even against Earth enemies, Demeter isn’t as flexible for multicore setups as the likes of Tez and Noah… but if you were specifically fighting Earth-attribute Archers, maybe you’d have a place for her thanks to these AoE buffs.
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Demeter’s NP is pretty simple. It’s primarily an AoE Arts NP with anti-Earth Supereffective damage tied to Overcharge. Niche damage is always nice and Earth is a broad niche, but unfortunately the NP is less impressive outside of that. While the NP technically does have ramp, it comes in the form of a post-cast defense debuff, which isn’t relevant to farming, can be cleared or resisted, doesn’t scale, and, of course, doesn’t apply until after the NP is used. It’s about as weak as ramp can get, though it’s technically there, which is better than nothing for CQ contexts. The NP also removes defensive buffs before activating—a decent consistency tool for CQs—and it applies buff block with each use.
That last effect is probably the most interesting thing here. Between her debuff cleanse, debuff immunity, buff removal, and buff block, Demeter has lots of ways to deal with enemies who spam annoying skills. This won’t do much for fights that have effects like that on break—they’re often marked as unremovable, which also means they can’t be blocked—but it can be handy to have an extremely consistent Servant on hand for fights that rely on random skill spam. Demeter’s value proposition is essentially, “she doesn’t hit hard, but she plays well in a team and she’s very consistent.” This is less valuable than it used to be—plenty of Servants hit hard and bring consistency, and plenty of others hit so hard that consistency is kind of irrelevant—but you can see the design intent here, at least.
Demeter has perfect loopage in Castoria/Castoria/Oberon teams, assuming she has Mana Loading. On turn 1, you use both Castoria Arts buffs, a Castoria Charisma, and all Demeter skills (targeting herself with her second skill). She refunds 10% against a single enemy and gains 20% from the passive charge on her second skill. You then use all remaining Castoria batteries to get back to 100%. Demeter refunds 10% again, gets another 20% passively, and then you plug Oberon in to secure the loop. 
Because of her refunds specs and battery distribution, Demeter is not well-suited to Tiamat farming—Castoria is the way to go. With an MLB Black Grail, an NP2 level 90 Demeter does roughly 365k damage out of niche, or 590k in niche. Demeter needs both higher NP levels and grails to reach non-niche 90++ damage thresholds even with class advantage. Demeter needs gold Fous, level 120, NP5, Castoria NPs, and niche to break a million damage against non-Archers. She technically can get there, which is better than some Servants have, but it takes a ton of investment.
Demeter does also have potential for multicore setups, especially if you only need a single AoE NP. Demeter only needs 30% extra charge to NP, assuming she has Mana Loading, which means she slots cleanly into Tiamat and Castoria multicore teams. You can toss her second skill onto your single-target DPS, and if you’re fighting Earth enemies you get access to an AoE NP with relatively little damage and charge loss compared to just bringing a second Tiamat or Castoria.
For CQs, Demeter brings consistency tools and healing, which makes her a good point Servant for conventional Castoria stall setups. My usual recommendation for a third support for this is Lady Avalon, but Tamamo, Reines, and now Flora are all also solid picks for Castoria stall. You can also run a burst-oriented Demeter team, as long as HP thresholds are relatively low, and have confidence that you aren’t likely to be stymied by things like random stuns or invulns, which can be nice.
If you don’t have the supports to run optimized teams, Demeter’s partywide buffs mean she works well in teams with at least one other damage-dealer, especially if that damage-dealer also provides partywide buffs. For mid-difficulty fights, you can get away with not bringing two full supports especially if both of your damage-dealers are also supporting each other.
Demeter passively outheals The Black Grail’s demerit at all times, and she really needs all the extra damage she can get. The Black Grail is solidly her best CE choice.
There isn’t anything obvious Demeter needs that CCs can provide. Crit damage CCs are decent here due to Demeter’s lack of in-kit crit buffs, but she’s also not likely to actually crit consistently in most teams, so they won’t always be helpful. You could also lean into her consistency by giving her CCs that remove offensive buffs, or lean into her bulk by giving her damage cut or healing CCs.
Demeter will need grails if you want to make her into a 90++ farmer, unless you’re only using her against Earth-attribute Archers. I wouldn’t recommend grailing her, though—she’s only fine, and grails won’t really change that.
Demeter is extremely consistent, and she brings a lot of solid-if-generic CQ-oriented tools. Her damage is quite low, though, especially in farming contexts, and FGO is largely past the point where “low damage, but with utility” is appealing, especially when that utility isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. She’s a situationally decent multicore unit and she has enough going for her that you might flex her in for the right CQ, so I won’t call her outright bad, but I do think she’s eminently skippable from a gameplay standpoint.