Rabbit’s Reviews #448: Gray Lily (4* Saber)

Gray has pretty typical stats for an SR Saber, with good but not exceptional attack and solid HP as well. Gray’s Arts card NP gain is slightly below average for her deck, and her Quick card NP gain is quite bad. She’s also not great at active star gen, due to having middling hit-counts and only one Quick card.

Gray has a long list of passives. Magic Resistance is modestly useful, as always, while Riding does nearly nothing for Gray and Independent Action provides a mostly-negligible crit damage buff. Spiritualist Constitution gives Gray 3% charge passively, which doesn’t matter for farming but might occasionally get Gray access to an NP she would otherwise miss in CQs. Mirror is a funny passive, providing a 10% NP gain bonus to Gray’s Buster cards. This normally does nothing, as Buster cards’ base NP gain is 0, and 0 times 1.1 is still 0—but in a mighty chain, or if you have an Arts card lead, Buster cards get to generate a little bit of NP gauge, at which point this NP gain buff does apply. It’s extremely marginal in any case, but it’s kind of funny to see.

Gray relies on Mana Loading and Skill Reload in order to make her CE-less loop setup work. Aside from that, the crit damage append is decent given that Gray is a Buster unit and has low in-kit crit buffs, and the other two appends are mostly irrelevant.

Gray is a welfare and thus functionally free to ascend, and she asks for mostly old mats for skills, so she should be pretty easy to invest in, if you’re so inclined.

As is often the case for welfares, Gray’s skillset is pretty focused, mostly consisting of the baseline tools Gray needs to work well. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

Sadly, Gray’s NP does not give any damage bonuses, let alone ramping damage buffs. In exchange, it charges Gray’s NP gauge by 10%, which is important for her ability to loop CE-less. This isn’t a bad trade—Gray gets more damage out of getting to run BG than she would from any realistic ramp—so this is about as good as we can realistically expect from a welfare.

Aside from that, the NP removes defensive buffs before dealing damage, which can be handy for consistency in CQs, and it deals supereffective damage to Undead enemies, which will almost never matter.

Gray’s CE-less loop setup uses a typical Koyan/Koyan/Oberon team, with Mana Loading and Skill Reload on Gray. On turn 1, you use all of Gray’s skills, both Koyans’ damage buffs, and one Koyan’s 50% battery. Gray NPs and gets 20% passive charge—10 from her battery and 10 from her NP. On turn 2, the other Koyan uses her 50% battery, which (with skill reload) brings all of Gray’s skills back off cooldown. Gray uses all her skills again, and her 30% battery brings her back to 100%, allowing her to NP. Gray gets 30% passive charge this time—20 from the two stacks of her battery, and 10 from her NP—at which point Oberon plugs in and uses all his skills to secure the loop.

A level 80 Gray with MLB BG, class score, and so on, deals about 537k at neutral, meaning Gray can 5CE farm any Lancer or Berserker node. Even at level 120 with gold Fous, Gray doesn’t reach the point of being able to omnifarm at neutral, or to counterclass without a CE—but given that she’s completely free, being a solution to Lancer nodes is still meaningful. Her damage is also high enough that she should be able to 6CE farm most sub-90++ nodes, which isn’t meaningless—you usually have a week or so of event farming prior to the 90++ node unlocking, and plenty of non-event farming nodes have lower damage thresholds. Gray is about as good a farmer for those cases as any Servant who can’t do the same thing plugless.

For CQs, you can use the same setup to maximize three-turn damage. Otherwise, Gray is pretty much completely unremarkable—you can use her like you would any other AoE Buster unit for roughly the same results. She doesn’t have particularly notable synergy with any specific supports or teams, but she’s a solid point Servant all-around. She can be a particularly good pick if you’re dealing with enemies who spam debuffs or defensive buffs.

As a welfare, Gray is of course very budget-friendly. You can pair her with Mash and grab a friend’s Merlin for a reasonably powerful and reasonably stable team that should be able to clear most story fights and some CQs.

The Black Grail is Gray’s best CE for farming and for CQs, assuming she’s properly supported. If you’re running a slowplay-oriented Buster team, though, you might prefer to give Gray a 50% charge CE, both to avoid BG’s demerit and to make it easier for Gray to get going. Alternatively, Prisma Cosmos isn’t a terrible choice for Gray for slower CQ teams, as it pairs nicely with Gray’s NP refund and passive charge to help Gray regularly access her NP even if cards don’t cooperate.

Gray is a Buster Servant with low in-kit crit buffs, so crit damage CCs are a natural pick here. Alternatively, you can put star gen CCs on Gray’s cards to help her crit a bit more consistently.

Gray is pretty much fully functional for everything you’d want her for at level 80. If you don’t have an MLB Black Grail or you haven’t finished the Saber class score, you could give her a pair of grails to help offset that, and having more stats will only make Gray better for CQs, but I don’t think she particularly needs the grails.

As AoE welfares go, Gray is really solid. She would be only okay were it not for the fact that she has a CE-less loop setup, but with the ability to run BG, or to 6CE farm lower-health nodes, she’s a fun and potentially useful free unit. The fact that she can farm makes her more valuable than her Lancer version, in my mind—it’s harder to replace a good AoE than a good ST unit, in most cases—but she’s not all that special outside of her loop specs.