Rabbit’s Reviews #453: Biscione (4* Caster)

Biscione has relatively high attack and relatively low HP for an SR Caster—which still leaves her with low-ish attack relative to SRs as a whole, but it’s a decent starting point compared to most Servants in her class. Her NP gain, on the other hand, is a mess, with truly terrible Arts and Quick card NP gain—she’s very much reliant on flat charge and NP refund to get access to her NP. Her star gen is also very bad, as she has low-ish hit counts and a triple-Arts deck with an Arts NP.

Biscione has a ton of passives, which collectively increase her overall performance on nearly every front. She starts with the typical Magic Resistance for occasionally avoiding debuffs, and she pairs that with the also-typical Item Construction, which is particularly relevant here, as Biscione is reliant on landing her poison debuffs. She then gets Dragonkin, which slightly increases her Buster card’s performance—not all that impactful in practice—and marginally reduces the amount of damage Biscione takes.

Biscione’s remaining passives are fully unique and give Biscione a 5% buff to her NP gain, star gen, and crit damage. Biscione is a deceptively strong crit Servant for reasons I’ll get into later, and while both the crit-related buffs are tiny, they’re still better than nothing. The NP gain buff, meanwhile, very slightly offsets Biscione’s weak cards and makes her NP’s refund even better than it would otherwise be. The one remaining effect from Biscione’s unique passives is more unusual, giving a burst of 10 stars when Biscione arrives on the field. This won’t often make a big difference—Biscione won’t likely crit with just 10 stars, after all—but it pairs nicely with any other star burst effects you happen to have, and it could be handy if you want to pair Biscione with a Servant who needs a certain number of Critical Stars to function, such as Miss Crane.

Mana Loading is Biscione’s most important append—she doesn’t need it for all of her farming teams, but she does sometimes require it, and it pairs nicely with her 30% battery. Skill Reload, meanwhile, enables a high-damage Summer Lilith setup (and can be nice for longer fights besides). The crit damage append pairs nicely with Biscione’s other tools, while the other two appends do next to nothing.

Biscione’s mat asks are fairly unremarkable, taking a mix of older and newer mats in pretty reasonable quantities. Not much to say here.

Biscione’s skillset is mostly focused on amplifying her own damage through a mix of standard buffs and poison stacking. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

Biscione’s NP is very nice, combining a bunch of useful effects. It starts with a ramping Arts buff that scales with overcharge—the values themselves aren’t especially high, but any form of ramp is handy. It also inflicts a 20% defense down debuff post-damage, further amplifying Biscione’s ability to ramp in CQs. More interestingly, though, the NP has an unusual effect that’s applied as a pre-damage on-NP buff: for one turn, Biscione’s NP drains enemies’ NP gauge by 1 and charges Biscione’s NP gauge by 10% per poisoned enemy. The fact that this is pre-damage doesn’t matter, as far as I can tell—it still applies after Biscione’s NP gauge has drained and thus functionally increases her refund. In most cases this is functionally extra flat refund per enemy, which is really nice! The only impact of this being applied as a buff, rather than just being a property of the NP, is that buff block can prevent it from triggering—but aside from that specific case, this should pretty much always apply.

Aside from the damage and refund effects, this NP also inflicts a poison damage up debuff to enemies. This only matters for CQs, of course, and even there, Biscione’s poison effects deal so little damage this isn’t likely to be much more than flavor… but after Biscione has looped a few times, she may be doing 5-digit poison damage, which is kinda fun!

Biscione is notable for a number of reasons, but among them is that she’s a Servant for whom double Ascalaphus is her preferred team (at least, if you want to not have to worry about node composition). Biscione has perfect loopage in an Ascalaphus/Biscione/Ascalaphus/Oberon team, and she doesn’t even need Mana Loading to get there!

For this team, you start by using all three Biscione skills, plus one Ascalaphus’s batteries, to let Biscione NP. She refunds just over 10% against a single enemy, plus 10% flat charge from her NP and 10% passive charge from her first skill. On turn 2, you use the other Ascalaphus’s skills for another 70% charge, and Biscione NPs again, once more getting 30% charge back. On turn 3, you plug in Oberon, who uses all his skills to secure the loop. As long as one of the Ascalaphuses has Mana Loading, you also use that Ascalaphus’s first skill, to bring him to 100% charge, and you can then slot his NP in before Biscione’s, which gives you a bit of extra damage and slightly boosts the Arts buff Biscione gets from Overcharge.

An NP2 Biscione with MLB BG deals about 315k in this setup—not 90++ level damage, but respectable for an SR. She hits 500k at around level 100 and NP5, meaning an NP5 Biscione with grails should be able to farm any Assassin node. She’ll never reach omnifarmer territory, and that’s a lot of investment just to counterclass one type of node—but if you happen to get a bunch of Biscione copies while pulling for other Servants, she can still put in work, and she should be able to 5CE farm any 90+ or lower node, as long as she’s not dealing with Riders or Casters. Again, this isn’t anywhere near what top-end SSR damage-dealers can do, but for an SR, it’s pretty good!

It’s also worth noting that a double Castoria team (where one Castoria has Mana Loading and thus is guaranteed an NP) deals a bit more damage—366k on wave 3—but has somewhat tighter loop specs. Biscione can theoretically still do 1/1/x without Mana Loading, but she needs a bit of overkill, and (crucially) will be short the necessary refund against Assassins. This team also loses out on the extra damage push from Ascalaphus’s NP, so the damage difference is smaller than it appears, and if you aren’t inserting a support NP the damage advantage disappears—but especially if you’re not trying to handle 1/1/x nodes, Castoria may be the better option.

Biscione can also run double Tiamat, though she needs 3/x/x to do it. In this team, you use everyone’s skills on turn 1 and use a Tiamat→Tiamat→Biscione NP gain to start the fight. Biscione refunds about 19% per enemy, or 57% in total, and she gets 30% passive charge (from her first skill plus the Tiamats’ passive charge), along with another 30% flat charge from her NP, more than securing the necessary refund. She NPs again, and then on turn 3, Oberon plugs in to secure the loop, while still enabling Tiamat’s guranteed-crit card stretch.

A level 80 NP2 Biscione with MLB BG deals about 332k on wave 3 in this setup—more than the Ascalaphus team, actually—and then also gets Tiamat’s card stretch, which means Biscione needs less investment to counterclass 90++ nodes with Tiamat than she does with either Castoria or Ascalaphus. If the first wave has three enemies, this will generally be her best team, but that’s of course not a given.

As with Beni, though, Biscione’s highest-damage (albeit most impractical) farming team involves Summer Lilith. Specifically, you run Lilith/Biscione/Waver/Urdr/Oberon/Lilith, in that specific order. For this to work, you need Mana Loading on both Liliths, Skill Reload on Waver, and both appends on Biscione.

On turn 1, you use all Biscione skills, and Waver’s first and third skills, targeting Biscione with his first skill. Lilith then uses all her skills, choosing to sacrifice herself. You use Lilith’s NP (which is enabled by Mana Loading, her own batteries, and Waver’s 10% charge), followed by Biscione’s. Biscione gets 20% in flat charge even ignoring refund. On turn 2, Urdr swaps in and uses all of her skills on Biscione. You then plug Urdr out for the second Lilith. Waver uses his second skill, and Lilith uses all of her skills, again choosing the self-sacrifice option. Biscione’s 20% flat charge, plus the 10% charge from Waver, plus the 20% from Lilith, plus the 50% from Urdr, brings Biscione back to 100%, so you use Lilith’s NP (which is again made possible by Waver) followed by Biscione’s.

On turn 3, Oberon swaps in. Biscione can now re-use all her skills, and Waver can also re-use his first and third skills. Oberon uses his first skill, and also uses End of the Dream on Biscione. Neither Biscione nor Waver needs Oberon’s targeted battery, so he can actually use it on himself (assuming he has Mana Loading) to enable an Oberon NP for a bit of extra damage. You then use Waver’s NP, followed by Biscione’s, followed by Oberon’s (which must go last, as it applies invuln to the enemies). Note that stacking Biscione’s skills not only gets you extra poison stacks on turn 3, but also stacks her ramping power mod, so you have more poison stacks, and those poison stacks count twice for Biscione’s niche, significantly increasing her net damage output.

On turn 3, NP2 level 80 Biscione with an MLB BG deals 705k damage at neutral. A level 100 NP5 Biscione clears a million damage—and that’s without gold Fous. As I said for Beni, this is highly impractical for farming, between the high team cost and the number of Servant swaps, but it is Biscione’s highest-damage team, and the difference is truly massive. If you really wanted to omnifarm with Biscione for some reason, you could do it. That’s more a testament to Lilith than it is to Biscione… but still! It’s neat that this is possible.

For longer fights, the typical Arts stall setups will work just fine, with Castoria/Lady Avalon still being (in my opinion) the best overall shell. Especially with her most recent buff, Himiko has a bit more of an argument in her favor now—she moves faster and is easier to use in general, and a Himiko/Castoria team is more likely to avoid taking any damage at all than a Castoria/Lady Avalon team is—but especially considering Biscione doesn’t provide any healing, it’s hard to pass up on everything Lady Avalon brings.

At the lower end, the usual suspects work well here, too, though Mozart gets a special shoutout. His most recent buff makes him a more powerful support in general, but most notably, it makes debuffs more likely to land, which is great for helping Biscione reliably stack her poison buffs even against enemies with lots of debuff resistance.

The Black Grail is, as usual, Biscione’s best CE, as it amps her damage by a lot. The only reason you wouldn’t bring it is if you’re expecting a very long fight and have no healing available… but that’s a pretty rare case, and the extra damage is usually worth it even if it means Biscione goes down a bit faster.

Poison infliction CCs are the obvious choice for Biscione. Every card with a poison CC functionally scales Biscione’s damage twice as fast, and there’s nothing else you could ask from from a CC that will be more valuable.

Casters aren’t great grail targets due to their low base stats and inherent attack penalty, but Biscione is a pretty good Caster. At this stage in the game, odds are good most players have at least one strong AoE Servant they’re relying on, and even with grails Biscione is unlikely to overtake them. That said, if you end up with a high-NP Biscione and want to have a reliable Assassin counter, grails will only make her stronger, so she’s not a terrible investment.

Biscione is very good for an AoE SR Caster. That’s a low bar to clear, so your mileage may vary with regards to how much that matters to you. There’s nothing really to complain about here aside from her class and rarity—this is more or less the ceiling of what we can expect from a standard DPS at this level. She’s a solid unit, and if you want to use her, she’ll do pretty well, but at the end of the day she’s not going to meaningfully outperform her baseline.