Rabbit’s Reviews #454: Lilith (5* Rider)

Lilith has nearly the highest attack of the SSR Riders. Her offense-focused stat spread is a natural fit for her self-sacrifice kit, and it both makes her better as a DPS and slightly increases her ability to help out with earlier waves in farming contexts. Her internals are good, too, with great Arts card NP gain and decent Quick card NP gain as well. She’s a Quick Servant with high-ish hit-counts, so her star gen capabilities are solid as well—though her Rider star weight can get in the way of a DPS’s crit consistency on occasion. Her only passives, meanwhile, are Riding EX—a nice boost to Lilith’s most important card type—and Divinity, which is mostly just there for the trait.

Mana Loading is by far Lilith’s most important append, and she needs it maxed-out in order to facilitate her best teams. None of the other appends particularly matter. Anti-Berserker damage is decent if you plan to use Lilith as a DPS, and the crit damage buff is solid given that she should have relatively easy crit access, but really, all she needs is Mana Loading.

Lilith needs a mix of older and newer mats. The only especially noteworthy thing she asks for is Amber from Past Chaldea, which is new enough to still be in short supply. Aside from that, she should be pretty easy to invest in.

Lilith’s skillset is perfectly tailored to enable her nonsense. Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.

Lilith’s NP is an economical bundle of useful effects. It notably has not one but two forms of niche damage, both of which Lilith can control, granting power mod against enemies with Confusion and supereffective damage against enemies with Charm. In both cases, a DPS Lilith has to be choosy about when she uses her skills. Confusion might persist across multiple turns in CQs, but since it’s removed as soon is it procs, there’s no guarantee of that, and in farming contexts it’s guaranteed to be one-turn-only. Similarly, while Lilith can inflict Charm, it only lasts for one turn. For a support Lilith, both of these niches are pure benefit, as she only needs one turn of buffs, but for a DPS Lilith, her damage will be a bit spikey.

Aside from that, the NP also inflicts a 20% defense debuff after dealing damage, which lets her damage ramp in CQs and increases the damage of a follow-up DPS NP while farming. Lilith would be better if this ramp was buff-based (and ideally partywide), but it’s not like she’s lacking for party support, so that would probably be a little too greedy. Also, the NP gives Lilith pierce invuln, for a bit of convenient CQ utility.

Lilith is significantly less notable as a DPS than as a support, but for consistency’s sake, I’ll start off with the usual breakdown of her loop specs and damage.

Her “standard” team is Summer Skadi/Lilith/Summer Skadi/Oberon. On turn 1, you use all skills from both Summer Skadis, plus Lilith’s second skill. Lilith gets about 8.5% charge per enemy, and she needs 30% refund per turn to loop, which means she can only loop 3/3/x nodes and even then only if she gets a fair bit of overkill or is swinging against Casters. Assuming she hits sufficient refund values, on turn 2, you plug a Skadi out for Oberon, use his 20% battery, and use Lilith’s 50% battery. On turn 3, you use Lilith’s third skill and Oberon’s two remaining skills to secure the loop. You might be able to get away with 2/3/x or 3/2/x nodes thanks to the 10% charge from the new plugsuit, but Lilith loses damage from using that instead of plugsuit 2, so it’s not ideal for that to be necessary.

An NP2 level 90 Lilith with MLB BG deals about 574k damage on turn 3 in this setup, assuming the charm from her third skill successfully lands. That’s pretty good—enough to counterclass Casters—though her weak loop specs mean the nodes in which she works for this purpose will be somewhat limited. A maxed-out Lilith deals about 970k, which isn’t strictly speaking omnifarming territory, but is close enough that cards should usually close the gap. Again, this relies on swinging against 3/3/x nodes and also getting a lot of overkill, but she’s just barely functional for this purpose.

A DPS Lilith’s best farming team, though, isn’t actually the standard team. Instead, she wants Summer Skadi/Lilith/Waver/Oberon/Lilith, in that order. In this team, the support Lilith needs Mana Loading, Waver needs Skill Reload, and (for perfect loopage) you also need the new plugsuit, which brings 10% extra charge. You start off by using all Summer Skadi skills and then plugging her out for the second Lilith. Waver uses all his skills, targeting the DPS Lilith with his first skill. The DPS Lilith uses her second skill, and the support Lilith uses all of her skills, selecting the self-sacrifice option on her third skill. The support Lilith NPs, followed by the DPS Lilith, and the support Lilith dies, swapping Oberon in. On turn 2, you use the DPS Lilith’s battery, as well as Oberon’s 50% battery, and Lilith NPs again. On turn 3, all of Waver’s skills have come off cooldown, so you can use all of his skills (targeting Lilith again), use Oberon’s 20% battery, use Lilith’s 20% battery, and use the attack buff and 10% battery from the new plugsuit to secure the loop. Waver also ends up with enough charge to slot in one of his NPs before Lilith’s last NP. This gets you perfect loopage, gives you two stacks of Waver’s skills, and lets you preserve Lilith’s charm for turn 3 to get its supereffective damage multiplier.

In this setup, a level 90 NP2 Lilith with MLB BG deals about 1.16 million at neutral on wave 3, which is solidly enough to omnifarm. A maxed-out Lilith deals nearly 2 million—or a bit over 1.2m without Black Grail. That is to say, a maxed-out Lilith can 6CE farm in this team. ...Or would be able to, were it not for team cost. This team involves 5 SSRs. With SR Mash occupying the last slot and 5* CEs on every Servant, this team would have a total cost of 124, which is too high to run at present. This means a maxed-out Lilith team is still limited to running 5 SSR CEs, even though she doesn’t need Black Grail.

That said, she can enable 6CE teams where some of the CEs have lower cost—if, for example, you’re using a mix of CE rarities to support different types of drops for a 90++ node—and if you want a DPS who can reliably clear nodes, regardless of time cost and CE number, Lilith is a strong option.

The trick here, though, is that most of that power comes from Lilith’s support potential, and almost any Servant—especially if they have a Quick or Arts NP—can benefit similarly. A farming team that uses Lilith exclusively as a support wants to run two of her, which means it runs up against team cost problems even more sharply, but in exchange, Lilith can give just about any Servant perfect loopage (if they didn’t have it already) and also amplify their damage to previously-unheard-of levels.

Support Lilith can work in a lot of different ways depending on the DPS she’s supporting, but the high-level concept is that you use Lilith’s support skills and then have her NP to swap herself out. She doesn’t just provide some extra damage, though—she also provides a turn of cooldown reduction to the party, potentially allowing your DPS, or even a support, to double-stack their skills where they couldn’t before. Lilith has 90% selfish charge in her own kit (once you factor in Mana Loading), so if your DPS has, say, a 50% selfish battery and at least 10% in party charge, you can run a Lilith/DPS/Lilith frontline, use everybody’s skills, and then do a Lilith→Lilith→DPS NP chain on turn 1 to make way for a conventional support line behind them.

This is rarely the best option available, though, and there aren’t all that many Servants who work that way. Even among the ones who can theoretically do this, Arts Servants will usually prefer a Lilith/DPS/Castoria frontline, as there’s a good chance you can insert two Castoria NPs while still running a double Lilith setup—see my Summer Beni review for an example of a team that works like this.

The closest thing to a “generic” Lilith setup—the team structure that’s most frequently the best way to use her—is Lilith/DPS/Waver/[50% charge card-type support]/Oberon/Lilith, in that order. Arts Servants usually want Urdr, Quick Servants want Summer Skadi, and Buster Servants want Koyan—though there are some specific cases where Servants of all three card types want Ascalaphus instead.

The reason this is ideal is twofold: for one, both Liliths need 10% extra charge in order to NP, and Waver just so happens to have two separate 10% charge skills, which he can split across two turns in order to provide both Liliths with the necessary charge even if the DPS has no party charge in their own kit. The other reason is that, as long as Waver has Skill Reload, double Lilith allows Waver to use his own damage buffs twice, massively increasing the amount of damage you’re providing to your DPS.

All your DPS needs in order to make this work is at least 20% flat charge (or 40% without Mana Loading) on one of their skills. Both Liliths need Mana Loading, and Waver needs Skill Reload—though he can push damage further if he has Mana Loading as well. Your DPS may need Mana Loading and/or Skill Reload depending on their kit as well. The one other asterisk is that your DPS needs a way to get 20% charge on turn 2. This can take many forms: straight refund, for Arts and Quick Servants, or post-NP flat charge, or a battery on a sufficiently short cooldown. “Sufficiently short” means 4 turns for Quick, 5 turns for Arts (thanks to Urdr), or 6 turns for Buster (thanks to Koyan). If your DPS has no way of getting that extra charge, they aren’t out of luck—you just trade your card-type support for Ascalaphus, who makes up the difference. Ascalaphus doesn’t even result in that much damage loss for Quick and Buster units, as his buffs are mostly type-agnostic!

The general strategy is that on turn 1 you use all your DPS’s skills, then Waver’s first and third skills, then all Lilith skills, choosing Lilith’s self-sacrifice option. Lilith dies, and your card-type support swaps in. They use all their skills on their DPS and then plug out for the second Lilith, who uses all of her skills. Waver uses his second skill, and if any of your DPS’s skills are off cooldown, you re-use them. Lilith and your DPS NP, and Lilith dies, making way for Oberon. On turn 3, you use all of Oberon’s skills and you re-use Waver’s first and third skills. Again, if any DPS skills are available, you use them—and then, assuming Waver has Mana Loading, you use a Waver NP, followed by a DPS NP.

This strategy is impractical in the sense that it involves running five SSR supports and thus has a very high team cost, and that it involves three support NPs and three Servant swaps, so it’s rather slow. In exchange, though, it lets nearly any Servant deal massively increased damage. Lilith will let just about any AoE Servant with a battery farm 90++ nodes, if you’re willing to go through the hassle. This can be a good trick to have in your back pocket if your preferred farmer happens to be countered—if, say, you usually rely on a maxed-out Berserker and suddenly you’re presented with a Foreigner node—but, maybe more importantly, it means you can almost certainly take your favorite AoE Servant, whoever they are, and farm with them.

For a completely random example, let’s take Mephistopheles. It’s not controversial, I think, to say that Mephistopheles is not a particularly good Servant. His new buff definitely helps him, but (without Lilith) he can’t BG loop, and he’s a silver Caster. In a classic Koyan/Koyan/Oberon team, with Cranking as his CE, a level 70 NP5 Mephistopheles deals about 264k damage at neutral, which is pretty nice for his rarity, but not enough to counterclass 90++ Assassins—and he can’t even get there with grails and gold Fous.

In the Lilith team, with MLB BG, he reaches 670k at neutral. If you happen to have a fully maxed-out Mephistopheles, he would do 1.06 million damage on wave 3—enough to farm nearly any node, as long as there are no Riders or Rulers involved. This is, of course, an absolutely massive difference, and it points towards what I think is the biggest benefit of Lilith: if you have an AoE Servant you really love, and you’ve invested heavily in them, and they have at least a 20% battery to work with, you can probably farm with them. It won’t be the fastest or most efficient way to clear the node, but you can use your favorites, and that’s worth a lot.

I pick Mephistopheles in part because he’s not a particularly well-optimized partner for Lilith. He’s a Buster unit, for one thing. It’s easy to look at Lilith’s Arts and Quick buffs and assume she only works for Arts and Quick Servants, but that’s very much not the case. It’s true that she doesn’t enable skill stacking where it wasn’t already possible for Buster units, but the extra damage you get from Lilith’s own buffs plus the doubled Waver buffs—and, more importantly, the ability for 30% chargers in particular to BG loop—is so significant that she makes a huge difference anyway. The benefit is even more pronounced for Arts and Quick units, which not only benefit from Lilith’s extra buffs, but also are more likely to appreciate her cooldown reduction. With Skill Reload, Lilith lets Quick Servants with 5-turn-cooldown skills stack those skills, and in conjunction with Urdr she enables Arts Servants with 6-turn-cooldown skills to re-use those skills, where prior to Lilith they were limited to 5-turn-cooldown skills at most.

As an example of an Arts Servant who benefits significantly from support Lilith, take Summer Shiki, who has two 6-turn cooldown skills. With the same Waver team as above, Shiki can stack all of her skills and use the stronger version of her third skill twice. At NP2 and level 90 with Black Grail, she ends up dealing 1.1 million damage with her AoE NP—and because she gets to use her battery on both turn 1 and turn 3, she can swap NP types if needed, letting her more effectively deal with 1/1/x or x/x/1 nodes. Against x/x/1 nodes specifically, an NP1 Summer Shiki without Black Grail can still reach 90++ damage numbers, due to her ability to functionally double her turn-3 damage by switching back to her ST NP form. This of course has all the usual time- and team-cost asterisks, but it just goes to show how absurdly efficient Lilith is at boosting a DPS’s damage in an optimized team.

There are almost certainly specific individual Servants who have setups that are marginally better than the generic Waver one (or at least who have reasonable alternatives), but the Waver team is a good starting point in that it works for almost everyone. It’s especially good for Servants with strong Overcharge scaling, as boosting Overcharge is an extra benefit of Waver’s buffed first skill. That said, I do recommend playing around with Lilith, if you have her, and trying her out in different teams to see how she best supports your favorites!

One thing to note about farming with Lilith is that Lilith can actually do too much damage with her NP. If Lilith clears a wave on her own, she prevents your DPS from using their NP afterwards. In many cases, this is completely fine, but for Servants who have pre-damage buff-based ramp, or for teams that are relying on on-NP party charge to secure an extra NP from a support, this can be a problem. Lilith’s NP won’t usually be enough to kill if you’re farming 90++ nodes—and if you’re not farming 90++ nodes, you probably don’t need Lilith’s extra damage anyway—but it’s still something to be aware of, as it can result in slightly lower turn-3 damage in some rare cases.

Also, as one other note, because Lilith is a self-sacrificing Servant with a damaging NP, she can function similarly to Arash and the like for supporting Servants who for one reason or another can’t deal damage on turn 1. Aoko and Mash are of course the primary beneficiaries here—Lilith is a particularly good partner for both of them if you’re trying to use them to farm.

All of these farming setups of course also work for shortform CQs, and therein lies another one of Lilith’s arguably most important features: her massive burst damage ampage means she’s extremely powerful for min-turn CQ clears, letting you easily overcome even very high damage checks. She even brings a bunch of defensive utility in the process: for enemies not immune to charm, the Waver-based Lilith team locks the entire enemy team down on turns 1 and 2, ensuring you get through your burst window unscathed, and she provides partywide dodge as insurance against on-break NPs. The only things she doesn’t offer are ways to get around invulns, debuffs, and buff removal, but because she boosts damage by such a substantial amount, you can afford to pick a DPS who has that utility even if their damage output is on the low side.

Lilith’s supportive value is lower if she’s not cycling herself out, but because she brings a mix of offensive utility, defensive utility, and charge, she can work as a general-purpose support for mid-length CQs in a pinch. Her charm and skill seal effects can slow down the enemy team, while her partywide dodge blocks NPs and dangerous crits. In fact, with smart spacing of Lilith’s skills, making good use of Lilith’s party dodge and AoE charm, your whole team will be completely protected more turns than not. A double Lilith team is actually decently likely to stay alive for a good length of time, and since this team gives you two sources of partywide cooldown reduction, it moves pretty fast, too. This isn’t Lilith’s primary use-case, but it’s not a bad one, and it means Lilith’s value isn’t restricted to players who already have a deep box full of all the existing meta supports.

Because Lilith teams tend to be very high on the team-cost front, she’ll often be run with no CE at all—and when she does have a CE, it’ll usually be a drop CE for farming. If she’s your DPS, the Black Grail is your best damage option, of course. If you’re running Lilith as a support in CQs, though, you do have a few options. The various CEs that give party charge on death, like Camlann, are an interesting pick for obvious reasons, giving you added benefit when Lilith sacrifices herself. CEs that give a burst of stars at the start of a fight can also be good if Lilith isn’t planning to stick around, while for a Lilith who plans to not sacrifice herself and instead support the party, you might consider 2030, which will passively speed up the team and increase functional NP gain by virtue of enabling more crits, which, for all Lilith’s other strengths, isn’t something she’s all that good at otherwise.

A DPS Lilith benefits from crit damage CCs, of course—she’s a Quick Rider and therefore decently likely to be critting, but she has low in-kit crit buffs. As Lilith is more likely to be used as a support, though, you might consider CCs that have more supportive value instead. Star gen CCs are a solid option that can be alright whether or not Lilith is sacrificing herself, though you might also consider CCs that give more defensive utility—in the form of buff and debuff removal, and healing—for the rare case where you want Lilith to stick around to a second (or even third!) buff cycle.

Lilith is a very good Servant, but most of her value isn’t dependent on her stats, and in rare cases Lilith having too much attack can actually be a problem, so I can’t necessarily recommend her for grailing without any qualifiers. That said, her damage as a DPS is pretty high, and a stronger Lilith also by extension makes it easier for Lilith teams to handle nodes with high-HP enemies on earlier waves. Whether to grail her or not depends on whether you’re more worried about being stymied by strong early waves or about getting yourself into a situation where you can’t use an NP you’re expecting to have access to on account of Lilith killing early.

It’s also worth considering that grails are pure benefit in CQ contexts, so if you think you might use Lilith in hard fights, that might sway things for you!

Lilith is, if nothing else, very interesting. At the end of this review, I’ve come down on the side of her being very, very good. It’s true that she’s often overkill as a support for Servants who are already strong, and it’s also true that she gets in the way of efficient farming if you have to use her—but she enabled things nobody else does, and the difference in performance between teams that do and don’t use Lilith is truly absurd. You may decide that you don’t want or need her—that you would always rather stick with a faster and more efficient farmer, like Olga, and that you don’t value facilitating lower-end units and don’t want or need Lilith’s CQ utility—but Lilith enables a whole bunch of Servants who don’t otherwise have the damage or loop specs to farm, and she’s quite possibly the single most valuable support unit for fastburn clears of hard content, on top of being a decent defensive support and a solid DPS. She kinda does everything, if you’re willing to build around her.

Lilith is, I think, the best overall unit and the most valuable pull out of this batch of summer Servants. When you don’t need her, you probably won’t want to use her, but if you do need her, no one else can fill that gap. There are all sorts of reasons why you might need her, too. Maybe you want to farm with a favorite unit, just to have an excuse to use them more. Maybe the easiest way for you to clear a hard fight is to burst it down, and you wouldn’t otherwise have the damage. Maybe we get a farming node down the line that has higher damage thresholds, and suddenly Servants that were sufficient for farming purposes need a little more help. If you look at all these use cases and decide that no, you’ll never reach for Lilith, you can skip her—but I think she’s a high-power, high-value, and highly unique unit who will be helpful for most players to have, even if they don’t always use her.