I was looking through upcoming NA banners to see if there was a servant worth saving up for, and I got interested in Prisma Corps because Illya is one of my favorite characters. I really don't like the loli stuff (I had to grit my teeth and roll my eyes through most of Prisma Illya), but I think she steals the show in Heaven's Feel, and this seems to be the only version I'll get of her anytime soon. So, I read through her page, and I'm a bit confused as to how useful she actually is from a gameplay perspective.
Her kit is all over the place. Her skills and triple Arts deck appear built for spamming her NP, but she has really low NP gain per hit (although that's somewhat counteracted by her 5-hit Arts card). She has a one-turn Buster steroid, but she only has one Buster card, so I'm never going to be able to do an NPBB chain to take full advantage of that skill. Her ST NP has an innate steroid, which is nice, and does as much damage as Heracles's Nine Levels, which is unexpected from a Caster, but it comes at a painful cost in terms of Attack/Defense down. I suppose I could try to avoid that demerit by popping Suspicious Medicine before the NP, but that still leaves me a 30% chance of suffering 10% Attack/Defense down for three turns. She also has some survivability skills, but they're either limited (e.g., only one-turn invincibility) or unreliable (70% chance of guts). Basically, she's not like any Caster I've ever seen.
So, is she actually useful? And if so, in what capacity does she shine?
Illya faces stiff competition from Medea and Xuanzang who can not only charge their NP more efficiently but offer utility as well (Buff removal and debuff removal for Medea; party wide debuff immunity, np gain and stargen, massive crit chance debuff for 1 turn and a tank skill for Xuanzang)
I'd put her on the same level as Arjuna, Saber Shiki, Mordred and Iskander in that while they're difficult to recommend compared to other servants, they're still usable.
If I'm not mistaken her NP gives her the highest burst damage of any caster in the game. In terms of offensive casters though I would still say Xuanzang is better since she can spam her NP.
Basically, Illya is probably the best nuke caster. That being said, casters in general don't tend to make good offensive units, but she isn't unusable.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that her low NP gain means that she would have trouble relying on it for damage, and would likely require a team to be built around her to be truly effective.
She's the strongest burst caster, and she can do high damage. Yes she is useful, of course, though the bad thing about her is, what you said, the NP demerit, making it stupid hard to spam her NP, though that's the only thing holding her back. Suspicious medicine can help her, but, take it mind the 70% chance. You can use someone like Ozy or post-interlude Kuro to make this problem disappear, though realistically speaking, it's dumb to bring Ozy with her, and Kuro really doesn't bring anything to the team aside that increase buff chance for Illya thing. If I were to compare her with the other offensive casters that is available right now, Sanzang is better in general, but if you can make Illya's problem disappear, she is really flat out better.
Also, 'caster makes bad offensive servant' is a myth. They do just fine, NA is just seriously lacks offensive casters.
Its not really a myth casters on average have lower attack stats than most other classes and have a .9x damage modifier meaning all other things being equal they do ~10% damage less than other servants doing the same thing so yeah you can use an offensive caster but unless your against a assassin it will generally be strictly worse than using a different class.
As a comparison the highest attack caster is 11658(functionally 10492.2) and the next highest is a huge drop to 10857(functionally 9771.3) which puts 5* casters damage output on the same tier or lower than 4*s in other classes and much lower than other 5*s such as rider's highest of 12001, lancers 11976(functionally 12574.8), archers 12342(functionally 11724.9), or sabers 12465 none of these classes have such a huge gap between their top attack stat and 2nd place.
Again not saying it doesn't work its just strictly worse than using other classes in most situations, game is fairly easy 99% of the time so that doesn't really matter though.
It IS a myth. Like I said, lol, we just lack good offensive casters. Assassins also share the same 0.9x multipliers and most of them are QUICKS which FURTHER lowers their damage, but, have you ever seen people complaining about Jack doing not enough damage?
Quick ends up doing more damage overall though due to the crit stars they generate(at least on assassins most other classes don't have high enough star gen to make quick cards actually net positive damage) as a crit quick card out damages a buster card and generates NP for even more damage and boosting your crit star generation even further. And yes though it goes without saying really its absolutely reasonable for Jack to be criting every time she attacks and other assassins can still crit more than half the time when you only need to be criting about 1/4th of the time to match casters arts cards in damage output. Assassins have higher base attacks as well with Jack at 4th place among assassins being only 100 attack behind Xuanzang who holds the highest attack of casters by a very wide margin.
Lacking a high attack stat is a inherit trait of the caster class just like assassins star gen or riders star draw - even if its not technically a "hard" rule its very clearly something done by design as there is only one caster with an over even 11k attack and its magnified by thier poor attack modifier the class was not built for damage.
Nah, again, we just lack good offensive casters. Like, for example, later on we'll get Sheba who can literally surpass Sanzang's 3 turn NP spam with burst crit. FYI, Sheba is a 4* and has naturally lower damage than Sanzang.
Quick doesn't do much damage even when critting lol. The thing with most quick servants are they can NP loop with quick crits, e.g. Jack, Okita, Kinrider, that's what made them amazing in the first place, crit + NP spamming, not pure crits.
Now, the thing with offensive casters are they are mostly NP spammers. Sanzang comes to mind, and there is also Medea, and later on we'll get Circe. Now, we have half of the reason why quick is so good, NP spamming, so we only need crits. That's where art crit setups come to play and those offensive casters would easily fit in and loop better than quick assassins. Mostly because in teams, quick assassins need to dominate the cards to keep the stars and crit going, while in art crit you only need to hit whatever blue button you see because you'll be either generating passively or have amazing star output from stupidly high star gen boosts. Of course, art crit does a lot more than quick crit. Damage wise, they easily surpass quick crit and NP gen wise they could fill your NP better than quick.
Tbh, even without art crits, offensive casters can still mow down enemies pretty quickly with NP spamming.
Lastly, at the end of the day, attack stats doesn't matter that much since you'll be buff stacking anyway, so, saying that casters isn't suited for offensive just because low attack is pretty much invalid since you only need to create a simple setup to buff stacks properly.
Quick cards damage scaling is 80%, 96%, 112% busters is 150%, 180%, 210% crits double all card traits(including the bonus from 1st card) crit quick cards hit harder than buster cards without crit which is to say plenty hard. As for NP spamming you rather invalidate your own point by pointing out assassins do the same thing with crits.
If you enter into the area of arts crits then you have to start looking at specific team compositions to even begin to measure damage output and frankly I'm too lazy to do that ~ so whatever. Worth noting by nature art quick requires more skills to go towards star gen though as art has the worst star gen of all cards which in turn means less skills buffing your attacks.
And finally for buff stacking you do realize buffs are multiplicative right? As in any 1 point in attack becomes worth more and more the more buffs are stacked. Worth noting that .9x attack modifier hits all of the buffs you've stacked as well making them 1 for 1 worse than they would be on any other class(aside from assassin ofc).
I'll say it a again the argument has never been about if casters are able to function offensively but if they can do it as well/better than the other classes and in that regard can you really point to a caster and say they're just as good as Jalter, Cu alter, Gil, Ozymandias, etc. If you can honestly do that good for you I guess but you'll have a hard time convincing others of the same.
I think I've been causing some confusion with the way I worded things lol. For the record, I never meant to say that offensive casters are bad, just that there would usually be better options for offence. In order for crit teams with a caster for damage to function properly, you would likely need to be building a team around them which requires expensive servants and CEs. Some may argue it simply isn't worth the effort unless you already happen to have a lot of the necessary components since you could basically put memerlin into a good buster-crit team that you could make for a similar cost/effort and completely dominate most of the game.
I'm not saying that an offensive caster is bad by simple virtue of being a caster, of course that isn't true. Offensive casters have their own niche as assassin killers, and some of those soul eaters do get really annoying.
It's just that, as classes go, casters are the least suited to offense as the person above me said (taking into consideration their usually low base attack, bad damage modifier and low crit star weight). Even within their own niche, they aren't the only option. Xuanzang is currently (generally) the strongest offensive caster, and many bersekers outdamage her even when fighting assassins.
At the end of the day, offensive casters, while definitely not bad enough that you will have problems when using them, are almost never the best option gameplay-wise, that's all (BTW I am saying this as someone who regularly uses Xuanzang).
In high level battles, Berserkers can die very fast as they take double damages and mobs with high critical chances can kill a Berserker in one turn. So bringing an Offensive Caster is better as they take less damage from assassins.
And enemy assassin has a 3 NP bars and some servants can charge one tick with their skills (Carmilla) so you wanna kill them very fast and Berserkers without a starting NP CE or Waver can have a really difficult time to charge their NP.
Okay, for real, you are talking with someone who has access to better offensive casters like Sheba and Circe here.
Zerks are NOT more useful against assassins. Right now, maybe. Later? Try using zerks against 500K HP big ghosts, I dare you, and those guys are literally everywhere.
Oh for sure, having a damage-dealer of every class, including caster, is going to be more and more important as the game progresses. I didn't mean to imply that berserkers were a better option against assassins overall, I apologise if that's how it came across; I was just saying that, at least in terms of damage, berserkers are often comparable to offensive casters against assassins, so there is more than one option for this niche if OP doesn't roll for Illya.
And to be fair though, Sheba is a very specific exception, not the rule, and she won't be out for a good long while. For about a year and a half, Xuanzang and Illya will be about the best we get.
That being said, you bring up a really good point that I forgot to mention. To the OP: it's a lot more worth it to roll Salem when that comes out than to spend any quartz on Illya, unless you really like her.
