MMM - Lavicious-Looking Ladies Lag in Latter Lineup, Lacking Lowly Lingerie (Summer 2022 Gacha Part 2)

Midsummer Goddess is first up on Ibuki’s skill lineup, and acts as her Charisma clone. Providing the typical 20% Attack up to the team for 3 turns, in addition it provides a 30% Critical Damage buff, and a 30% NP gain buff (for Summer Servants) for the same duration.

While those are all pretty good supportive buffs, they fundamentally help Ibuki herself out a lot. Since she is a Summer Servant herself, she nabs a pretty good boost to her NP refund out of this skill, as well as the increase to her damage output. Add in that she has the ability to take advantage of that Critical Damage boost in spite of being a Berserker (gee, I wonder why), she can use every aspect of this skill to her own benefit.

And all that aside, it’s already compensating for her weakness in base NP gain. Or is her base NP gain low because she has this skill in her kit? Nobody knows…

With a base cooldown of 8 turns, this skill is on a longer downtime than most Charisma skills, but to be fair it’s got some fairly impactful buffs to it. And that longer cooldown probably exists for a reason like…

Hey, it’s a skill cooldown reduction skill! What a surprise, eh?

Summer Cheerleader is fundamentally a supportive tool, providing a moderate dual-card buff of Arts and Buster to a targeted ally for 3 turns, and also reducing their skill cooldowns by a turn on use.

By a supportive tool, I mean it exists to support Ibuki and Ibuki only. For real, who else would you use it on but the Berserker who wants to squeeze out every last ounce of damage she can manage to annihilate the enemy? That’s the reason her Charisma skill is on a longer cooldown, at least - her kit is inherently kind of 1 turn shorter on cooldown than it appears, except this skill.

The value this provides to Ibuki’s kit should be pretty self-evident - it’s a notable damage increase to her primary card types, gets her skills back quicker, and, once again, helps compensate for her otherwise-weak NP gain. With these buffs in play, her cards basically have above-average NP gain instead of the abysmal gauge they provide normally.

In some weird support setups, I suppose you could also use this in a pinch, in fact Ibuki is essentially the best option to provide the missing 1 turn skill cooldown reduction Arcueid needs for a 3-turn loop with double Koyanskaya, so if you’re an actual giga-whale then that’s available to you. But I’ll be honest, most of the time you won’t find an offensive Servant to better use this skill on than Ibuki. You’re basically already fielding the best available.

Given how Servants with targeted skill cooldown reduction tend to interact with their own kit, the base 8-turn cooldown on this skill is wholly fair.

Last on Ibuki’s skill lineup is, you guessed it, her gauge charger. Beach Apocalypse sounds about as devastating as a gauge charger skill can be to the enemy, and for good reason.

Providing her with a typical 50% gauge charge as well as a 10 stars/turn buff and a big Star Focus buff for 3 turns, this skill doubles up as both a means to get to her NP faster, and facilitate her critical damage output.

While those effects may be pretty plain on paper, having a consistent way to draw in Critical Stars as a Berserker (the strongest Berserker offensively in the game, at that) while also having critical damage buffs built into your kit means this goes the extra mile to facilitating Ibuki’s role as a damage dealer.

That’s the long and short of it. Gauge chargers are always good, especially as big as 50%, and it doubles up by completing the components of her kit that make her a critical damage dealing threat.

The 8-turn base cooldown on this skill is typical for the effects, but lower than normal considering Ibuki has a skill cooldown reduction skill.

Getting onto Erice’s skillset, we begin with Evil Spirit Medium. A direct copy of her welfare form’s skill, this thing doubles up as both her primary defensive tool and her 3-turn card steroid, providing both a 2-time, 3-turn Evasion buff and a 30% Arts boost for the same turn duration.

The straightforward simplicity of this skill means there’s not much to talk about, but getting both a defensive tool and your main offensive buff out of the way in one skill, especially when the defensive buff is hit-based, is a pretty good start.

The only flaw, if any, to point out with this skill is it has an 8-turn base cooldown, when it could very reasonably be 7 turns. Knowing me, I probably said the same thing about the original Erice.

Next on the lineup is Boundary of the Underworld, and it has a fair few effects to unpack. First, it drops a 3-turn, 1000 damage Curse on every enemy. Not particularly significant in the damage department, but it’s important regardless for later aspects of Erice’s kit.

Secondly, Erice puts a Taunt on herself for 1 turn, and gains a buff that applies a 3-turn 10% Defense debuff to any enemy that hits her for 3 turns. The synergy in these effects is pretty evident. Even if the Taunt is for a single turn, that usually equates to 30% defense down on a singular enemy, with potential for that to further increase on following turns. While not too potent, it does provide a fairly assured offensive steroid to use, if on a 1-turn delay.

Lastly, and most importantly, this skill acts as a 30% gauge charger. While Erice is a ST Servant, and as a result not that invested in having a gauge charger compared to sum, it’s still a very useful tool to have at one’s disposal, enabling earlier NP’s in the first stages of CQ’s, and generally increasing the speed to which she can NP in succession.

With all those tools, some more vital than others, provided in a singular skill, it’s very generous that this skill is on an 8-turn base cooldown.

Lastly, we have Reaper. This skill, as you may expect, provides a big-looking +120% Death Success rate boost to Erice for 3 turns, as well as boosting her Critical Damage and her damage to Servant-trait enemies by 35% apiece for the same duration.

While such a large number on the Death Success Rate buff may look intimidating, it’s actually more or less a non-factor unless you’re taking Erice to kill generic enemies that won’t die to her normal NP damage often. I may as well delve into this since I don’t think I’ve talked about Instant Death mechanics on the MMM for a while:

Instant Death effects in FGO take into account 3 stats to determine success - The base success rate of the death effect (Cu’s Gae Bolg is 60% after his NP strengthen, for example), the Death Rate of your target, and any modifiers to Instant Death success rate / resistance.

The formula is pretty simple:

Chance of Death = [Death effect Success Rate] x [Target’s Death Rate] x [Death success rate / resistance modifier]

The thing to keep in mind is that generic enemies’ Death Rates are almost always dependent on their rarity (Bronzes have 80% Death Rate, Silvers 50%, and Golds 20%), while Servant Death Rates are class-dependent, but hover around the 40% mark for player Servants, and the 1-5% mark for enemy Servants. Downright unfair, isn’t it?

The important thing to note is that while Death Success Rate buffs look like huge improvements, they’re ultimately just doubling the resultant death rate most of the time, which is entirely influenced by the enemy death rate. If Erice herself, for example, with a death rate of 8%, is targeted by Gae Bolg, the end Death Rate is a measly 4.8%, which would become 10.56% if Cu had Erice’s own Death Rate success buff applied to him. By contrast, the same Cu using his NP on a Bronze generic would have the normal 48% chance of death be elevated to 105%, a guaranteed kill. Simply put, Death Rate success buffs are more significant the more likely Instant Death is to occur, but in most cases your Instant Death chance will be hovering in the 5% or less range, making it an insignificant boost.

Hilariously, the end result of how the death mechanics work is that they’re significantly more influential for farming than difficult content - Summer Kiara, for example, can manage to consistently farm some nodes even if her damage is insufficient, simply because she reaches a consistent kill chance with her NP on Bronze enemies. Conversely, Nitocris’s ability to farm is hindered because her Instant Kill chance applies before her NP’s damage, stealing refund from her NP if an enemy is instantly killed before the NP does damage to them.

But I’ve gone on for too long. The other aspects of this skill, particularly Erice’s anti-Servant effective damage, are far more important. Erice, being a ST Servant, will be tackling other Servants most of the time, so this boost is fundamentally just a straight up 35% damage buff for her, while the Critical Damage buff sums up to a pretty good critical damage boost when her passives are factored in.

While the Death Success rate part of this skill is pretty insignificant, the other parts are pretty good, providing an additional form of damage steroid for Erice versus her primary targets as a damage dealer. The 8-turn base cooldown on this skill is shamefully longer than I’d hope, but at least it means all her skills are in buff alignment.