MMM Miniature - Have you got what's hot to take your shot and close up shop using Habetrot? (Habetrot analysis)

Now we’re getting on to what’s truly important. While you’ll have a good idea of Habetrot’s first 2 skills from LB6 story, there’s no harm in a refresher.

Thread-Spinning of Good Fortune A is a targeted heal and utility skill, restoring 2k HP to an ally, giving them 1-turn debuff immunity and a very hefty 100% stargen rate boost for a turn. While none of these effects are particularly impressive, the skill itself is packaged on a 5 turn base cooldown, making it a blazingly fast 3 turn cooldown at skill level 10.

I’ll be the first to admit that even when it comes back up that frequently, the heal and stargen boost isn’t too good, but debuff immunity is pretty much universally handy in difficult content, especially when it can be popped so frequently. So while this thing is a niche supportive skill, it’s a strong one.

Next up on the list is “Boy do I wish every Arts farmer had this skill” incarnate - Rapid Thread-Spinning B. Providing a 30% Arts Booster for 3 turns and an 80% gauge charge, this skill is downright criminal.

While naturally you can assume (correctly) that Habetrot is somewhat designed around this skill’s power, which includes the skill’s negligible 2k HP drain from use (she can even heal that straight back herself), it’s still incredible. With the new append skills this even translates to an instant NP if you’re willing to farm the dupes in FP gacha and spend the mats to increase the gauge append skill to 20%.

Now, speaking hypothetically, if Habetrot were to have a high-damage AOE Arts NP instead of the totally-not-placeholder healing NP she has in LB6 story, wouldn’t that make this thing great for Arts looping.

If you asked me a month ago what I thought Habetrot’s 3rd skill would be, I’d probably say some sort of powerful support skill that still wouldn’t justify using her since it wouldn’t be an ally gauge charger.

And in the end, I was half-right. Guardian of Brides EX is a super-amped targeted support buff that can only affect females. It’s practically a grab-bag of defensive buffs, giving a 1-turn Invincible, 5k HP Guts and a 2k HP / turn regen for 5 turns, and removing Burn/Poison/Curse from the target.

But the real best part of this skill? It kills Habetrot at the end of the turn it’s used.

Now if you’ve never used Arash or Chen Gong in your life, you’re probably wondering why that’s a good thing. Let me explain - in FGO if you boil down the resources in the game which contribute to the power of a team which can’t be influenced outside of the battle, then it’s NP gauge and skill cooldown. It’s also why abilities which influence those two tend to be the most powerful effects in the game.

But there are also two effects which, when you think about it critically, also essentially provide extra NP gauge and bring skills off cooldown, and that’s Formation Swap and Death. The former is only provided by Miss Crane’s NP and the Battle Suit Mystic Code, while dying is a power only afforded to a few, and most of the time, it isn’t on-demand. Dying is essentially just formation swapping to the frontmost Servant in the backline, with the downside of not getting the tagged out Servant back. It still provides the benefit of using the fresh Servant and their NP / Skills as they’re instantly available when they swap in.

While Arash has been pulling the “suicide is badass” shenanigans since the game’s release, Habetrot is the first Servant to be able to kill herself unconditionally (not requiring to get a NP off or meet certain conditions to use a skill) and also the first act as freely as she likes on the turn she dies. Even if her kit were pretty weak that’d be a useful trait to use on-death trigger CE’s.

And even then, if for whatever reason you don’t like the idea of Habetrot dying mid-quest, she can use this skill on herself if she needs the defensive benefits and just set her HP to 5k (or 7k, I’m not sure if the death or HP regen applies first) as cost. You don’t even need to target a female ally specifically with this skill, so you can dump it on Waver and watch a bunch of NO EFFECT messages just to suicide her.

So yeah, the skill is very good.