Rabbit’s Reviews #398: BB Dubai (5* Moon Cancer)

Our other Summer SSR this year is also a Moon Cancer with a special gimmick. BB Dubai’s claim to fame is her ability to choose between two Noble Phantasms: an AoE Arts NP, and a support NP. She’s somewhere around Spish’s level as a DPS, and she’s a little weaker than the likes of Tamamo and Lady Avalon as a support, though she comes with quite a few asterisks regardless of playstyle. From a certain point of view, this makes her pretty good. She’s not the best at either of her roles, but she can do both passably. FGO, though, is a game where specialists are almost always worth more than generalists. If you already have a good favored AoE unit, and you have the top-end Arts supports, BB has almost nothing to offer you. If you have a less-developed roster, though, you may find her kit appealing.

BB has a defense-leaning stat spread even by the standards of the already defensive Moon Cancers. This is fine for her as a support, but it’s not ideal for her DPS role. She has two 5-hit Quick cards, which is decent for active star gen, and she’ll make good use of the rest of her hit-counts due to the star gen buff on one of her skills. Her active NP gain, though, is pretty low—her Arts cards and Quick cards are both quite bad.

BB has a ton of passives, as is typical for Extra class Servants. Magic Resistance and Core of the Goddess together give BB a whopping 50% innate debuff resistance, which means one out of every two standard debuffs will miss her—a nice consistency buff, if not enough to be completely reliable. Item Construction makes BB’s debuffs slightly more likely to land, which is important given how debuff-centric her kit is. Far Future Management makes BB slightly more likely to crit and slightly less likely to get crit. Finally, the two Humanity Assessment passives give BB small attack and defense buffs against specific enemies—not important enough that you need to keep track of who BB’s fighting, but still a nice bonus on occasion.

Unlike several other recent Servants, BB Dubai doesn’t have any standout reasons to prioritize the new Append skills. Mana Loading is important for maximizing her loop flexibility, but aside from that there’s nothing to note here.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Rider Piece x5 Caster Piece
3	300,000	x12 Rider Piece x12 Caster Piece
4	1,000,000	x5 Rider Monument x5 Caster Monument
Max	3,000,000	x12 Rider Monument x12 Caster Monument

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Rider x5 Gem of Caster
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Rider x12 Gem of Caster
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Rider x5 Magic Gem of Caster
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Rider x12 Magic Gem of Caster
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Rider x5 Secret Gem of Caster
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Rider x12 Secret Gem of Caster
7 → 8	10,000,000	x8 Shell of Reminiscence x5 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
8 → 9	12,000,000	x9 Scarab of Wisdom x9 Golden Cauldron
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Rider x5 Gem of Caster
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Rider x12 Gem of Caster
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Rider x5 Magic Gem of Caster
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Rider x12 Magic Gem of Caster
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Rider x5 Secret Gem of Caster
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Rider x12 Secret Gem of Caster
7 → 8	10000000	x8 Eternal Ice x8 Divine Leyline Spiritron
8 → 9	12000000	x21 Ether Light Collector x9 Moonlight Core
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

BB strongly wants all of her skills maxed out, as the uptime on her skills is an issue both as a DPS and as a support. If you have to choose, recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

DPS BB is fairly simple. You can run her in standard double Castoria/Oberon teams, or in Castoria/Tamamo or Castoria/Lady Avalon stall teams, and she’ll do fine. She’s better at this in CQ contexts, since her debuffs get to stick around—for farming, she ends up with really weak turns 1 and 2 since she needs to save her debuffs for turn 3. Her loop specs are pretty good, though, by virtue of having 70% total battery, and she should be able to do anything 1/2/x or harder, provided she has the damage.

BB’s theoretical best farming setup, though, is actually an atypical one. It turns out the only Servant who actually wants BB’s support for farming… is BB herself. Castoria/BB/BB/Oberon allows BB to get her Supereffective modifier on both turn 2 and turn 3, and it gives BB substantially more NP damage buffs than double Castoria, which Oberon can then double for higher turn 3 damage. In exchange, you have less battery to work with, and even lower turn 1 damage than normal.

On turn 1, you use Mana Loading, Castoria’s 30% battery and Arts buff, and both BB’s 50% batteries. DPS BB selects CCC, and support BB selects GGG. You then use GGG, followed by CCC. CCC only refunds about 7.5% per enemy in this case, and you need to refund 20% for this loop to be feasible, which will require three enemies, or two enemies and a ton of overkill.

On turn 2, you use Castoria’s 20% battery, both BBs’ 20% batteries, the support BB’s second skill, and then you plug support BB out for Oberon, who uses his 20% battery. BB refunds about 20% per enemy, and you have 50% charge still available, so you again need either three enemies or two and a lot of overkill. On turn 3, Oberon secures the loop and uses End of the Dream, and you can throw in another Castoria NP for extra damage. BB will hit really hard on turn 3, in exchange for jumping through all these hoops.

In sum, a DPS BB can farm low-HP nodes with challenging enemy compositions, or high-HP nodes with easy enemy compositions. …Unfortunately, usually hard nodes have both high HP thresholds and difficult wave setups, so that’s not the best place to be.

On the other hand, outside of the above farming setup, BB is really only worth using as a support in CQs, and mostly in cases where you’re supporting a Living Human/Moon Cancer Arts Servant who can kill fast, has defensive tools to help cover the time when BB can’t use GGG, and who benefits from pushing more towards NP damage buffs than Arts buffs. The list of Servants for whom that applies is… basically just Tez. BB’s pretty good for Tez! …Though if you expect the fight to last more than a single buff cycle, you’re still probably better off bringing Tamamo to keep the party healed and cycle your buffs faster.

There’s also Jinako to consider, who is in many ways similar to BB Dubai as a support—she provides 20% party charge, defensive tools, comparable steroids with some of them tied to debuffs, and more damage in a specific context. Unlike BB, though, Jinako is always a support, and you don’t have to jump through hoops to make her work; against any Lawful enemy, especially, she provides a ton of damage, in addition to safety.

Jinako is, notably, one of BB’s favored targets, which makes them natural partners. Jinako’s damage output isn’t usually very good, but if you’re running a DPS BB, Jinako can still leverage BB’s specialty buffs to keep her own NP damage up. A BB/BB/Jinako team would have fairly high damage output from all three Servants, along with quite a few ways of mitigating damage.

Ultimately, you should look at Support BB in the same way you would any third-tier support—you slot her in if you can’t use the others, either because an event has placed specific limitations on who you can bring, or because you don’t have better supports. Look for Servants who benefit from the specific things BB brings and who don’t mind, or can help with, the hoops she has to jump through as a support.

DPS BB wants Black Grail for damage, as usual. Support BB, though, has a few more options. 2030 is a solid pick on supports in general, as increasing your stars per turn helps with reliable crits, but any general performance-boosting CE should be fine.

BB should be generating a decent number of stars, but her in-kit crit buffs are quite low, making crit damage CCs a natural pick. Alternatively, you can give her buff removal or healing CCs, to add a bit more utility to her kit as a supporter.

If you’re primarily going to use BB as a support, there’s no reason to grail her. If you intend to make her your go-to AoE DPS, grails will help offset her low attack. She’s not good enough overall to merit grails over better alternatives, but if she’s all you have, or if you’re committed to using her even though she’s not the best, higher attack is always good for a damage-dealer.

I don’t particularly like BB’s kit. It has a lot of awkwardness baked into it, and there are several small annoyances here that will make her unpleasant to use in either a DPS or supportive role. I don’t think this is an accident, either—there’s probably a design idea here that a Servant who was both a great DPS and a great support would be too dominant in a way that’s unhealthy for the game. I don’t even necessarily disagree with that, but if anything that points towards BB’s kit being ill-conceived from the jump.

BB is somewhat unique in that she’s both an okay support and a pretty good DPS. She’s better in both roles than many other Servants… but I wouldn’t pull for a generic, kind of awkward Spish clone in a world where Ibuki, Moriarty, Space Eresh, and Tez exist, and I wouldn’t pull for a support who’s mostly worse than Tamamo in a world where Tamamo, Lady Avalon, and Castoria exist. The fact that BB is both at once doesn’t actually help her in a game like FGO.

BB’s kit exists for new players (to the extent that there are new players anymore), and for BB fans. If you’re missing key pieces, BB can slot into a couple of roles passably. If you love BB, you have multiple options for how to use her. She’s not bad, per se, but she’s not going to offer anything of value to players with well-developed accounts. Sorry, BB.

Overall: 8/10
Single-Target DPS: 2/10
AoE DPS: 8/10
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 7/10
Defensive Utility: 6/10
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Space Suits: 10/10