Rabbit’s Reviews #394: Space Ereshkigal (5* Beast)

For the second year in a row, the anniversary Servant doubles as an extra Summer unit. Space Eresh is notable for a number of reasons, even beyond Summer Ereshkigal being a long-requested addition. Most of all, though, she’s our second playable Beast. Interestingly, she does not share the same class affinity as our last playable Beast, Draco. Instead, Space Eresh gets deals 1.5x damage to and takes half damage from Rulers, Moon Cancers, Alter Egos, Foreigners, and Pretenders, and she has class disadvantage against Avengers. She’s neutral to all other classes, including Berserkers. Eresh’s damage is very good against anything that’s not an Avenger, and it’s excellent against most Extras.

Aside from that, Eresh has a pretty loaded kit, with batteries, party support, crit tools, and defensive utility. Her damage buffs are quite low, but in exchange she gets a semi-controllable supereffective damage gimmick. In long fights, her damage is second-to-none, and for farming it’s still very good. At the end of the day, she’s yet another Spish clone, in the sense of being a powerful AoE Arts looper who plays much like all the others, but she does it well enough to compare favorably to most of the competition, and she brings a flavorful and effective gimmick along with her. No complaints here.

Eresh has fairly average stats relative to SSRs as a whole. She’s not in a bad place, stat-wise, but she would appreciate higher attack. She stands out in particular versus Draco, who does have a strong attack slant. Meanwhile, as an Arts unit, Eresh isn’t great at active star gen (though her Quick is decent at it). Her NP gain is also not super, with her Arts and Quick cards both having low NP gain.

As is typical for fancy Extra-class Servants, Eresh has a whole ton of unique passives. She starts with Anti-Magecraft, which provides a free 3-time debuff immunity. This is great for consistency, and especially in short fights it can be enough to protect Eresh from all debuffs for free. Eresh follows this with another unique passive in Spatial Conservation, which gives her a flat 5% NP charge each time she uses a card. On another Servant, this would be a great NP gain buff. On Eresh, it mostly just offsets her low NP gain—though it does mean she can prioritize her Busters without losing as much NP gain proportionally.

After that, Eresh has three variants on pre-existing passives. Core of the Goddess is the usual flavor damage boost and debuff resistance. Eresh’s version of Beast’s Authority provides 20% crit damage up, but only against Servants—not a large buff, but better than most crit passives. Independent Manifestation, meanwhile, gives a trivial boost to crit damage, instant-kill resistance, and mental debuff resistance. More importantly, it makes Eresh immune to stun, petrify, bound, and pig, further raising her consistency.

Eresh’s last passive (aside from Nega-Space, which does nothing), is II. This is Eresh’s central gimmick, giving her what is effectively an affection gauge that starts at 1 and increases over the course of the fight as Eresh does various things. The complete list of actions that affect the gauge is in the skill description, but the long and short of it is that every 10 points increases Eresh’s affection level, and Eresh’s NP gets stronger the higher the gauge gets. Eresh’s ability to generate affection is somewhat dependent on things like card draws and loop conditions (e.g. whether you can afford to use Eresh’s skills first and whether you can slot in Castoria NPs), but she will always be able to reach level 5 by turn 3 in farming situations. In longer fights, she can eventually hit level 10, and then she has it for the rest of the fight, no questions asked. Eresh’s NP picks up a number of effects as the level rises, but, most importantly, it has a supereffective modifier that scales with level. At level 10, Eresh’s NP deals double damage to everything for the rest of the fight. Against non-Extras especially, Eresh is dependent on scaling her affection for damage.

…Normally this is fine. She has a few hoops to jump through, but in exchange you get really high damage. The caveat to this is that Eresh’s gauge is permanently locked at level 0 when you take her off support. Your own Eresh is a very good Arts looper, if not quite the best, but a friend’s Eresh is… honestly pretty bad. It’s annoying that this is true, and it more or less means you can’t back up a maxed-out Eresh pulled off support with your own Castoria and expect to do well. If you’re not going to pull for her yourself, you’re better off ignoring her entirely.

And now we get to appends. If you haven’t heard—or if you’re coming back to this review after a long time has passed (hello, time-traveler!)—the same anniversary that gave us Eresh also introduced two new append skills: Special Attack Technique Improvement, which gives a passive 20-30% crit damage up, and Skill Reload, which provides a one-time-only, 1-turn cooldown reduction. Skill Reload applies to the first skill used at levels 1-5, the first two distinct skills at 6-9, and all three skills (once each) at level 10.

The first—and, to many people who first heard about this system, most obvious—implication of this is that fully maxing out a Servant is now much more expensive. An SSR, for example, now needs to be NP8 and Bond 15 in order to reach level 120 with all five appends unlocked. The math is even worse at lower rarities. For all but the whaliest of whales, this probably means unlocking all appends is mostly out of reach.

In exchange, we are ostensibly going to get the ability to swap appends around. That is to say, once you’ve unlocked and leveled an append, you can switch it to a different append at any time. In practical terms, this will mostly just let you swap the Extra card buff or anti-class attack up for one of the two new appends, both of which are largely better, but this does mean you will (in theory) be able to swap to the anti-class buff when you specifically need it, and switch to something more generic when you don’t.

Breaking down append skills has felt a little meaningless for a while. Usually the story is the same: Mana Loading is almost always worth it, the Extra card buff is okay if you have good base NP gain, and anti-class damage is good if you have class advantage against the class, or if you’re a strong generalist. The two new skills are going to be a similar story: crit damage up is generically nice, especially for Servants with crit tools, but 30% isn’t particularly high-value for a crit buff, while a 1-turn, 1-time CDR is critical to a small number of Buster units and somewhat nice for longer fights on everyone else. Additionally, if your whole team has skill reload, it gets you to a second buff cycle one turn faster, which can make a difference in CQs.

In light of this, I’m going to be slightly changing up how I’m approaching appends in these reviews. Rather than go through all five and repeat this information in each review, I’m going to specifically call out appends that matter or interact unusually—when Mana Loading matters for loop functionality, when Skill Reload enables something unusual, and so on.

So with that in mind, how do Eresh’s appends look? Mana Loading is necessary to maximize her loop functionality—she can do 1/2/x or 2/1/x with it, while she needs at least one more enemy on one of the waves otherwise. None of the other appends are particularly notable for her. If you’re flush with coins, Skill Reload is marginally nice for getting her to a second buff cycle, and to maxed affection, more quickly, but levels beyond 100 are probably a better use of coins in general.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Void's Dust x10 Ghost Lantern
3	300,000	x10 Deadly Poisonous Needle x10 Shell of Reminiscence
4	1,000,000	x10 Aurora Steel x10 Reactor Core of Dawn
Max	3,000,000	x10 Fragment of a Twinkling Star x10 Flower of the End

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Void's Dust
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Ghost Lantern
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Shell of Reminiscence
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Aurora Steel
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Fragment of a Twinkling Star
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Obsidian Knife
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Ether Light Collector
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Flower of the End
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x10 Evil Bone
2 → 3	400000	x10 Deadly Poisonous Needle
3 → 4	1200000	x12 Refined Magatama
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Stake of Wailing Night
5 → 6	4000000	x12 Reactor Core of Dawn
6 → 7	5000000	x15 Ash of Remembrance
7 → 8	10000000	x15 Ceremonial Sword of Twilight
8 → 9	12000000	x15 Sun Leather
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Eresh has Avenger-style mats: two different materials per ascension level, and a different material per skill level. This has the usual pros and cons: she doesn’t need a ton of any given mat, but she needs enough different things that odds are good at least one of them will block you. She shouldn’t be too hard to max, at any rate.

Space Eresh’s skillset is pretty loaded, but it’s mostly just a soup of generic goodstuff. Her damage buffs are a little low, but aside from that it’s more or less all upside. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

As mentioned above, Eresh can loop 1/2/x and 2/1/x CE-less in a conventional Castoria/Castoria/Oberon setup, provided she has Mana Loading. Assuming you go through the steps to get her to affection 5 on turn 3, and you give her the two Castoria NPs she can guarantee, her damage against neutral classes—so, the main seven—is about the same as Summer Ibuki’s. Ibuki doesn’t have to jump through the same hoops to get there, and she has niche on top of that, but Eresh gets 1.5x damage (which is the equivalent of Ibuki's niche damage) against Extra classes. They’re pretty comparable. Eresh can't quite hit 90++ damage levels against Extras at NP2 and level 90, but with a combination of grails and additional NP levels, she can get there.

We’ve also recently gotten our first 90** node. The one example we have so far requires about 2.5 million damage to clear, and it gives a heightened form of class advantage to the relevant class. Functionally this means anyone who could clear 90++ with class advantage can clear the appropriate 90** node, but any generalists (like Avengers, Berserkers, and, most relevantly, Beasts) are out of luck. We still don’t know for sure whether this will be the standard going forward, but if it is, Eresh's half-class-advantage likely won't "count," making her effectively useless for the new farming standard.

Players on servers other than JP will likely know whether these things are true by the time Eresh rolls around. For JP players, you have a Servant who’s sufficient for almost all sub-90++ farming, will work for certain 90++ nodes, but may not work future higher-difficulty nodes. Whether that's worth it is up to you.

For longer fights, your typical Arts stall setups will work fine. Eresh wants to stick around long enough to max out her affection gauge, at which point her innate advantages should let her steamroll through most things. Castoria/Lady Avalon is probably the best team for this, especially since Eresh is one of the few Arts Servants who can make good use of Lady Avalon’s crit tools. Castoria/Tamamo also should work well, as should Castoria/Reines as long as you don’t need to survive so long that the lack of healing becomes a problem.

At the lower end, I’d recommend supports who can buy time for Eresh to scale her affection meter. A frontline of, for example, Mash and George should be able to protect Eresh through a buff cycle or two while she builds affection. Once affection is maxed, the defensive supports can die off to make way for more offensive alternatives, like Xu Fu and Mozart, who can help Eresh push out a bunch of damage to close out the fight.

Eresh’s loop specs are good enough that there’s very little reason not to run the Black Grail. Eresh loves the extra damage, and faster clears are safer clears, by and large.

Eresh’s kit is so self-sufficient there’s not a lot she actually needs that CCs can provide. Without any other standout options, crit damage CCs are always safe, especially since Eresh’s crit buffs are relatively low outside of her burst turn.

Eresh is an excellent Servant and grails will let her hit harder. If what you want is 90++ counterclass levels of damage, Eresh will typically need grails to compete. Additionally, at NP5 and level 120—with gold fous, MLB BG, Castoria NPs, the works—she does approach a million damage at neutral in farming situations, which could be worth it depending on what else you have.

Even setting farming thresholds aside, though, grails will make Eresh better at dealing damage and taking hits in CQs. For a Servant this strong, it’s hard to pass up on the extra stats.

Space Eresh is among the best generalist damage-dealers in the game. She’s in a similar category as Servants like Summer Ibuki and Tez—extremely optimized kits, very high damage, ready out-of-the-box for high-difficulty nodes and quests. That said, we have so many strong AoE Arts units that even an exceptional one may not be worth it to all players, and there’s the looming question of whether we’ll see more 90** nodes going forward. With this in mind, Eresh is somewhat of a risky pickup. At minimum, she'll be great for CQs and (with enough investment) great for 90++, but she may turn out to be a swan song for an era when generalists reign supreme. If 90** becomes the standard going forward, Eresh will almost immediately be left behind.

Overall, Eresh is an amazing get if you don't have a top-end Arts generalist ready to go. Otherwise, you're probably better off taking a wait-and-see approach. We'll have a better sense of where FGO is going before too long.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 8/10
AoE DPS: 9/10
Survivability: 8/10
Offensive Utility: 5/10
Defensive Utility: 4/10
Farming Usefulness: 9/10
Underworld Subjugation: 10/10