MMM - Must Make-Believe Maidens March Across The Moon Making Merry Madness? Mend Me, My Medic!

First on the skill lineup we have Destruction Declaration, or otherwise known as “the NP Astolfo keeps forgetting the name of”, in skill form. I’m using that fact as an excuse to cover that I can’t remember the name of it. Castum Logellis? Let’s just say it’s that.

Anyways, true to the power of the original NP, this skill is pretty good, providing a 20% NP gauge charge per turn for 3 turns, totalling 60% gauge charge at skill level 10, on top of a cheeky Debuff cleanse for Astolfo. And it’s on a neat 7-turn base cooldown, making it pretty quick to pop back up, unlike the vast majority of 50%+ gauge chargers.

While many of you may prefer a straight 50% gauge charger instead of an over-time buff, my personal opinion is this is much better suited to Astolfo - it works better with making a Skadi loop team for difficult battles, and in regular quests it gives you the succinct idea he has good NP gain while he gains as much NP gain in an AQQ chain that Ereshkigal gets from a single Arts card.

...Don’t mind me, just crying in my corner.

If one NP skill wasn’t enough, Astolfo is trying to pull a full Achilles and load his skill set with NP’s instead. La Black Luna, unfortunately not the Super Smash Bros player with a redundant descriptor of his race, or The Magic Flute that Brings Panic, is honestly one of the best skills in this game.

That’s right, I used “best (...) in the game” in the same paragraph as “Astolfo”. The world is ending.

First, this skill applies Fear to every enemy for 3 turns. For those not-too familiar with using Abbie or, worse, Gilles, Fear has a chance to apply Stun to those afflicted with it each turn (and said chance can’t be affected by debuff resistance, only immunity). In Astolfo’s case, the chance is 40% each turn at skill level 10.
Now you might be saying “But Rath! 40% Stun chance, even with no debuff resistance influencing it, is really low!”, and you’d be right, but it’s time for a lesson in conditional probability. This debuff lasts 3 turns, and disappears once it triggers. Meaning, over the course of 3 turns, you only need to land the 40% chance once for it to trigger the stun. In other words, for it to not trigger the stun, you have to hit a 60% chance 3 times in a row. Any Fire Emblem players should know not to trust a 60% chance as far as you can throw it, then again 3 successively.

Long story short, the odds of getting the Stun is 78.4%. That isn’t factoring in the possibility of debuff resistance stopping the debuff landing to begin with, but even with say, 20% debuff resistance it becomes a 62.72% chance of a stun, still higher than most AOE stun skills and NP’s in the game.

Naturally, the downside is you can’t really choose when the stun triggers. But regardless, the chance of it going off and negating an enemy turn is pretty high, and it even somewhat synergizes with the second part of the skill - a 3-time, 3-turn Evasion for Astolfo.

No stunning the enemy on the same turn that you need to evade a NP, thus wasting a turn of Evasion. While not as good as skills without a turn limit such as Protection from Arrows, 3-hit Evasion is exceedingly good, and helps out Astolfo’s durability a bunch.

Right, and 8-turn base cooldown on an AOE stun skill is, in fact, pretty fast. Pretty much every other AOE Stun / Charm in the game is slapped with a 9-turn cooldown, including Abbie, Shuten, and MHX’s upgraded Stun (it was originally 10 turn cd, yeesh).

Finishing off the skill trio, we have Majestic Triumphant Return EX, which isn’t a NP...as far as we know.

Thankfully this one’s straightforward to describe and evaluate - it’s a series of 3-turn buffs for Astolfo, bolstering his offense. At skill level 10, it’s 20% atk up, 30% crit dmg up and 500% Star Focus for Buster cards….wait.

Buster cards? Let me correct that. Buster card. You could’ve convinced me he wasn’t a BAAQQ servant with 3 Quick cards (including NP) for a second, there. So apparently Astolfo really wants to slap people with his single Buster? No matter how hard you try, you’re not being paired with Merlin, buddy. Even his Bond CE provides a crit boost to his Buster Card. Do the devs have some sort of “single Buster card boytoy” fetish? Who knows?

Outside of that...abnormality, this skill is solid. Anyone can appreciate a simple 3-turn offense boosts, and with Astolfo’s focus on Quicks and good stargen, all the bonuses from this skill will find effective use. Wrapped up with a 7-turn base cooldown, this skill has solid uptime, too.

Getting to the nitty-gritty, we start with Assault Medicine. While the name is certainly worrisome, evoking images of being air raided with syringes (and I think that’s sort of exactly what she does), the skill is plain and helpful to the player. Remove 1 buff from all enemies, remove 1 debuff from all allies, Heal for a good sum, totalling 3k at skill level 10.

Simple. Buff/Debuff removal is always a useful tool, but unfortunately in cases like this skill it has a level of unpredictability that is hard to wave off. 1-(de)buff removal is a relatively new effect, and we still don’t really know how it decides which to remove - Randomly? By oldest first? By newest first? Priority on more powerful buffs/debuffs? It could be anything. As a result, especially in the case of the enemy buff removal, you may stand risk using it to remove the enemy’s teensy debuff resistance up buff, instead of their Invincible Pierce, or Evasion, or whatever. In the player’s case, this drawback is a little less harsh, as we get far fewer debuffs than the enemy gets buffs when it matters.

Long story short, useful tool, heals are nice, but the fact it can’t be fully predicted or relied upon in the case of multiple crippling buffs/debuffs is a nuisance.

Next up, we have Nurse of Steel (Holy Night). As a targetable ally buff skill, all you need to know is it fixes Consort Yu’s Buff removal issues for 3 turns straight and it still does nothing to make her less terrible.

In all seriousness, this skill has 3 buffs but will generally only be used for one of them - a 3-turn 30% NP dmg buff. The 1k HP Guts may come in handy now and then, but the effects of this skill don’t have much overlap in situations they can be used - Most notably, this makes it the only skill or NP in the game that lets you survive buff-removal-before-damage NP’s, even if you’ll be left with a miniscule 1000 HP to work with after.

So a situationally-useful defensive tool that will more often than not act as a solid offensive buff for a teammate. Oh yeah, it also has a 9 turn base cooldown, so...hope you like using it once then never again.

The Bell which the Angel Rings on the Holy Night EX is a stupefyingly long-winded skill name, but it’s like that in Japanese, too - “Tenshi ga seiya ni narasu kane”. It’s one of the few times the English and Japanese terms for something are about the same length.

My translation remarks aside, it’s a poor man’s Ishtar Charisma! In exchange for 10% more critical damage buff, it has a 1-turn longer cooldown, which in my opinion is a poor deal.

Thankfully, my evaluation can be concise - Charisma is good. Critical damage is good. Both on a servant who can benefit from both effects on their own is very good. Shame about the cooldown, though. Justice for Charisma skills, the 7-turn base cooldown is practically part of their identity.