MMM - Pernicious Pharaoh Perplexes Playerbase, Partying in Pop-up Pickup (Nitocris Alter)

Rounding things off is Nito’s NP, Neferu Suen Anubis. This is an Arts AOE NP with, as you’d expect, the farming loop calculation song and dance attached, but its effects are also worth noting:

Before dealing damage, this NP provides Nito with a 10% NP Strength buff for 1 turn, scaling on Overcharge. While not particularly significant, this does provide a second piece of the 3-buff trinity, amplifying Nito’s damage output by a surprising degree in practice, as she’d otherwise only have Arts buffs to work with.

Then, this NP dishes out the damage, with a +50% damage modifier against Human attribute enemies. So far as Attribute-based effective damage goes, this is one of the best. Human attribute has the greatest population of Servants in the game, occupying about 40% of the roster, and also covers pretty much every human-like generic enemy with occasional exceptions. While it’s not likely to provide a damage boost versus mid-bosses in farming nodes, the chance of it getting that bonus versus Servants is pretty high, and elevates the overall power of the NP for high-difficulty content.

But that’s not all! This NP also has everyone’s favorite side-effect on AOE farming NP’s, Instant Death!

I’d normally be sarcastic, but this NP doesn’t commit OG Nitocris’s mistake of putting the Instant Death before the damage, often inadvertently stealing the NP refund she would get from a kill. This NP has a 50% base death rate regardless of what enemy it hits, then Evil trait enemies also get slapped with a second 100% base death rate. That’s a lot of death in one.

Unfortunately, Instant Death rates are somewhat false advertising, as they get multiplied by the enemy’s own death rate to produce the actual odds of death. For most generic enemies, this is determined by their frame - Bronze frames have an 80% death rate, Silvers 50%, and Golds 20%. Miniboss-type enemies tend to have even lower death rates, in the range of 1-10%. For Servants, basically forget it - getting Instant Death on enemy Servants outside of scripted fights is a stroke of luck.

What this means is versus most farming quests, the Instant Death will kill enemies that would die to the normal damage anyways, and even versus the lower death rate enemies, with Evil trait applied to them, the chance of death is hardly consistent, 62.5% for Silver frames and 28% for Gold frames. While this will come in handy on occasion for when Nito’s own damage output isn’t enough, it’s nowhere near consistent enough to write home about.

With that all out of the way, we can actually cover her looping potential, and farming as a result.

Using just her own buffs, Nito’s NP gives out a baseline refund of 20%. Not bad at all on paper, but in actuality that’s fairly low for an Arts AOE NP. In a 50% NP gauge CE setup with double Castoria, she manages to bump it up to 59% refund, which, again, looks high but for a Servant with two Castorias and a CE’s bonuses behind her, is in actuality quite low.

That doesn’t hinder her from farming in such a setup, though. On her first NP she’ll net just over 50% refund, allowing her to NP again from the second Castoria’s gauge charges, then simply pop her own gauge charge for the last wave, regardless of her refund. Frankly, the real problem in such a setup is her damage output. In spite of it all, she only manages 66k damage neutral on each wave with this setup, jumping up to 90k damage on wave 3.

While that’s sufficient for easier forms of farming, it falls short of what’s necessary for higher level nodes in events, which means we need to take that blackened Irisviel out of the closet and see how she does with Black Grail.

Running Black Grail almost immediately runs into issues. The insufficient NP refund I mentioned earlier comes back to bite Nito, as unlike Summer Ibuki or similar, her refund doesn’t go anywhere near the 70% or higher mark in order to make Black Grail farming without Battlesuit a possibility. If you very specifically get her the Level 10 Mana Loading Append Skill, and run her with the True Ether Mystic Code, you can just barely scrape enough refund on turn 1 to reach 70% gauge, which enables her to do a clean 3-turn loop by popping her 100% gauge charge on the 3rd wave. This does, however, lose to any negative NP gain modifiers on enemies (Berserker or Assassin-class enemies), so it’s not wholly consistent.

As a result, we’ll be looking at the numbers for her Battlesuit swap farming setup. In a 1k Attack Fou, non-LB Black Grail setup with double Castoria, Oberon on Battlesuit swap, Nito dishes out 105k damage neutral on wave 1, 124k damage on wave 2 (due to Oberon swapping in and doing his NP Strength buff), and a hefty 226k damage on wave 3 with all of Oberon’s buffs unleashed. Naturally, that’s more than enough to clear most farming nodes, and it’s also pretty much not refund dependent at all, as Nito only needs 30% gauge on wave 2 to be able to 3-turn loop.

The real cost to such a setup really comes in the action intensity - you need to use every skill on all 4 Servants involved, as well as the Battlesuit skills, which is a lot of button presses. But hey, she’s a universal farmer, even if it’s in a more intense Black Grail setup than usual.