Rabbit's Reviews #269: Illyasviel von Einzbern (4* Archer)

Introduction

Prisma Illya Servants just can’t seem to catch a break. While we haven’t seen Abby’s kit yet, Illya seems for now to be the clear dud from this batch of Servants. She’s inferior as a looper to her most direct non-limited competition (Atalante), not to mention the stronger Quick loopers or… pretty much any AoE Arts Servant now. Even setting aside direct comparisons, she has a mismatched kit that doesn’t synergize well at all with her primary support. Her kit is somewhat similar in construction to that of Xiang Yu—who is himself not exactly a standout—in that her primary appeal is her very high internal crit steroids. With a bad deck and without the advantage of being a Berserker, however, Illya is uniquely poorly positioned to actually take advantage of her theoretical strengths. In short, she’s not good.

Servant Data

Archer

QQAAB (Archer)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

4

3

4

5

Attribute	Human
Alignment	Neutral Summer

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

April Fool's

Max HP 10,914

HP Rank

Max ATK 10,098

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,683	Base HP	1,746
Max Atk	10,098	Max HP	10,914
Grail Atk	12,226	Grail HP	13,233

Magic Resistance A

Increase your Debuff Resist by 20%.

Independent Action B

Increase your Critical Strength by 8%.

Infinite Magical Energy C

Increase NP Gauge by 3% each turn for yourself.

Card Hits	4	3	3	4	5
Per Hit	0.63%	0.63%	0.63%	0.63%	0.63%

	NP per Hit (%)						0.63%
	NP when Attacked (%)						3%

	Star Absorption	148
	Star Generation per Hit	8.0%

Overview

Material Requirements

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x4 Archer Piece
3	150,000	x10 Archer Piece x4 Claw of Chaos
4	500,000	x4 Archer Monument x8 Shell of Reminiscence x4 Phoenix Feather
Max	1,500,000	x10 Archer Monument x7 Phoenix Feather x4 Egg of Truth

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x4 Gem of Archer
2 → 3	200,000	x10 Gem of Archer
3 → 4	600,000	x4 Magic Gem of Archer
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Magic Gem of Archer x4 Shell of Reminiscence
5 → 6	2,000,000	x4 Secret Gem of Archer x8 Shell of Reminiscence
6 → 7	2,500,000	x10 Secret Gem of Archer x3 Claw of Chaos
7 → 8	5,000,000	x5 Claw of Chaos x15 Mystic Spinal Fluid
8 → 9	6,000,000	x45 Mystic Spinal Fluid x20 Divine Pulse Spirit Orb
9 → 10	10,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Servant Skills

Illya has some nice component pieces built into her skillset, but they don’t come together in any particularly helpful way. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

Quick Up

High Pressure! A

Increase own Quick Card effectiveness (3 turns).
Increase own Quick Card Star Gathering Rate (1 turn).
Increase own Critical Strength (1 turn).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Quick +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
Quick Star Gather +	300%	320%	340%	360%	380%	400%	420%	440%	460%	500%
Crit Damage +	50%	55%	60%	65%	70%	75%	80%	85%	90%	100%
CD	7	7	7	7	7	6	6	6	6	5

High Pressure is trying to be three things at once and doesn’t accomplish any of them especially well. It’s Illya’s core Quick steroid, buffing her NP damage and NP gain a touch. It also draws stars to Illya’s Quick cards for a turn. Lastly, it buffs Illya’s overall crit damage by 100% for a turn, theoretically paving the way for high-damage cards. Taken as a whole, though, this is a decidedly awkward skill in the context of Skadi. The Quick buff implies Illya should use this on turn 1 to facilitate looping—but on turn 1 Illya isn’t going to have any stars and will therefore be unable to leverage the crit buffs without the help of Carp-type CEs. Even with a turn-1 star burst, using this skill right out of the gate implies not having access to the extra crit damage on a later turn, when Illya’s more likely to need it. You also run into the issue of diminishing returns: a 100% crit buff sounds impressive on its own, but in a double Skadi team Illya has 200% in outside Quick Crit buffs already, so an extra 100% isn’t going to make a huge difference. In theory, Illya could use her Buster or Arts cards instead (for good damage and good NP gain, respectively)—but the star weight buff explicitly draws Illya’s stars towards the cards that benefit the least from the crit damage buff: her Quicks. It’s such a weird skill in any Skadi team that it almost implies Illya is meant to be used without Skadi—perhaps with Osakabehime—but at that point it becomes very difficult to justify not running Arts or Buster instead. It’s also not like Illya’s innate damage is all that great even with her innate crit buffs taken into account—at the end of the day she’s an SR Archer with a single Buster card, and even among SR Archers there are plenty of better card damage options. In most practical contexts, Illya will use this on turn one for the Quick buff, and any crit potential she might have will go to waste.

Invi Shield

Summer Vacation! (Child) A+

Apply Invincible to self (1 time, 3 turns).
Increase own NP Gain (3 turns).
Increase ATK for all [Child] Servants (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
NP Gain +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
ATK +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Summer Vacation is fine. At base it’s a specialty Charisma, giving 20% attack up to Illya and any other children Servants you happen to be running. In practice this means this might as well be a selfish attack buff—Illya doesn’t have any natural synergy with any of the child Servants outside of maybe Hans. The skill also buffs Illya’s NP gain a bit—and she sorely needs the help—and gives a single hit of invuln. The invuln means the skill forces a survivability-damage trade, and you’re almost always going to want to use this on turn 1 to facilitate looping, so the invuln ends up being kind of irrelevant.

Start Np

Legal Shower! B++

Increase own NP Gauge.
Increase own Critical Strength (3 turns).
70% Chance to restore 500 HP each turn for self (5 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
NP +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
Crit Damage +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
CD	7	7	7	7	7	6	6	6	6	5

Regal Shower is a 30% battery that also gives a 3-turn 50% crit buff. The crit buff runs into a similar issue as Illya’s first skill—a combination of a bad deck and diminishing returns with Skadi limit its impact—but the battery is actually important to Illya’s ability to loop. With this skill, Illya can just barely loop in some non-MLB-Kaleid teams. Without it, she’d need the MLB for sure. The skill also has a chance to give Illya a small passive regen effect, but between the randomness and the low value it’s kinda meaningless in practice.

Noble Phantasm

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
A	Anti-Army	5

Effect	Deal damage to all enemies. Apply Sure Hit to self (1 turn) [Activates first].

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Damage +	600%	800%	900%	950%	1000%
Sure Hit

Overcharge Effect	Increase own Quick Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first]. Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first]. Increase own Buster Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first].

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Quick +	10%	20%	30%	40%	50%
Arts +	10%	20%	30%	40%	50%
Buster +	10%	20%	30%	40%	50%

Usage Tips

Grail Potential

Conclusion

All in all, Illya’s kit is just ugly. She has a mishmash of effects that don’t work particularly well together even within the kit itself and they actively mesh poorly with Quick’s favored support. She can technically loop if you have Skadi, Kaleid, and another 50% charger, but at the point you have all those tools you’re pretty likely to have literally any other Quick looper as well. Illya’s pretty bottom-of-the-barrel as loopers go, which hurts her overall value. If you like Illya, you can make her work—she’s not unusably bad or anything, and she could be interesting in nonstandard Quick comps—but she’s definitely not anything resembling “good.”

Rabbit's Arbitrary Ratings

Overall: 5/10
Single-Target DPS: 5/10
AoE DPS: 5/10
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 1/10
Defensive Utility: N/A
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Gardening: 10/10