Rabbit’s Reviews #369: Cait Cu Cerpriestess (4* Pretender)

Summer Baobhan Sith is our first limited Pretender at the SR level, and like most of her fellow Pretenders, she’s quite good and has some unique features. On the whole, though, she’s just a standard AoE Buster unit with a lot of bells and whistles. While she does have a lot going for her, at the end of the day she has two notable weaknesses that hold her back: her damage isn’t all that impressive, and she’s locked to fighting Knights. Baobhan Sith’s unique value stands out a lot more in stall contexts. She’s not the best at Buster stall by a long-shot—and she’s in direct competition with Morgan, who’s much stronger—but her gameplay is fairly unique and she’s only an SR, so it’s a pretty fair place to land.

Baobhan Sith is fairly offense-leaning as SR Pretenders go, with nearly as much attack as Hephaestion, who remains the best of the bunch in this regard. This is a good starting point for a damage-dealer, and the extra attack helps offset Baobhan Sith’s lowish steroids a bit. Her internals are pretty standard, with average NP gain on her cards and an unfavorable deck for star gen.

Baobhan Sith has five passives, two of which are unique. Magic Resistance provides the usual debuff avoidance, and Riding and Territory Creation help her less-important cards. Tam Lin and Priestess are interesting passives in that their strengths vary by ascension. At ascension 1 and 2, Tam Lin is weaker, giving a puny 4% crit damage buff against Man enemies, but Priestess is stronger, giving 5% NP gain up to Chaotic and Good allies. At ascension 3, Tam Lin’s crit damage buff jumps to 20%, but Priestess’s NP gain buff drops to 4%. These are marginal enough values that it doesn’t make a big difference which you choose—stage 3 is slightly better for burst setups, while stage 1 or 2 is slightly better for stall, but the difference is trivial either way. Priestess also causes allies to receive a small trait buff for a turn when attacked, marginally increasing their crit damage and (more importantly) giving them more value from Baobhan Sith’s third skill.

Baobhan Sith is a 30% charger, so Mana Loading is crucial to her ability to loop—if you want to use her as a farmer, you need Mana Loading maxed, which realistically also means you need her NP2+ for coins (though her damage at NP1 will be far too low to farm much of anything anyway). Aside from that, Anti-Berserker attack up is nice for her given that Berserkers will be a rare case where she gets full offensive class advantage, and the Extra Attack buff doesn’t really matter at all.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x8 Shell of Reminiscence Open Shell of Reminiscence configuration options x8 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
3	150,000	x8 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options x8 Meteor Horseshoe Open Meteor Horseshoe configuration options
4	500,000	x8 Scale of Fantasy Open Scale of Fantasy configuration options x8 Primordial Lanugo Open Primordial Lanugo configuration options
Max	1,500,000	x8 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options x8 Divine Leyline Spiritron Open Divine Leyline Spiritron configuration options

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x8 Shell of Reminiscence Open Shell of Reminiscence configuration options
2 → 3	200,000	x8 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
3 → 4	600,000	x10 Meteor Horseshoe Open Meteor Horseshoe configuration options
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
5 → 6	2,000,000	x10 Primordial Lanugo Open Primordial Lanugo configuration options
6 → 7	2,500,000	x12 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options
7 → 8	5,000,000	x12 Scale of Fantasy Open Scale of Fantasy configuration options
8 → 9	6,000,000	x12 Ashes of Forgetfulness Open Ashes of Forgetfulness configuration options
9 → 10	10,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100000	x8 Meteor Horseshoe Open Meteor Horseshoe configuration options
2 → 3	200000	x8 Great Knight Medal Open Great Knight Medal configuration options
3 → 4	600000	x10 Tearstone of Blood Open Tearstone of Blood configuration options
4 → 5	800000	x10 Scarab of Wisdom Open Scarab of Wisdom configuration options
5 → 6	2000000	x10 Eternal Ice Open Eternal Ice configuration options
6 → 7	2500000	x12 Mystic Spinal Fluid Open Mystic Spinal Fluid configuration options
7 → 8	5000000	x12 Divine Leyline Spiritron Open Divine Leyline Spiritron configuration options
8 → 9	6000000	x12 Egg of Truth Open Egg of Truth configuration options
9 → 10	10000000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

As a Pretender, Baobhan Sith requires an array of different mats in place of the usual gems and pieces. Her mat asks are quite eclectic, ranging from day 1 mats to things that were introduced relatively recently. As with any Servant of this type, there’s a decent likelihood any given player will be missing one or two of the needed mats, but overall she’s not hard to max out.

Baobhan Sith’s skillset is packed with utility, but none of that utility really does much to push her beyond her role as a fairly typical Buster AoE unit. Recommended skill order is 2>3>1.

As a farmer, Baobhan Sith works with double Koyan and any 50% charger, though she prefers Oberon to alternatives. On turn 1, a 50% charge CE plus Mana Loading (or Oberon’s 20% battery) and Baobhan Sith’s own CE lets her NP. On turn 2, the Koyans use their batteries. On turn 3, she gets 20% charge in total from her NP, uses her 30% battery again, and gets 50% charge from the third support to secure the loop. Assuming Oberon, a maxed-out damage buff from the new plugsuit, a maxed out Cranking CE, and fighting a Man-attribute Knight, an NP5 Baobhan Sith caps out at around 800k damage on turn 3. At level 100, with gold Fous, she reaches nearly a million damage—enough to reliably clear 90++ nodes under those conditions. This is a fairly limiting set of circumstances, and there are better units who can do similar things with less investment or in more cases, but the fact that she can do it at all as an SR unit is honestly pretty impressive.

Baobhan Sith is a decent point Servant for stall teams as well. Himiko/Castoria is the classic Buster stall shell, giving you 5 hits of Solemn every three turns, provided you can build up NPs in that time. Going even more old-school, Mash/Merlin/Baobhan Sith can work well also, as you can fairly easily hit 100% total defense up/attack down, reducing incoming damage to 0 if there are no other attack buffs in play.

For farming purposes, Baobhan Sith needs a starting charge CE. Cranking is the best option, though Aerial Drive is nearly as good—whichever you have at the highest level will do fine. In CQs, The Black Grail is solidly the best choice, especially since Baobhan Sith can heal off the demerit.

Baobhan Sith has pretty easy crit access and next to no inherent crit buffs. Crit damage CCs are a good pick for her, as a result, increasing the overall effectiveness of her cards.

Unless you’re going all-in on maxing Baobhan Sith out, there’s not much reason to grail her. She does benefit from the extra attack, and higher levels are necessary to getting her to 90++ damage thresholds… but there are far better alternatives out there. Grails are important to making her useful if she’s a favorite, but otherwise there are better uses of your resources.

Baobhan Sith has some neat unique utility, and her NP is absolutely packed with Stuff. Most of this is window dressing, though, on an otherwise fine AoE Buster unit. She’s quite good by SR standards, but she falls behind most SSR options. This is a reasonable place for a limited SR to land, and if you happen to snag a couple copies going for Melusine—or if she’s a favorite and you invest heavily in her—she can do good work in her favored contexts.

Overall: 8/10
Single-Target DPS: 4/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 7/10
Offensive Utility: 6/10
Defensive Utility: 6/10
Farming Usefulness: 7/10
CERNUNNOS POWER: 10/10