Milk: Blooming Bunny Analysis – Should You Pull?

It’s embarrassing how many times I almost misspelt ‘Embarrassment’.

---

Overview

• Powerful Pierce DPS with some Distributed Damage wave clear.
• Annoying to play optimally.
• Incredible self-ATK and Pierce buffs means she prefers DPS buffers that debuff bosses with Damage Taken.

---

Should You Pull?

Honestly, Milk is incredibly strong for a Pierce DPS. However, there are two issues with Milk, one that’s her fault, and one that isn’t. Iron is a very competitive DPS. Not only is the best DPS in the game currently capable of dealing Iron damage, but there’s a lot of Iron DPS available to use over Milk. Having to build yet another Iron DPS could be a big ask for many.

The second issue is that Milk is possibly the most annoying DPS to play optimally. She needs to proc her S1 at the start of the round, and at the start of the end of Full Burst, every time she uses her own burst. On top of that, the best way to deal optimal damage with Milk is by spamming autos, similar to Alice and Ein mid-burst.

However, Milk needs to perform a fully charged attack at most within every 6 seconds (considering base 1s charge time, give yourself leeway to perform the fully charged attack) to maintain Pierce status; this will take some getting used to, and unlike Alice, Milk can only be a DPS unit and can’t be a supportive secondary for a certain unit.

While she is strong, if you already have plenty of Iron DPS built, you don’t have as much reason to pull for her. The best thing to do is wait for the next banner units to be revealed before coming to this decision.

---

Newbie/Incomplete Box Section

Milk: Blooming Bunny is an Iron B3 Attacker Unit that primarily deals pierce damage with some distributed damage to have wave clear in normal maps, or bonus damage vs bosses. Despite how complicated her S1 appears, how she works is fundamentally quite simple, as she beats enemies to death with pure stats. This doesn’t make it less annoying to play her, though.

At the start of every combat, Milk has to trigger Embarrassment buff to ensure she maintains maximum buff power. Milk currently has the highest self-buff values in the game, both from her S1, S2 and her burst. While Shift Up had the forethought to not make them stack, they are still incredibly strong on their own.

Due to how high her self-buffs are, the most optimal way to play her includes forgetting the charge time and just spamming your weapon shots, as the raw attack and pierce buffs don’t benefit so much from fully charged shots as much compared to releasing as many buffed attacks as possible. However, as Pierce Damage can only benefit damage that has the Pierce property, one has to perform a fully charged shot every once in a while to maintain Pierce status from S1.

---

Basic Information

---

---

Skill 1: Embarrassment Suppression

■ Activates when performing Full Charge attacks. Affects self.

Gains Pierce for 6 sec.
■ Activates when Full Charge lasts for 0.5 sec or more, and self is not in the Embarrassment state. Affects self.
Embarrassment:
Function: Performs Forced Reload at reduced reloading speed, increasing attack capabilities and dealing Distributed Damage.
Effect 1: Affects all enemies. Deals 290% of final ATK as Distributed Damage.
Effect 2: Affects self. Removes 100% of bullets.
Effect 3: Affects self. Fixes reloading speed at 50% reduction. Applies to 1 reload(s).
Effect 4: Affects self. Forcefully reloads.
Effect 5: Affects self. ATK ▲ 118.7% for 40 sec.

Despite how much text it contains, the skill is actually quite simple. When Milk isn’t in Embarrassment status, if you manually hold the trigger for half a second longer than full charge time (charge speed modifiers do lessen the time it takes), she will perform a special attack that deals a little distributed damage to the whole screen, empty her magazine, and give her a fixed -50% reload speed modifier for 1 reload. (Reload speed modifiers can’t change this)

Activating the Embarrassment buff

Since it forces her to reload, ammo refills will also not decrease the delay. Milk will always have to perform this 3 second reload. As seen in the gif, entering Full Burst with Noir/Siren in the party, two units that have magazine refill skills, didn’t let me prematurely end the reload.

To make up for it, Milk gives herself one of the strongest self-ATK buffs in the game on a normal skill, at 118.7%, for 40s. While she has the Embarassment buff, she isn’t capable of activating Embarrassment again, so there’s no way to accidentally trigger the Embarrassment attack.

Due to the fact that the skill requires you to hold for 0.5s longer than a full charge time, but Auto Play automatically shoots when a charge weapon user reaches full charge time, you have to manually perform the Embarrassment attack yourself, as Auto Play is incapable of doing it on its own. The attack will trigger on its own when enough time passes with no further input, so there is no risk of accidentally holding it for too long.

Whenever Milk performs a normal, fully charged attack, her bullets gain a pierce buff for 6 seconds. While this effectively gives her permanent pierce, as it is an easy condition to fulfill, the 6 second duration will really come into play with both her S2 and Burst if you want to play her optimally. If you don’t care, though, you really can just leave Milk on auto play after performing the Embarrassment attack, and it’s a self-sustaining buff.

Skill 2: Outburst

■ Activates only when in Embarrassment status. Affects self.

Pierce Damage ▲ 64.7% continuously.
■ Activates only when in Overconfident, Huh?! status. Affects all enemies every 2 sec.
Deals 447.7% of final ATK as Distributed Damage.

As long as Milk is in Embarrassment status, she also gives herself Pierce Damage. This combines with the ATK Milk gives herself while buffed with S1 to increase her DPS a lot off-burst. However, as Pierce Damage buffs only activates for weapons that can Pierce, and the Pierce buff from Milk’s S1 activates only on fully charged attacks, and lasts 6 seconds, there’s two ways to go about it.

If you leave Milk on auto, you don’t have to worry about it, as the Pierce buff she gets is effectively self-sustaining. One fully charged attack after another just refreshes it again, making it effectively permanent. However, to play Milk and deal optimal DPS, one has to play her similar to Alice; the sheer strength of Milk’s buffs mean it’s optimal to unleash as many attacks as possible, even if they aren’t fully charged.

However, you can’t always spam attacks, as you’ll time out the Pierce buff, so ever so often, you need to shoot a fully charged attack within the buff time window to ensure you maintain optimal DPS. For this reason, I consider Milk a lot more annoying to play than Alice or Ein optimally, since at least with Alice or Ein, once it’s time to DPS, it’s just time to spam as much as you can. With Milk, you both have to spam and release a fully charged attack ever so often to maintain optimal DPS.

Whenever Milk activates her burst, she gains the “Overconfident, Huh?!” status. This will cause her S2 to perform a distributed damage attack every 2 seconds. Since the buff from burst lasts 10 seconds, that means Milk releases 5 distributed damage attacks with every full burst use. It’s nice bonus damage for Milk to deal in the middle of her own burst, on top of her autos.

The distributed damage S2 deals can be very valuable in Tetra tower currently, a tower that lacks consistent screen-wipe outside of Bready + Crust, and unlike the duo, Milk does it unconditionally upon using burst. However, unlike Bready, Milk doesn’t just perform a distributed damage attack on every auto.

Burst: Embarrassment Explosion

■ Affects self.

Overconfident, Huh?!:
Gains Immunity to Embarrassment for 10 sec.
Pierce Damage ▲ 117.64% for 10 sec.
ATK ▲ 220% for 10 sec.

Milk makes herself immune to Embarrassment for 10 seconds, effectively dispelling her S1 Attack buff, and with it, the S2 pierce damage buff. In exchange, she grants herself even stronger versions of the same buffs. The buffs she gets from burst are almost double the amounts from her regular skills. As long as Milk can maintain Pierce status from S1, her bullets can deal incredible damage mid-burst.

The huge ATK buff also benefits the distributed damage she deals with S2 when she has her burst buff. As Milk’s Distributed Damage is heavily influenced by (ATK – lowest defense), the raw ATK power Milk gives herself mid-burst means that her S2 distributed damage will help a lot at either clearing mobs in regular maps, or dealing extra damage to bosses.

However, due to the fact that Milk dispels her Embarrassment buff from herself, this means at the end of every Full Burst after she uses her own burst, she will need to re-activate Embarrassment again. Meaning that despite the 40s duration, with optimal burst gen, the buff shouldn’t ever last the entire duration. While powerful, this is another reason why it’s annoying to play Milk optimally.

---

Campaign

Milk can be really good in campaign, with her combination of incredible pierce damage, distributed damage mid-burst that is massively buffed with her ATK buff mid-burst. She is capable of both proper wave clear with her burst, on top of incredible single target DPS with her buffed autos.

With her being a unit that effectively has permanent pierce, this gives her great burst gen as well, and it can also clear enemies lined up to get hit by a single shot.

However, since she is a pure DPS unit with no utility, she has to compete with other DPS units. There are units available that have good wave clear, good burst gen and/or good DPS vs bosses without being as annoying to play optimally. The difference between Milk mostly on auto (outside of activating Embarrassment) and being played optimally is just too much to ignore, at least 50% difference.

If you don’t have any better units, Milk can be invaluable in campaign, but if you have units that can deal the damage without needing to break your hands, they would be preferable to use over Milk.

Note, for Tetra Tower specifically, Milk is one of its best units at the current moment, even if not played optimally. Her distributed damage from S2 without needing Crust to activate it means that Milk has unconditional screen-wipe that peppers mobs of enemies and the incoming waves every time she uses her own burst.

---

Arena

Since Arena is pure auto play, Milk is unable to activate her Embarrassment buff in an arena match. While she has a powerful burst for Arena in terms of self-buff and the distributed damage it deals from S2, her burst gen is unremarkable if it’s not piercing. To use her in Arena would necessitate supplemental burst gen.

---

Special Interception | Union Raid | Solo Raid

Milk is capable of dealing better damage than Red Hood vs Ultra in Special Intercept if played optimally. If you don’t mind playing Milk this way for Special Intercept, she can easily take Red Hood’s place in it, and is currently one of the best Iron units vs Ultra thanks to Pierce being especially effective vs the boss.

When it comes to bosses, Milk will love to face off against bosses with lots of parts. The more parts she can pierce through, the more powerful her bullets are, which thankfully, a lot of Iron weak bosses are full of.

Due to her self buffs being so incredibly high, especially mid-burst, Milk prefers to ally with Blanc if possible. Pierce Damage is in the same damage formula as other modifiers like Attack Damage, meaning that additional sources of Pierce Damage, ATK and even Attack Damage are diluted when they have to add into Milk’s incredible self ATK and Pierce Damage buffs.

For the above reasons, Damage Taken debuff sources like Blanc and Summer Rosanna are the best DPS up sources in raids for Milk, in places where sets of teams have to take on the bosses.

---

Strengths

• Incredible self-buffs on and off-burst.
• Good wave clear from burst’s Distributed Damage and great single target DPS
• Permanent pierce gives her good burst gen in regular maps.
• My tomboy seriously can’t be this cute.

Weaknesses

• Annoying to play optimally.
• Embarrassment buff has to be activated every at the start of every combat and at the start of every Full Burst time after she uses her own burst. More of a nitpick than a weakness, even if it does cut into potential DPS.

---

Rating

Category	Rating
Overall	S
Story	S
Bosses	SS
Arena	A

---

Recommended Cubes

bastion cube,resilience cube

While Resilience cube doesn’t affect the speed of the Embarrassment reload, it affects any other reload Milk performs, which is why it’s still valuable. Depending on how many ammo lines are rolled, Bastion can also be a valid choice.

---

Doll Priority

Thanks to her sheer strength, dolls are a high priority for Milk. The ATK modifier she gives herself really amplify the base atk gains that the doll gives, on top of the other benefits it gives. If you want to play her optimally, I recommend giving her a doll. Overall, I rate her high, but depending on how much a player wants to play her optimally or not definitely impacts this.

---

Expected Skill Priority

Nikke	Budget Skill Investments	Recommended Skill Investments	Skill Priority	Notes	Investment Priority
Milk: Blooming Bunny	Skill 1: 4 Skill 2: 4 Burst: 7	Skill 1: 7 Skill 2: 7 Burst: 10	S1 = S2	Skill 1 provides her with an incredible ATK buff. Skill 2 gives her high Pierce Damage that stacks with her ATK buff from S1. If you desire more wave clear for Tetra tower, you can choose to max this to increase the distributed damage it deals. Burst gives her incredible buffs. While they don’t stack with S1 or S2, their values more than make up for it.	High

---

Overload Gear Priority

Gear Priority = Head > Gloves > Chest > Boots

Attribute (Sub-Stat)	Priority	Recommended	Notes
Increase Element Damage Dealt	★★★★★	4x	Wanted for Union Raids and Solo Raid content.
Increase Hit Rate	☆☆☆☆☆	0x	—
Increase Max Ammunition Capacity	★★★★☆	1-2x	Ammo
Increase ATK	★★★☆☆	1-2x	Due to how much ATK Milk gives herself from either S1 and burst, ATK is de-prioritized for Milk.
Increase Charge Damage	☆☆☆☆☆	0x	—
Increase Charge Speed	★★★☆☆	1-2x	It both makes Embarrassment activate a little faster and make her spam autos hurt more by getting more charge within the same time window.
Increase Critical Rate	☆☆☆☆☆	0x	—
Increase Critical Damage	☆☆☆☆☆	0x	—
Increase DEF	☆☆☆☆☆	0x	—