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MMM - A Banal Blessing Bestowed Before Burning Bygone Beings! (New Years Gacha 2020)

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The Modern Magus Magazine

Happy New Year, one and all!

I hope you’re all comfy and enjoy yourselves to the fullest, since we have another ¾ of a year before any other real Holiday. Putting that aside, we’ve been showered with countless blessings for this New Year - enhanced penis-piercing lasers, a free grail, and, my personal favourite, tonnes of exp in the Mana Prism shop so I don’t have to farm it. Got my priorities straight, for sure. 

...Now when can I buy QP with real money? I’ll accept 1M QP to the Dollar. I’m that desperate.

Yang Guifei Summon Banner
NA Release Date: 12/31/2022
Introduction

Ah yes, as almost seems to be tradition, we’ve got another SSR Foreigner to welcome the new year. Something about having cute girls possessed by Elder Gods entrap the world in a fire cage made by their eyes just fills you with hope for the New Year. Cthugha f’tagn.

...also since it’s somewhat relevant, RIP Miyu Matsuki. Cthuko now lives on in FGO, and hopefully Hisui too when the Tsukihime remake comes out...it is coming out, right?

Servant Data
Foreigner
Entity of the Outer Realm EX

Gain 2 Critical Stars per turn.
Increase your Debuff Resist by 12%.

Divinity B

Apply Damage Plus for yourself (Total Card Damage +175).

Overview

With Yang’s addition to the Foreigner lineup, making base stat total comparisons doesn’t really feel arbitrary any more. Two’s company, three’s a crowd, you know the drill. With that in mind, Yang’s base stats are just, well, good. 

Possessing both higher HP and Atk than Hokusai, and a slightly more offensive spread compared to Abbie, she’s pushing the Foreigner class’s fairly good base stats in the right direction. 

Her setback, however, is in her comparative lack of ridiculous passives compared to her fellow Foreigners. While her Entity of the Outer Realm passive is great as usual, it only comes paired with B-rank Divinity, meaning she lacks the primary card type boosters that her fellow Foreigners tend to have. The passive 2 stars per turn and slight damage boost from Divinity is still handy, but it still puts her at a relative disadvantage.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So how is Yang Guifei on the whole? On one hand, she’s super hot (in more ways than one):

She’s pretty damn durable, even if she’s inviting being hit with most of her kit. The combination of her Invuln and a 30% def up means she can endure both burst and gradual damage, and her second skill’s NP drain also assists in reducing the frequency of NP’s, and also synergizes with Arts comps, as they still rely on NP drain for survivability instead of team dodge / invincibility.

Her damage output is...frankly shockingly high. Super-effective modifier NP’s usually hit hard, but being at liberty to trigger them through your own kit is frankly overpowered (looking at you, Arjuna Alter, though I guess that’s Effective damage buff, not NP modifier). So long as she gets a turn to wait first, her NP hits extremely hard, and the nature of her kit means she’s unlikely to drop a burn on her target until it’s dead.

Speaking of burns, I’ll add a mention that her burn damage, well, adds up. Her typical NP’s will be doing around 60k damage before class advantage, while each NP will be dishing an extra 9k damage from the burn, on top of the possible 9k every 6 turns at skill level 10 from her third skill makes for a sizeable amount of extra damage. Thankfully they didn’t throw burn amp in her kit, else I’d have to call her the birth of the DoT meta.

Her NP spam is...pretty good. She doesn’t require too excessive a setup to get going (she works with non-LB Kaleido, Paracelsus and Support Tamamo), and she isn’t too demanding for card chains, either. Put frankly, she’s a reliable ST NP spammer without being excessive. Her only real issue is star supply, but her star weight, good stargen and star bomb help to remedy that a fair bit.

However, she isn’t without her cold spots:

Getting a burn before her first NP is inconsistent, and it’s very annoying to work around. I haven’t mentioned it anywhere since it’s kind of a nitpick, but none of her burn debuffs have high application rate, meaning debuff resistance can make them flat-out fail. Thankfully most Berserkers lack passive debuff resistance, but it still may present an issue on top of what I’ve already outlined. Of course, Debuff Immunity and Debuff Cleanse apply to this, too, but they're a bit more predictable and simpler to work around.

In most cases, she benefits from delaying her NP to her second turn on the field, which can be restrictive at times, especially for challenge quests. This is compounded by her second skill getting its best returns by letting a group of enemies live for a turn, so she can sometimes forcefully put the brakes on a team to get what she wants.

Yang Guifei is honestly in a strange spot, since she’s kind of like...Hokusai Alter? Instead of gaining momentum from hitting the right cards, she gets momentum from being hit, and similarly only deals significant damage with her NP’s effective damage in play. Unlike Hokusai, her ST NP’s nature better lends itself to the strengths of the Foreigner class, not playing ball with Berserkers’ silly class advantage on everything for challenging content, meaning she feels more satisfying to me.

Hey, I might have an inherent bias against DoTs, but even I can like them when it makes your NP smack harder than most people’s waifus. Yang is definitely niche regardless, but even outside of focusing on Berserkers, she makes for a decent class-neutral Arts damage dealer, having the damage output and general durability to back it up, unlike some of her competitors.

Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Final Conclusion

So, against my expectation, LB5 Part 2, Electric Boogaloo wasn’t landing on Christmas Day. Maybe Part 1’s ending got me a little bit too excited for an over-the-top December. Instead, we can take it easy in an event rerun this month, while awaiting the conclusion to LB5 in Spring.

This might sound like an odd complaint, but could we get some of the New Years servants in main story chapters? Musashi is a given, but even with Hokusai and Benienma appearing in events, it feels like they’ve been a little underused. Let’s hope Yang doesn’t follow the same path.

Until next time!

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