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MMM - Teatime Tastes Taught to Timeworn Triggerman, Tracking Threatening Theriothropes (GudaGuda Shin Yamatai-Koku)

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Article by GamepressRath
MMM Gudaguda New Yamataikoku 2022
Table of Contents

The Modern Magus Magazine

Ah, the prestigious writer of the MMM and taking too long to write the damn thing, name a better duo.

Now I could pull the British card here and use the Queen’s parting as an excuse for the delay, but the truth is I was simply busy this week, and conversely the Bank Holiday for her funeral provided a convenient day to focus on this.

I’m sure Liz wouldn’t mind, she loved giving out freebie Bank Holidays for her Jubilees, after all.

Now to honor a great British tradition, shared with the Japanese, and drink some tea daintily while looking down on the commoners.

New Yamataikoku Banner 2022
NA Release Date: 09/2024

Sen no Rikyu

Introduction

FGO “do not genderbend a major male Japanese historical figure” challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).

As of the time of writing, her later ascension forms and profile are still locked, so I frankly have no clue why she’s a Berserker. Maybe she gets really mad if you are shoddy at Tea Ceremony?

Servant Data
Berserker
Madness Enhancement (Tranquil) EX

Increase own Buster Card effectiveness by 10%.
Increase own Critical Strength by 5%.

Territory Creation (Refined) A

Increase own Arts Card effectiveness by 8%.
Increase own Mental Debuff Resist by 20%.

Aesthetic Appreciation (Tea) A

Increase own Debuff Success Rate by 10%.

Freeform Thinking B

Increase own Quick Card NP Gain by 10%.

Overview

As an SSR Berserker, Rikyu comes packing with all the neat offensive perks of the class, which includes a high Attack stat. Even among her peers, she packs the 5th Highest Attack of her class/rarity, in exchange for the tied lowest HP.

So perhaps not a fair tradeoff, but as I always say, HP for Berserkers has diminishing returns from the get-go, so having a low HP score in exchange for more Attack is fundamentally a positive tradeoff. So what if every Servant with more Attack than her in her class also has more HP? She still hits pretty damn hard.

On the passives front, though, she’s got quite a collection. With 4 Unique passives, we’ll go over each in turn:

Madness Enhancement (Tranquil) is the typical moderate Buster boost you would expect from a Berserker, with the added benefit of a minor boost to Critical Damage on top. Though with Riyku’s BAQQQ card deck, it’s actually not as huge a boon as it is for most Berserkers. Still nice to have, though.

Territory Creation (Refined) provides her with a moderate Arts boost, which is again, not her primary card type, as well as a pretty sizeable bonus to her Mental Debuff Resistance, letting her shrug off Charm, Confusion, Terror and such similar debuffs easier.

Aesthetic Appreciation (Tea) is really just Item Creation in disguise, but who am I to complain? A boost to the consistency of the debuffs you apply is always useful, and often rare outside of the Caster class. Remind me why she’s a Berserker, again?

Last on the list is Freeform Thinking, providing a modest increase to NP gain with Quick cards passively. It’s no Quick booster passive, but having that multiplier constantly active for your primary card type is really nice, especially if you’ve got prospects for Quick looping farming in your future.

On the whole, Rikyu has a very solid lineup of base offenses and passives to supplement it, which will go far to aid her performance.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So how is Sen no Rikyu overall? On one hand, she’s got a cultured palate, and leaves a distinguished taste in your mouth:

Rikyu makes for a very solid Quick universal farmer. While she can struggle in damage output without the proper setup, she meets necessary damage benchmarks to farm most nodes with a 50% gauge CE setup, and can farm pretty much anything in her higher-investment Black Grail setups. Considering the competition for Quick farming Berserkers is otherwise pretty limited, or inconvenient (god save me if I try to figure out a farming team with Frankie, as good as she is at it) she makes a welcome addition to their lineup.

She’s pretty scary in CQ scenarios, too. Rikyu has an impressive critical damage engine that supplies itself, and synergizes well with her NP spamming abilities, providing a huge star drop from her NP to fuel her crits. Paired with her useful utilities in her targeted gauge charger, NP Seal on her NP, and anti-Human attribute effective damage, she performs well in both roles.

Since Rikyu doesn’t really let up, she makes for a reasonable sub-support for Quick teams, on top of everything else. Providing a +20% Quick booster, +20% NP gain buff, a 30% gauge charger and +2 Overcharge levels on the first NP is great for some Servants, and it’s largely better than many other options lingering about for when you need some specialised support to a Quick team. In particular, Ruler Skadi benefits greatly from it.

However, she’s also not seeing any upright stems in her cup:

Without access to the components of her Black Grail setup, Rikyu may not be a worthwhile farming option on the whole, especially when compared to incredibly convenient options in other card types such as Summer Ibuki. She demands a fair bit to manage her Black Grail setup, and failing it her damage output essentially barely scrapes over the necessary benchmarks to work, meaning she may have issues should farming quests further increase in HP in the near future. Combined with Summer Skadi being hard to access until a Summer gacha rerun, she is a little demanding.

If there’s an idiom I can provide for FGO as a whole, it’d probably go thusly:

It is very hard to make an AOE Quick/Arts Berserker bad.

I’m no poet, but hopefully you agree it’s true. I’m pretty sure it’s because Berserkers tend to have high base NP gain from their low Arts card counts, which in turn means their NP’s have higher refund than is typical, plus the offensive might of their class is simply a match made in heaven.

Our most recent Berserker additions prove that beyond doubt - Summer Ibuki is arguably the best farmer in the game, while Sen no Rikyu, while lagging behind in the damage field, is a very valuable addition to the Quick farming roster, and even somewhat performs similarly in how she pulls double duty for farming / difficult content and can provide vital support for a niche Servant in the right circumstance (Arcueid and Summer Skadi, respectively).

While I get a feeling her yet-to-be-revealed ascensions and profile will give me some whiplash, she’s otherwise a very well-rounded and respectable Berserker that can provide some essential farming aid should you have the roster to back her up. Rath™ Seal of Approval, with a recommendation.

Yamanami Keisuke

Introduction

Seems like we have the pretty boy quota for this event already filled. At this rate we’ll run out of named Shinsengumi members to implement full stop.

Servant Data
Saber
Magic Resistance D

Increase your Debuff Resist by 12.5%.

Riding E

Increase your Quick Card effectiveness by 2%.

Overview

As a member of the Shinsengumi, Keisuke continues their tradition of having really poor base stats (though to be fair, that’s due to them all being near-modern Servants and how base stats are tied to Servants’ lore Parameters). With the 6th lowest Attack of the SR Sabers, and the 8th Highest HP, he’s defensively-leaned, but still lacking in stats overall - a good number of the Servants with higher HP than him also have higher Attack.

While we’ll be going over the structure of his kit in a moment, I will say he has a supportive NP, but definitely would like to have a good Attack stat, so this is something of a setback.

Keisuke’s passives are otherwise typical and fairly non-impactful. His Riding rank does…something to his Quick cards, and Magic Resistance provides a small boost to his ability to shrug off debuffs. But nothing crazy here.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So how is Keisuke overall? Well it should be pretty obvious if you’ve been reading until now, but hey, I’ll throw him a bone:

With dedicated support at his side, Keisuke isn’t the worst critical damage Saber out there. He has a few supportive tools to lessen the burden on his supports of choice (probably double Proto Merlin), as well as charge their NP’s every time he uses his own. When loaded up on Arts booster buffs he’s capable of chaining multiple NP’s in succession, resulting in a pretty scary stack of Attack / Crit Damage buffs, so it would probably be fun to take him to town in such a setup.

But being serious, I’m shocked Okita’s the one that’s meant to be half-dead from tuberculosis, not him:

Keisuke is a Servant that’s simply spread too thin, and even what he constitutes to begin with is too weak to make a splash. Half his kit tries to be a damage-focused Saber, and the other a Shinsengumi-focused support, but ultimately the most he can do is cosplay as an incredibly bad Qin Shi Huang and huff Copium till the end of days. There’s too much to break down in how he fails to constitute anything of notable value, but getting a +10% increase to basically all his buff values wouldn’t even do it.

If there’s anything I can commend Keisuke for, it’s that he actually feels like how strong a Shinsengumi member would be in a Grail War versus titans like Gilgamesh. Except the Grail War is the metagame of FGO 7 years in, and he’d be crushed in an instant.

While a possibly fun Servant to roll out for a very suboptimal Arts team, and another component to stick in your Shinsengumi theme teams, Keisuke simply doesn’t do enough to make a splash in any conceivable way. He’s even outclassed by most 3* or Welfare supportive options in being a niche support for Shinsengumi Servants, which is simply sad.

Iyo

Introduction

If Himiko was so great, why isn’t there a Himiko Tw-

All joking aside, even if they’re the same class, successive monarchs to the same throne, and from the same event, they’re their own characters. But it’s still somewhat comedic to me that the sequel event also had a “sequel” Servant.

Servant Data
Ruler
Magic Resistance B

Increase your Debuff Resist by 17.5%.

Territory Creation B

Increase your Arts Card effectiveness by 8%.

Natural Constitution B

Apply Poison Immune and Burn Immune to self.

Incantation of Kunu C

Increase own Quick Card effectiveness by 5%.
Increase own Quick Cards Critical Strength by 10%.
Apply [Wild Beast] trait to self.

Overview

The SR Ruler lineup is shockingly pretty small all things considered, but thankfully there’s enough present to get a good judgement on Iyo’s base stats. With the lowest base Attack of her class and rarity, Iyo also packs the tied highest HP in return. While her Attack on the whole isn’t awful due to the Ruler class attack modifier, she still has lesser Attack than Ruler Da Vinci in exchange for the same HP, so she’s a little underpowered on the whole.

Naturally, the more attack the better when you have an offensive NP, but even with her less-than-average Attack for a Ruler, it’s higher than most SR’s Attack stats after attack modifiers are taken into account.

But moving on to Passives, Iyo has a fair few. Territory Creation and Magic Resistance are two common friends of ours that aid her Arts card damage / refund and resilience to debuffs alike, but she also packs two unique passives:

Natural Constitution provides her with an inherent immunity to Poison and Burn debuffs, something that saves her some HP in niche situations, and rarely will be a vital perk to ignoring dangerous aspects of difficult quests. While Incantation of Kunu is a straight offensive buff, providing modest boosts to Quick cards and Quick Crit damage alike, on top of giving her the Wild Beast trait.

While Iyo’s own kit interacts with the trait in some ways, that’s mostly a disadvantage, giving her additional weaknesses to a handful of enemies like Koyanskaya of Darkness or Proto Cu. It’s a neat bit of lore, though, being a kind of magical enhancement that provides the strength and grace of a beast that runs the risk of transforming into one wholly if overused.

Iyo might not pack the greatest offensive baseline out there, but she gets some decent compensation from her passive lineup, so she’s not doing too bad.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So how does Iyo stack up on the whole? On one hand, she’s a beastly presence in battle, despite her appearances:

Iyo is a very welcome addition to the freebie farming roster out there. While she does face competition from Ranmaru in the role as a welfare Arts AOE universal farmer, Iyo is simply, on the whole, better than her gender-less competitor, dishing out higher damage per NP, especially over the course of a 3-turn loop. Add in her superior gauge charger and situational anti-Divine perks, and it’s a clear sell.

She’s not lacking outside of the farming role, either. While largely focused on a single turn’s burst of damage, her Critical damage output is far from bad, and the fact she can use the star focus / Arts Up built into her kit to also get more NP gauge for NP spamming is a neat synergy. When she has Proto-Merlin(s) backing her up with offensive buffs, Iyo can actually pull off some fairly disgusting crit chains. That Poison / Burn immunity may also come in handy, so who knows?

However, she’s also overshadowed by her inner darkness…didn’t Gaia do something like this?

While Iyo’s damage output is pretty solid, like most Servants without an absolutely bonkers offensive profile, she might run into damage issues when running more budget setups. In the game’s current environment it’s not exactly too much to expect Castoria and Black Grail / a secondary Arts support from people, but there are always those unfortunate enough to lack the necessary components. Also not worth the extra bullet point, but her regular card NP gain makes me sad.

All things considered, Iyo is one of the better welfares introduced to the game thus far. Her kit is quite effectively streamlined to provide both potent critical offence in challenging content and consistent, reasonably-high damage in farming content, paired with that little extra Wild Beast support / Curse damage spice that most Servants need to stand out.

Normally the Ruler class is something of a flaw when in a farming role, providing not much offensive payoff while robbing you of a common class advantage, but Iyo is quite fortunate to meet the damage benchmarks needed to breach the realm of universal farmers, and she’s all the better for it. She’s just frankly good to have as an option, even if she isn’t going to blow Servants with class advantage or big-name SSR farming options out the water.

Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Outro

Another event, another MMM where I’m fashionably late to finish it. Ah, some things never change.

Honestly, I’d probably be much better with scheduling if Lasengle did more Saturday/Sunday game updates lately. Having the new content drop on Wednesday means by the time I feel mentally prepared and with free time to write, the honeymoon period has basically passed.

Yet the pen keeps writing. I swear one of these days I’ll do a same-day MMM drop. Just…please do a 1-Servant banner sometime soon.

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