Rabbit’s Reviews #337: Utsumi Erice (4* Avenger)

Erice’s kit can be summed up by saying she’s roughly on-par with Astraea. Her damage can be higher or lower depending on what you’re fighting. Erice benefits from having better buff uptime and a wider niche, but Astraea spikes higher against Evil enemies. Astraea has better crit tools and NP refund, but Erice has some nice party utility and better batteries. They’re more or less the same unit, in a lot of ways, and almost any situation where you would bring one will let you use the other.

Erice’s stats are iffy by Avenger standards, but even so, Erice has high attack relative to SRs as a whole. High attack is good for a DPS, so even if it could be better I can’t complain too much. Her internals are fine—she has very slightly below-average Arts cards and low-end-of-passable Quicks, which isn’t bad considering Avengers usually have weak active NP gain to make up for their passives. Erice isn’t even terrible at active star gen, as Arts Servants go, with two four-hit Quicks.

Erice gets a whopping six passives. Oblivion Correction and Independent Action together give Erice a respectable 14% passive crit damage up, while Riding helps her Quicks hit a little harder and generate a bit more meter. Avenger increases Erice’s defensive NP gain, which is particularly useful in context of Erice’s skillset (which we’ll get to later). Erice also has the highest possible level of Self-Restoration, giving her an impressive 4.2% charge per turn for free. Her passive list ends with Divinity E, which is mostly just for flavor and for making her weak to Divine-killers.

For Appends, Mana Loading is the most useful, as always. Anti-Lancer damage up is potentially nice, too, though there’s no shortage of strong ST Arts Sabers already. The Extra buff is the least important of the appends to Erice, but it’s still not a dud, since it helps with NP gain and Erice can usually count on having access to her cards when you bring her.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x8 Ghost Lantern Open Ghost Lantern configuration options x8 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
3	150,000	x8 Fool's Chain Open Fool's Chain configuration options x8 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
4	500,000	x8 Shell of Reminiscence Open Shell of Reminiscence configuration options x8 Tearstone of Blood Open Tearstone of Blood configuration options
Max	1,500,000	x8 Refined Magatama Open Refined Magatama configuration options x8 Tsukumo Mirror Open Tsukumo Mirror configuration options

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x8 Fool's Chain Open Fool's Chain configuration options
2 → 3	200,000	x8 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
3 → 4	600,000	x10 Homunculus Baby Open Homunculus Baby configuration options
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood Open Tearstone of Blood configuration options
5 → 6	2,000,000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence Open Shell of Reminiscence configuration options
6 → 7	2,500,000	x12 Refined Magatama Open Refined Magatama configuration options
7 → 8	5,000,000	x12 Ball of Rainbow Thread Open Ball of Rainbow Thread configuration options
8 → 9	6,000,000	x12 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant Open Flaming Oni Lantern Plant 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 Octuplet Crystals Open Octuplet Crystals configuration options
2 → 3	200000	x8 Ghost Lantern Open Ghost Lantern configuration options
3 → 4	600000	x8 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing configuration options
4 → 5	800000	x10 Eternal Ice Open Eternal Ice configuration options
5 → 6	2000000	x10 Stake of Wailing Night Open Stake of Wailing Night configuration options
6 → 7	2500000	x12 Divine Leyline Spiritron Open Divine Leyline Spiritron configuration options
7 → 8	5000000	x12 Tsukumo Mirror Open Tsukumo Mirror configuration options
8 → 9	6000000	x12 Ashes of Forgetfulness Open Ashes of Forgetfulness configuration options
9 → 10	10000000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

As an Avenger, Erice has no need for gems. Instead, she uses a host of different mats. None of her asks are too bad, except for possibly lanterns, but she needs enough different things that you’re pretty likely to be gated somewhere along the line.

All three of Erice’s skills play nicely into her overall kit, so she’ll need all three leveled to operate at max capacity. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

There’s not a lot of complexity to Erice’s gameplay. She’s a straightforward Arts DPS and wants your usual good stuff. Double Castoria is best for blitz setups, with Tamamo or Oberon as your third support depending on whether you need more damage or more reliable loopage. Tamamo has the added bonus of transitioning into one of Erice’s better stall teams (Castoria/Tamamo) if you don’t swing the 3T—Erice’s damage is so massively inflated while her curse is in effect that cooldown reduction gives her an outsized benefit.

I alluded to this above, but Proto Merlin is also a good partner for Erice—less because of her overcharge buff, and more because Erice actually appreciates having crit access. It still takes some doing to get Erice critting—you basically need to flood the field with stars, which probably means 2030s on Proto Merlin and Castoria, and stacking Winds of Avalon with itself—but Erice is one of the larger beneficiaries of Light in those Hands’s crit buff once you get everything set up.

Lower-level Arts teams should also be fine, since Erice is generically solid. All of the usual good low-rarity tools apply, including the recently-released Xu Fu, whose NP goes a long way towards getting Erice crit access. Caster Gilgamesh also gets a rare shoutout here, as Sovereign of Magical Staff lets Erice’s debuffs reliably pierce debuff resistance passives.

In burst setups, Erice wants the Black Grail as usual. Outside of that, staples like Painting Summer and Mark on a Smiling Face work well, though you can also consider Another Ending and Meeting of the Heirs for their respective crit tools. This is, incidentally, exactly the same set of CEs I recommended for Ibuki, and the reasoning is basically the same.

Star gen CCs are a nice choice on Erice, as she has decent crits but no good way to get access to them. You can also cheat her effective star weight up by giving her star weight CCs on all of her cards, which can bring her up to more Caster-ish levels of overall star weight—a net positive here.

Erice is a really strong unit overall, and Avengers benefit a lot from grails. If you find yourself using her regularly, two grails will markedly improve her performance for relatively little cost, and I’d definitely recommend going for it. Beyond that, it largely depends on how strong your other Arts damage-dealers are. If you have top-end tools like Vlad or Kriem already, or if you have a lot of counterclass options and only bring Erice to fill in for classes you’re missing, grails beyond 90 are less worth it. If she’s your best option and you’re bringing her everywhere, though, she’ll make good use of the extra stats.

Erice is a pretty nicely-balanced Summer Servant. She’s not at the top of the power spectrum, but she’s pretty close, comparing pretty favorably to Astraea but being cleanly inferior than the ST Arts Berserker trio. If you like her, or if you get multiple copies while pulling for Ibuki, she can pull a lot of weight. Otherwise, she’s a safe skip—there are plenty of alternatives out there.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 9/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 5/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 7/10
Farming Usefulness: 5/10
Servant Murder: 10/10