Rabbit’s Reviews #341: Sen no Rikyu (5* Berserker)

Sen no Rikyu is something of an interesting next move after the drama of anniv and summer. On the one hand, she’s a very good unit—in contention for best Quick AoE, in fact—but on the other, she doesn’t feel nearly as remarkable as our past few SSRs. She’s great, make no mistake, but she comes with the usual sorts of trade-offs we would expect of a strong new limited Servant. She has contexts in which she’s the best option in her card type, but those contexts are fairly specific, and she doesn’t really raise the overall power ceiling. Which is to say, she’s a pretty balanced unit, albeit a strong one. Unfortunately, she’s in direct competition with Ibuki, who’s better in every way, and she comes at a time when most players are probably short on quartz. In a vacuum, though, she’s a nice addition, and she’s a good option for anyone with a shiny new Summer Skadi and no modern Quick units to run her with.

Sen’s stats are strictly worse than her immediate predecessor’s—she has lower attack and HP both than Ibuki. Fortunately, she still has a strong offensive lean and high attack overall, which isn’t a terrible starting point. She’s squishy, but she can hit things hard, and that’s what really counts. Her internals, meanwhile, are quite good. She has an odd triple-Quick deck, but she leverages it well, with normal single-Arts NP gain and great NP gain on her Quicks. Her high hit-counts and deck also make her excellent for active star gen, which is important since, as a Berserker with no star weight buffs, she needs to flood the field with stars in order to crit. Sen has a great mix of passives, too, all of which are unique to her. Madness Enchancement (Tranquil) pairs a buff to Sen’s lone Buster card with a generic crit damage buff. 5% crit up won’t do much for Sen given that she should have more than enough crit buffs already, but still, it’s there. Territory Creation (Refined) buffs Sen’s Arts card—mostly a de facto NP gain boost—and also gives her some resistance against mental debuffs. Aesthetic Appreciation (Tea) makes Sen’s many debuffs more reliable, and Freeform Thinking boosts the NP gain on Sen’s already-impressive Quick cards and NP.

As a 30% battery unit, though, Sen is especially dependent on Mana Loading’s extra charge. The extra attack buff is a decent append skill as well, due to Sen’s good bases. Anti-Saber crit resistance is pretty useless, though—that’s one to ignore.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Berserker Piece
3	300,000	x12 Berserker Piece x8 Octuplet Crystals
4	1,000,000	x5 Berserker Monument x6 Black Beast Grease x3 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
Max	3,000,000	x12 Berserker Monument x6 Lamp of Evil-Sealing x5 Cursed Beast Gallstone

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Berserker x3 Black Beast Grease
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Berserker x6 Black Beast Grease
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Berserker x5 Octuplet Crystals
7 → 8	10,000,000	x10 Octuplet Crystals x6 Soundless Bell
8 → 9	12,000,000	x18 Soundless Bell x72 Ashes of Forgetfulness
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Berserker x15 Evil Bone
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Berserker x29 Evil Bone
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Berserker x3 Tearstone of Blood
7 → 8	10000000	x6 Tearstone of Blood x3 Egg of Truth
8 → 9	12000000	x8 Egg of Truth x72 Small Bell of Absolution
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Sen’s mat asks are… very similar to Ibuki’s, with one glaring exception: she needs bronze mats at high levels. Most of what Sen asks for is reasonable, but she does need 72 ashes per skill, which immediately makes her a pain to max out. She also needs 72 LB6 bells per appends, just to make sure Mana Loading isn’t free.

Sen’s skills are surprisingly modest—by and large, they do just enough to make her strong, but nothing to push her much beyond that threshold. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

Sen is not a very complicated Servant to use.

For farming, Sen can probably farm 2/3/x or 3/2/x nodes CE-less with two Summer Skadis and an Oberon. Sen refunds about 13% per enemy with two Summer Skadis. On turn 1, she uses Mana Loading, her own battery, and a Summer Skadi battery to NP. She then has a 50% battery on each of the subsequent turns, plus an extra 20% from Oberon at some point. Sen needs overkill on the wave of 3 to hit 50%—that’s about two hits of overkill per enemy—but if she gets that, Oberon’s 20% makes up for the wave of 2, and you’re golden. Notably, 3/3/x nodes aren’t actually any easier in this setup, except in that Sen can get her overkill on either wave.

For 3/3/x nodes, though, Sen actually benefits from triple Skadi setups. With Caster Skadi’s Quick buff added to the mix, Sen refunds almost exactly 50% against three enemies, making farming standard nodes CE-less extremely consistent, especially considering Sen’s damage output in this setup will be through the roof.

With a 50% charge CE, Sen can farm just about anything, provided her damage is sufficient. With double Summer Skadi and an Oberon, Sen only needs to refund 30% on one wave, which means she can do 2/1/x or 1/2/x nodes. With double Oberon and one Summer Skadi, she gets away with 10% on any wave, which she can do against a single enemy, making 1/1/x technically possible. All of these work similarly—CE plus Mana Loading plus Sen’s battery gets the first NP, and then you use your many support batteries to secure the loop on subsequent turns.

For CQs, Sen is generally going to want triple Skadi. Double Summer Skadi and single Caster Skadi is marginally better for NP damage, as you get more overall damage buffs and are less likely to run into the defense down cap, while double Caster Skadi and single Summer Skadi gives you more crit buffs on your most common cards. You can go either way, really—both will work well—so if one or the other is more common on your friend list, try that one.

Sen is pretty squishy and also pretty powerful, so there’s no real reason not to try to burst through fights unless they prohibit it. If you have to stall, though, Caster Skadi/Castoria is still a pretty good shell. Sen isn’t a terrible pick for it, either, between her flexible battery, her ability to push party NP gain, and her ability to boost Castoria’s overcharge level. She also, y’know, hits things really hard, which is nice—moving faster means you spend less time stalling, which is less time in which something can go wrong.

Sen is a pretty self-sufficient character, so she should do decently well with lower-end Quick tools in play. If you don’t have the Skadis natively, you can grab one off support and pair Sen with a budget Quick support. Barti is a great choice here, as he gives buffs Sen appreciates while also making it much easier for her to crit by dropping his own star weight to zero.

Assuming you’re not running an event CE, the Black Grail is your best damage option. Traces of Christmas, meanwhile, is a great 50% charge option, boosting Sen’s Quick performance an NP gain.

Sen is so low on innate steroids that any CCs that give her extras can make a big difference, especially since she can place Quick cards before her NP to spike her damage anyway. NP damage up CCs on Sen’s Quicks are a great pick, if you have them available.

Berserkers are great grail targets and Sen is one of the better Berserkers we’ve gotten. Extra attack would help her further compensate for her low steroids, too, so especially with grails being relatively more common, taking her to level 100 is a good investment for anyone planning to use her actively.

Sen is a very good unit. If she had released two months ago, I would probably be singing her praises a lot more—she rivals Caren for best Quick unit in the game, with higher damage potential in exchange for less flexible loopage. The problem here is that Ibuki just released. Sure, Ibuki is Arts and Sen is Quick, but all Summer Skadi did was make it so Quick and Arts play mostly the same, at least in burst contexts. Unless you’re fighting something with massive Arts resistance, in any case in which you would bring Sen, you could bring Ibuki and do it better.

I’m not usually one to say a Servant is bad because another one does the same thing better, especially when both of those Servants are limited SSRs. And I’m not saying Sen is bad, to be clear—she’s quite good. But for JP players, Sen is coming after an absolutely brutal set of banners, making her a hard pull, and for NA players, Sen will be following a unit who’s directly superior in pretty much every way. This means there’s very little reason to pull for her, at least at launch. The only real reason to target her specifically—at least, from a gameplay standpoint—is if you have your Arts needs covered (say, by a high-NP Spish), you pull Summer Skadi, you don’t have any good Quick AoEs, and you want one pocketed just in case it happens to be useful. Sen fills that specific need, and she fills it well… but it’s a pretty specific case.

In short, Sen is a good addition to the game—it’s only timing and context that make her less exciting than she might otherwise be.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 8/10
AoE DPS: 10/10
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 4/10
Defensive Utility: 5/10
Farming Usefulness: 8/10
Tea: 10/10