Rabbit’s Reviews #344: Huyan Zhuo (5* Assassin)

Huyan Zhuo is a pretty good unit, held back by a handful of mostly-unavoidable disadvantages. On one hand, she’s an AoE Quick unit with fantastic steroids, good loop specs, and very nice utility. On the other hand, she’s very very similar to Sen no Rikyu and is stuck in a worse class. Even with Summer Skadi, Quick is still probably the weakest overall card type—Buster tends to be a bit better for blitz damage thanks to inherently stronger crits (and a pool of uniquely powerful Servants), and Arts is much much better at the sustain game and inherently advantaged for refund farming—so even as a very good Quick unit, Huyan looks unimpressive relative to many units in other card types, especially Summer Ibuki.

All this is to say that Huyan’s value is somewhat questionable. She’s probably the best AoE DPS Assassin we have (with the arguable exception of Koyan herself), but the bar was not especially high, and there’s not a lot Huyan can do that Sen before her can’t do more effectively. There are some things—Huyan’s utility may be fairly niche, but it’s non-trivial regardless—but overall, I don’t know that Huyan does enough to stand out to make her a particularly appealing pull.

Huyan has a defense-leaning stat spread, with high-ish health in exchange for the second-lowest attack of the SSR Assassins. This is a real disappointment, as Huyan’s unusually high steroids are largely negated by the combination of her low base attack and the class’s innate 0.9x attack multiplier. Her internals aren’t super impressive, either, with a very average Arts card and two unimpressive (though not terrible) Quicks. Her star gen is good, at least, thanks to high hit-counts across-the-board on top of the star-gen-centric Assassin class.

Huyan’s passives are fairly useful, even if simple. She has the Assassin-standard Presence Concealment for extra stars, plus Riding as a permanent buff to her most important card type. She also gets a unique passive, Phantasmal Beast Possession, that raises her Buster card star weight a bit—a nice, if small, bit of synergy with Ruler Skadi. For appends, Mana Loading is borderline necessary, as Huyan is a 30% charger. The other two appends are easily skipped—Huyan’s cards aren’t good enough for an Extra Attack buff to really matter, and anti-Archer damage is pretty forgettable on a unit who mostly wants to be fighting Riders.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Assassin Piece
3	300,000	x12 Assassin Piece x15 Void's Dust
4	1,000,000	x5 Assassin Monument x29 Fool's Chain x3 Primordial Lanugo
Max	3,000,000	x12 Assassin Monument x6 Primordial Lanugo x5 Fragment of a Twinkling Star

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Assassin
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Assassin
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Assassin
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Assassin x15 Fool's Chain
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Assassin x29 Fool's Chain
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Assassin x10 Void's Dust
7 → 8	10,000,000	x20 Void's Dust x4 Primordial Lanugo
8 → 9	12,000,000	x11 Primordial Lanugo x72 Twilit Ritual Sword
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Assassin
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Assassin
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Assassin
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Assassin x3 Claw of Chaos
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Assassin x6 Claw of Chaos
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Assassin x3 Black Beast Grease
7 → 8	10000000	x6 Black Beast Grease x6 Soundless Bell
8 → 9	12000000	x18 Soundless Bell x10 Fragment of a Twinkling Star
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

I don’t know what it is recently with new Servants and horrendous mat asks, but I feel like it’s been unusually common lately. Huyan is no exception—she needs three bronze mats for her skills, and the most recent of them (swords) she needs at the dreaded 72-per-skill level. Gross.

As with Sen before her, Huyan’s skills are mostly just “generically strong.” There’s not a lot of complexity here, but there also doesn’t need to be, since they work well together. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

There’s a lot of overlap between Huyan and Sen, to the extent that this usage tips section is going to read very similarly to Sen’s, aside from a few utility-related things.

For CE-less farming, Huyan’s loop specs are very slightly worse than Sen’s due to how the values multiply, earning about 12% per enemy instead of 13%. In order to farm 2/3/x or 3/2/x nodes with the standard Summer Skadi/Oberon setup, Huyan needs approximately six hits of overkill per enemy on the wave of three, which is pretty difficult to get in most cases. Fortunately, Huyan should mostly be farming Riders, and Riders give an innate bonus to NP gain. She still needs some overkill—about four hits per enemy on the wave of three—but that’s a lot more doable than six, especially considering Huyan has class advantage pushing her damage up. Because of her distribution of buffs (all Quick, no NP gain) a third Skadi doesn’t change this much, meaning Oberon is still probably the best pick for 3/3/x nodes, unless both waves of three have low enough HP that Huyan gets a bunch of overkill.

A 50% charge CE puts Huyan in range of farming pretty much anything with Skadi and two Oberons, though she may have damage issues. Double Skadi/Oberon requires refunding 30% against one wave, which is probably out of reach for Huyan unless there’s a wave of two low-HP Riders, but Double Oberon/Skadi only needs 10% on any wave, and Huyan gets that pretty easily. Without the extra Quick buffs from a second Skadi, Huyan will really need to rely on class advantage to hit damage numbers, but it’s still an option.

Huyan doesn’t really have much in the way of stall tools—even her dodge and stun do more for stabilizing her burst than for keeping her alive long-term—so if you’re using her for CQs, you really want to go all-in on burst damage. Double Summer Skadi is the best pick for this, as you’re maximizing your Quick buffs and increasing crit damage on the better card type. Caster Skadi is generally the best third support, maximizing damage output and propping up Huyan’s Quick crits, though Oberon can also be situationally better for loop consistency and emergency damage push, especially if Huyan has the Black Grail.

Huyan is going to be most valuable in CQs that are most easily cleared with burst strategies but that involve dodges or invulns and buff removal. Even better if you’re fighting Riders or Berserkers. That’s a pretty niche category, but it’s not a nonexistent one. If you level Huyan’s skills and have her ready, she’ll be extremely helpful on some rare occasions… but whether that’s worth the investment, especially considering her awful mat asks, is something of an open question.

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 Huyan’s Quick performance and NP gain.

With Huyan’s innate star gen capabilities, she should be critting pretty frequently, but her innate crit buffs are pretty low, so extra crit damage is a nice idea—especially on Huyan’s single Arts card, which won’t benefit from Skadi’s crit buffs.

Assassins are weak grail targets in general, and Huyan, while good, is probably not going to have her use cases meaningfully increased by having higher stats. That said, extra levels will help to offset her low base attack, so it’s not the worst idea if you’re investing heavily anyway. I just wouldn’t grail her unless you know you’re going to make a point of using her wherever you can, rather than just in cases where she shines.

In the same way that Sen was a great unit overshadowed by a recent phenomenal unit in a similar role, Huyan is a good unit overshadowed by a great unit who does mostly the same things. Huyan has some niche use cases, sure, but by and large there’s not a lot of reason to go for her. Most obviously, she follows a much better Quick unit who plays almost identically… but even compared to upper end Arts Servants, she doesn’t compare especially favorably. Her damage is pretty comparable to the likes of Muramasa—another utility-oriented AoE SSR, in fact—but she has worse refund and a weaker sustain game, thanks to her card type, without a lot of other benefit to show for it. She’s the kind of Servant who will do well if you invest in her, but who just doesn’t stand out enough to be really worth that investment.

Overall: 8/10
Single-Target DPS: 4/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 6/10
Defensive Utility: 5/10
Farming Usefulness: 7/10
Star of Destiny: 8/108