MMM - Bootylicious Bounty Hunters Bounce Beyond Celestial Bodies, Bopping Baddies (Saber Wars II Gacha)

Being honest, the trend of a gag servant suddenly becoming an eldritch god is so overused by now I actually saw this coming. So instead she’s not only Ishtar, but also Astarte (Combined form of Fertility Goddesses) and Astaroth (One of the highest ranked demons from the Ars Goetia, and also by association a Demon Pillar). I like it when Nasuverse actually implements linguistic history into their servants, though. Anyways, servant analysis, stay on track, Rath!

Being an Avenger, Space Ishtar packs pretty much what you’d expect from the class - high base attack, albeit barely the lowest of the SSR Avengers, poor star weight, amazing defensive NP gain, awful HP-wait.

Why do I see a “13” in front of her HP stat? Surely she knows as an avenger that’s illegal? At any rate, her HP somehow manages to be “Below average” rather than “Painstakingly low” for once, despite not losing too much attack in comparison to her fellow Avengers for it. Surely she packs some other weaknesses in exchange for not dying to a mild breeze?

Kind of. With a BBAAQ card set, 2-hit Arts, 3-Hit Buster, 4-Hit Quick and 5-hit Extra, Ishtar’s generation stats look fairly ordinary. However, her base NP gain is only 0.69%, which while nice, is certainly below average for a servant of her hitcounts. In fact, her generation stats are, on the whole, very similar to Dantes, except for their different card sets and Ishtar having 0.07% base NP gain on him. As a result, her Arts cards don’t generate an overwhelming amount of gauge, but her Quick remains pretty solid, and her Extra is solidly average. Ishtar’s stargen is also decent for her card set, mostly due to her Quick hitcount. On the whole, pretty mediocre on this front, though that’s yet to consider her passives.

Passives

The MMM isn’t even over yet and Space Ishtar has already earned an award from yours truly - Most Passives in the game (that actually impact gameplay). I can’t be bothered to look up who got dethroned from the title, but 6 passives outside of events is, quite frankly, absurd. So I’m going to go over each with the amount of detail they deserve:

• Magic Resistance C is an extra 15% passive debuff resistance. Whoop dee doo, next.
• Independent Action C gives her 6% extra crit damage. Normally not too noteworthy, I’d just keep this one in mind.
• Goddess Core A++ gives her a pretty notable 270 damage up buff constantly, and 27% MORE passive debuff resistance. Now she has 42% passive debuff resistance, putting her, much like her Archer version, in the zone of “almost always debuff immune”, due to normal debuffs having a near-50/50 chance of succeeding on her. Boy do I love this combo.
• Avenger EX both establishes that she is the angriest Avenger to date (somehow), and also gives her a huge 22% boost to defensive NP gain, meaning she gets 6.1% gauge for every hit she takes. Oh, and her teammates lose 12% debuff resistance while she’s on the field, but who cares about those losers.
• Oblivion Correction A is what I meant when keeping her Independent Action in mind. 16% total critical damage up passively is actually noticeable, and allows her to hit some pretty nice damage numbers when her Avenger attack stat and modifier is kept in mind. She hits hard, that’s a given.
• Lastly, Self-Healing (Mana) B has her passively gain 3.5% gauge every turn. 

NP Generation Conclusion

With that all stated, let me make a correction for Ishtar. Her NP gain is not mediocre.

What do I mean by this? Allow me to provide an example. Proto Arthur has a somewhat similar card set and hitcounts, as 0.84 base NP gain, 0.15% higher than Space Ishtar’s. However, Space Ishtar has her passive 3.5% gauge charge. In a AQA chain from either, they gain the following:

Proto Arthur: 6.72+6.6+11.76+8.4 = 33.48% gauge

Space Ishtar: 5.52+6.92+9.66+6.9 = 29% gauge, +3.5% = 32.5%

With how the game rounds gauge numbers, it’s usually likely that 32.5% and 33.48% gauge will result in the same displayed number - 33%. As such, Space Ishtar actually ends up having equal NP gain to a servant with much better NP gain on paper.

...and that’s ignoring her defensive NP gain is double Proto Arthur’s. For every hit (not even attack, hits from said attack) Space Ishtar takes, Space Ishtar will be getting 2-3% more gauge than most servants, which will add up a lot over the course of a quest.

So, QED, Space Ishtar’s NP gain is not bad when all her kit is taken into account. Not spectacular, but it edges above average.

Well, I kind of got carried away, but if you fell asleep reading me talk about looping numbers, or simply skipped to the end, then here’s the bit where I say the good stuff and the bad:

This is the part with the bad stuff, as is custom:

So on the whole, Space Ishtar is a servant which manages to accentuate the good points of the Avenger class without succumbing too hard to its drawbacks - she has some blistering offense that can be put to good use through class neutral AOE loops, if she so wishes to end someone’s career in a Brave Chain with her really cool Extra card animation she can, and she accomplishes without needing a friendly neighborhood Merlin or Skadi to protect her every NP. Which, in turn, makes her an excellent fit for Arts teams who lack such support.

While she may not have any ground-breaking niches or amazing unique supportive options, she aims to be a powerful universal Arts farmer with strong offense for more difficult quests, and she accomplishes it with bonus style points. She is, for all intents and purposes, pretty neat. Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Hustling into our purview with an outfit as spacey as her enunciation in her voice lines, Jane somehow manages to feel less like an Eiyuu Senki* character the more I use her. Which is a good thing. And don’t search for Eiyuu Senki* at work, for the record.

In something of a shock for what is, essentially, a modern-era servant, Jane actually has a good base statline, with identical attack to EMIYA Alter, but more HP. While that still places her on the lower end of attack stat for 4* Archers, she’s at least getting a fair sum of HP out of the deal, actually having the highest HP of any 4* Archer. Despite Atalanta having far less attack. Give my catgirl some more strengthenings, please.

Jane, joining in the same gacha as Space Ishtar, seems to have been infected with her excessive passives, though thankfully not to the same degree. Her Magic Resistance gives her some extra safeguards against debuffs, but the real point of Interest is her Riding, Presence Concealment and Independent Action, increasing her Quick card damage and star generation, then giving her some extra oomph for when she comes to spend those crit stars.

While Independent Action is a given for an Archer, the high-ranking Riding and Presence Concealment really helps Jane out a lot, increasing her overall stargen in a chain using both her Quicks by about 17.5% or so. Naturally, the damage increase to her main card type also helps.

In terms of generation stats, Jane has what I consider pretty standard 3-hit Arts card NP gain. With her BAAQQ card set, 0.71% base NP gain and 3 hits on both her Arts and Quick cards, she has fairly good Arts NP gain in exchange for mediocre Quicks, and a very mediocre Extra card. At the same time, her stargen is pretty much what you’d expect for that Quick hitcount - not good, but not that bad, either. Her passives do help augment her Quicks a fair bit, but the baseline isn’t superb. On the whole, she isn’t lacking in the NP gain front, but that’s the only stand-out part of her base stats.

So how is Jane, now that I’ve gotten bored with breaking my usual format from Space Ishtar’s conclusion? On one hand, she’s a hot shot and rocking the world as we know it:

On the other hand, she may be better off cheering on the sidelines:

In conclusion, Calamity Jane is certainly a calamity, though both to herself and her foes. Speaking in real terms, her own potential as a critical damage dealer or ST NP Archer, or Skadi-looping Quick monster isn’t better than anything already around, even among welfares, which leaves her seeking a niche she can fulfil. While she isn’t going to break the support meta with her skill set, it isn’t wrong to say that Jane has a plethora of handy supportive buffs that can both aid herself and an ally, should she so desire.

While said supportive potential won’t shine in most content existing in the game, it does exist, and allows her to reach a role which would otherwise necessitate 2 existing SSR servants (Holmes and Brynhildr) to reach the same result. As such, I would say she has enough of a niche to be considered a worthwhile servant. Maybe the jab about being a cheerleader wasn’t so inaccurate. Rath™ Seal of Approval, provided her supportive ability can be properly used in the future.