Rabbit's Reviews #250: Space Ishtar (5* Avenger)

Space Ishtar is pretty nifty. She’s our first Servant with the ability to change her NP card type, letting her effectively function as an Arts, Buster, or Quick Servant, at your preference. She doesn’t bring much of value beyond damage, and she’s generally less effective than the top-tier options in each card type, but her damage is high enough to make her a solid point Servant for any color of team, making her a great hole-filler and a strong pull for newer players especially.

Ishtar’s stats are quite good. While she does technically have the lowest attack of the SSR Avengers, she’s only slightly below Dantes and Nobu, and she gets roughly 1000 extra health in exchange, which isn’t a bad trade at all. Her base NP gain is less good, with Arts NP gain that’s well below standard relative to her deck. She has a pretty good hit-count spread, though, so her lone Quick card will help to make up the difference a little bit—although even her Quick only gets roughly 2.8% gain. Ishtar has decent hit-counts, but her deck will leave her struggling to make stars, especially if she doesn’t set her NP to Quick.

Ishtar gets a whopping six passives to boost her performance. Magic Resistance and Core of the Goddess make her quite resilient against debuffs, and Core of the Goddess also marginally boosts her damage. Independent Action and Oblivion Correction together give Ishtar a decent permanent crit buff, and Avenger and Self-Replenishment help to offset Ishtar’s low innate NP gain.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	10,000	x10 Octuplet Crystals Open Octuplet Crystals configuration options x10 Black Beast Grease Open Black Beast Grease configuration options
3	30,000	x10 Serpent Jewel Open Serpent Jewel configuration options x10 Primordial Lanugo Open Primordial Lanugo configuration options
4	100,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood Open Tearstone of Blood configuration options x10 Dawn Core Open Dawn Core configuration options
Max	300,000	x10 Scarab of Wisdom Open Scarab of Wisdom configuration options x10 Heart of the Foreign God Open Heart of the Foreign God configuration options

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Eternal Gear Open Eternal Gear configuration options
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Phoenix Feather Open Phoenix Feather configuration options
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Mystic Spinal Fluid Open Mystic Spinal Fluid configuration options
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Iron Stake of Evening Tears Open Iron Stake of Evening Tears configuration options
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Reactive Gunpowder Open Reactive Gunpowder configuration options
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Aurora Steel Open Aurora Steel configuration options
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Cursed Beast Gallstone Open Cursed Beast Gallstone configuration options
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Egg of Truth Open Egg of Truth configuration options
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Avengers are usually pretty easy mat-wise, but Ishtar insists on asking for some really nasty mats. She takes both cores and eggs—hard-to-farm gold mats from the last two Lostbelts—along with requiring an assortment of lower-rarity mats that can easily serve as temporary roadblocks. Her mat spread makes her among the most difficult servants in the game to ascend, and her skills aren’t any better.

If you set aside her NP-changing gimmick, Ishtar has a skillset that is quite simple but also generally powerful. Recommended skill order is 3>2>1.

The most important thing about Ishtar’s ability to change NP type is that it lets her function with whichever supports you happen to have. Do you have Merlin? You can run Buster Ishtar and do fine. Do you have Tamamo? Arts Ishtar will work well. Skadi? Same with Quick Ishtar. She’s not the best in any of these roles, but she can slot in as a DPS in any standard team shell regardless of type, which is really cool.

If you’re looking at very high end content, Ishtar’s Arts loop requirements are exceptionally tight and generally require sacrificing damage in favor of NP gain. She has a bit more potential in 3-turn Quick setups, though only because of Skadi’s targeted battery—Quick Ishtar has an absolutely terrible NP refund and won’t get anywhere near looping territory without battery spam. She’s workable in certain teams, but if you have the tools to make Ishtar loop, you probably also have better options and don’t really have any reason to care about her.

Ishtar’s flexibility makes it hard to provide specific CE recommendations beyond “Black Grail, or a 50% starting CE that fits your intended card type.” Holy Night Sign works for Quick, Painting Summer is always great for Arts, Aerial Drive is strong for Buster, and so on.

Ishtar is in kind of an odd position in that she’s really good pretty much regardless of team but she’s not really the best at anything, which is an argument both for and against grailing her. If you like her, you can bring her to nearly anything, which means you can get a lot of use out of the grails, but at the same time, even with the extra stats she won’t be anything earth-shattering.

As a whole, I would say Ishtar is amazing for new players and probably redundant for a lot of older players. Her damage is quite high, and it’s easily possible to have an established account and be missing a good AoE bruiser for one of the three card types—in which case Ishtar might have some value—but if you’re clearing content reliably already Ishtar won’t do much more than offer you some flexibility. She’s definitely a good pull, make no mistake, but she’s also not particularly necessary or even—setting her gimmick aside—especially interesting.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 7/10
AoE DPS: 9/10
Survivability: 7/10
Offensive Utility: 3/10
Defensive Utility: 1/10
Farming Usefulness: 9/10
Taste in Crowns: 10/10