Rabbit's Reviews #257: Yang Guifei (5* Foreigner)

Our first Foreigner in ages, Yang Guifei is a semi-gimmicky ST Arts Servant. She has some okay utility and pretty high damage potential, but the weird setup involved means she’ll rarely reach her ceiling, and she suffers from significant cooldown issues on top of a mismatched kit. She’s just okay overall—a totally workable Arts DPS, but solidly below much of her competition.

Yang Guifei has the highest attack of the SSR Foreigners—and very high attack in general, for that matter. Her HP also isn’t as low as it could be, so she’s in a solid place stats-wise. As is typical for Foreigners, Yang has high hit-counts across-the-board, so especially with her two Quick cards she can make a decent number of stars off a brave chain. Her Arts card NP gain is quite good relative to her deck, though in exchange her Quicks are not great, so while she will build meter quickly her effective NP gain is not quite as good as it looks. Yang is pretty light on passives by Foreigner standards, packing only the default Foreigner passive Entity, as well as Divinity. Entity is awesome, though, giving two stars passively by default, so it could be worse.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Evil Bone Open Evil Bone configuration options x10 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
3	300,000	x10 Phoenix Feather Open Phoenix Feather configuration options x10 Claw of Chaos Open Claw of Chaos configuration options
4	1,000,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood Open Tearstone of Blood configuration options x10 Scarab of Wisdom Open Scarab of Wisdom configuration options
Max	3,000,000	x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing Open Lamp of Evil-Sealing 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 Fool's Chain Open Fool's Chain configuration options
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Ghost Lantern Open Ghost Lantern configuration options
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Serpent Jewel Open Serpent Jewel configuration options
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Stake of Wailing Night Open Stake of Wailing Night configuration options
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Ancient Bell Open Ancient Bell configuration options
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Dawn Core Open Dawn Core configuration options
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Tsukumo Mirror Open Tsukumo Mirror configuration options
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Glowing Star Fragment Open Glowing Star Fragment configuration options
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Yang’s skillset is pretty weird, and while it’s almost amazing, it has some serious cohesiveness issues that hold Yang back overall. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

Yang’s top-priority is to NP every other turn, which means batteries and NP gain buffs are extremely helpful. This makes Bride and Lanling great partners, as they both can push damage and effective NP gain and both have batteries available to help out. Bride even has a long-lasting burn effect on her NP, which takes some of the fastplay pressure off of Yang. Tamamo is also valuable, as always, for her damage boostage and her cooldown reduction, the latter of which helps to offset Yang’s long cooldowns. Waver is also helpful, of course, as you can plug him in to push Yang to an NP on a turn when she might otherwise have to let her burn effect fade.

NP gain is the name of the game here, and Yang’s lack of an internal Arts buff makes Painting Summer even better than usual. Sign of Smiling Face is also awesome if you’re willing to do without the starting NP—and Yang takes at least a turn to setup before she can NP for full damage anyway, which makes this especially appealing.

I would pass on this one. Yang’s stats are good enough to be functional if you want to make use of her, and the extra stats aren’t going to help her all that much. She’s also not all that amazing of a Servant—odds are you have better ST Arts Servants you could grail, even if just the welfares.

Yang has a lot of tools that are independently strong, but they fight against each other so much that she’s really going to struggle to reach her theoretical ceiling. She want to be a slowplay Servant and a fastplay Servant at the same time, and focusing on either one hurts the other without letting her be as effective as even moderately-specialized Servants. She has enough innately good stuff in her kit that she’ll be a solid Arts DPS at minimum, but she’s just too awkward to be really great.

Overall: 7/10
Single-Target DPS: 8/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 4/10
Farming Usefulness: 2/10
Elder God Hunting: 10/10