Rabbit's Reviews #281: Ibuki-Douji (5* Saber)

LB5.5’s second banner brings with it a single new SSR. Ibuki-Douji is really bland. She would be a good unit had she released a few years back, but with the current state of the game she’s a super standard Buster Servant in an environment where Buster is heavily disfavored and an AoE Buster unit more or less needs an Interlude to be at all worthwhile. She does have the distinction of being the only Saber with a 50% battery as of the time of writing, but for the most part she’s a triple-Buster Servant who’s pretty reliant on her cards for damage and who isn’t even a particularly remarkable crit Servant. For a shiny new Limited SSR, she’s a pretty huge disappointment.

Ibuki starts with really good stats, with the highest attack of any Saber and an HP stat that isn’t overly penalized for the attack. Her internals are pretty standard as triple-Buster Servants go, though her Arts and Quick cards aren’t good enough to offset the fact that she has so few of them. She’s also very much not optimized for active star gen—mostly due to her deck—but that’s true of most non-Quick Servants. For passives, she has your basic Magic Resistance and Riding passives, along with two unique passive skills. Dragon Kin is an excellent passive, giving Ibuki a permanent 12% Buster buff and also passively reducing incoming damage by 200. That’s not a huge defense buff on its own, but in conjunction with defense buffs and especially against Lancers it means she’s remarkably tanky. Her other unique passive is a Divinity variant, giving the usual mostly-fluff flat damage amp and also giving Ibuki a permanent 20% buff removal resistance. 20% is not nearly enough to count on, but it could potentially save her from what would otherwise be a wipe on occasion.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Saber Piece
3	300,000	x12 Saber Piece x6 Serpent Jewel
4	1,000,000	x5 Saber Monument x29 Evil Bone x2 Mysterious Divine Wine
Max	3,000,000	x12 Saber Monument x4 Mysterious Divine Wine x5 Demonic Flame Light

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Saber
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Saber
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Saber
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Saber x15 Evil Bone
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Saber x29 Evil Bone
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Saber x4 Serpent Jewel
7 → 8	10,000,000	x8 Serpent Jewel x3 Dragon's Reverse Scale
8 → 9	12,000,000	x8 Dragon's Reverse Scale x10 Demonic Flame Light
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Ibuki’s skills are all just “fine.” Nothing she has is amazing, and her cooldowns hurt her a little, but all of her skills are at least reasonably useful. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

Ibuki is a super standard Buster Servant. Despite being ostensibly an AoE Servant, her crit-damage lean means she’s arguably better-suited for ST fights. In a standard double-Merlin shell, Merlin covers Ibuki’s defensive holes while Ibuki can help slow down enemy NPs enough for the Merlins to use their Illusions. Meanwhile, Merlin buffs Ibuki’s crit damage and helps offset her lack of Arts cards with passive NP gain. This is… not especially well-suited for the current state of the game, especially considering there are plenty of Buster Servants who are actually ST (or are Arjuna Alter) and can do it better, but it’s an option, at least.

Incidentally, although I’ve recently become an advocate of Himiko-and-Castoria-centric Buster setups, Ibuki is a uniquely bad pick for those teams, as NP delay is not terribly useful when you’re invincible all the time anyway, and that shell much prefers DPS Servants who are happy to prioritize their NPs and mostly ignore their Buster cards (and who have hard survival to protect themselves in a pinch). Ibuki meets none of these criteria—you’ll want to stick with Merlin as your preferred support. If you don’t have Merlin natively, you can go even more oldschool and run a support Merlin with your own Mash (or someone like Waver or Reines if you have them). These cheaper setups let Ibuki lean into her own defense buffs to keep card damage under control.

For farming, Ibuki will want a 50% charging CE (such as Sumo or Aerial Drive), or an MLB Kaleid for loop setups—although at the point you can battery loop with Ibuki, you probably have Arts or Quick Servants you can loop with instead. For CQs, Ibuki will generally want CEs that can help her cards. Golden Sumo is a great pick here, too, as the extra attack helps in all cases and lets Ibuki NP immediately if she wants to. The old standard Limited Zero Over is actually a decent choice here, too, as it helps Ibuki’s Busters even if she can’t swing the crits, while also pushing her NP damage a little higher in the process.

For Command Codes, Ibuki wants anything that boosts her card damage. If you’re confident in your ability to feed her crits, crit damage CCs in particular are good picks.

Ibuki is super bland and isn’t going to be meaningfully better with the extra stats. She has good stats by default anyway—I wouldn’t bother with this one.

Ibuki’s most direct competition is Artoria and Mordred (and Altera, I suppose, but her lack of a battery makes her meaningfully inferior). Artoria hits much much harder in burst in exchange for a little less sustain, while she and Mordred both have the ability to battery loop even with just a standard Kaleid—although this runs into the same problem as Ibuki in that their damage while looping is super low, so it’s probably not worth it regardless. Overall, Ibuki’s probably a bit better than Mordred but worse than Artoria in practical terms.

The larger issue, though, is the fact that she’s in contention with these two at all. Our existing AoE Buster Sabers aren’t exactly shining examples of what a powerful Servant should be—they’re all pretty mediocre—and Ibuki definitely doesn’t make herself an appealing enough target to justify being the limited alternative to the general-pool options. She’s an easy skip even if you don’t have her competition, and if you do have alternatives she brings basically no unique value.

Overall: 5/10
Single-Target DPS: 5/10
AoE DPS: 3/10
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 1/10
Farming Usefulness: 7/10
Sword Coolness: 10/10