Rabbit’s Reviews #336: Ibuki-Douji (5* Berserker)

Introduction

Only once in the history of FGO have I looked at a new Servant at launch and gone, “Wow, this is a brokenly powerful Servant, to an extent that is probably unhealthy for the balance of the game as a whole.” That one Servant was Castoria, who remains the best Servant in the game, and while her addition was probably for the best in the long-run, it is undeniable that she completely changed FGO’s standards of power and reshaped future difficulty and balance around her.

Ibuki is now the second to spark that response from me.

What makes Ibuki so ridiculous? Well… she’s now the best Arts farmer in the game, cruising past existing top-tier options. The previous top-of-the-line Servants now look like mere reasonable alternatives, and previous reasonable alternatives look kinda sad. With good steroids, the highest attack of all Berserkers, Berserker class advantage, and top-of-the-line loopage, there’s really no way for another Arts unit to top Ibuki without basically just being Ibuki 2.0—the same basic kit, but with much higher steroids or extra batteries. Ibuki does basically everything outside of, like, some niche utility things a tech support can easily cover, and the only real way to outdo her is to just Do Everything Better.

Incidentally, Ibuki is also a genuinely strong semi-support, and she brings particular value to Arc in particular, making her an integral part of what is probably the strongest Buster farming team in the game. Ibuki has a lot of utility built into her kit, and she does pretty much everything you’d want a DPS or a powerful semi-support to do. She’s really absurdly strong—I can’t emphasize that enough.

Personally, I don’t think this is healthy for the game as a whole. If this kind of scaling power becomes the norm moving forward, and if content difficulty also scales to match it, many old Servants who were perfectly fine—or even outright strong—will be left behind to the point of being impossible to justify pulling for outside of pure character loyalty. In a game as grounded in its characters and its collection mechanics as FGO, this feels like the wrong direction for the game to be moving.

That said, there are a lot of complexities and nuances to Ibuki’s kit. Nothing for it but to break them all down, as usual. Here we go!

Servant Data

Berserker

QAABB (Saber)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

3

4

5

Attribute	Heaven
Alignment	Chaotic Summer

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

Malevolent Midsummer Goddess

Max HP 12,150

HP Rank

Max ATK 12,961

ATK Rank

Base Atk	2,003	Base HP	1,782
Max Atk	12,961	Max HP	12,150
Grail Atk		Grail HP

Madness Enhancement E

Increase your Buster Card effectiveness by 2%.

Dragonkin EX

Increase own Buster Card effectiveness by 12%.
Apply Damage Cut by 200 to self.

Core of the Serpent God A

Apply Damage Plus 250 to self.
Increase own Buff Removal Resist by 20%.

Card Hits	3	3	4	5	5
Per Hit	0.38%	0.38%	0.38%	0.38%	0.38%

	NP per Hit (%)						0.38%
	NP when Attacked (%)						5%

	Star Absorption	9
	Star Generation per Hit	4.9%

Overview

Material Requirements

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Berserker Piece
3	300,000	x12 Berserker Piece x5 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
4	1,000,000	x5 Berserker Monument x6 Black Beast Grease x3 Claw of Chaos
Max	3,000,000	Berserker Monument x6 Claw of Chaos x5 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Berserker x3 Black Beast Grease
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Berserker x6 Black Beast Grease
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Berserker x3 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
7 → 8	10,000,000	x6 Lamp of Evil-Sealing x6 Shell of Reminiscence
8 → 9	12,000,000	x18 Shell of Reminiscence x10 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Berserker x2 Cursed Beast Gallstone
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Berserker x4 Cursed Beast Gallstone
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Berserker x5 Eternal Ice
7 → 8	10000000	x10 Eternal Ice x6 Ball of Rainbow Thread
8 → 9	12000000	x18 Ball of Rainbow Thread x72 Small Bell of Absolution
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Servant Skills

Basically everything about Ibuki except her card-based NP gain is pretty unfairly good, and her skills are no exception. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Dmg Up

Midsummer Goddess B

Increase ATK for all allies (3 turns).
Increase Critical Strength for all allies (3 turns).
Increase NP Gain for all [Summer Form] allies (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
ATK +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
Crit Damage +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
NP Gain +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Midsummer Goddess is a Charisma variant that also provides a partywide crit buff, as well as an NP gain buff to every summer Servant. This includes non-summer-event Servants who have swimsuit or summer costumes (but excludes Nobukatsu, which is truly the greatest of Ibuki’s crimes, if we are being honest). The NP gain buff, notably, does apply to Ibuki herself. The skill is on a slightly longer cooldown than a typical Charisma, but it more than makes up for that drawback—Ibuki has solid crit access and the stats and deck to take advantage of crit buffs, and NP gain up on an AoE Arts Servant is a rare and powerful luxury. Because this is a Charisma variant, all of these effects apply to all allies, too, which is excellent for double-DPS farming setups, Himiko teams, and so on and so forth. As a stinger, the longer cooldown is somewhat fake, as Ibuki has cooldown reduction on her second skill, which can “reset” this back to a standard Charisma cooldown if Ibuki uses the CDR on herself.

Arts/Buster Up

Summer Cheerleader C

Increase Arts Card effectiveness for an ally (3 turns).
Increase Buster Card effectiveness for an ally (3 turns).
Decrease Skill Cooldown by 1 for an ally.

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Arts +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
Buster +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Summer Cheerleader is an important part of Ibuki’s offensive kit and also the main reason she works so well as an off-support. It gives 30% Arts and Buster up to an ally for 3 turns, along with one turn of CDR. This is pretty clever, as the skill effectively has two different cooldown times—if used selfishly, the CDR means it has the standard 5-turn cooldown expected of buffs of its type, while when taking advantage of its support potential, it has a slightly longer 6-turn cooldown. This skill also makes Ibuki a better support than Reines for a handful of Buster Servants who have skills on 7-turn cooldowns, as they get more from Ibuki’s buffs and their long-cooldown skills than they do from what Reines provides. This is most true—exceptionally true, in fact—in the case of Arc. I’ll go into that later, but for now it’s enough to note that Ibuki has either good and reasonable in-kit self steroids, or strong damage buffs for an ally, depending on what the situation requires. The CDR can also be situationally useful in stall contexts if, for example, Castoria or Proto Merlin are a turn away from a skill that will enable protecting the party from an incoming NP. This is a powerful and flexible skill and is a large part of why Ibuki is so powerful.

Start Np

Beach Apocalypse A+

Increase own NP Gauge.
Apply to self: Gain Critical Stars each turn (3 turns).
Increase own Critical Star Gather Rate (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
NP +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
Stars +	5	6	6	7	7	8	8	9	9	10
Star Gather +	3000%	3200%	3400%	3600%	3800%	4000%	4200%	4400%	4600%	5000%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Beach Apocalypse is a 50% battery on an AoE Arts Berserker with ridiculous stats, great refund, and reasonable steroids. Altogether, Ibuki has solidly better NP gain that Spish, her closest competitor, matching batteries exactly and refunding about 5% more per enemy in a double Castoria setup. This skill also gives 10 stars per turn and substantially increases Ibuki’s star weight, making it much easier for her to crit, leveraging her high stats, Berserker class, and innate crit buff. While Ibuki’s crit buff value is not especially high, she has all three main in-kit crit tools (damage, stars, star weight) as well as all three buff brackets (attack, card type, crit damage), which makes her about as complete of a crit-unit package as you can reasonably hope for. This is in spite of being an Arts Servant, which usually struggle to crit and struggle to benefit from crits when they do. As an additional note, this goes a long way towards remedying Ibuki’s bad NP gain, as reliable Arts crits paired with both Arts and NP gain buffs will let her cards gen more reasonable amounts of meter than they otherwise would.

Noble Phantasm

Ibuki-no-Mitama, Eight Surging Waves B+

Remove Defensive Buffs from all enemies [Activates first].
Deal damage to all enemies.
Decrease Critical Rate for all enemies by 20% (3 turns).

<Overcharge>

Deal supereffective bonus damage against [Earth] attribute enemies.

Show Info/Video

Ibuki-no-Mitama, Eight Surging Waves

Spirit of Ibuki - Hachimyaku Dotou

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
	B+	Anti-Army	5

Effect	Remove Defensive Buffs from all enemies [Activates first]. Deal damage to all enemies. Decrease Critical Rate for all enemies by 20% (3 turns).

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Buff Removal
Damage +	450%	600%	675%	712.5%	750%
Crit Chance -	20%	20%	20%	20%	20%

Overcharge Effect	Deal supereffective bonus damage against [Earth] attribute enemies.

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Supereffective ATK +	150%	162.5%	175%	187.5%	200%

Ibuki’s NP is, like the rest of her kit, really good. It’s an AoE NP with great base refund—well above the norm—and a host of useful additional effects. It removes defensive buffs pre-damage, meaning Ibuki only has to worry about unremovable defense buffs. Most importantly, the NP hits really dang hard. Even with “normal” steroids and no ramp, Ibuki benefits massively from her class and stats, to the extent that an NP1 Ibuki is roughly comparable in damage to a “normal good” Servant at NP2, and NP2 Ibuki compares to many Servants at NP5.

If that wasn’t good enough, this NP also gets Supereffective bonus against Earth Servants, letting Ibuki hit even harder in a fairly broad niche. This niche is also, notably, distinct from Man, which all Buster units cover courtesy of Koyanskaya. Someone with both a favored Buster unit and Ibuki can count on massive damage against the majority of the cast. If that Buster unit happens to be Avenger Nobu, the attribute coverage expands to include Sky, which just leaves Star and Beast—the smallest groups by far—unaddressed. Ibuki’s damage is such that she likely won’t need her niche in most cases, but it’s there when it helps.

Also, the NP inflicts crit chance down after dealing damage, which means, in addition to everything else she provides, Ibuki helps keep the team alive a bit by heading off enemy crits. So there’s that.

Usage Tips

Okay, so, lots to unpack here. Let’s start with farming, shall we?

With double Castoria, Ibuki refunds 25% per enemy. With Mana Loading, Ibuki has a plugless loop for standard nodes (using the 2004 Mystic Code). It works without any overkill, too, which means it probably works against Assassins and Berserkers too, with a bit of overkill thrown in. On turn 1, you use all Castoria skills except for one 20% battery, and then also 2004’s NP gain buff. This lets Ibuki refund 80%, so on turn 2 you use the remaining Castoria battery. On turn 3, Ibuki refunds 75%, letting her battery finish the loop. Technically this works for 3/2/x nodes as well, since Ibuki only needs 50% total refund on the second turn in order for her battery to do the rest.

With plug Oberon, Ibuki can loop 1/2/x or 2/1/x nodes as well, with a similar strategy. You use the same Castoria skills to start the fight, use Ibuki’s battery on turn 2 and Oberon’s on turn 3, and add the remaining 20% Castoria and Oberon batteries when you need them. It’s pretty simple, but don’t let that overshadow how powerful this is. Ibuki basically solves anything but 1/1/x nodes, provided you have the supports she needs, and she can get away with lower NP levels than anyone else.

You can also swap Oberon for another 50% charger, like Reines or Waver, though this adds another enemy to the requirements—that is to say, you need 3/1/x, 1/3/x, or 2/2/x. Still not bad, though, considering plenty of formerly top-end Arts Servants needed at least four enemies across the first two waves even with Oberon prior to Ibuki.

If you don’t have Oberon, though, Ibuki can also loop 1/2/x and 2/1/x nodes with another surprising setup: double Koyanskaya. With Koyanskaya/Ibuki/Castoria/Koyanskaya, Ibuki can use her battery on both turns 1 and 2. Because of how the skills work out, Ibuki only has to refund 30% on either turn 1 or turn 2, and then the various batteries do the rest. This isn’t even a particularly big damage loss relative to double Castoria teams, as Ibuki gets to double-stack her own buffs—and it means Ibuki gets niche damage bonuses against both Man and Earth, letting her hit the majority of the cast for massively inflated damage.

That’s all assuming Ibuki doesn’t get a starting charge CE, of course. With even a 30% charge CE (and Mana Loading), Ibuki loops everything in the above Koyanskaya team, no questions asked, for the usual reasons Koyan looping works. Oberon teams also work—one Castoria uses her batteries on turn 1; on turn 2 you use Ibuki’s battery, the other Castoria’s 20%, and Oberon’s 20%; on turn 3 you use Castoria’s 30% and Oberon’s 50%. The Oberon setup can theoretically fail against low-NP-gain classes, but overkill should make up for the refund loss in most cases.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that, since Ibuki has 50% charge, all she needs in order to NP once is 30% charge from anywhere. This makes her a great pick for 90+ farming in double-DPS setups, as Ibuki can NP with just the incidental charge from a Castoria who’s focusing buffs onto another damage-dealer. Ibuki can also toss her second skill onto the damage-dealer, which can be helpful in nodes with extremely-high-HP single-target waves. Ibuki/Hephaestion/Castoria/Castoria should be a nearly universal team for 90+ nodes that include at least one single-target wave, since you can give Castoria batteries to whoever needs to NP twice, and flexibly give buffs to whichever DPS needs it more. That’s just one example, too—with Hephaestion picked because of how flexible her battery makes her—and plenty of ST damage-dealers can work in similar setups.

It’s also important to note that Ibuki is now also part of the best Buster farming team in the game. Arc really wanted a new support who gave a turn of CDR along with some better buffs than what Edison provides. Ibuki, it just so happens, brings exactly that, pairing CDR with 50% total damage buffs. This mostly solves Arc’s damage issues in and of itself, but Ibuki’s true absurdity in this team goes a step beyond that. See, Arc gives 30% charge to her allies. This means, in a Koyan/Arc/Koyan/Ibuki setup, Ibuki can NP for free on wave 2 or 3. An NP1 Ibuki does about 30k damage in this context, and this can scale up if paired with Arc’s defense debuff or the plugsuit’s damage buff. This gives Arc teams a lot of flexibility to meet damage checks wherever they happen to fall in a node, and it makes Ibuki solidly Arc’s best third support.

Speaking of Ibuki’s support capability, she’s not limited to just Arc. The number of Buster Servants who benefit more from Ibuki in optimal teams than from Reines is quite small—at the SSR level it’s OG Abby, Summer BB, Dark Koyan, and Arc—but it’s pretty silly that there are cases where she’s the best third support for a Buster team, considering she’s also the best Arts DPS in the game. She also still works well as an alternative third-support for Arts and Buster units in general, if you don’t have as many supports in your box. 50% steroids plus cooldown reduction plus good damage output is nothing to sneeze at. Ibuki is, in fact, genuinely strong as a semi-support, by virtue of the fact that her buffs are quite powerful and her damage output remains good even if she’s not the focus of attention. The fact that she can be so strong despite not being specialized as a DPS or a support, in a game where specialization is king, tells you how ridiculously good she is.

It’s also worth noting that Ibuki’s extra CDR makes her situationally useful for Buster units with very strong skill-based buffs on 5-turn cooldowns, with Arjuna Alter and Avenger Nobu being the biggest beneficiaries. Buster teams sometimes struggle with turn-1 damage output, and being able to stack Anti-Evil or Nobu’s buffs with themselves right out of the gate largely solves that. Ibuki is squishy enough that she can pretty reliably die with a taunt CE, reducing the disruption to your support lineup even when she’s used in this way.

For blitzing CQs with Ibuki as your DPS, you can do all the same things listed for farming, but since you have card access, you can afford to prioritize damage a little more. Tamamo is generally going to be a better option than Oberon as a third support for this reason, but broadly speaking you just want to load Ibuki up with buffs and let her go crazy. Arts stall setups will also work. Really, Ibuki is just so generically strong that any half-decent Arts team you slot her into will do great.

At the lower end, all of the usual Arts Supports are nice. Thanks to Ibuki’s better-than-average crit potential, Lanling and Sherlock have some unusually nice synergy, as do budget options like Mozart and Barti. Mash and Waver can stack their defense buffs with Ibuki’s innate damage cut to give her some extra bulk, too. Honestly, just pair Ibuki with as many supports as you can squeeze in, and she’ll be fine.

Assuming you’re not running an event CE, the Black Grail is your best damage option. CEs like Mark on a Smiling Face, Painting Summer, and so on are also good options if you don’t want to incur the demerit. Meeting of the Heirs is also an interesting option, giving Ibuki some extra stars for slightly more reliable crits, and Another Ending amps Ibuki’s crit damage while also boosting her NP damage output.

Crit damage up CCs are much-appreciated on Ibuki, as her crit damage is high but her actual crit buffs are relatively low, meaning these have an outsized impact on her CQ performance, at least relative to how they perform on most Servants.

Grail Potential

Conclusion

Ibuki is miles above the competition. She’s by far the best Arts unit in the game. She’s also part of the best Buster farming team in the game and is an optimal support for a handful of other Buster Servants. She’s a workable support for Arts and Buster in general and enables some unique and situationally important things. She’s a ridiculously good farmer. She has nice CQ utility. Her refund is silly and she makes the whole team better in the process.

There’s really nothing we care about that Ibuki doesn’t do. Sure, she can’t keep herself alive long-term, and sure she can’t handle, like, unremovable invulns… but we have supports for that, and Ibuki’s damage is so high she can afford to slot in a tech support to cover those situations without issue. She wants Castoria and appreciates Oberon, but her baseline is so high she can work well even with other supports and teams. There are no drawbacks to this Servant, genuinely.

If the level of difficulty of farming, CQs, and story content remains roughly where it is now, this might be fine. Ibuki is a major outlier, and I think she’s unhealthy for overall game balance, but as long as she’s ignorable, it’s not the end of the world. If content scales up to match Ibuki, though, most old Servants will be left in the dust.

There is an argument to be made that this doesn’t matter. New strong Servants theoretically make powerful teams more accessible. This was arguably the net result of Castoria, after all—farming became easier for almost everyone, and everyone around Castoria got stronger. Arts was completely dominant for a year, but Buster eventually carved out a healthy place for itself, and Quick is… usable for most things, at least. What makes Ibuki any different?

The key distinction here, I think, is that Ibuki doesn’t actually bring anyone else up with her, except for Arc, who was very clearly designed with Ibuki in-mind. Ibuki doesn’t let you use your old favorites to clear content, or reframe existing Servants through new use conditions, or anything of that nature. She just clears things herself and makes a lot of old units look bad. This isn’t particularly fun from a player standpoint, even if it has no further knock-on effects—and Castoria’s release led to much more difficult content after a while, so I have no confidence Ibuki won’t do the same. Furthermore, unlike in Castoria’s case, content designed around Ibuki would necessarily exclude the vast majority of existing Servants, likely homogenizing practical strategies.

This may or may not happen. Ibuki could just remain an outlier—a cheat code of sorts, who operates on a level above anyone else, while the rest of the game continues to operate at its existing power level. Only time will tell, but personally, I’m a little worried.

We’ll see, I guess.

Rabbit's Arbitrary Ratings

Overall: 11/10
Single-Target DPS: 9/10
AoE DPS: 10/10
Survivability: 4/10
Offensive Utility: 8/10
Defensive Utility: 5/10
Farming Usefulness: 10/10
Cheering For Arc: 10/10