Rabbit’s Reviews #350: Tezcatlipoca (5* Assassin)

Introduction

Daybit’s Servant, Tezcatlipoca, is our third consecutive AoE SSR Arts looper. As with the two before him, he has several unique traits to set him apart from the rest of the crowd. Unlike the two before him, though, he’s also unusually powerful. His damage at neutral is roughly comparable to Spish’s, and he comes with a truly absurd level of CQ utility on top of that. Tez is also perfectly tailored to 90++ nodes, with a wide niche and a class advantage context, on a servant with great base damage and strong loop specs. He’s not quite as universal as Ibuki, since Casters stop him and his nicheless neutral damage is lower than hers, but his utility is much better and he has an easier avenue for reaching 90++ levels of damage. There’s a case to be made that Tez is a more valuable pull even if he’s more “balanced” in the abstract.

Which is ridiculous! To be an Assassin in contention with the best Berserker in the game is a testament to how perfectly optimized Tez’s kit is. Hard to beat this one for value.

Servant Data

Assassin

QAABB (Saber)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

4

3

4

6

4

Attribute	Heaven
Alignment	Chaotic Good

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

Max HP 14,535

HP Rank

Max ATK 10,982

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,697	Base HP	2,131
Max Atk	10,982	Max HP	14,535
Grail Atk	12,021	Grail HP	15,924

Traits

Card Hits	4	3	4	6	4
Per Hit	0.41%	0.41%	0.41%	0.41%	0.41%

	NP per Hit (%)	0.41%
NP when Attacked (%)	4%

	Star Absorption	99
Star Generation per Hit	25.5%

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Assassin Piece
3	300,000	x12 Assassin Piece x5 Claw of Chaos
4	1,000,000	x5 Assassin Monument x6 Black Beast Grease x3 Primordial Lanugo
Max	3,000,000	x12 Assassin Monument x6 Primordial Lanugo x36 Obsidian Knife

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Assassin
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Assassin
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Assassin
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Assassin x3 Black Beast Grease
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Assassin x6 Black Beast Grease
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Assassin x3 Claw of Chaos
7 → 8	10,000,000	x6 Claw of Chaos x3 Heart of the Foreign God
8 → 9	12,000,000	x8 Heart of the Foreign God x72 Obsidian Knife
9 → 10	20,000,000	Crystallized Lore

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Assassin
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Assassin
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Assassin
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Assassin x3 Primordial Lanugo
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Assassin x6 Primordial Lanugo
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Assassin x2 Tsukumo Mirror
7 → 8	10000000	x4 Tsukumo Mirror x18 Mystic Gunpowder
8 → 9	12000000	x54 Mystic Gunpowder x72 Twilight Ritual Sword
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Dmg Up

Combat Charisma A

Increase ATK for all allies (3 turns).
Further increase ATK for all allies with [Guts] (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Attack +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
Guts Attack +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
CD	7	7	7	7	7	6	6	6	6	5

Combat Charisma is a nifty Charisma variant. It follows the classic specialty Charisma formula of 20% attack for 3 turns, with an additional 20% for Servants with a particular trait. The trait in this case, though, is just the guts status. Tez meets this requirement mostly for free, thanks to his third skill—although the cooldown on that skill means this one will likely be more or less stapled to it, giving this skill a one-turn-longer effective cooldown than it has on paper. Plenty of other damage-dealers have guts skills of their own, and you generally won’t care if a support gets the extra attack, which makes this pretty nice for double-DPS setups. In fact, Tez in general is pretty excellent for double-DPS teams, whether in farming contexts or CQ contexts, as in addition to this extra damage push, he also beings a ton of AoE batteries.

Start Np

Black Sun EX

Increase own NP Gauge.
Increase NP Gauge for all allies except self.
Apply Invincible to all allies (2 times, 3 turns).
Inflict Nullify Invincible Buff to all allies (1 time, 3 turns) [Demerit].

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Self NP +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
Party NP +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	9	9	9	9	9	8	8	8	8	7

Speaking of AoE batteries, Black Sun is a silly good skill. It’s a 50% battery for Tez himself—always useful—but it also splashes 30% to all allies. This is a lot of charge to give to the whole party: there are only a handful of Servants who provide that much battery to the team, and the only ones who do it without any sort of catch are Castoria and Dark Koyan. Tez’s party charge is handy for enabling two-DPS setups, as mentioned earlier, but it’s also great for facilitating support NPs. It can get you easy access to Castoria NPs for extra damage in farming, or solidify NP access in stall setups. Tez’s party charges make him a great pick for Castoria/Reines, Castoria/Tamamo, or Castoria/Lady Avalon teams, for much the same reasons Servants like Saber Shiki or Rider Da Vinci are… except with much better damage output. On top of that, the skill gives a two-hit invuln to the entire party, lasting three turns. PfA-type effects are great when self-targeted. This being AoE makes it one of the best defensive skills in the entire game, offering substantial protection to the party during its uptime. In exchange, it does block the next invuln received for the duration… but that’s not hard to work around. Evasion and Solemn Defense aren’t blocked, debuff removal takes care of the demerit, and hit-based invulns are liable to block further invulns anyway just because of how stacking works. There will inevitably be times where this demerit causes problems, but further invulns being unreliable until the hit-based ones would naturally wear off is something you should be accounting for anyway when using skills like these, so Tez enforcing that a little more severely than usual isn’t much of an issue. On the topic of downsides, this skill is on a pretty long cooldown, and the combination of defense and batteries can result in survival-damage trades, which is a bit unfortunate, but the overall value of this skill is so high it’s hard to argue it doesn’t deserve the cooldown.

Guts

Tepeyollotl A

Apply Guts to self (1 time, 3 turns).
Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (3 turns).
Apply Special ATK [Divine] to self (3 turns).
Apply Special ATK [Super Giant] to self (3 turns).
Grants Sunlight Battlefield Nullification buff to self (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Revives with HP	1000	1200	1400	1600	1800	2000	2200	2400	2600	3000
Arts +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
Divine Atk +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
Super Giant Atk +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Tepeyollotl is a nice-if-standard skill. It’s a self-guts, which is good for survival purposes, and it buffs Tez’s Arts card performance, helping with damage and refund. It also gives power mod versus Divine and Super Giant enemies. Super Giant is a pretty limited niche that mostly applies to non-Servant enemies—this can occasionally be handy for hard farming nodes, but that’s about it. Divine, on the other hand, is a broad and common niche, only really held back by the fact that we have plenty of other anti-Divine Servants who do the job plenty well. Power mod is also mostly worse than supereffective damage, especially on a Servant without strong cards, as it stacks additively with NP damage up (which Tez also has) rather than multiplicatively. Still, these are nit-picks: this is a solid defensive tool with a good performance buff and not one but two damage niches, all on a reasonable 6-turn cooldown. The guts also enables the bonus attack up from Combat Charisma. …Oh, and this also negates sunlight field while it’s in effect. This hurts potential synergy with a small handful of Servants who don’t have much synergy with Tez anyway, and it could theoretically counter a CQ gimmick somewhere down the line. Mostly it’s just flavor.

Noble Phantasm

First Sun Xibalba B

Apply Ignore Invincible to self (1 turn) [Activates first].
Deal damage to all enemies. [450-750%]
Increase NP Gauge for all allies by 10%.

<Overcharge>

Increase own NP Strength (3 turns) [Activates first]. [20-40%]

Show Info/Video

First Sun Xibalba

第一の太陽

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
	B	Anti-World	4

Effect	Apply Ignore Invincible to self (1 turn) [Activates first]. Deal damage to all enemies. [450-750%] Increase NP Gauge for all allies by 10%.

Level	1	2	3	4	5

Overcharge Effect	Increase own NP Strength (3 turns) [Activates first]. [20-40%]

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%

First Sun Xibalba is pretty much the perfect AoE NP. It gives a sizable, ramping, pre-cast damage buff. That buff is tied to overcharge and thus can be further amplified by chaining NPs. The NP has pre-cast pierce to deal with defense gimmicks. It has good refund for an Arts NP. And, on top of that, it provides flat charge—to the whole party, no less. Wow.

The NP charge is the real star here. AoE charge on NP is fantastic for CQs, speeding up teams at all levels of investment, whether you’re making Tez himself kill things as fast as possible, running hybrid teams, or trying for stable, stall-oriented clears. It also takes what would be good loop specs and turns them into great loop specs. Tez refunds about 20% per enemy with two Castorias, and then he gets another 10% on top of that. Even when fighting a single enemy, Tez will come out of a buffed NP with 30% charge. I’ll get into this in more detail in the usage tips section, but this means Tez in an optimal team can loop literally anything CE-less, with plug. This puts him in pretty rare company, and company which usually struggles to output necessary damage to kill things.

Tez does not struggle to output necessary damage. With 40% attack and Arts up, plus 20% NP damage up per NP, Tez punches well above the thresholds his class and attack stat would imply. He’s one of the best farmers in the game as a result, with his only real drawbacks being that he’ll fall flat against Casters, and that he doesn’t scale quite as well into the absolute upper echelons of investment—NP5 and level 120—as do Servants like Spish and Ibuki.

Usage Tips

As mentioned above, Tez can loop 1/1/x nodes with a Castoria/Castoria/Oberon team, provided he has Mana Loading. On turn 1, you use all Castoria skills except for one of the 20% batteries, along with Tez’s first and third skills. He refunds 30%, with his NP’s charge effect factored in, and the second Castoria battery plus Tez’s own 50% battery lets him NP again. He refunds 30% once more, and Oberon finishes things off. Tez also guarantees both Castorias can NP on turn 2 for extra damage, even if neither has mana loading, and he accumulates NP damage buffs throughout the process, which Oberon doubles for massive damage on the final wave. He’s pretty perfectly optimized for farming—it would be hard for an Arts farmer to be more effective at this without just having higher numbers somewhere.

Tez is also excellent for CQs. His damage is high enough that he can probably burst through a lot of fights using the same strategies that work for farming, but he’s also a very good stall unit, between his party charge and his defensive tools. While Reines and Lady Avalon are better stall units than Tamamo overall, Tez has strong synergy with Tamamo specifically, as his biggest weakness in stall setups is his cooldowns, and Tamamo also provides healing to offset incidental chip damage that gets through Tez’s invulns and Castoria’s solemn defense.

If you don’t have the optimal supports to run Tez with, you can still pair him with lower-end units and expect him to do well. His base performance is high enough that free supports like Mash, Xu Fu, and Mozart will still let him do silly things, and he also does a great job of supporing a secondary DPS. You can pair him with someone like Nemo—who also has AoE buffs and comes with an in-kit guts—and let the two prop each other up for mid-length clears.

Really what it boils down to is that Tez is a unit who can be thrown into just about any team and make them better. For low-end teams, he has party support and multiple layers of safety that can accommodate for not having ideal supports handy. In more optimal teams, he accentuates the existing strengths of Arts teams, dealing consistently high damage and providing a bit of extra stability to stall strategies.

Since Tez can reliably loop CE-less, the Black Grail is usually his best CE choice, for the extra damage. That said, in stall contexts, the demerit can sometimes cause problems, and extra NP gain can be useful, in which case something like Mark on a Smiling Face or Painting Summer can be a better pick.

Normally I would recommend crit damage CCs on a Servant with no in-kit crit buffs, but Tez doesn’t really have any way to crit, and his cards are mostly a lost cause. With that in mind, I would opt for utility CCs—buff removal, debuff removal, and maybe healing. These complement Tez’s good inbuilt utility and will help make him more of a one-stop-shop for clearing hard fights.

Grail Potential

Conclusion

It’s safe to say at this point that Summer 2022 set a new standard of power for FGO. Tez is, I would say, solidly better than Spish at standard levels of investment in the current environment. As an “omnifarmer,” he’s roughly comparable—so long as you can forgive not killing Casters—but he comes with better loop specs, much much more utility, a pair of niche damage bonuses, and the ability to reliably handle a subset of the hardest farming nodes at relatively reasonable levels of investment. Summer Ibuki remains a truly ridiculous unit, but Tez has genuine reasons to advocate him over her—she’s not strictly better than Tez in the way she is most other Arts units below the 90++ level.

Power creep sucks. It’s always annoying when old favorites have trouble keeping up with new standards of power, especially when it feels like the shiny new toys are only as strong as they are to incentivize spending. That said, I personally think having more options at the power ceiling is better than fewer, and to that end, I would call Tez a positive addition to the game.

Mechanically speaking, he’s a fantastic unit, with high damage, nearly perfect loop specs, and a heck ton of utility. If you aren’t already heavily invested in a top-end Arts unit, you can’t go wrong here.

Rabbit's Arbitrary Ratings

Overall: 10/10
Single-Target DPS: 4/10
AoE DPS: 10/10
Survivability: 9/10
Offensive Utility: 6/10
Defensive Utility: 9/10
Farming Usefulness: 10/10
Suns: 1/5