Modern Magus Magazine - Illustrious Informative Item's Inauguration (Archer of the Apocalypse)

With a BAAAQ card deck, this Onee-san focuses heavily on her Arts cards, and good thing, too, with how her base Arts gain pans out - With a base NP gain of 0.35 and 4-hit Arts cards, her base Arts gain is a pretty abysmal 1.4, bad even when you have three Arts cards to your name. As you may expect with such low base NP gain, her other cards are hardly worth mentioning for NP gain, though her 6-hit Extra card isn’t the worst it could be, if still bad overall.

Speaking of star generation, Onee-san is moderately good at it, the 4 hits on her Arts and Quick card(s) alike producing a solid amount of stars, and the aforementioned 6-hit Extra card is great for star generation. Between that and the Archer class’s high star weight, she can at least somewhat compensate for her lesser base NP gain with the NP gauge gain boost from critical hits.

Skill 1

First on the skill lineup is some of that Good Old Thread. One would assume older thread is the kind of thing you don’t want to weave with, but what do I know?

This skill is a multifaceted team buff, providing 20% Arts Up and Attack Up to the team for 3 turns, as well as a team Debuff Cleanse. That alone is a pretty great set of perks, boosting both Onee-san and her team’s offensive capabilities notably, but it doesn’t end there - she also applies a 3-turn buff to herself that makes her normal attacks remove 1 buff from the enemy on hit, and apply a stack of Past Alteration for 3 turns, her unique debuff which we’ll get to when we cover Onee-san’s NP.

The offensive buffs alone are solid, but for any Servant, having the ability to remove team debuffs and strip the enemy of their buffs in one skill is fantastic. The 8-turn base cooldown is fair given the overall potency of the skill.

Skill 2

Next up is Divine Rune of the Past. Befitting a skill of such a grand title, this thing is scarily powerful.

A targeted ally buff skill, this provides the mandated 50% gauge charge in an SSR’s kit to your chosen ally, as well as reducing their skill cooldowns by 1 turn AND providing a 30% Arts Up buff for 3 turns.

Such a skill would already be superb for Onee-san’s own purposes, providing immediate power and even more buffs to her primary card type, but as a targeted ally buff this provides a package of buffs which the astute among you may have already noticed, is already rivalling Castoria’s offensive package - 20% Attack Up and 50% Arts Up for 3 turns.

I won’t jump the gun and call the lady a competitor to Castoria, but she does provide a very powerful buff package and 50% gauge charge, which alone means she’s among the best supportive Servants in the game. The skill cooldown reduction is also notable, if not as strong as Koyanskaya’s, as she opens up avenues for Arts Servants with 7-turn base cooldown or lower skills (with the Skill Cooldown reduction Append Skill) to re-use them in a 3-turn loop when supported by two copies of this Onee-san, a significant boost in damage or looping capabilities for the right Servants.

As you might expect for how individually strong it is, this skill comes with a hefty 9-turn base cooldown, but if she uses it on herself that cooldown DOES also get reduced, so it’s not as bad as it seems in those scenarios.

Skill 3

Rounding off this Onee-san’s kit is The Weaver.

The most unique effect of this skill is its first, applying a 3-turn buff to her which, at the end of each enemy turn, Removes 1 Buff from every enemy while also applying 1 Stack of Past Alteration for 3 turns, and removes 1 Debuff from each ally. Put on paper like this it might not stand out, but let me phrase it this way - During the enemy turn, they fire off a skill that gives them an Invincible buff for 1 turn, and also activates a Gauge Break skill that hits your party with NP Seal for 3 turns. Pretty devastating right? It’s not too common to see this kind of mechanic, but it hurts when a fight has it. Well good thing none of that happened, because this skill just undid both of those annoying effects automatically.

The limitation of 1 buff/debuff means that it can’t fix every single problem the enemy throws at you in the same turn, but it’s still great for dodging crippling walls in more difficult fights. It also is notable for being a rare way of removing Skill Seal on the “same turn” it’s applied without using a Mystic Code, and that’s just the first effect. Based on the wording, this presumably doesn’t apply the stack of Past Alteration to the new wave of enemies if you defeat a prior wave, so it doesn’t have many applications in farming, but it’s great regardless.

The remaining effects are far more sensible - a 10 Star per turn buff applied to Onee-san herself for 3 turns, and a combo of 10% gauge charge and 2k Regen each turn to the team for 3 turns. While the healing and critical stars are handy to keep your allies alive and fuel more crits, the gauge charge is exceptionally good, providing a hefty 90% gauge charge to the team over its duration, and bringing the NP gauge she provides to her team to a competitive level with Castoria, too. All she needs is Anti-Enforcement Defense and she might claim the crown…but who am I kidding?

At any rate, this skill’s 8-turn base cooldown is fantastic given its power, and that can get even lower given the skill cooldown reduction in Onee-san’s own kit.

Rounding off the entirety of this Onee-san’s kit is her NP, Urðarþráður Forn. I need you all to know that I definitely said that name aloud with correct pronunciation as I typed it.

As an Arts AOE NP, this thing has plenty of potential for looping and farming, but before that we need to break down its actual effects: Before dealing damage, Onee-san gets a 10% NP Strength Up buff (Scaling up to 30% with Overcharge) for 1 turn, as well as draining 1 level of NP gauge from every enemy on top of applying 1 stack of Past Alteration to every enemy for 3 turns. With all that out of the way, she dishes out her damage, with a Super-Effective modifier of +10% damage per Past Alteration stack on an enemy, up to +100% at 10 stacks.

While the side-effects on this NP are pretty light, NP gauge drain is pretty great for difficult battles, stalling the always-deadly enemy NP turn to let you buy time. The real value is in the damage output, providing the essential-if-minor NP Strength Up buff to complete her buff trinity, as well as an easily-exploitable Effective Damage modifier built into her NP, resulting in very high damage no matter her target.

That said, this Onee-san doesn’t stack up Past Alteration very fast unless she has a chance to make Brave Chains, or have a 3+ turn fight against a single wave of foes. Those circumstances don’t come up in farming, so she ends up with a relatively minor +10% damage in those cases, but any multiplier is certainly better than none.

With that out the way, let’s look at her damage output and looping potential. With her own buffs active, she is dishing out pretty much 25k damage neutral on the dot, a very decent number, if nothing amazing. At the same time she gets a very reasonable 28% gauge refund, which becomes effectively 38% with her 3rd skill factored in.

Let’s take that further, though. With a standard double Castoria setup and Black Grail (because I’ll be frank, performing 3-turn loops with her without a gauge charge CE is easy), she’s dealing 107k neutral wave 1, the same for wave 2, and 135k damage on wave 3. She might struggle to net the lethal damage on wave 3 for some farming quests, but that is pretty solidly in universal farmer territory for damage output.

It would be remiss of me to not also cover how high her damage output can get in drawn-out fights, too. In the same setup, but on the 3rd turn of a fight where, being moderate, this Onee-san has landed two regular attacks against a target, they should have 6 stacks of Past Alteration built up, resulting in 198k damage against a neutral target. It’s nothing absurd, but she is getting a little close to the kind of damage AOE Servants reach on an Oberon buff turn, which is certainly impressive given it’s solely driven by an effective damage multiplier on an Arts Servant, lacking such explosive boosts in damage.