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Rabbit’s Reviews #424: Ryougi Shiki (5* Moon Cancer)

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In a summer full of tightly-balanced and generally useful Servants, Shiki is the standout… in that she’s the only one who’s bad.

Shiki has essentially two core elements to her kit. She’s an NP-form-switching Servant, and she has the best iteration yet on switching between AoE and ST noble phantasms, because her form-switching is tied to a skill, she can choose whether or not to switch, and her NP form persists indefinitely. This means Shiki can function fully as either an ST or AoE Servant, and she can also switch between the two mid-fight provided the skill timing works out. This is, in theory, a neat trick… but it’s only relevant if both of her forms are useful. Unfortunately for Shiki, not only is this not true, but instead both of her forms are useless.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but only a little bit. The second core element of Shiki’s kit is that she has really high steroids for a damage-dealer, especially in her AoE form, with the buffs spread nicely between all three brackets. Unfortunately, her attack stat is so low that her overall damage output ends up being mostly nonviable for hard content. It’s pretty rare for base stats to be a Servant’s core failing, but Shiki’s stat spread severely hurts her… and I’m going to be bold and say I think this was an accident.

I’m usually hesitant to say a game’s developers made a mistake when it comes to balancing. For a game like FGO, systems designers do a lot of testing and number-crunching, and even when something is well above or below the power curve, you can safely assume this was both known and intended.

The reason I think this isn’t the case with Shiki is that she’s surrounded by interesting and well-balanced Servants, and if it weren’t for her statline, she would actually be pretty good. It very much looks like Shiki was given what should have been a modestly strong damage-dealing kit, and then her stats were applied using the generic formula that determines all Servants’ stats, which resulted in something much less powerful than intended. It strikes me as likely that most of this summer’s development time—the number-crunching and fine-tuning and playtesting—went to making sure Olga’s card-rigging and Lip’s tanking and Tiamat’s brand-new-Meta-support functionality were all polished to a mirror sheen, which meant that Shiki’s practical damage output went overlooked.

...Whether this is true is neither here nor there (except in that if Shiki is truly well below where she was meant to be she’s more likely to get buffed on the sooner side). The fact of the matter is that every Servant this summer is great, except for Shiki. There’s essentially no reason to pull for her mechanically, and she’s solidly the worst SSR so far this year.

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