Rabbit’s Reviews #451: Beni-Enma (5* Berserker)

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Summer Beni is a phenomenally strong Arts Berserker with a fun and flavorful new mechanic. Numerically speaking, she’s pretty close to what you’d get if you took Summer Ibuki and permanently stapled a (non-MLB) Black Grail to her. Her overall damage output is a step above any other AoE Arts Servant in the game, and while she’s not quite at Olga’s level in terms of overall performance or Lord Logres's level in terms of practical damage output, she’s still solidly one of the best Servants released to-date and is one of the few who can give Olga a run for her money.
It feels like FGO’s power creep is accelerating, or at least like the power curve has jumped since Lostbelt ended. We’ve had a handful of Servants in the past year—starting with Olga—who are a step above what used to be the power ceiling. Beni is probably the third-best AoE unit overall at the moment, behind Olga and Logres, and she comes with the unique advantages for longer fights that go with being an Arts unit. This is one of the few Servants who’s strong enough to, in my opinion, be worth considering even for players who already have a robust box.
At any rate, she’s really good, so if you’re looking for a class-agnostisc AoE damage-dealer, she’s a great pickup!
Beni-Enma (Berserker)
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Beni has both mid-low attack and mid-low HP for an SSR Berserker, giving her weak stats overall. Berserkers tend towards high attack stats, so relative to SSRs in general, her offensive statline is still okay, but this isn’t an ideal starting point for a DPS. Her internals are also not great, with very weak card-based NP gain and a weak deck for star gen.
Beni has a bunch of passives, starting with Magic Resistance for occasionally ignoring debuffs, and Presence Concealment and Independent Action for marginally better baseline crit performance. The crit passives have very low values, and “Arts Berserker” is just about the worst crit chassis a Servant can have, but it doesn’t hurt Beni to have these passives. She also gets Ventriloquism, giving her immunity to Skill Seal, just like her Saber version—a minor benefit, but occasionally useful. Beni also has a flavor-only unique passive with no effect, in Demonic Warden of Summer.
Beni’s last passive is her most unique one, and it’s the core of her special gimmick. It gives her entire party a special “Fullness Gauge,” which functionally controls how often Servants can benefit from Beni’s first skill. Every time Beni uses her first skill, it grants a partywide buff and also fills the Fullness Gauge for each target by 2. If the gauge is full, the target doesn’t get the buff. Most Servants have 4 slots in their Fullness Gauge—letting them receive two benefits—while Super Giant allies have 8 slots (presumably because they are larger and therefore can eat more without getting full). Every Servant empties their Fullness Gauge by 1 step when they attack, or by 2 if they crit. The intent here is clearly for Beni to splash buffs to the party, and for the party to use their cards to make room for more buffs, a flavorful and fun little extra mechanic.
Oh, and Friend of Mayoiga also gives Beni a passive 20% buff removal resistance—not enough to rely on, but still nice when it happens to save one of Beni’s buffs!
Skill Reload is actually Beni’s most important append—it’s critical for Beni’s most optimal team and has direct synergy with Beni’s first skill, while Mana Loading (despite still being the second-best Append for Beni) isn’t required for Beni’s best team. Aside from those two, the crit damage buff and Extra attack buff are decent albeit small bonuses, and anti-Pretender crit resistance might as well not exist.
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Beni’s mat asks aren’t particularly noteworthy. She does need Oni Lanterns, which are a popular mat requirement and thus might be in short supply, but aside from that, she shouldn’t be hard to max out.
Beni’s skillset is, in a word, busy, with her first skill in particular having a ton of text. At the end of the day, though, Beni’s skillset isn’t too complicated, as it mostly amounts to “lots of damage buffs, a 50% battery, and some party support.” Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.
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Dizzying Banquet is a weird skill. It’s on a one-turn cooldown at max level, which means Beni can use it every turn. Skill Reload lets her use it twice on turn 1, and any form of cooldown reduction will immediately bring this off cooldown for another use. Every time Beni uses this, it grants 30 critical stars, meaning a team with Beni should have 30 stars minimum every single turn, and can easily have more. Aside from that, it gives one other partywide benefit, with the caveat that applying the benefit fills every target’s Fullness Gauge by 2, and a Servant with a full Fullness Gauge cannot benefit. The effects are a 20% attack buff (good for damage), a 2000 HP max HP buff (decent for survival), a 20% NP charge (generically good), a 20% NP damage buff (very good for damage), a 50% crit damage buff (respectable in general), and a 10000 HP heal. That heal is worth calling out as particularly nice for CQs, as it’s likely to fully restore your party’s health every six turns. This is amazing for Castoria-centric stall teams, pretty much single-handedly solving Castoria’s biggest drawback for stall. After using all six effects, the skill loops back to its first one, so you can keep track of which effect Beni has and plan for the later-turn benefits accordingly. While in its first form, this skill has a 5% chance to proc every effect all at once, fully filling everyone’s Fullness Gauges in the process. Even if this triggers, the skill still progresses to its second step afterwards. It’s also worth noting that a Servant needs only one empty Fullness Gauge slot to benefit from this skill—even if the super version of the first step of this skill triggers, as long as there’s at least one open slot, all of this skill’s effects will still apply. I’ll dive into how to think about using this skill in the Usage Tips section, but basically this skill works in two ways: in farming and burst contexts, you plan exactly how many times to use this skill on each individual turn in order to maximize its effect without wasting key buffs, while in CQs, you just use this every turn and work around the buffs you happen to have available at any given time. While the Fullness Gauge is a bit annoying to have to work around, this skill has a lot of value both for short and long fights.
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Sparrow’s Birdbath is very strong but much more standard skill. It gives a typical 3-turn 30% Arts and Buster buff, and it also gives a respectable 50% 3-turn crit damage buff. This skill (plus Beni’s passive crit damage buff) gives Beni good crit damage in general, which can spike to great crit damage with skill 1’s crit damage buff factored in. Beni doesn’t have the most reliable crit access on her own, but given that she provides 30 stars minimum every turn, it’s not that hard to get her critting. On top of all that, this skill gives Beni a 3-time, 3-turn dodge—always a phenomenal survival tool, especially on a Berserker—and reduces Beni’s Fullness Gauge by 2, giving her more room for her own skill 1 buffs.
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Headhunting Elder’s Pincushion Sword is a phenomenal skill, pairing a 50% battery with a 20% 3-turn NP damage buff, and another conditional 20% 3-turn NP damage buff. The conditional buff requires Beni’s Fullness Gauge to be empty, but, importantly, it only checks this when the skill is used. As long as Beni uses this skill first, she’s guaranteed to get the second buff, which gives her a truly remarkable level of steroids for short fights. Even in longer fights, and even if Beni isn’t consistently emptying her Fullness Gauge, this is a persistent damage damage buff and a 50% battery, both of which are great on an AoE Arts Berserker. This skill does have one other effect, which is that it causes Beni’s NP to attempt to instant-kill targets, which won’t usually matter, but it’s there for the occasional situation where instant-kill is helpful.
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Much like the rest of Beni’s kit, Beni’s NP is busy, with a ton of different effects all at once. It’s an AoE Arts NP, and it notably has much higher base refund than a typical NP of its type, which plays into Beni’s perfect loopage. It has two forms of niche, too. It starts with a one-turn power mod against Undead enemies—a fairly narrow and not particularly useful niche—and it also deals supereffective damage against Evil enemies—the superior form of niche damage, against a trait that’s much more likely to be relevant. While Beni sadly doesn’t ramp, having a broad SE niche is still great, and Beni has fantastic steroids already, so the lack of ramp doesn’t hurt her too much.
It’s also worth noting that Evil is technically a controllable niche, as Ruler Moriarty can set it on enemies via his NP. In CQs specifically, there may be cases where you get more damage value from bringing Moriarty than from bringing a conventional support—an extra 50% damage that stacks multiplicatively with everything is hard to argue with—but for the most part you’ll only benefit from Beni’s niche when an enemy happens to have it naturally.
Aside from damage, the NP brings a bunch of utility. Most notably, it charges the whole party’s NP gauge—which again contributes to Beni’s own loopage and also improves the functionality of her teammates. The NP also grants a max HP buff to all allies, removes all allies’ damage-over-time debuffs, and clears all allies’ defensive debuffs, all of which help make Beni teams safer and more stable in CQ contexts. Lastly, the NP raises the cap on the whole team’s Fullness Gauge by 4. This doesn’t stack, unfortunately, but using Beni’s NP once gives the whole team the ability to take two more buffs from Beni’s first skill without using any cards, which is nice!
At first glance, you might expect Beni’s best farming team to be double Urdr. I certainly did! Urdr reduces skill cooldowns by 1, and Beni’s first skill has a one-turn cooldown, so Urdr lets Beni use it repeatedly. A team with Beni and two Urdrs lets Beni use her first skill six times in three turns – three times naturally, plus two from Urdr, plus one from Skill Reload.
...But in practice, Castoria is better. The most important steps of Beni’s first skill are the first and fourth uses (which both boost damage), and the third use (which charges the party’s NP gauge). Beni gets to use all of those effects even without Urdr’s help, and Urdr doesn’t let Beni stack her other skills, so there ends up being no real advantage to using Urdr over Castoria—and, more importantly, Beni’s party charge lets you get two Castoria NPs off, which significantly amps your damage.
For Beni’s Castoria team, you run Castoria/Beni/Castoria/Oberon, with Mana Loading on both Castorias and Skill Reload on Beni. On turn 1, you use Beni’s third skill, then you use her first skill twice, then her second skill—the order matters for optimizing Beni’s Fullness Gauge. This strategy assumes Beni does not get the super version of her first skill, but the way the timing lines up, the only impact of hitting the 5% chance is that Beni gets a bit more damage than I’m accounting for here. Both Castorias use their third skills, and one Castoria uses her Charisma and tosses a 20% battery to Beni.
Beni refunds about 24% against a single enemy, plus another flat 10% from her NP’s Overcharge effect. Beni then uses her first skill, which gives 20% charge to the whole party, and the other Castoria uses her Charisma and gives her 20% battery to Beni. At this point, all three Servants have full NP gauges, so you can use both Castoria NPs, followed by Beni’s NP.
Beni refunds 30% against a single enemy this time, and with the Overcharge buff from the NP chain, she gets 20% charge off her NP. At this point, Beni uses her first skill again for the NP damage buff, and you can plug in any 50% charger to secure the loop—though Oberon results in the maximum possible damage.
An NP2 level 90 Beni with Black Grail deals about 984k damage with Berserker class Advantage, without niche. That is to say, an NP2 level 90 Beni is capable of farming almost every node in the game, provided you’re willing to use Castoria NPs and BG. This is assuming NP1 Castorias, too, so any Castoria NP levels will boost that further. It’s absolutely overkill if you’re using BG anyway, but a maxed-out Beni hits 1.66m without niche, or 2.5m with it. More importantly, though, an NP5, level 120 Beni with 3k/3k Fous deals almost precisely a million damage—just a few thousand over, in fact—without a CE. That is to say, if you’re willing to push Beni as far as she’ll go, she should be able to farm every single node in the game, no questions asked.
The only real asterisks here are that including two support NPs slows down farming, and this does require a plug support, where a maxed-out Olga can often also 6CE 90++ nodes and frequently doesn’t even need plug to do it… but the upshot of all this is Beni is, I think, the only AoE Servant other than Lord Logres who meaningfully challenges Olga’s title of best in the game. 
A maxed-out Lord Logres, meanwhile, does around 1.2 million CE-less damage on wave 3 (via a team that lets Waver double-stack his skills), so there's a fair gap between Beni's damage and Logres's, but she still outstrips everybody else, and she does surpass Logres if she gets niche and Logres does not (which isn't unreasonable, as Logres's niche is much narrower), or if you use a specific and rather impractical team that I'll get into below. Logres also has some demerits and skill cooldown issues that make her kind of awkward in longer fights, to the point that I'd argue Beni is probably the better CQ unit, if you care about that.
It’s also worth noting that Beni is mostly Tiamat-compatible as well, provided there are at least two enemies in the first wave. In a Tiamat/Beni/Tiamat/Oberon team, you use Beni’s third skill, then use her first skill twice, then use her second skill. You then use all three Tiamat skills, and you use both Tiamat NPs, followed by Beni’s NP. Beni refunds about 18% per enemy, giving her more than 30% refund against two enemies. She gets 30% charge from her NP, which will be at Overcharge 5 thanks to Tiamat, and then she gets 20% more charge from the Tiamats’ passive charge skills. On turn 2, Beni uses her first skill for the third time, giving her the 20% charge she’s missing. On turn 3, you plug one of the Tiamats out (whichever one does not have cards available that you want to use), and use Oberon’s skills secure the loop. NP2 Beni with MLB BG deals around 740k without niche in this setup, which is a fair bit lower than the Castoria team, but in exchange you get card stretch from the Tiamats. Even with card stretch, Castoria is probably better—but since this team is marginally less reliant on NP damage specifically, it can be an option if you’re trying to work around an NP1 Beni or don’t have BG access or the like. Also, as a note, you can squeeze in an extra Tiamat NP on turn 3 in this setup, but the damage you gain from the extra NP isn’t worth the damage you lose from losing out on a crit, so it’s generally not worth it.
...But none of these are Beni’s actual best damage team. For Beni’s best damage team, we need another brand-new Servant: Summer Lilith. For this team, you run Lilith/Beni/Castoria/Urdr/Oberon/Lilith, in that order. On turn 1, you use Beni’s third skill, then her first skill twice, then her second skill. Castoria uses her Charisma and uses her Arts buff on Beni. Lilith then uses all of her skills, selecting the self-sacrifice option on her third skill. Beni can then use her third skill again. You then use Lilith’s NP, followed by Beni’s. Beni refunds just over 15% charge, and she gets 15% flat charge from her NP, bringing her to 30%.
After Lilith dies, Urdr swaps in. Beni uses her first skill again, gaining its NP damage buff. Urdr then uses all of her skills, targeting Beni with her targeted skill, and Beni uses her first skill again. You then plug Urdr out for the second Lilith, who uses all of her skills, again selecting the self-sacrifice option. Lilith’s party battery brings both Beni and Castoria to 100% charge. Beni uses her first skill for a sixth time, and Castoria uses her targeted 20% battery on Lilith to get Lilith the rest of the way to 100%. This time, you use Castoria’s NP, followed by Lilith’s, followed by Beni’s. Beni refunds 28% against a single enemy, Beni and Castoria gain 20% flat charge from Beni’s NP, and Beni and Castoria also both gain 10% flat charge from Urdr’s third skill, bringing Beni to 58% charge (before overkill) and Castoria to 30%.
When the second Lilith dies, Oberon comes in to replace her. At this point, all of Beni’s skills are off cooldown, and you can re-use all of them, getting the buffs from skills 2 and 3 for a second time, as well as getting the first effect of skill 1, as you use it for a seventh and final time. Beni’s battery brings her back to 100%. Oberon then uses his skills, targeting Beni with End of the dream and Castoria with the 50% battery, at which point you can use Castoria’s NP for a second time, followed by Beni’s.
The damage enabled by this setup is absolutely ridiculous. A level 90, NP2 Beni with MLB BG deals nearly 1.6 million damage on turn 3 in this team, without even needing niche. Even at NP1, Beni deals about 1.2m—solidly omnifarming territory. Without a CE, an NP1 Beni deals about 740k without niche, or 1.1m with—enough for NP1 Beni to farm 90++ if niche is involved—while an NP2 level 90 Beni with no CE deals just about a million damage with no niche, and an NP5 level 120 Beni with 3k/3k Fous deals 1.9m, way above Lord Logres's preferred farming team.
Now, other Servants will be able to accomplish similar silliness with Lilith—I’ll go into that in more detail in her review—and this comes with all sorts of asterisks. While this is technically farming-viable, you’re dealing with super high team cost, for one thing, which means you can’t run a full set of SSR CEs. For another, you’re adding four support NPs into the mix, and you’re swapping Servants out three times, which massively slows down farming. Still, it’s extremely high damage at least in a theoretical sense, and it’s crazy for an NP2 level 90 Servant to technically be able to omnifarm CE-less.
All of the above teams work for burst setups, too, though you might consider swapping your Oberon for someone who doesn’t require a three-turn clear—Lady Avalon is always a good choice for Castoria teams, and Urdr is also solid as a third support, if you aren’t already using her.
For stall, meanwhile, Beni is a fantastic point Servant for a Castoria/Lady Avalon team, as she can keep the team healthy and help her supports get access to their NPs. A Castoria/Beni/Lady Avalon team will have excellent damage and fantastic survival and should be capable of clearing just about anything.
Beni is a powerful and self-sufficient Servant who brings a lot of party support, so she’ll do well at the low-end, too. You can pair her with any of the usual budget supports—Xu Fu, Mozart, et cetera—and have success. Mozart in particular just got a very nice buff, and he’s a super solid partner for Beni if you’re looking for cheap alternatives to the usual suspects.
In any team where you aren’t specifically angling for a three-turn clear, you generally want to use Beni’s first skill every single turn. If you know a buff is coming up that you want a certain Servant to be able to take, try to prioritize using one of their cards on the turn prior. You might occasionally choose to delay using Beni’s first skill if an otherwise-valuable effect would be wasted—but waiting to use Beni’s first skill means you’re delaying access to effects that you probably want up as often as possible, and even if your whole team is full, the skill gives you a bunch of stars, so it’s never truly worthless. For the most part, I would treat it almost like a passive effect that triggers automatically each turn—something to plan around and play around, not something to try to save for the perfect moment.
The Black Grail is Beni’s best CE for damage output, as usual, and her NP gain is good enough that she doesn’t really need starting charge. The only reason you might not run BG is if you want to amplify her card damage as well, in which case you might consider something like Golden Sumo… but usually, you’ll want either BG or an event farming CE.
Star gen CCs are a very good pick for Beni, as she gets a baseline 30 stars per turn, so even a few extra stars dropped from cards may make the difference in terms of Beni being able to crit. Alternatively, crit damage CCs are always solid for damage-dealers.
Beni is one of the best damage-dealers in the entire game. Berserkers gain a lot of value from grails, and Beni just gets better and better the more you invest in here. She is, in my opinion, one of the easiest grail recommendations we’ve ever had. Throw your resources at her; you won’t be disappointed.
Beni is a truly phenomenal Servant. She has a good bit of party support and survival for such a powerful damage-dealer, but the main thing she has going for is that her damage is just absurd. A maxed-out Beni should be able to 6CE farm any node in the game, as long as you’re not dealing with Foreigners, and even at modest levels of investment, Beni can farm with BG. While her optimal burst setups do require plug Oberon—and thus she’s unlikely to be able to do plugless 6CE 90++ farming—Beni is otherwise comparable in performance to Olga, despite not having access to card rigging. This means she’s one of the best AoE units in the entire game, and probably the best outside of Olga and (for farming and short fights) Lord Logres. Especially if you want a top-end Arts unit, Beni is an exceptional pull.