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Usually when I talk abt berserker Guda I default to “relatively low madness enhancement, is hard to understand but is mostly aware of what is going on around them,” but recently I’ve been toying with the idea of a berseguda with much higher madness enhancement. A Guda who is stuck in full survival mode 24/7, who only perceive things in terms of “threats” and “not threats.” Their noble phantasm is One Way Out. You know how Sherlock’s np allows him to create clues that can lead him to the truth, even if it bends reality to do so? Guda’s np creates a way to get out of any situation- whether it’s coincidentally just the chemicals you needed to make a smoke bomb in the vicinity, or the existence of a very specific loophole in someone’s invincibility, think all the time in canon where everything seemed lost and we got through by the skin of our teeth.

So the good news! Since the madness enhancement is higher, Guda is much stronger than any of their other servant selves, and when it comes to powerlevels they might actually stand a chance in a straight fight with other servants. Additionally, since they’re motivated by survival at all cost, that’s a servant who will protect their master (since death of the master = death of the servant) regardless of your moral standing or otherwise dickery level.

Now the bad news.

As I said, that’s a Guda in full survival mode. That doesn’t translate to I need to kill everyone. That translates, in fact, as I need to hide and I need to run and how do I remove myself from this dangerous situation as fast as humanly possible. Which, when you’re fighting a battle royale and you actually need to get some fighting done, is the opposite of useful. And because you raised the madness enhancement, you lost all your chances to resonate with them with a well-placed “oh but you’ll be safe if they all die first!” That’s too complicated a train of thought. You kinda shot yourself in the foot here.

Of course, you can use a command spell to force Guda to fight. But that’d actively hinder their noble phantasm- again, it’s like Sherlock’s np. It doesn’t garantee that you can make it out. It just creates a possibility that you can. If their np creates a passageway to get the fuck away but you asked them to fight, they won’t use the passageway. Which might be disadvantageous.

Additionally, even if you buffed up Guda’s powerlevel, you just did it at the cost of them being able to have a conversation that isn’t “shh someone is coming.” You just privileged raw power over Guda’s most prized skill, their ability to make allies. Which is. A poor move.

I Just Think it’d fuck if you could jack up Guda’s raw power at the cost of any chance of actually winning the holy grail war. I think it would be really on brand with this franchise as a whole.