MMM - Enchanting Effigy of Eras Eternal Evokes Essays of Emotion, Evading Ear of Eastern Enchanters whose Estate Embodies Expansion (Valentines 2025)

With a BAQQQ card deck, Komachi truly commits to the role of a Quick Caster, unlike a certain Kabuki actor…but putting that aside, her base NP gain of 0.8% paired with a 3-hit Arts card provides a very respectable base Arts gain of 2.64, pretty high even for a Servant with one Arts card. Perhaps more importantly, her 4-hit Quick cards produce decent enough NP gauge that she doesn’t suffer for the shortage in Arts cards, with her Extra card similarly packing a good hitcount for her NP gain.

Naturally, with such a heavy focus on Quick cards Komachi’s star generation is superb, even if she doesn’t have any external factors supplementing it. Her plentitude of Quick cards and their respective hitcounts will provide a very sufficient star supply to enable plentiful crits, especially if she has Quick Up buffs from supports.

Skill 1

First on Komachi’s skill list is, fittingly, Komachi Legend - Appearance. This is a triple card booster skill, improving every aspect of the primary card types by 20% for 3 turns, as well as providing a unique effect when attacking with each card type for the same duration - 10% Gauge charge for Quicks, a 1-time, 1-turn Evasion buff for Arts, and a 1-turn Sure Hit buff for Buster.

The most frequent and, frankly, most powerful of those buffs is thankfully the Quick one, essentially providing miniature gauge chargers every time she plays a Quick card. This benefit even includes her Quick NP, so she nets a 10% gauge refund by default when using it during this window. The other buffs are situationally useful, but due to the low chance of actually seeing Komachi’s Arts/Buster cards during the turns you need their effects, they can hardly be depended on while 2 other Servants are in play.

In the grander scheme of things the damage boost from this skill is relatively minor, but it does provide some essential gauge charge by proxy, and the lower damage boost compared to many dual-card booster skills is mitigated by the fact it covers everything. The 8-turn base cooldown is similarly pretty fair given the relative power of this skill.

Skill 2

Next up is Love Poem. This skill is painfully straightforward, providing a 1-turn Skill Cooldown reduction and huge Star Focus buff to the target for 1 turn, while also charging Komachi’s own NP gauge by 50%. Even using this in the most blunt way possible it’s a solid cooldown reduction for Komachi’s own kit, on top of the standard SSR 50% gauge charge, making farming with her far less of a nuisance than it'd be otherwise.

The Star Focus effect is interesting, but with how solid Komachi’s stargen is, you’re unlikely to get much use out of it, short of guaranteeing a crit on a specific card when you don’t precisely have 50 stars available. The Skill Cooldown is definitely the primary reason you will throw this on allies, and getting powerful skills back sooner than usual can be essential in many difficult fights.

But let’s not kid ourselves, this skill is primarily valuable for its gauge charge, so I’m thankful that part exists. Due to the Skill Cooldown reduction it’s plastered with a more hefty 9-turn base cooldown, which is a downer when tackling difficult content, but for farming purposes it’s not like this drawback particularly matters.

Skill 3

Last for the skill lineup is Daughter of Takamura. This skill is a very straightforward combo of offensive buffs, providing a +30% NP Strength Up buff, as well as individual +50% Effective Damage buffs against Undead, Evil, and Shadow Servant traits for 3 turns.

The boost to NP damage is naturally always great, but of course our focus has to be on the trait-based effectiveness. Of those, Undead is entirely relegated to NPC’s, consisting of, well, zombies, skeletons, and ghosts. While you get the occasional farming node that features Undead as the main wave or mini boss enemies, it’s hardly a desirable trait to target. Evil is naturally, an all-time favourite of mine to have effectiveness against, personally. While it doesn’t come up for enemies present in farming, a very significant chunk of difficult fights in the game are against Evil NPCs or Servants, and similarly a large proportion of the Servant roster are Evil, so the odds of the Servant boss in a farming node having the trait in events is pretty good.

Lastly, and probably most interesting, is effectiveness against Shadow Servants. While as a general rule Shadow Servants don’t tend to be present in difficult content or major story boss fights, they are pretty omnipresent across the game, and you can often run into them in the dailies at Chaldea Gate. So on the whole Komachi will hit pretty hard versus a select but, on the whole, broad range of enemies.

The cooldown on this skill is, unsurprisingly, 8 turns at base to match Komachi’s first skill.

Rounding off Komachi’s kit is, fittingly, a NP directly named after her: Komachi Densetsu - Kijin Hakume. This is a Quick AOE NP, so I’ll be delving into farming calcs for it, but let’s go over the effects first.

Before doing damage, Komachi applies a 20% NP Strength Up buff to herself for 1 turn, scaling with Overcharge. Then she does her damage, with no special frills.

Following that is the interesting part. Komachi applies a 30% Healing Reduction debuff to every enemy hit for 5 turns, as well as a new kind of debuff for the same duration. This debuff removes a single (most recent) buff from the enemy at the end of the enemy turn, much like the timing of Lady Avalon’s gauge drain effect. While this effect doesn’t have the benefit of stripping a multitude of buffs at once, the fact it lasts for so long, and removes the most recent buff applied, means it can effectively keep an enemy locked down, even getting rid of their buffs before they become a true nuisance by doing it before their turn’s end.

The Healing Reduction is less impressive, but can still come up handy if certain fights have persistent healing on the enemy, as the long duration lets you stack up multiples of it over a long period.

The last aspect of this NP is an Instant Death effect at pretty low chance, one that thankfully comes after damage. It’s very rare it will be relevant, but in some cases Instant Death can finish off a farming wave you lack the damage to kill, so it’s not an entirely useless presence.

Naturally, the main draw of this NP is its damage output, so let’s break it down. With Komachi’s own buffs this skill’s neutral damage comes out to a rather pathetic 20k damage neutral. While it’s nothing unusual for a Caster to have poor damage output (boy, you don’t wanna know what Scheherazade was doing before her strengthenings), her damage won’t actually be as bad as it seems in practice. In addition, with just her own buffs, Komachi’s refund with her NP comes out to 17%, plus an additional 10% from the gauge charge off her first skill. 27% from each NP is absurdly high for a Quick Servant, for the record, and you’ll see how far that goes as I now look into realistic farming setups.

In a double Summer Skadi setup with a 50% gauge CE, Komachi’s doing a far more respectable 77k damage neutral, jumping up to about 100k neutral on wave 3, enough to manage class advantage farming versus most nodes, though it is a little shaky. If she nets any of her effective damage modifiers, which are fairly common when combined together, then her damage output becomes far more standard, but that naturally can’t be a given. In such a setup, her NP refund pans out to a pretty clean 43%, or 53% with her skill’s gauge charge effect.

The astute may notice that she hits over the golden 50% refund line with that setup, which is rather key, as it means she can manage Black Grail farming setups. While the refund calculations are a little tight, so long as she gets the Overkill NP gain bonus from actually killing she should manage the 3-turn loop with Oberon’s help on Battlesuit swap. In such a setup she’s doing 105k neutral wave 1, 120k neutral wave 2, and 268k on wave 3. While she’s not going to be clearing the hefty 90++ wave bosses with nearing 1m HP doing those numbers, she can farm pretty much anything else, with her high NP Strength Up buffs really pulling her damage output from Oberon buffs.

…and that’s not even considering her Effective Damage buffs. Needless to say even if you don’t have Oberon it’s best to run Komachi in a Black Grail setup, any Servant with 50% gauge charge is enough to supply her 3-turn loop.