Rabbit’s Reviews #402: Kazuradrop (5* Alter Ego)

Kazuradrop has a defense-leaning stat spread, with the second-lowest attack of the SSR Alter Egos, which is not a great starting point for a damage-dealer. In exchange, she has quite good NP gain on her cards (though low refund on her NP). She’s also an AoE Quick Servant with decent hit-counts, so she’s pretty good at active star gen.

Kazuradrop has four passives, one of which is High Servant and does nothing. She also has Magic Resistance, which is decent for occasionally staving off debuffs, and Territory Creation, which boosts KD’s Arts card NP gain a bit. Her other passive, though, is in fact core to her functionality. Hatred of Kin provides a small damage boost against Sakura Series enemies (which includes BB, the Sakura Five, and a few of the generic CCC enemies, but not non-BB-related Sakura Servants like Parvati and Durga). More importantly, though, it gives a huge 75% power mod effect against any Servant with the same class as Kazuradrop. This is why KD’s ability to change to the same class as her opponent is noteworthy. Power Mod shares the same bracket as crit- and NP-damage buffs, so despite being ostensibly a 75% bonus, it will usually be less of a damage boost than even the half-class-advantage Alter Egos get against Cavalry, but it’s still a good chunk of damage that KD can call on-demand.

For appends, Skill Reload is the only somewhat notable one, as it lets Kazuradrop reach a second buff cycle with only a single turn of downtime.

Kazuradrop takes a full set of Caster and Assassin pieces and gems. Caster gems are often in short supply due to the number of important Servants who ask for them. KD also asks for a decent number of OC3’s new silver mat, which means she may be tricky to max out in the near-term.

Kazuradrop’s skills all scale pretty substantially with levels. Recommended skill order is 2>1>3.

Kazuradrop’s NP is extremely plain. It’s an AoE Quick NP with very low refund, and all of its bonus effects are debuff-based and post-damage. The combination of attack down and stun is pretty nice for keeping the team alive, though even with KD’s first skill the stun caps out at a 70% chance before resistance, which isn’t reliable enough to count on. 20% defense down is decent ramp for CQs, but since it doesn’t persist across waves it’s useless for farming.

As a farmer, Kazuradrop is by far most effective in Kazuradop/Kazuradrop/Summer Skadi/Oberon teams. In this setup, Kazuradrop is a 100% charger who provides 50% teamwide Quick resist down and another 50% defense down against a single enemy. This team can farm anything it has the damage for, and it doesn’t need starting charge CEs. On turn 1, Summer Skadi uses her buffs and battery, and then you plug her out for Oberon, who uses his first and second skills to amp damage and let one of the Kazuradrops NP. On turns 2 and 3, the Kazuradrops use their 100% batteries to NP.

In this setup, an NP2, level 100 Kazuradrop with MLB Black Grail deals around 300k neutral damage on wave 3, or 630k to one enemy if both Kazuradrops use Moon Chrysalis on that enemy. This damage is functionally multiplied by 1.5 if the target is a Berserker (as KD becomes a Berserker and Berserkers deal 1.5x damage to each other) or by 2 if the target is a Foreigner (for the same reasons), meaning KD can theoretically clear 90++ nodes against Berserkers or Foreigners provided HP thresholds are relatively low outside of the main enemy. That is to say, KD won’t be able to do nodes with an enemy with a million health and an enemy with 700k, but she can do nodes where one enemy has a million and the other two have 300k.

A fully maxed-out Kazuradrop under these circumstances can deal a million damage to a single target, though it comes with all the same caveats about secondary enemies. It’s also important to consider that meaningful farming setups require finding another Kazuradrop off support who meets your needs, whether those needs are being high-NP and having an MLB BG, or having an event CE, or whatever else. Unlike top-end supports, who you can count on always finding on your friend list, Kazuradrop may take some searching, which at the very least will slow down farming. There’s also the fact that you’re running two damage-dealers, and if wave 1 health thresholds are high enough that your secondary Kazuradrop also needs a damage-boosting CE, you’re suddenly limited to four drop CEs, where a typical strong DPS can reliably run five.

All this is to say that Kazuradrop is theoretically capable of effective farming, but it’s something of a hassle to get her there and won’t work in all circumstances despite her perfect loopage.

As a CQ unit, Kazuradrop can be run either as an extremely bursty unit, or as a stallish Quick AoE. For a bursty setup, you can run a double KD comp like the one described above, using Moon Chrysalis twice on the same enemy. This does hit the defense down cap, meaning the ramp from Kazuradrop’s NP stops mattering, but you can deal a good chunk of damage against a single enemy over the course of three turns, while also splashing some incidental NP damage to the other enemies. This will be best for short fights with one major threat flanked by minor enemies, especially when the major threat is a Foreigner.

Even for longer fights, Kazuradrop doesn’t really want to commit to hard stall, since she doesn’t have tools that directly support a Skadi/Castoria shell. What she can do, though, is buy time for a second buff cycle. Assuming you aren’t running her alongside another Kazuradrop, all of KD’s skills are functionally on a 5-turn cooldown, which means you only have to survive for two turns (or one, with Skill Reload) before you can start going again. With incidental stuns and the NP drain on Pixie Finger, Kazuradrop can generally keep a fight going long enough to win it, even if she can’t clear in three turns.

Something to consider for CQ usage is whether it’s worth using Moon Chrysalis at all. In some cases, the answer is a resounding yes: if you’re fighting a class Kazuradrop isn’t already class-advantaged against, there’s no reason not to. Otherwise, it’s not as clear-cut. KD will usually want to run Black Grail, and even with just an MLB Black Grail in play, KD’s innate class advantage versus Cavalry is worth more than 75% power mod. If you have more NP damage up than that—from Oberon, for example—the math gets even worse. Something similar happens with Berserkers, as KD goes from having 2x class advantage as an Alter Ego to having 1.5x class advantage as a Berserker.

That said, the defense debuff will usually push things back in the direction of Moon Chrysalis being worthwhile against a single target. What this means in practice is that if you’re fighting Cavalry or (sometimes) Berserkers, you typically want to use Moon Chrysalis in cases where one enemy has substantially more health than the others (as you’re increasing your damage against that enemy and dropping it versus the others), or in cases where the enemies are of varying classes and stealing a class from one of them will help you against the others (for example, if you’re fighting a Rider and a Caster, since you can turn into a Rider and hit both enemies for serious damage).

The best case for Moon Chrysalis is, ironically, the one class against which Kazuradrop already gets full class advantage: Foreigners. When she turns into a Foreigner, Kazuradrop keeps her doubled damage output and gets the benefit of Hatred. The one drawback to this is that KD goes from taking half damage to taking double, so you do need to be aware of your defenses if you opt for this strategy.

Kazuradrop needs starting charge to farm in conventional double Skadi setups, but assuming you can find another KD on support, there’s no real reason to run those setups for farming. You’re much better off fielding a Black Grail for damage. In CQs, similarly, KD has good enough cards that you can reliably run BG and use cards to supplement her weak NP refund.

There’s nothing obvious Kazuradrop’s kit is missing that command codes can provide. Crit damage CCs are a decent fallback, even if they’re not likely to have a whole lot of impact given that that buff bracket is already pretty full.

If you get Kazuradrop to NP2 and want to use her for farming, I’d strongly recommend taking her to level 100, as it’s borderline required for her to clear 90++ Berserkers. Aside from that, grails will help offset Kazuradrop’s low attack and are probably worth it in general if you’re using her actively.

Kazuradrop is… fine? She’s neat in that her optimal burst/farming setups aren’t the usual ones, and she has a wholly unique gimmick that impacts how she plays. It’s a bit disappointing that using her gimmick can worsen her performance in some situations, and it’s also disappointing that, at the end of the day, all the gimmick really does is make Kazuradrop Foreigner-ish in functionality.

She’s not a bad Servant, at least. If you like her, you can make her work well, and if the stars align she’s viable for the upper-end nodes. She’s also the kind of Servant where a really good future Quick support could potentially make her more notable. For now, though, she’s a serviceable AoE unit with a conceptually cool gimmick, and that’s about it. Pull if you like her; easy skip otherwise.