Rabbit’s Reviews #411: Ono no Komachi (5* Caster)

22whiterabbit22

 Ono no Komachi is a pretty unremarkable Servant. Her claim to fame, such as it is, is that one of her skills gives her extra NP charge on all of her Quicks—including her NP—which means her effective NP gain and loop specs are Arts adjacent. Unfortunately, she still suffers from the fact that Skadi can’t split her batteries, so her practical CE-less looping capabilities are still somewhat limited. She’s a pretty good farmer if she can use Black Grail and mostly forgettable otherwise.
Ono no Komachi
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Ono no Komachi has a relatively offense-oriented stat spread relative to her class and rarity, with fairly high attack and fairly low health. That said, Casters tend to have low attack as a rule, and they suffer from a further innate attack penalty, so being in a good position for a Caster doesn’t mean Ono no Komachi has good stats for a DPS in general. Her internals, though, are rather nice, with solid NP gain and good active star gen.
Her passives aren’t terribly impactful. Item construction makes her debuffs slightly more likely to land, and Territory Creation is functionally a small NP gain buff for Ono no Komachi’s Arts card NP gain. Ono no Komachi’s unique passive is a little more interesting but still fundamentally situational—it’s a variant on Divinity that makes her immune to instant death. This won’t usually matter but might be helpful for the occasional gimmick fight.
None of Ono no Komachi’s appends matter much. Even Mana Loading isn’t particularly useful, given the available battery distribution. Especially now that we can freely switch appends around, you can unlock whichever one you want—or you can hold onto the coins so you can more easily grail her past 100 if you end up using her a bunch.
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Ono no Komachi’s mat asks are quite friendly—it shouldn’t be too hard for a reasonably established player to max her out, assuming you’re not short on pieces or gems.
Ono no Komachi has a reasonably strong skillset, with each of her skills contributing to her functionality. Recommended skill order is 2>3>1.
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Komachi Legend is a tricolor card-type buff, though its values cap out at 20% instead of the usual 30% for a selfish skill of this type. In exchange, the skill grants a secondary effect when Ono no Komachi uses each of her cards. Buster cards grant Sure Hit and Arts cards grant a single hit of dodge, both of which are decent utility, but the real draw here is the Quick effect. This skill makes Ono no Komachi’s cards give 10% charge when they hit—and this also applies on a per enemy basis to her NP. With this skill in effect, Ono no Komachi refunds a little over 20% per enemy in an optimal team, which, while still not especially remarkable, does mean her loopage is comparable to a typical AoE Arts Servant’s.
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urn cooldown reduction and hefty star weight buff. The star weight buff is enough to let even Berserkers crit… but she doesn’t otherwise have supportive tools and she generates so many stars there’s not a lot of need for a star weight increase. In most cases, you’ll use this selfishly, which just means this is a generic 50% battery and all of Ono no Komachi’s cooldowns are a turn shorter than advertised. In very rare cases, it might be helpful to toss this onto a support instead, but usually the utility here is meaningless. 50% batteries are nice in general, but this skill is still a bit unimpressive.
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Daughter of Takamura is a solid damage buff. It gives 30% NP damage up for 3 turns, which is nice, and then it also gives Ono no Komachi niche damage against three different enemy types. Unfortunately, only one of them—Evil—is likely to matter with any regularity. Power Mod is also a worse form of niche than Supereffective Damage. For comparison, Ono no Komachi needs to hit two of her niches at once in order to overtake the damage Alice Kuonji deals against her single niche category. This certainly isn’t a bad skill by any means—the NP damage buff alone is good, and having three niches is nifty—but it’s also not as amazing as it could be.
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Ono no Komachi’s NP is pretty strong. It doesn’t ramp, sadly, but it does provide a pre-damage NP damage buff that scales well with overcharge. It also has some interesting utility in the form of a 5-turn debuff that removes a buff from its targets every turn. Because of the duration of the effect, this can keep enemies relatively in-check while waiting on a second buff cycle and can also keep annoying defensive skill spam from getting in your way. The other effects of this NP are mostly flavor—the instant-kill chance is too low to proc in most cases, curse is a marginal bit of extra damage, and slightly reducing healing received may occasionally matter but will usually be irrelevant.
In a double Summer Skadi team, Ono no Komachi refunds a little over 20% gauge per enemy when she uses her NP. This means she can use Black Grail (or an event CE) on standard 3/3/x nodes with any third 50% charger, or 3/2/x or 2/3/x with a plug Oberon. Unfortunately, the nodes with damage thresholds high enough to warrant Black Grail also tend to have wave compositions that make using it impossible for Ono no Komachi. At the very least, she should be able to handle standard nodes without issue.
For CQs, the same sort of fastburn setups should be effective. While Ono no Komachi can’t ramp, and her damage isn’t all that high, her persistent debuff removal may help survive to a second buff cycle, which is nice enough. If you want an AoE Quick Caster for CQ usage, Alice is a lot better, but Ono no Komachi should be fine for most purposes.
The Black Grail is Ono no Komachi’s best CE if you can loop with it and don’t want to run an event CE instead. Otherwise, the usual suspects are available—Traces of Christmas for starting charge and Quick buffs, Golden Sumo for an attack buff (which Ono no Komachi otherwise doesn’t have), Kaleid for ease of NP access, and so on.
Ono no Komachi has easy crit access and no innate crit buffs, making crit damage CCs a natural pick.
Ono no Komachi is fine. If you find yourself using her a lot, extra stats certainly won’t hurt… but Casters don’t benefit all that much from grails and Ono no Komachi is an unremarkable Caster, so personally I’d skip this one.
Ono no Komachi is interesting in that she can, under the right circumstances, BG loop despite being a Quick Servant. Aside from that, she’s utterly unremarkable—neither good nor bad. If you specifically want an AoE Quick Caster, she’s… an option. I’d still take Alice over her in general, and do you really need an AoE Quick Caster anyway? There’s one thing that can be said about Ono no Komachi for certain, which is that she exists. So points for that, I suppose!