Rabbit’s Reviews #417: Mash Kyrielight (Shielder) – Part 2

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 This is part 2 of a three-part review series evaluating Mash Kyrielight as she stands after having received what is likely to be her final update in the Japanese version of FGO. I recommend reading part 1 before continuing with this; the intro to that review provides some additional context for why I’m doing this and what to expect. You can find part 1 here.
As a note, these reviews will contain “spoilers” in the sense that they reference gameplay elements that have not yet been introduced in FGO NA. These reviews will not touch upon any story content that relates to Mash’s various upgrades. If you are continuing beyond this point, I am assuming that you are okay with discussion of the mechanical elements of Mash’s kit as it stands in FGO JP in May 2025.
Mash’s second kit was somewhat controversial when it was originally introduced at the beginning of Cosmos in the Lostbelt. What had been a strong and reliable stall support was replaced with a kit that was a lot less coherent, trading most of Mash’s defensive support for an extra taunt and a random Buster buff. It didn’t make much sense at the time.
FGO, however, was changing, and with the arrival of Cosmos in the Lostbelt we saw more and more fights where indefinite stall was difficult or impossible, especially before Castoria’s release. Taunting went from being a mildly interesting tool to an invaluable way to control exceptionally difficult enemies, and having two taunts in the same place made Mash a very helpful Servant for some of the hardest story fights. She also got a handful of buffs as the story went along, and here in 2025 Ortinax Mash is a distinct and effective Servant. She’s not the kind of Servant you bring for every miscellaneous fight, but when you need what she has to offer, nobody does it better.
Mash Kyrielight
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Despite having exactly the same stats as base Mash, Ortinax Mash has a “worse” stat spread. The reason for this has to do with how the kits are structured. Base Mash is a defensive support whose role is to stick around as long as possible and keep the party alive, and she’s not expected to do any damage, so having relatively low attack and relatively high health is a good thing. Ortinax Mash is oriented towards shorter fights, where you’re more likely to want her to get out of the way once her skills have been used (thus making higher health a problem), and you sometimes want Ortinax Mash to contribute damage via her crit skills (thus making lower attack a problem). Her stats aren’t bad, per se, and there are times where you will benefit from Mash’s defensive lean, but Ortinax Mash’s statline doesn’t synergize as much with her kit as it does with base Mash’s.
Similarly, while Ortinax Mash has the same problematic internals as base Mash, they impact Ortinax Mash more. Ortinax Mash doesn’t have the benefit of a huge NP gain buff to offset her low NP gain, and she actually wants to be able to crit, meaning weak active star gen becomes relevant. These aren’t critical failings, but Ortinax Mash will generally have more trouble accessing her NP than base Mash will, and she’ll feel her lack of star gen more than base Mash will, despite being numerically identical.
Ortinax Mash’s passives are the same as base Mash’s as well, and here the impact is effectively the same: Magic Resistance is mildly nice, Riding does nothing, and Stargazer’s Journey incentivizes using Mash for story content.
Mana Loading is still Ortinax Mash’s best append. It’s arguably even more important here than for base Mash due to Ortinax Mash’s overall weaker NP access. Skill reload can also be somewhat useful, especially considering Mash’s focus on shorter fights—you’re unlikely to use her past a second buff cycle anyway, so getting to that second cycle faster is a good thing. Unlike with base Mash, Ortinax Mash actually can make use of the other three appends. Due to her relatively limited damage buffs outside of Black Barrel, anti-Extra class damage can be nice for a lot of boss fights, and the crit damage buff, while small, synergizes with Mash’s third skill. The Extra attack buff append is probably the least useful to Mash, but a bit of extra damage on a brave chain isn’t the worst thing in the world.
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By the time you have Ortinax Mash unlocked, you’ve probably already leveled Mash’s skills. If you haven’t, it’s well-worth doing—she’s easy to raise and gives significant return on the investment.
Ortinax Mash’s skillset is a little weird, and it doesn’t slot cleanly into any standard team setups. What it does do, though, is provide useful tools for dealing with difficult and gimmicky fights. Recommended skill order is still 2>1>3.
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Black Barrel is an odd fit for Mash at first glance, being purely offensive in nature. It provides a huge Buster and Buster crit buff for one hit. The Buster buff is consumed any time you use a Buster card, while the crit buff is only consumed on a Buster crit specifically. Ideally you want to use both at the same time—that is to say, you don’t want Mash to use a Buster without critting—and if you can manage to get a Buster crit with both buffs it can actually do pretty good single-hit damage, even without outside buffs in play. Black Barrel isn’t going to make Mash a DPS on her own, but it can be useful for finishing off an enemy’s break bar or for taking out a moderately bulky side enemy. When you consider that Ortinax Mash is primarily aimed at shorter fights, having a way to contribute to damage push makes a bit more sense. Black Barrel is not a damage source to rely on; it’s a utility tool that you make use of when things happen to line up to support it. The short cooldown contributes to this, too—Mash usually won’t be doing any damage, but every four turns or so you can use Black Barrel for a bit of extra punch. This skill also lets Mash ignore defense for three turns, which mostly only matters for the Black Barrel hit, but it does mean Mash can ignore enemy defense buffs for three turns out of every four if you need that for some reason.
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Amalgam Goad is a taunt on a 5-turn cooldown. It doesn’t come with any protection, but it does give Mash a small battery, which can enable her to NP while taunting. It’s actually helpful for Mash to have one taunt that protects her and one that does not—you can use Amalgam Goad to have Mash eat a single-target NP or a dangerous crit and die to make room for another support. When a taunted unit is killed, that usually also ends the enemy’s turn. Mash’s taunts don’t help with AoE attacks and NPs, but for any single-target enemies Mash does a good job of redirecting fire. This is also on a short enough cooldown that you’ll sometimes get to use it twice in one fight, which is nice.
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Paradox Cylinder is Mash’s other taunt. In exchange for being on a longer cooldown, it also makes Mash invincible for a turn. This means Mash can almost always provide at least two turns of survival—one through this skill, and one through Amalgam Goad—even if the enemy’s damage is high enough to kill with ordinary cards. Aside from that, this skill has a small HP demerit (which can sometimes be nice for making sure Mash dies quickly) and it gives a large burst of critical stars and lets Mash pierce invuln. This naturally synergizes with Black Barrel, making it much easier for Mash to get that key Buster Crit and also making it so very few defensive buffs are able to stand in her way. The only drawback to this skill is that the cooldown is quite long, so you’re unlikely to use it twice in a fight… but it’s still quite strong as a whole.
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Ortinax Mash’s Lord Camelot is very similar to Base Mash’s, but it has a few key differences. For one, the damage cut lasts 5 turns but only applies for 3 hits. If an enemy attacks three times a turn, its attacks are single-target, and it spreads those attacks evenly across all teammates, this is a net neutral. Assuming the enemy occasionally uses skills, this can last longer than the damage cut on base Lord Camelot does, as the damage cut charges aren’t “wasted” if unused in the first three turns. On the other hand, if the enemy focuses their fire on a single Servant, they might burn through the damage cut stacks quickly, where base Lord Camelot would continue protecting them against subsequent hits. Similarly, this is much less effective against AoE attacks, which will quickly consume all three hits for the whole team.
The attack buff, meanwhile, now applies to Mash as well, meaning it can slightly increase Mash’s Black Barrel damage. It also starts at a lower value and scales with overcharge, meaning this can provide more attack to the party than base Lord Camelot does if you have a source of overcharge up. In most cases, though, you’ll want to use Mash’s NP before your allies’ which means this will be stuck at overcharge level 1, making it a bit weaker for the purposes of boosting party damage.
The defense buff, lastly, is exactly the same as base Lord Camelot. It’s still a bit less useful here than on base Mash, though, due to Ortinax Mash not having any other defense buffs. Defense buffs tend to be more valuable the more of them you have, so even with this NP having the same defensive value as the other, it’s still effectively a bit weaker in the context of Ortinax Mash’s kit.
Ortinax Mash doesn’t slot into any one particular team structure in the way base Mash does. Instead, Ortinax Mash is a Servant you bring in response to specific fights. If you’re fighting an enemy who deals a ton of damage every turn, Ortinax Mash can be a great pick, able to draw fire off your other Servants while they try to burst the enemy down. If a fight is structured such that standard meta-support-driven fastburn setups don’t work, but that fight still involves high enemy damage output and a need to clear quickly, Ortinax Mash can be a great pick.
Generally, when using Ortinax Mash, you want to use her two taunts on key turns to keep the party alive. If Mash if going to die to a single hit, you use her invuln taunt first, and then her non-invuln taunt on the next turn, usually ending in Mash’s death and making way for another support. If Mash is likely to survive for a bit, you flip the order, to give Mash’s second skill the best chance of coming off cooldown before Mash dies.
As I addressed in part 1, bringing Ortinax Mash means you can’t bring Mash’s other kits. You’ll want to take Ortinax Mash over base Mash for fights where base Mash’s damage mitigation is not sufficient to keep the party alive, or where you otherwise need some defensive support but still want to be able to play fast. Ortinax Mash is also much better at dying and is less likely to clog up the field well past when you want to use her, which can be a point in her favor.
As with base Mash, Ortinax Mash’s biggest advantage over Mash’s third form is that she has zero team cost. Ortinax Mash is in many ways even easier to slot into a team that’s hitting the cost cap than base Mash is. Not every team wants a Servant who’s going to stick around and slow the whole fight down, but most teams can benefit from a backup Servant who can draw enemy fire for a few turns in a pinch. Ortinax Mash’s kit also has much less in common with Mash’s third kit than base Mash does, which means, even setting aside team cost, Ortinax Mash stands apart more clearly from the “stronger” kit. None of the other Mash kits have two taunts, and both other Mash kits are extremely bulky, which means Ortinax Mash is in many respects more flexible than either of the others, at least in terms of how she plays and the types of teams she can slot into.
Once again, Kaleidoscope is a good CE for Mash if you want her to NP right away. Otherwise, CEs that provide on-death benefits, like Camlann, or CEs that give buffs when Mash enters the field, like Ox King, can be smart choices, as they maximize fastburn benefit and fit well with Mash’s general gameplan of providing defenses and then going away.
If prioritizing Ortinax Mash when making your CC choices, crit damage CCs pair nicely with Mash’s third skill, as well as with Black Barrel, making her a bit better at contributing damage in a pinch.
Extra health is more likely to get in Ortinax Mash’s way than base Mash’s… but extra health can also sometimes let Ortinax Mash survive until one of her taunts comes off cooldown, functionally giving your team an extra turn of protection. There are pros and cons with this one. Ortinax Mash does make pretty good use of increased attack, though, on account of Black Barrel. In a vacuum, I might not recommend grailing Ortinax Mash—she doesn’t benefit heavily enough from the extra stats to be worth the resources—but there are enough reasons why you might want her at a higher level that it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing if you did want to grail Mash for the benefit of her other forms.
Ortinax Mash is specifically a utility tool for certain hard fights. You won’t often want what she has to offer, and she’s probably the least consistently strong of the three versions, but she’s also the easiest to randomly stick in the backline of another team, and her tools are exceedingly helpful for the fights where they matter. Ortinax Mash’s value is less straightforward than her other two kits, but the importance of her utility has been borne out over the course of the game, and in her final form she deserves to stand alongside her other two kits.
To be continued in part 3!