Rabbit’s Reviews #452: Kingprotea (5* Moon Cancer)

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Kingprotea is mechanically the least interesting of the four summer SSRs this year (and yes, we have four SSRs this year, and only two SRs, plus the welfare). KP is a competent AoE Buster unit with high steroids and the ability to rig her own niche. Her damage is quite high—comparable to John Lackland if she can rig her own niche—but she suffers from the fact that she has to have card access to force her niche, she can only do so against one target at a time, and she has no way within her own kit to force cards while farming. What this means in practice is Kingprotea is pretty good as a CQ-oriented damage-dealer, but she underachieves in farming, and unlike the other SSRs this year, she doesn’t do anything particularly unique or notable along the way. She’s not a bad Servant, but she’s solidly the weakest of the bunch.
Kingprotea (Moon Cancer)
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Kingprotea has essentially average stats for an SSR Moon Cancer, but Moon Cancers have defense-leaning stat spreads in general, so this isn’t a great starting point for a DPS. Her stats are, incidentally, exactly identical to Summer Kiara’s. Kingprotea’s NP gain is roughly typical for her triple-Buster deck, and her star gen isn’t great, as she only has one Quick card.
As is often the case for Extra class Servants, Kingprotea has a bunch of passives. Madness Enhancement provides a small buff to Kingprotea’s most important card type, and Independent Action slightly increases Kingprotea’s baseline crit damage. Territory Creation both has low values and applies only to one card, so it doesn’t matter much. Core of the Goddess gives Kingprotea a bit of debuff resistance—though unlike most Servants with this passive, Kingprotea does not have Magic Resistance, so she ends up with roughly normal debuff resistance values—and High Servant does nothing.
Kingprotea has two fully unique passives in Yokai Inheritance. The first Yokai Inheritance passive gives three stars passively per turn, plus another two on waterside fields—which Kingprotea herself sets and thus should basically always benefit from. The passive star gen isn’t hugely impactful, but it’s still nice to have. The second passive boosts Kingprotea’s Buster card star weight, making a bit easier for her to crit with her more powerful cards.
Mana Reload is Kingprotea’s most important append, as it’s required for her to loop without a starting charge CE. Skill Reload is the next most impactful, since it lets Kingprotea stack her buffs on earlier turns and increases her damage in burst contexts. The damage-boosting appends are all decent-but-marginal.
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Kingprotea needs a full set of Rider and Saber mats. Whether that makes her easier or harder to level depends on how many Riders and Sabers you’ve invested in—though her capstone skill mats mostly come from relatively recent chapters, so she’s a bit tricky to max out relative to most Moon Cancers.
Kingprotea’s skillset provides the generic AoE Buster tools, plus a few other bells and whistles here and there. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.
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Grown-Up Menu is a pretty straightforward skill, pairing a 50% battery with a 3-turn 30% attack buff. Neither of these is unusual, but both are great to have. The skill also gives 30% power mod against both Evil and Good enemies. Power Mod is a weak form of niche, and 30% is not a lot in Power Mod terms, but this does hit most Servants, so it’s hard to complain. It’s also worth noting that enemies who are both Evil and Good (like Arjuna Alter, or a good-aligned character who has the Evil trait applied by Moriarty) do get hit with both niches, bringing the Power Mod to a more respectable 60%. This is a rare case, but it’s nice when it happens. On top of all that, the skill boosts Kingprotea’s max HP by 5000 for 3 turns, which is in practice a generous self-heal that can help mitigate incidental damage.
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Insect Search is a 30% 3-turn Buster buff and a 50% 3-turn crit damage buff, both of which are standard and solid. On top of that, though, this skill lets Kingprotea remove buffs with her normal cards, and (more importantly) inflict the Target Lock trait to enemies she hits with her cards. Target Lock triggers the supereffective damage multiplier on Kingprotea’s NP. In CQs, this is fantastic, letting Kingprotea mark dangerous targets and deal much more damage against them. In farming contexts, this is, unfortunately, not something you can rely on. You can use a Kingprotea card before Kingprotea’s NP to apply this trait to a high-health enemy, but on any given turn there’s about an 8% chance that you draw no Kingprotea cards. That’s a pretty low fail chance, but any fail chance at all is enough to make a Servant unappealing in an environment where consistency is key. In addition to all of the above, this skill gives Kingprotea Sure Hit for 3 turns, slightly increasing her consistency in CQs.
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Kaiju Baby is one of those skills that’s really nice for CQs and pretty disappointing for farming. It gives three turns of a debuff immunity, a 3-turn invuln, a burst of stars, and stars per turn, all of which are great consistency tools for hard fights and none of which matter for farming. The one element of this skill that’s relevant to farming is that it causes Kingprotea’s Buster attacks—including her NP—to inflict a 10% defense debuff before dealing damage. For farming, this amounts to an extra 10% defense down against each enemy wave—or 20% on wave 3 if you have Skill Reload and double Koyan and can stack this. In CQs where the same enemies last for the whole fight, this (combined with Kingprotea’s NP) lets Kingprotea significantly ramp her damage against enemies, but for farming, it’s just a disappointing and marginal damage buff.
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Kingprotea has an excellent NP. At baseline, it’s an AoE Buster NP with 3-turn pre-cast NP damage ramp and a controllable niche, all of which collectively mean Kingprotea will do a lot of damage. This is especially true in CQs, where Kingprotea has much more meaningful control over her supereffective trait, and where she can stack defense debuffs. Speaking of which, this NP also inflicts a 20% defense debuff after dealing damage, which means Kingprotea has a ton of ramp as long as the same enemies remain on the field. Aside from all that, the NP gives another small one-turn NP damage buff if Kingprotea has a Super Giant ally on the field—most relevant if you’re using Summer BB to lock Kingprotea’s cards—and it sets the Near Water trait to the field, triggering the extra effect on Kingprotea’s unique passive.
Overall, Kingprotea is a pretty typical AoE Buster unit. Her farming/burst team is the usual Koyan/Oberon/Koyan setup. As a 50% charger, she can BG loop, though she needs Mana Loading and the newest plugsuit to do it, and she does need Oberon to start in the front line.
For this setup, you start with Mana Loading, and on turn 1, you use all of Kingprotea’s skills, along with the first Koyan’s damage buffs. This brings Kingprotea to 70% charge. Oberon uses his 20% battery, and you use the new plugsuit’s attack buff for its 10% battery to bring Kingprotea to 100% charge. On the next turn, you use Koyan’s battery on Kingprotea, then plug her out for the second Koyan, who uses all three of her skills. Kingprotea can now reuse Insect Search if she has Skill Reload. Kingprotea NPs again, and then reuses any skills that are available (most notably her 50% battery), after which Oberon uses his 50% battery and End of the Dream to secure the loop.
In this setup, an NP2 level 90 Kingprotea with MLB BG deals roughly 468k at neutral, or 701k with her Target Lock niche. A maxed-out Kingprotea deals 792k at neutral, or 1.2m with Target Lock. These are pretty good damage numbers, especially compared to older Servants, and especially when you consider that Kingprotea will almost always be able to land Target Lock against a single target. That said, that almost does a lot of heavy lifting here, and the fact that a maxed-out Kingprotea can still fail to reach 90++ numbers if you get unlucky makes her hard to recommend, especially over true top-end AoEs like Olga or Lord Logres.
Of course, you can guarantee Kingprotea gets cards on turn 3 if you run Summer BB instead of Oberon and just lock in Kingprotea’s cards if you draw them on an earlier turn. This ensures you get a bit of card stretch, too, and it adds an extra 20% NP damage to Kingprotea’s NP by virtue of having BB, a Super Giant ally, on the field… but in exchange you have to run Kaleid in order for Kingprotea to loop, and you lose out on all of Oberon’s buffs. This is, of course, a losing trade.
It’s also worth noting that Kingprotea’s damage is higher in CQ contexts. If the same enemy is present for all three turns, Kingprotea is guaranteed to hit the defense down cap against them and also can guarantee she gets to apply her niche to at least one enemy. Even setting aside other mostly-CQ-only ways of pushing burst damage, like Crane and Nobukatsu, and even ignoring that you can probably afford to use the better plugsuit once post-NP cards are allowed, Kingprotea’s NP2 damage with the exact same setup jumps to 824k (with Target Lock), and her maxed-out damage becomes 1.4m (again with Target Lock). This still isn’t true top-end damage output, but it’s better than in farming contexts, and it’s more reliable.
Aside from pure burst setups, Kingprotea is a pretty standard Buster unit. She’s fairly stable, so while she doesn’t have particular synergy with Castoria-centric hard stall, she’s decently positioned for mid-length fights. A classic Merlin/Mash team, for example, nicely balances offense and defense, and Kingprotea’s crit tools and selfish survival tools slot in nicely to that sort of team.
Also, while Kingprotea specifically doesn’t do much more for this team than any other incidental AoE Buster unit does, I’d like to mention that Himiko got a very nice buff recently, adding a 30% party battery and an extra crit damage buff to her existing kit. This makes Himiko/Castoria teams better than they have been and worth giving another look, especially if you used to use these kinds of teams and haven’t given them a try in a while. In a Himiko/Kingprotea/Castoria team, you can now use everyone’s NPs on turn 1 (as long as Castoria has Mana Loading) even without starting charge CEs, immediately putting up a full layer of defenses and getting the stall shell rolling.
The Black Grail is, as always, Kingprotea’s best CE for damage. There’s not a lot of reason not to use it unless you’re running an event CE instead.
Kingprotea has solid crit potential and middling in-kit crit buffs, so crit damage CCs are a natural pick. Alternatively, you might consider star weight CCs, especially on Kingprotea’s Buster cards, to help offset the fact that Moon Cancers have Caster-tier base star weight.
On the one hand, Kingprotea needs grails to reach omnifarmer damage numbers, so if you’re planning to lean heavily into using her, grails will help a lot. On the other hand, even when fully maxed out, Kingprotea can randomly fail to hit a million damage, and there are much better options out there. Basically, I wouldn’t recommend grailing Kingprotea unless you’re specifically trying to make her work for you in spite of her flaws, in which case yes, she does need the extra attack.
If you allow Kingprotea her Target Lock niche, she has very high neutral damage. The biggest knocks against her are that, while she’ll usually get that niche, she won’t always get it, and even with it she’s a little below the damage output of John Lackland, who’s a comparable Extra Class Buster AoE who has no such asterisks. In exchange, she does get some nice utility—a bunch of consistency tools, a bunch of survival tools—and she ramps nicely in CQs. She’s definitely a good Buster AoE, and even a year ago I’d probably be singing her praises, but the power ceiling has raised, and Kingprotea now comes with enough asterisks that I’d find her hard to recommend unless you actively like the character. If you do love Kingprotea, she’ll put in good work for you, but she’s not a standout or a must-pull in the current environment, especially given the other SSRs who are on rate-up this Summer.
In many ways, Kingprotea reminds me of Summer Kiara, who was also a slight step below the top end when she released, was also theoretically very powerful but came with a number of asterisks, and (least relevantly but perhaps most interestingly) was also a Moon Cancer. Summer Kiara’s a decent unit even today, but especially as the power ceiling has continued to raise, a Servant who was an awkward half-notch below the top has settled into being a fairly forgettable and mostly unremarkable AoE unit, too strong to merit a buff but not strong enough to be especially worth bringing to any particular fight. I suspect Kingprotea will end up in a similar position in the long run.