Rabbit’s Reviews #455: Kingprotea (Alter) (5* Avenger)

KP Alter has quite high attack (and low health) even by SSR Avenger standards, which means she has among the highest attack in the game. This plays into her general concept, which seems to be “a strong baseline plus card-rigging, and not much else.” Her internals are pretty standard for her deck, with average Arts card NP gain, a decent Quick, and high hit-counts that can facilitate passable star gen for a single-Quick Servant.

KP Alter has a ton of passives. She starts with Avenger, of course, slightly increasing her defensive NP gain at the cost of making the team more susceptible to debuffs. Self-Restoration and Yokai Inheritance collectively give KP Alter 6.3% NP charge per turn, or 8.3% on waterside fields, which is pretty nice and turns out to matter for her loop specs. KP Alter does not have Oblivion Correction—which is unfortunate, as its crit damage buff would have been more relevant here than it usually is—but in exchange she gets Independent Action, for a bit of generic crit damage ampage, and Phantasmal Species Succession, which further boosts KP Alter’s Buster crits. It’s a testament to KP’s weak steroids that these passives make up about a third of her total crit damage buffs in most cases.

KP’s passive spread ends with Territory Creation, which provides a small boost to a not-terribly-important card, as well as the lowest possible level of Madness Enhancement. A 1% Buster card buff is better than a 0% buff, but it’s such a comically small value that it’s almost insulting for it to be here at all. And speaking of unimpressive passives, High Servant is also here, and it does nothing, as usual.

Skill Reload is the most important of KP Alter’s appends, as it gives her the flexibility to use her card-rigging two turns in a row. Mana Loading is necessary specifically for KP Alter’s 1/x/x farming setup, but otherwise it won’t often matter. Due to KP Alter’s focus on card damage and her low in-kit crit buffs, the crit damage append is deceptively valuable here. The Extra Attack buff also boosts KP Alter’s functional damage output. The anti-Saber attack buff of course only matters against Sabers (though it’s pretty nice in those cases, and it’s worth swapping the Extra buff or the crit damage buff out if you’re dealing with a Saber fight). In general, because KP Alter’s appends are more or less useful depending on context, this is an important time to remember that you can freely swap which appends are equipped—for example choosing Mana Loading for 1/x/x farming and the crit damage append otherwise.

In typical Avenger fashion, KP alter takes a wide range of different mats. Many of her mats are recent ones, coming from Ordeal Call and newer chapters, which might make her harder than a typical Avenger to level—but not needing any gems is still pretty nice,

Kingprotea’s skillset is just barely functional, offering a 50% battery, some very weak damage buffs, and not too much else—except, of course, for card-rigging. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

As with the rest of KP Alter’s kit, her NP is underwhelming and disappointing. It’s a single-target NP that ignores defense, which is decent, but its other various effects are weird-to-bad.

First off, it sets any available master skills on cooldown, “stealing” their effects to give a one-turn 20% NP damage buff to KP Alter for each buff stolen. This can amount to a 60% NP damage buff every other turn if you’re not using your Master Skills, which can be very powerful, and in this context KP Alter's otherwise low steroids make a bit more sense: she technically has buffs in all three buff brackets, her attack and Buster buffs are stackable, and she gets (again, theoretically) massive NP damage buffs, which, especially given her Avenger chassis, can result in very high theoretical NP damage.

In exchange, though, this significantly reduces KP Alter’s flexibility. Most notably, it means KP Alter teams cannot plug any Servants out on turn 2—they must either use the plugsuit on turn 1, or wait until it comes off cooldown on turn 3. This ends up preventing KP Alter from using Oberon when farming 1/x/x nodes, and it’s liable to get in the way of alternative strategies as well. Farming with card-rigging Servants often relies on being able to slightly adjust the selection of cards and placement of skills to respond to the node in question, and (for multiple reasons, this being one of them) KP Alter has less ability to do that than her competition. It’s rather annoying that KP Alter has no ability to choose not to steal the Master Skills, since it turns what is meant to be a benefit into a potential demerit, especially considering the damage buff only lasts a turn and thus does not even facilitate ramp. She also will never get this benefit on turn 2 (unless you're not NP-ing on turn 1), which means her NP damage is likely to drop on her second turn even if she's immediately stacking her buffs--and on turn 3, most KP Alter teams will have used at least two of the available Master skills, reducing KP's innate NP damage buffs in turn. This is essentially a reverse ramp, and one that makes using your Master Skills more difficult in the process.

KP Alter’s NP also gives another 1-turn NP damage buff on city and waterside fields, which is situational but decent when it applies, and it reduces the target’s attack by 20%, providing a marginal survival benefit in CQs. The NP’s damage ignores defense buffs as well, which can be handy on rare occasions.

The NP’s overcharge effect, though, is also worth discussing. It’s a pre-cast (not that it matters) crit damage buff that scales with overcharge. This is KP Alter’s only crit damage buff outside of her passives, which means it’s very important to her card damage—but its values are very low for a crit damage buff, starting at 30% and only reaching 50%, the baseline for respectable crit buffs, at overcharge 5, and it only lasts for a turn. Not only does this mean the buff can’t ramp, but it also means KP Alter only gets her crit buffs after she NPs on a turn. This means if KP doesn’t have her NP ready and forces her cards for a standard BBB chain, she’ll functionally be doing it without any crit damage buffs—and if she needs to use a BNPB chain (for example, to clear a wave of three enemies in a farming context), her first Buster card won’t have her crit buffs, limiting her ability to deal with waves of enemies that have even health spreads. This overcharge effect is just unnecessarily weak, especially considering KP Alter has no crit buffs on her skills.

Overall, KP Alter’s NP is annoying. It doesn’t play nicely with her role as a card-rigging Servant, and its effects range from undertuned to actively harmful.

Despite being a single-target Servant, KP Alter has card-rigging and thus can farm nodes that cooperate. Unlike Ciel, though, KP Alter cannot farm 3/3/x nodes except in extremely rare cases. Ciel handles 3/3/x nodes with a Koyan/Ciel/Koyan/Summer BB team, using Summer BB to lock Ciel’s cards and using BNPB chains, killing one enemy with each Buster card plus one with Ciel’s NP. Ciel, however, has more NP gain tools than KP Alter does, and KP Alter doesn’t get enough NP charge off a post-NP Buster card to loop. With a lot of overkill, a QNPA chain where the Arts card crits can give KP Alter enough charge to use an NP each turn, but the loop conditions are super tight, it’s not at all guaranteed that you’ll have enough stars for the Arts card to crit on turn 2, and (most importantly, perhaps) you’re assuming that a completely un-buffed first Quick card can kill one of the enemies on the field. A level 90 KP Alter with MLB Black Grail deals somewhere around 11k damage with a first Quick crit in a Mighty chain, which will fail to kill in… well, most farming nodes. It’s not great.

What this means is unlike the other three card-riggers, KP Alter can pretty much only farm in 90+-and-higher nodes. On the one hand, those are the most difficult nodes to farm and thus the nodes where a powerful farmer is most useful. On the other hand, it’s hard to recommend a Servant for their farming capacity when they can’t handle most normal nodes.

KP Alter’s ideal farming team is usually Koyan/Koyan/Oberon, and with it, she can handle x/1/x and x/x/1 nodes, provided the damage values cooperate.

For these nodes, you start with both Koyans in the front line. On turn 1, you use all three KP Alter skills, plus both Koyans’ second and third skills, and one Koyan’s battery. You then plug the spent Koyan out for Oberon—you don’t need him now, but you will want him next turn, and if you don’t plug him in early, KP Alter will prevent you from accessing him. Against 3 enemies, you use a BNPB chain, and against two, you (usually) use an NPBB chain. An NP2 level 90 KP Alter with MLB BG deals about 93k off a first Buster crit, 147k off a third, and 316k with her NP.

KP Alter ends up with almost exactly 30% charge, between the on-Buster NP gauge from Koyan, the passive charge from her passives, and her Extra card. On turn 2, therefore, you use the remaining Koyan’s battery, plus Oberon’s 20% battery, to bring KP Alter back to 100% charge. You then re-use KP Alter’s second skill, and if there’s more than one enemy on wave 2, you re-use her third skill as well. The damage output on turn 2 ends up being very close to the same as turn 1, as KP Alter doesn’t get her on-NP NP damage buffs, but she does have Oberon’s NP damage buff and has stacked her second skill’s Buster buff.

On turn 3, you re-use KP’s battery, and you use Oberon’s 50% battery and End of the Dream to secure the loop. You also re-use KP Alter’s third skill, if you haven’t already, to force cards, and you add on the plugsuit’s damage buff (which offers more damage than the 20% NP damage up you’d get from leaving it unused). KP Alter deals about a million damage with her NP on turn 3—again, assuming NP2 and MLB BG—so if the last wave has only one or two enemies, or if there are three enemies but two of them have relatively low health, KP Alter is probably 90++ viable. Due to how her numbers shake out, she also does approximately the same damage when maxed-out and CE-less, which means she might be able to 6CE the right nodes.

In the best-case scenario, when you have one enemy on wave 2 and 1 or 2 on turn 3, KP Alter may be able to use an NPBB chain on turn 3, which will result in her highest possible T3 damage. KP Alter deals 1.06m off her NP, 219k off a second Buster Crit, and 252k on a third Buster crit, for a total of about 1.5 million damage. Ciel, for contrast, deals 711k off her NP, 228k off a second Buster crit, and 263k on a third Buster crit, under about the same circumstances. This means their crit damage is actually pretty comparable—the power of having in-kit attack buffs and an Avenger base—but KP Alter deals nearly 50% more NP damage. If both can clear a node, KP Alter is probably the better farmer, but KP Alter is much less likely to be able to actually do this in practical contexts (and Ciel's slightly higher crit damage may matter in some cases).

For 1/x/x nodes, you have to use KP Alter’s third skill on both turn 2 and turn 3, which by extension means you cannot use either Koyan’s battery until turn 2 at the earliest. This means you have to have your third charger start in the front row, and you need to have both Koyans available on turn 2. If KP Alter didn’t block using the plugsuit on turn 2, this wouldn’t be a problem—you’d just start with a Koyan/Oberon frontline and swap Koyan out for a second Koyan on turn 2—but KP Alter specifically blocks turn 2 Servant swaps, which means you cannot use KP Alter’s NP on turn 1, lock cards on turns 2 and 3, and still have Oberon on turn 3.

In fact, to make the loop specs work, you can’t use Oberon at all. Instead, you have to use Miss Snake, making KP Alter one of the rare Buster Servants for whom Miss Snake is part of an optimized farming team. To make 1/x/x nodes work, you run a Koyan/KP Alter/Snake/Koyan team, with both Mana Loading and Skill Reload on KP Alter. On turn 1, you use KP Alter’s first and second skills, as well as all three of Snake’s skills, and you plug Snake out for the second Koyan. You use both Koyans’ third skills on KP Alter, and have KP Alter NP. On turn 2, you use KP Alter’s third skill, then both remaining skills from each Koyan, and then you re-use KP Alter’s second skill, and you use a BNPB chain (if fighting 3 enemies) or an NPBB chain (if fighting 2). With the passive charge from Snake, the on-Buster NP gain from Koyan, KP Alter’s passive charge, and KP Alter’s Extra card’s NP gain, KP Alter gets 50% total charge after a BNPB chain, which lets you use KP Alter’s battery to secure the loop. You can also then use her third skill a second time to force KP Alter’s cards.

KP Alter deals significantly reduced turn-3 NP damage in this team, of course, only reaching around 665k at NP2 with MLB BG. That said, her card damage is actually somewhat higher than in the Oberon teams, due to Miss Snake’s buff spread. Her overall damage in a Snake team ends up being pretty comparable to Ciel's damage in an Oberon team, and Ciel's damage is often sufficient, so KP Alter's damage should be as well, leaving a Snake-supported KP Alter probably able to clear many 1/x/2 or 1/x/1 nodes.

Of course, KP Alter also has much higher theoretical single-target damage output than Olga and Archer Ishtar, though that's a bit deceptive, as Olga and Ishtar don't have to split their damage output across multiple enemies in the same way. In almost all cases, killing the adds with an NP and being able to land a full, albeit weaker, NPBB chain against a priority target will be better than a BNPB chain even if that NP hits harder.

To look at Ishtar specifically, on turn 3, she does 552k with her NP, 192k with a second crit, and 222k with a third crit, under the same conditions as above. She ends up doing about the same damage in total against a single enemy as KP Alter does with an NP, but she does much higher damage against the non-preferred targets, which means she's less likely to be stymied by a set of high-damage adds. KP Alter might be better specifically for a final wave of 2 enemies, where she can use a BNPB chain to kill a low-HP add with the first Buster can then get an NP and a Buster on the main target, but Ishtar will be more effective in most cases.

Olga is harder to provide one single set of values for, as her damage fluctuates depending on the traits of the enemies she's swinging against and her ability to use her second skill. She can usually use it at least once in 90++ farming, and sometimes twice, but I think factoring in one use of the skill is fair here considering we're already giving wave composition concessions to KP Alter and Ciel. In this case, Olga does 490k with her NP, 170k with a second Buster crit, and 195k on a third Buster crit. This is, notably, lower than Ishtar's damage, but it's also assuming no niches. Olga's damage jumps against Man, Star, or Main Class Servants, can go higher if she can double-stack her third skill, and (most relevantly to her ability to solve all farming forever) scales massively with NP levels, as her NP's attack buff scales with level rather than with overcharge. The story here ends up being basically the same as Ishtar, though—Olga's theoretical damage against a single target is lower, but having an AoE NP is more than worth the difference.

The sum of all this is that KP Alter is a good high-end farmer in the sense that she’ll be able to 5CE, and possibly even 6CE, some high-tier farming nodes at relatively reasonable levels of investment, but in exchange she’s pretty inflexible, unable to farm most “normal” nodes and capable of handling a narrower range of nodes than Ciel (not to mention Olga and Ishtar). If you’re willing to use a more convenient but lower-damage farmer for sub-90+ nodes and swap KP Alter in when she happens to be the most efficient option, this might make her valuable… but that requires looking at any given 90++ node and doing the math to see if KP Alter works, which is kind of a hassle, especially when there are other Servants who work about as well universally.

The various farming teams above work as fastburn options for CQs, too, though in CQ contexts you may get more value from slotting in Summer BB to ensure KP Alter gets all of her cards multiple turns in a row. In CQs, KP Alter's main advantage over her competition—her very high damage—is a bit more salient. KP doesn't offer too much in the way of CQ utility, but there are definitely fights where being able to do a ton of damage is valuable, and KP can do that. Note though that because of KP Alter's low steroids (especially if you aren't sitting on your Master Skills), you'll be able to get more damage out of ST Servants with better kits, if you're willing to reload for good card draws. That said, if you're not willing to do that, KP Alter's ability to force her own cards can give her higher damage output than a "stronger" ST unit would have without cards.

KP Alter also works for the same niche purpose Ciel and Olga do—you can use her card-rigging skill and then plug her out to force cards for a different Servant. Olga remains the best option for doing this by virtue of generating 50 stars in the process, but KP Alter is an option if you don’t have the others, and she's a better card rigger than Ishtar for this purpose specifically, as Ishtar's card-lock skill executes on a delay.

KP Alter has a bit of defensive utility that can make her work in slowplay teams as well, between her party defenses and the attack debuff on her NP. You’ll still need some form of hard survival to protect KP Alter from NPs, as she doesn’t have any hard defenses that apply to herself, but standbys like Merlin, Mash, or even Reines can take care of that.

The Black Grail will typically be Kingprotea’s best CE option—even though its buffs only apply to NPs, it gives more raw attack than most other CEs do, which means it still helps KP Alter’s cards even while mostly boosting her NP. Alternatively, if you happen to have GudaGuda Poster Girl, that can situationally be a better pick for farming, as it provides comparable buff value to BG and does apply to cards. Especially for non-Oberon teams, it’s likely the best overall damage buff KP Alter can get. Aside from that, if you specifically need higher card damage—for example, to deal with a strong first wave—something like Limited/Zero Over, or even Golden Sumo, can be a decent option.

Command Codes matter more to KP Alter than they do to most Servants. Crit damage CCs are a great pick here, as KP Alter has pretty low in-kit crit buffs, and higher crit damage directly translates to better farming capabilities. Alternatively, if you’re having trouble with inconsistent crit access, flat star gen CCs on KP’s Busters can be a solid pick. You could even put a star gen CC on one of KP’s Busters and crit damage CCs on the other two, so you can pick the star gen Buster on earlier turns and skip it when you just need to push damage as much as possible.

Grails have a huge impact on KP Alter’s performance. She has specific damage thresholds all over the place—the amount of damage she can do with a single Buster, the amount of damage she can do with an NP, the damage she can output with a Buster and an Extra, et cetera et cetera. The higher her attack, the less likely she is to be unable to farm a node just because of one single enemy with unusually high health somewhere in a given wave. On top of that, Avengers are good grail targets in general, and KP’s high base attack means every extra level will go a little further than it would for most Servants. Her damage is very high—the highest of the card-riggers—and grails accentuate that strength.

...That said, as card-rigging Servants go, KP Alter is the worst one. If you have Ciel, Ishtar, or (especially) Olga, they’re all better choices for your grails, and if you’ve already grailed one of the others, there’s not a lot of reason to do so with KP Alter as well. Essentially, if KP Alter is your only card-rigger, and if you’re not actively planning to pull for the others, she’s a fantastic grail target and will benefit substantially from the investment, but if you have or plan to get alternatives, there’s not much reason to bother, unless you just want to have big numbers in your back pocket.

At the start of this review I posed a question: just how powerful is card-rigging in a vacuum? Having gone through this whole review, I think the answer is “pretty dang powerful, but not a cure for all ills.” KP Alter has a number of really significant flaws, from low steroids to limited CQ utility to questionable loop specs to a really annoying NP effect. Even with all of these drawbacks (and in part because of her class), KP is capable of doing the thing Ciel specifically can do: clearing top-end farming nodes at lower investment than most Servants. In fact, KP Alter may be able to clear certain nodes at lower investment levels than Ciel can, by virtue of her higher NP damage. In exchange, she can’t farm “normal” nodes and she has less flexibility than the other card-riggers, meaning she’s nowhere near the silver bullet Olga is and her use-cases are a lot more restrictive than Ciel and Ishtar as well. Even if she was on-par with Ciel (which, again, she’s not), Ciel is much much better for hard fights, where KP Alter doesn’t have much to offer for those other than high damage.

All that said, KP Alter is competing with some of the best Servants in the game. The fact that she compares unfavorably to them doesn’t mean she compares unfavorably to most Servants. On the one hand, being unable to farm normal nodes is an annoying knock against her. On the other hand, almost no ST units can do that, and I don’t usually ding them for it. If nothing else, she’s an ST Avenger with a 50% battery and (by virtue of her card-rigging) deceptively high burst damage considering her low steroids. If you think of her as a damage-oriented DPS for challenge fights who also happens to work for the occasional farming node, she starts to look a lot better.

If it weren’t for her card-rigging, Protea Alter would just be bad, or at least disappointing. With card-rigging, she jumps to pretty solid in general, and situationally excellent. I do think she has been unnecessarily hindered in many ways, but card-rigging becoming more widely available is a good thing, and if we get more Servants who can do it, we will inevitably get Servants who do it more and less well. From that standpoint, KP Alter—a mediocre member of the best category of damage-dealers—is something of a necessary evil.

The real takeaway at the end of the day is that if you have Olga or Ciel (or maybe Ishtar), KP Alter doesn’t bring much value for you. If you don’t have them, she’s great, because card-rigging is great—but also you can probably just wait for a better card-rigger, whether that’s a rerun of the existing staples or someone newer and flashier.