MMM - Dame Daimyou who gets Damp to Desolation Delivers Deified Design, Damn. Dat's Divine! (Uesugi Kenshin)

The Modern Magus Magazine

Let it be said that if I am anything, I am self-aware. The very same day I finish one MMM, I’m back to writing another. Thankfully there’s only one Servant to get through.

Now if only there weren’t a certain Caster gem deficit I’m currently dealing with due to my excessive love for Caster and Ruler Servants…to whale is to suffer, sometimes.

Introduction

While I’m certainly happy to see our battle-crazed nut job in another class form, reading her profile there’s definitely a tinge of sadness and irony to her entire situation as a Ruler. Her encounter with Chaldea as Kagetora is what enabled her to connect to the divine aspect of Bishamonten and be summoned as Ruler, even though she normally qualifies only for Saber, Lancer, and Rider.

In such a form, she somehow manages to gain the human understanding of emotion and expression she normally lacks, as big Bishamonten is pulling the slack somehow. So in order to finally reach a state of being that could understand being human, she became no longer human.

It’s doubly ironic that she only ever had the aptitude in battle to be considered a possible avatar of Bishamonten because of her psychotic affliction. Talk about a catch-22 situation. At least she’s happy, I guess?

Servant Data

Ruler

QAABB (Saber)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

4

5

4

Attribute	Earth
Alignment	Chaotic Balanced

Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4

Max HP 13,365

HP Rank

Max ATK 11,495

ATK Rank

Base Atk	1,776	Base HP	1,960
Max Atk	11,495	Max HP	13,365
Grail Atk	12,583	Grail HP	14,642

Magic Resistance B

Increase your Debuff Resist by 17.5%.

Riding A

Increase your Quick Card effectiveness by 10%.

Divinity A

Apply Damage Plus for yourself (Total Card Damage +200).

Treasured Heart B

Increase own Buff Removal Resist by 10%.
Increase own Instant Death Resist by 10%.

Overview

As an SSR Ruler, Kenshin has some pretty potent competition, but she certainly gets off to a good start, packing the tied-highest Attack stat of her class and rarity bracket, next to Holmes and Summer Melusine, and the tied-lowest HP stat with Holmes, giving the two of them an identical statline.

An incredibly aggressive stat spread, but that’s fine, given the defensive perks of the Ruler class, and its 1.1x Attack modifier, giving her notably more power than first seems from that attack stat of hers.

She also comes packaged with a good array of passives. Magic Resistance, Riding, and Divinity provide more resilience to debuffs, a notable boost to her Quick card, and some flat bonus damage to every card, while her unique passive, Treasured Heart, provides her with a small sum of Buff Removal Resistance and Instant Death Resistance. While neither of those benefits are particularly significant, the chance to shrug off buff removal is incredibly powerful the few times it actually applies, so it shouldn’t be dismissed entirely.

NP Generation

Card Hits	4	4	5	5	4
Per Hit	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%	0.62%

	NP per Hit (%)	0.62%
NP when Attacked (%)	3%

	Star Absorption	99
Star Generation per Hit	10.2%

Servant Skills

Crit Dmg

Fate is in Heaven, Armor is on the Chest, Accomplishment is in the Feet A

Increase own Critical Strength (3 turns).
Increase own Critical Star Gather Rate (3 turns).
Apply Evade to self (2 times, 3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Crit Damage +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
Star Gather +	300%	320%	340%	360%	380%	400%	420%	440%	460%	500%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Starting off Kenshin’s skill list is Fate is in Heaven, Armor is on the Chest, Accomplishment is in the Feet. Besides winning the prize for longest skill name by a landslide, this is essentially a composite skill of Kagetora’s own skills, in both name and effects.

This skill is primarily a crit buff skill, providing a 30% Critical Damage buff and +500% Star Weight buff for 3 turns, allowing her to both gather stars onto her own cards easier and hit harder when she does crit. The buff values are pretty modest, admittedly, but it’s enough to give an extra sting to her normal cards, and secure crits for NP gain, which Kenshin will really appreciate in action.

The other aspect to this skill is an Evasion buff, providing protection for 2 hits over 3 turns. While the number of hits to it isn’t spectacular, defensive buffs are still very valuable, especially ones which can be “fired and forgotten” like this, providing value regardless of when you use it, and being able to get its cooldown running sooner relative to when it provides its value.

So while not a crazy powerful skill, this is a solid backing for Kenshin to dish out some heavy critical damage, and the defensive buff is simply useful to have around, keeping her protected in difficult content. The only downside is it's on a harsh 8-turn base cooldown for a relatively weak skill, but that’s not the end of the world.

Arts Up

White Flame A

Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (3 turns).
Increase own NP Gauge.
Apply to self: Gain Critical Stars each turn (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Arts +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
NP Gauge +	30%	32%	34%	36%	38%	40%	42%	44%	46%	50%
Stars +	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	15
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Next is where we get into the real meat and potatoes with White Flame. This skill kind of does it all, but the main appeal is certainly its 50% gauge charge. Gauge chargers are incredibly powerful, as always, and this is no different, granting a very good step-up to her first NP, and just increasing the rate at which she can NP during a fight.

Attached to this skill are also two buffs - a 30% Arts booster and a 15-star per turn buff on Kenshin herself, for 3 turns. Neither are that powerful individually, but having both is more than enough to push this skill over the edge. Arts booster is a damage boost to Kenshin’s NP and main card type, as well as an improvement to her NP gain overall. While the star production aids her budding critical damage output capabilities, as well as aiding her NP gain by proxy due to the critical boost to NP gain.

The gauge charge is ultimately going to be the main reason you press the button here, but the buffs are also important to Kenshin’s overall game plan, so it’s a fairly powerful skill, packing the typical 8-turn base cooldown for a 50% gauge charger.

Overcharge Up

Jeweled Pagoda's Divine Aid C

Increase NP Overcharge Level by 2 for an ally (1 time, 3 turns).
Increase ATK for an ally (3 turns).
Increase NP Gain for an ally (3 turns).

Show Info

Lvl	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
ATK +	10%	11%	12%	13%	14%	15%	16%	17%	18%	20%
NP Gain +	20%	21%	22%	23%	24%	25%	26%	27%	28%	30%
CD	8	8	8	8	8	7	7	7	7	6

Last on the skill lineup, but certainly not least, is Jeweled Pagoda’s Divine Aid. This is a targeted ally buff skill, so it has some manner of supportive capability packed into it, but I’ll tell you now that it’s always going to be used on Kenshin herself.

This skill provides three buffs - an Overcharge boost by 2 levels 1-time for 3 turns, a 20% Attack buff for 3 turns, and a 30% NP gain buff for, you guessed it, 3 turns. The Overcharge boost on Kenshin herself isn’t very significant, as I’ll tell you now it just translates to a 1-turn 10% Arts booster buff, but in the case you don’t toss it on her, it’s very useful to toss on a Castoria and boost the number of hits her NP provides Invincibility for, or some other uses on supports.

The main appeal is the other buffs, providing an important additional damage buff to bolster Kenshin’s damage output, even if it’s relatively weak, and a solid boost to her NP gain, improvising her NP refund and regular card NP gain by a notable degree. For an Arts ST Servant, both are incredibly important, and round off a solid buff profile for her over a 3 turn cycle.

Much like her first skill, this really could’ve been a 7-turn base cooldown given its power, but it’s not much worse for it to be 8 turns, especially since it means all her skills have an aligned cooldown for convenience.

Noble Phantasm

Biten Hassou - Shiranui A

Remove buffs from a single enemy [Activates first].
Deal damage to a single enemy.
Deal 150% supereffective damage against [Human Attribute] enemies.

<Overcharge>

Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first].

Show Info/Video

Biten Hassou - Shiranui

Bishamonten's Eight Aspects - Shiranui

	Rank	Classification	Hit-Count
	A	Anti-Personnel	4

Effect	Remove buffs from a single enemy [Activates first]. Deal damage to a single enemy. Deal 150% supereffective damage against [Human Attribute] enemies.

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Buff Removal
Damage +	900%	1200%	1350%	1425%	1500%
Supereffective ATK +	150%	150%	150%	150%	150%

Overcharge Effect	Increase own Arts Card effectiveness (1 turn) [Activates first].

Charge	100%	200%	300%	400%	500%
Arts +	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%

To wrap it all up, we have Kenshin’s NP - Biten Hassou - Shiranui. As a fun fact, this NP’s sub-name of “Shiranui” was just Kenshin making up a cool-sounding name for the sword she uses, since it was otherwise nameless. Never forget she’s a colossal sword nerd, even when she sounds somewhat respectable in this form.

This is an Arts ST NP, so beyond the effects we’ll have some NP refund stats to run through later. Before dealing damage this NP does a couple of things, providing a 20% Arts booster buff to Kenshin herself for 1 turn, scaling with Overcharge, as well as removing all buffs from the target. Buff removal has lost a fair bit of power since the olden days of FGO, but it usually does something relevant in difficult fights, and at best will take pesky Evasion / Invincibility / Guts buffs that would otherwise block her offence. Regardless it’s a useful effect to have on a NP, even if it’s not as frequently useful as something like Invincible Pierce due to unremovable buffs.

Then she dishes out her damage, with a +50% effective damage bonus versus Human attribute foes. The Human attribute is an incredibly useful one to hit, as it’s by far the most common attribute in the game.

In fact, I can tell you precisely how common it is for once without printing out a very ugly fraction, as Kenshin is the 400th Servant in the game. Congrats, by the way, FGO.

Keeping on topic, exactly 41.5% of Servants in the game currently are Human attribute, meaning Kenshin is hitting that effective damage incredibly often versus Servants, and even outside of Servants it hits a decent pool of NPC enemies, working on pretty much any being that is or was based on a human. Not as wide-reaching as Earth or Heaven attribute for NPC’s, but when you’re a ST Servant hitting other Servants for high damage is typically better.

That’s it for effects, so let’s look over damage output and refund. On her own, Kenshin’s NP with all her buffs active does 47k damage neutral. Not particularly high, but far from terrible, especially as she’s going to be using this NP often. The refund is much more important, though. With just her own buffs, Kenshin’s NP has a baseline refund of 14.5%, which is frankly more than high enough to work with.

But let’s throw those numbers into practice. With a double Castoria setup and a 50% gauge CE, Kenshin is getting 36% refund per NP, which bumps up to 41% if it kills. That’s easily enough to make a 3-turn loop as a single-target Servant, which is rather impressive. The damage doesn’t slack, either, doing 140k damage neutral per NP in the prior setup, jumping to 210k if it’s a Human attribute target.

With her level of refund, you can even do a Black Grail farming setup with her using battlesuit swap. In such a setup she’s doing closer to 274k neutral, bumping up to 315k on the last turn, or 473k versus Human attribute (this setup is assuming Reines as the battlesuit swap for convenience reasons).

You might be wondering whether this level of refund can transfer to difficult content where she won’t be getting Overkill for that extra push of NP gauge? Well, let me just throw a number at you: 165%

No, that’s not a buff number, it’s not how much I love Karna out of 100%, that number is how much NP gauge Kenshin gets off a single 3rd card slot Arts crit in the double Castoria setup on her NP turn. That’s right, not only does she get a FULL FREE NP off a single crit, she nearly gets a free Overcharge level. Considering her NP’s refund is usually bigger than 35%, that means pretty much any turn where she NP’s with an Arts card pulled is a guaranteed 200% charge NP on the next turn. And that’s utterly absurd, even if the payoff in practice is just a small bonus to her next NP.

So yes, Kenshin is very absurd in difficult content, and can pretty much spam her NP to her heart’s content. It’s actually mind-boggling.

Conclusion

So how is Kenshin on the whole? Well on the one hand, she’s absolutely divine, an avatar of war, and well worth your worship:

Something of a rarity, Kenshin manages to be a very dependable ST farmer without relying on very high-investment setups. Her damage output isn’t high enough to farm 90++ nodes without class advantage, but regardless it’s a strong niche to have, and as a Ruler Servant she’ll pretty much assuredly be able to aid in farming any node, so she’s the equivalent of a single-target universal farmer, even if that’s not much of a title.

Kenshin’s capability to crush difficult content can’t really be understated. She’s capable of obscene levels of NP spam, supported by her incredibly high regular card NP gain and critical-damage focus to ensure she’s dishing out NP’s often, and she hits hard with or without a NP on the chain. Adding in her dependable defensive skill, potential for NP Overcharge support, and buff removal on her NP, it’s natural that she’s a force to be reckoned with versus any number of fights. The Ruler class pulls double duty here, too, providing powerful defence versus most classes and an offence that won’t run into an unfavourable matchup most of the time.

However, she’s only human, after all. But don’t put all the blame on her:

As much as I love the perks of the class, being a Ruler also has its flaws. Being able to hit almost any class for neutral is great, but not having any common class to gain class advantage on means Kenshin will be dishing notably less damage than a Knight/Horseman class equivalent, while Mooncancer foes will be few and far between, lest we’re going on a BB-bullying spree sometime soon. This ultimately isn’t much of a flaw, though, which goes to show how strong I feel Kenshin is.

It feels funny given how recently they’ve been released between each other, but Kenshin and Summer Melusine have a lot of similarities, being essentially the same concept of “High Power NP spam Arts crit Ruler with solid durability” but being imagined slightly differently and of course, one being ST and one being AOE.

I’d like to say it’s just coincidence that I’ve also rolled to get both at NP2, but I’m kind of addicted to Rulers and Arts both, so I’ll admit she’s completely the type of Servant I have fun with.

The point of this comparison is to say Kenshin has a very clear identity and game plan, and one she executes almost flawlessly. Her damage output is solid, she can NP spam to high heaven, and her toolkit is stacked with useful effects for difficult content. But she doesn’t stop there, also being a useful ST farmer for most nodes, even if single-target farming doesn’t come up often.

Her niche might be pretty similar to someone like Astraea’s, but ultimately Kenshin has a lot more power and longevity built into her buffs, as well as a more impressive refund profile, even if both do pretty impressive damage given the chance.

So while Kenshin isn’t necessarily bringing something fresh to the table, she simply performs her speciality so well that she’s the premier option for anyone looking to use a ST Arts damage dealer on any class out there. I, for one, will be utilising her extensively in the future, and if you really want a 1-Servant multitool to tackle a wide variety of difficult content in Arts teams, Kenshin is absolutely the Servant for you, too. Rath™ Seal of Approval, with a recommendation.

Outro

Joke’s on you, Lasengle, I predicted your Servant drop this time and came prepared, writing this MMM on the exact same day she dropped. No, I won’t disclose how busy my work schedule is, if you found out you’d probably whither and die from sympathy.

I had most of my outro fluff written on the previous MMM, making this mostly a bonus one.

…

Damn, I need to put something here. Uh…hmm… Since we have 400 Servants in FGO now, who would win? 1 Billion Lions and all the Pokemon, or every Servant in FGO? That’s right, the classic conundrum, but in a tag-team! Rest assured, I will absolutely not be reading the comments to hear your opinions!

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MMM - Dame Daimyou who gets Damp to Desolation Delivers Deified Design, Damn. Dat's Divine! (Uesugi Kenshin)

The Modern Magus Magazine

QAABB (Saber)

Quick Card

Arts Card

Arts Card

Buster Card

Buster Card

Traits

Tags

Crit Dmg

Arts Up

Overcharge Up

Biten Hassou - Shiranui

Outro

Links

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