MMM - Fae Females Flourish, Flaunting Franchise Founder's Fetishes Flagrantly, Furthermore Fergus-loving Floozie Finds Fortune in Favoritism (Summer 2023 Part 1)

First on the skill lineup is Pulse of Spring, Zerktoria’s wonderful gauge charger skill. As one might expect, it’s a 50% gauge charger, providing that all-important leg up toward your first NP, but this skill also comes with additional, and rather powerful, perks.

Providing both a solid 50% Critical Damage and +5000% Star Weight buff for 3 turns, this skill also turns Zerktoria into a crit machine, stealing pretty much every star that will show up for the duration and dealing delicious bonus damage when that results in a crit.

This not only provides a crit niche for her in difficult content, but also improves her NP gain, as crits result in a doubling of any NP gauge gained from the card, so it shores up one of her weaknesses that we’ve established. The main draw of this skill is naturally still the gauge charger, but these two buffs are very good for Zerktoria, especially as her focus is going to be taking down single targets from her ST NP.

The 8-turn base cooldown of this skill is expected given its nature as a 50% gauge charger, so no complaints here.

Next up is Summer Fae. This skill is a slight variant on one of Castoria’s original skills, providing a 20% gauge charge to a targeted ally and a NP gain buff to the team for 3 turns, albeit the NP gain buff is 20% instead of 30%, and in exchange the targeted ally gets a 1-time, 3-turn +200% Overcharge buff. Honestly, it’s a very solid tradeoff.

This not only functions as a bonus to Zerktoria’s already superb gauge charging capabilities, but also gives her some supportive utility (that should probably be used on herself). While there are plenty of applications to Overcharge buffs now that feel very tempting (Whether used on OG Castoria, or Aesc, for example), most of the time getting an extra sum of gauge charge on the primary damage dealer will be optimal, especially as the bonus overcharge on her NP will be able to increase her damage output.

It’s simply a strong and versatile skill, overall. While it seems like a straight-up upgrade to the original Castoria skill, it does notably have an 8-turn base cooldown instead of 7, so it will take longer to come off cooldown by comparison.

Lastly, we have Holy Sword Operation. Once again acting as something of a mirror to the OG Castoria skills, this isn’t a superpowered Arts support buff, but just a normal, selfish superpowered Arts buff, providing herself with +50% Arts for 3 turns, as well as a 10 star/turn buff for the same duration, and 1-turn Invincible if all of that wasn’t enough.

It goes without saying that as an Arts Servant, this is a huge power boost, amplifying her damage output massively and also improving the NP gain of her Arts cards by a large margin. While this is worryingly the only offensive buff for her NP in her skill kit, it’s a pretty powerful one.

Doubling up as a defensive skill and star-generation source is just the icing on the cake, but it means she won’t be feeling the flaws of the Berserker class as much, especially with how she can easily soak up the produced critical stars to fuel her high crit damage.

Like all of Zerktoria’s skills, of similar power, this has an 8-turn base cooldown. Nice and uniform, I suppose.

First up on the skills is BF Super Summer. This is your run-of-the-mill Charisma clone, providing the standard 20% Attack up buff to the team for 3 turns, alongside its bonus effects - a 20% NP damage buff to all Summer Servants for the same duration (including Suzuka herself), and a 15-star bomb.

While there’s not really much to discuss about this skill, it is a very good offensive steroid for Suzuka herself, both providing a 44% damage boost to her NP on its own for 3 turns, and also giving her a moderate star bomb to fuel her cards’ crits and NP gain with, which will become relevant for her later. It also provides some modest supportive ability, though the odds of Suzuka becoming an option for a dedicated support are pretty low based on this skill alone.

This is packing the standard 7-turn base cooldown for Charisma clone skills, so nothing shocking there.

You can’t simply end on one of the classics, I guess, so throw in another! Divine Power (Summer) is unsurprisingly a 3-turn card booster skill, providing Suzuka with 20% Quick Up and 50% Critical Damage up for 3 turns. While the Quick boost is relatively small, it adds up to a lot when it starts multiplicatively stacking with the Attack and NP damage boost already in her kit. Conversely, the critical damage buff is very handy for her, giving a proper payoff to the star bomb she’s packing, and her Rider star weight making soaking stars fairly easy.

The real point of discussion is the 3rd effect of this skill, providing a buff to Suzuka which grants her a 3-turn, 10% Attack buff every time she lands a crit for the 3-turn duration. Like most “On-hit, get X buff” skills, it can’t apply to NP’s as much as I wish they could crit, because Lasengle knows applying on-hit buffs to AOE NP’s can get very broken very fast - even with Salter’s limited exception to the rule with her new skill upgrade it’s pretty strong.

Blatant foreshadowing go!

Keeping on track, the boost to her damage output when critting is nice, but the 3-turn time limit means that functionally the most you can get out of it is a +50% Attack buff, and only for a limited timeframe. While it might come up on occasion in difficult content if the stars align for it, this is more a flavour buff than anything else - the existing damage buffs are already plenty for this skill.

The 8-turn base cooldown for this skill is pretty unfairly long given its power, but maybe they’re spooked you might stack it up with skill CD reduction? Hard to say.

Last up is Summer Flag. Please excuse me for a moment as I suffer through war flashbacks of my days playing through Labyrinthine VN’s with complex flag and path systems like Kara no Shoujo before eventually giving up as I’m thrown into a bad end that explains nothing to the reader.

In any case, this is a targeted buff skill that provides a chosen ally with a very nice 30% NP Gain Up buff for 3 turns, as well as reducing their skill cooldowns by 1 turn. Now I see maybe why they were careful with her 2nd skill’s cooldown. But throwing those perks aside, the real appeal of this skill is the 30% gauge charger Suzuka gets from using it, enabling a lot more freedom for her setups when farming (because spoiler, she’s got an AOE NP, she’s gonna try her hand at farming.)

With that context in mind, this doubles up as a leg-up to her first NP and a boost to her NP refund, as well as possibly opening up shenanigans with cooldown reduction effects, as with this she can manage to get her 1st skill’s cooldown reset on wave 3 with the Atlas Academy outfit cooldown reduction.

And outside of the farming context, this can be a handy supportive tool that may be key in getting an ally’s NP gauge to full or getting an important skill off CD in time, but really it’s going to be used for a boost to Suzuka’s refund most of the time.

First on Kuro’s skill lineup is How’s Your Progress? If you didn’t get the memo, Kuro’s theme for her Summer form is that of a doujin writer’s editor, complete with constant pestering for deadlines and overall exasperation at the uselessness of a creative who isn’t working on a salary.

Coming from this master of procrastinating, she’s frankly terrifying.

The skill itself is technically a Charisma clone, but it has a very unique twist to it. Providing a 20% Attack and Critical Damage buff to the team for 3 turns, this skill also applies two on-hit buffs, one to Kuro herself and one for the team. Kuro gets a 10% Critical Damage buff for 3 turns whenever she lands a Quick card for 3 turns, a pretty solid buff to improve her Critical Damage output simply by using her primary card type, especially when stacked atop her already-numerous critical damage buffs.

The whole team, however, gets a Manuscript Complete buff each time they hit an enemy with an attack, up to a max of 5 times. This buff by itself does nothing, but with both the buff that applies it and the stacks themselves lasting 5 turns, they’ll stick around for a long time, so you can consider it an inherent mechanic to deploying Avenger Kuro in a team (As this skill has an 8-turn base cooldown, meaning it only has 1 turn of downtime at max skill level).

The notable part about both buffs in question is that they apply on Noble Phantasms. And for Manuscript Complete, it applies for each enemy hit by the NP in question, not just for the single attack. You may already know why this is important, but let me build up to it.

Next on the lineup is Just in Time for Revisions. Boy, they are really committing to the bit with this kit, aren’t they?

This skill is short, but certainly not simple to use. It gives a 1-time, 3-turn Guts buff to a chosen ally, then applies a delayed buff to Kuro herself which switches her with the rearmost Servant slot possible at the end of the turn. In other words, an in-built Battlesuit Swap skill.

Unlike Miss Crane, though, there’s no clear reason why Kuro has this skill…yet. After all, her NP is offensive and she’s an Avenger - surely she’s just a damage-dealing Servant, right? My how… how… naive.

This is a prime utility skill, but utility only has value when there is something to leverage with it. And that leverage is yet to come.

And Here’s Your Manuscript! is the payoff. Those skill names still don’t feel great to say.

This skill is a 20% team NP Damage buff for 3 turns, but more importantly, it’s the thing the rest of Kuro’s kit is leading up to, charging the entire team’s gauge by their number of Manuscript Complete buffs times 10%, then removing them afterwards. While this does seem like a roundabout way to have a team gauge charge skill, the specific intricacies of the buff itself means you can come up with very…fun ways to use it.

Due to the way the Manuscript Complete buff interacts with AOE NP’s, it essentially provides a 10% NP gauge refund per target hit, meaning typically 30% per NP. And you can stack multiple Kuro’s How’s Your Progress? Skills to mean that buildup is doubled, meaning any Servant will get a 60% gauge “refund” with each NP they use over 5 turns.

Now the more astute of you might have realised that because the gauge charge skill removes the stacks after use, and NP gauge chargers kind of lose value once the charge is over 100%, this is fundamentally just a 100% gauge charge for 2 support slots, not exactly worth it right?

WRONG. That’s where Kuro’s second skill deviously comes in - by popping one of your Kuro’s skills immediately then using her own skill to tag out at the end of the turn into a more traditional support like Koyanskaya or Castoria, you can net a neat pair of essentially 50% gauge charger supports while still reaping the benefits of other supportive options.

There’s even some very funny gimmick teams you can do in combo with Cheng Gong and Miss Crane with Kuro to constantly sub out your support lineup to an almost-ridiculous degree.

While this is all both cool and fun to use, I’ll be the first to admit it’s a bunch of flashiness for what is essentially still 50% gauge charge support, and at the cost of inferior offensive buffs compared to a traditional support. But it is cool.