Rabbit's Reviews #272: Archer of Inferno (4* Saber)

Midnight is more-or-less the centerpiece of Tomoe’s kit. The main draw here is the 3-turn 100% crit damage buff. This is a hefty damage buff that can let Tomoe hit unusually high levels of card damage on her Arts cards (especially with Castoria) and her Buster cards (in general). Crits are the one thing neither Tamamo nor Castoria helps with, and fortunately Tomoe has the in-kit tools to facilitate critting, so this is at least a theoretical advantage over many other Arts Servants and can help partially make up for the fact that Tomoe isn’t the greatest looper. The skill also comes with a 3-turn guts, which is potentially an okay survivability tool but is likely to get wasted when Tomoe uses this for damage. Capping the skill off is a delayed self stun (the delayed part of which is technically treated as a buff to prevent clearing it in advance of the stun itself triggering). Something to note here is that stuns stop cooldowns from counting down, so unless you plan to prevent or remove the stun Tomoe’s skill cooldowns are going to be one turn longer in practice than advertised. With the delay from the stun factored in, this skill ends up on an effective 7-turn cooldown at max, which is standard for a Guts and kind of disappointing given the skill’s primary use as a crit buff.

VR is Tomoe’s weakest skill. In the abstract, this is a Mana Burst that gets to drop a turn of cooldown and gain an Arts-specific star weight buff in exchange for having lower buff value typical of sustained card buffs. This isn’t a bad thing in the abstract, but unfortunately in this case it gets whacked from multiple angles. Perhaps most glaringly, sustained buffs are now significantly more valuable than one-turn buffs just by virtue of Castoria’s nonsense loop-enabling capabilities, which means even with the shorter cooldown this doesn’t really mesh nicely with Tomoe’s preferred support. To make matters worse, it also doesn’t mesh nicely with the rest of Tomoe’s kit. The star weight buff would imply using this to enable boosted crits via Tomoe’s first skill, which means Tomoe will typically want to save this skill until her crit buff is available. Since the crit buff has a longer cooldown, the shorter cooldown on this skill becomes kind of meaningless in practice. The kicker, though—at least in an “add insult to injury” sense—is that Tomoe’s self-stun effectively inflates the cooldown on this skill by one (assuming the stun isn’t cleared or prevented), which largely negates the implicit “benefit” of the skill in practice. On a different Servant, this could be a good skill. On Tomoe it’s… considerably less valuable than it looks in a vacuum.

Survival is Tomoe’s primary enabling skill. It pairs a significant star burst effect with a passive star gen buff, which synergizes beautifully with Tomoe’s first skill. The two skills even share a cooldown. Using these skills together (especially with some 2030s in play) will help Tomoe to leverage her sustained crit potential. The skill also comes with a 1-time, 5-turn debuff immunity skill. Against enemies who don’t use debuffs, this can reliably prevent Tomoe’s self-stun as well, which helps clean up the skillset a little. Against enemies who do favor debuffs, though, the first debuff to land will consume this effect, which presents something of a dilemma: do you use this skill the same turn you use Tomoe’s first skill in order to facilitate consistent crits, or do you save this till the third turn of the effect to guarantee you protect against the stun? This will depend in part on team composition and card draws—Castoria teams will probably prefer to use this asap, especially since Castoria herself can clear Tomoe’s stun with the use of her NP, where teams with more star gen and less ability to stall (Lanling teams, for example) may prefer to hold off in order to ensure Tomoe doesn’t lose a turn.