Rabbit's Reviews #285: Taira no Kagekiyo

Kagekiyo is a remarkably straightforward Servant. She has a few gimmicky bits here and there, but ultimately she’s just a powerful and reliable ST Quick Servant. Kagekiyo has relatively low damage steroids, but she makes up for it with strong crit buffs and (more importantly) extremely high consistency. She’s one of the best netural Quick damage-dealers in the game, which is neat in its own right—although the actual value of this in practice is somewhat diminished by the plethora of powerful free Quick tools, not to mention the (generally superior) Arts options. All-in-all, this leaves Kagekiyo as a very strong Servant who’s ultimately rather forgettable.

Kagekiyo’s stat spread is generally offense-leaning, even by Avenger standards. This is good, given her DPS role, as the high stats help overcome her relatively low base steroids. Her internals are quite good, too, with high NP and Quick hit-counts that allow her to generate a lot of stars. Similarly, her Arts card NP gain is standard for her deck, and her Quick cards are solid—and between her multi-hit NP and her four good genning cards, she’ll have a pretty easy time of looping her NP assuming proper supports. She also has the three standard Avenger passives, which slightly boost her crit damage and (more importantly) boost her overall NP gain in practice. Very nice.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Ghost Lantern x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
3	300,000	x10 Refined Magatama x10 Primordial Lanugo
4	1,000,000	x10 Tearstone of Blood x10 Black Beast Grease
Max	3,000,000	x10 Cursed Beast Gallstone x10 Demonic Flame Light

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Evil Bone
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Fool's Chain
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Ghost Lantern
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Stake of Wailing Night
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Arrowhead of Atonement
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Tearstone of Blood
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Cursed Beast Gallstone
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Tsukumo Mirror
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

For how involved her skillset looks, Kagekiyo’s kit is actually pretty straightforward in practice. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Kagekiyo is a highly typical Quick looper. With double Skadi, she deals very high damage, drops a lot of stars, and loops easily with her four genning cards. Assuming you have a native Skadi, the only real question is who you plug in as your third support. Castoria is (as always) a strong pick due to her survival tools and NP gen buffs, and Kagekiyo’s generic crit buff means she can actually leverage Castoria’s Arts buff for powerful Arts crits. Reines and Waver are also useful for their attack buffs, as always.

Kagekiyo does have some good synergy with a few less typical supports as well, however. Doman is the most notable of these—as Kagekiyo is Chaotic Evil, she gains the full benefit of his buffs, and her strong innate loopage means she can run support Doman without much of a drop in consistency in exchange for huge damage. Similarly, while Chen Gong is always great, Kagekiyo can use Chen Gong to forcibly proc her own guts in exchange for extra damage if you’re confident you can win quickly. Similarly, Asclepius boosts Kagekiyo’s NP gain and can provide extra gutses for extra Vengeance stacks, while Santa Nightingale also provides an extra guts while providing significant NP damage boosts.

Guts-centric Kagekiyo setups are going to be generally inferior to running her in “typical” Quick teams, but especially if you don’t have native Skadi the aforementioned alternative supports can allow for highly effective setups. Something like Asclepius/Kagekiyo/Support Skadi/Summer Night lets Kagekiyo NP on turn 1 with Black Grail (or even Poster Girl) and leaves you with plenty of NP gain and damage buffs to work with.

Given that Kagekiyo is meant for CQ contexts and CQs allow cards, Kagekiyo is free to run Black Grail for maximum damage and rely on genning cards to loop. If you’re having consistency issues and you have more than enough damage, however—when fighting Genji, for instance—you could run something like Traces of Christmas instead, for starting NP and more consistent loopage. Poster Girl also gets a shout-out, if you have it, as you can use it to make Kagekiyo more likely to proc her gutses while also supercharging her damage in the first three turns.

Kagekiyo is all about damage, and she has most everything else she needs, so CCs that boost her damage are going to be good picks. Her Quicks will benefit less from this as they’ll be loaded with buffs regardless, but adding to her Buster or Arts crit damage can stabilize her overall damage output.

Avengers are good grail targets in general, as they get extra effective attack from the levels. Kagekiyo likely won’t need the extra damage (and may not want the extra health), but if you find yourself using her often and wish she hit just a little harder, she’s not a bad grail pick.

Kagekiyo is very strong. She has high damage, consistent loopage, buff removal, and very good survivability. While she’s probably inferior to, say, MHXA (not to mention the likes of Vlad), she still has quite a bit going for her, and she’ll do very well for anyone who wants to invest in her. That said, we have plenty of very strong free ST Quicks, including two excellent welfares within the past year, so the value of a very-good-but-not-outstanding neutral ST Quick is diminished somewhat. She’s probably not a Servant to target unless you actively like her, as the free tools will do fine for you and Arts Servants are still better in general, but if you do choose to go for her you won’t be disappointed.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 9/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 8/10
Offensive Utility: 3/10
Defensive Utility: 2/10
Farming Usefulness: 5/10
Brotherly Grudge: 10/10