Rabbit's Reviews #319: Taisui Xingjun (4* Alter Ego)

Taisui draws immediate comparisons to last year’s welfare, Ranmaru. Both are AoE Arts Servants in Extra classes. Both have similar loopability and base damage in practice. Both are, broadly speaking, very good. As an Alter Ego, though, Taisui comes with a simple distinguishing factor: he deals bonus damage to cavalry, and half damage to knights. This establishes him pretty solidly as a sidegrade to Ranmaru: Taisui is better for cavalry-only nodes, while Ranmaru shines against anything with knights. Ranmaru is probably better overall—the Avenger chassis is just really hard to compete with—but Taisui’s damage advantage against cavalry is no joke, and he brings some nice utility along as well. Taisui’s event is also only locked by LB2 (instead of Heiankyo), making him a little more accessible than Ranmaru.

All this is to say, Taisui and Ranmaru are pretty similar, but Taisui has enough distinct use cases for the two to both have value. Not a bad place for a new welfare, especially considering Taisui is objectively pretty strong.

We don’t have many SR Alter Egos to compare Taisui to, but he has by far the most defensive stat spread of the bunch, and he has low-mid attack and high-ish HP relative to SRs as a whole. This is not a great starting point for such a generically deepsy unit, but fortunately Taisui’s solid steroids and free access to NP5 help prop up his damage regardless. Unfortunately, Taisui also has weak NP gain, with bad Quicks, Arts cards that are well-below average, and low base NP refund. His star gen is marginally better thanks to his two 4-hit Quicks, but he’s still an Arts unit with few crit tools, so those Quicks only take him so far. For passives, he has Magic Resistance for occasionally avoiding debuffs, Item Construction for making the debuffs on his NP slightly more reliable, and Divinity for flavor. For Appends, Mana Loading is the most important as always. Taisui doesn’t get much out of the Extra Attack buff—his Extra is pretty bad—but he does get bonus damage against Assassins, which makes him a nice substitute for an AoE Caster, especially if you missed Sieg and don’t have the depth of supports to fuel Chen Gong. Since Taisui is a welfare, too, you can safely unlock all three appends without extreme investment, which is a nice bonus.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x1 Proof of No.1 Fan
3	150,000	x1 Proof of No.1 Fan
4	500,000	x1 Proof of No.1 Fan
Max	1,500,000	x1 Proof of No.1 Fan

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x4 Gem of Assassin x4 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	200,000	x10 Gem of Assassin x10 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	600,000	x4 Magic Gem of Assassin x4 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Magic Gem of Assassin x10 Magic Gem of Berserker
5 → 6	2,000,000	x4 Secret Gem of Assassin x4 Secret Gem of Berserker
6 → 7	2,500,000	x10 Secret Gem of Assassin x10 Secret Gem of Berserker
7 → 8	50,000,000	x6 Octuplet Crystals x6 Homunculus Baby
8 → 9	6,000,000	x7 Spirit Root x7 Cursed Beast Gallstone
9 → 10	10,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100000	x4 Gem of Assassin x4 Gem of Berserker
2 → 3	200000	x10 Gem of Assassin x10 Gem of Berserker
3 → 4	600000	x4 Magic Gem of Assassin x4 Magic Gem of Berserker
4 → 5	800000	x10 Magic Gem of Assassin x10 Magic Gem of Berserker
5 → 6	2000000	x4 Secret Gem of Assassin x4 Secret Gem of Berserker
6 → 7	2500000	x10 Secret Gem of Assassin x10 Secret Gem of Berserker
7 → 8	5000000	x6 Refined Magatama x4 Tearstone of Blood
8 → 9	6000000	x14 Vision Scales x7 Fragment of a Twinkling Star
9 → 10	10000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Taisui needs all three skills leveled to be fully effective, but skill 2 is mostly just utility and as such can safely be saved for last. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

There are more or less four main ways to setup Taisui for farming: no CE and plug, Kaleid and no plug, Kaleid and plug, and a 50% CE and… well, lots of options. We’ll go through those in order.

CE-less setups specifically refer to setups that let Taisui loop without starting NP charge, allowing him to equip an event CE or Black Grail for their respective benefits. This requires at least 3 enemies per wave, but it’s a pretty straightforward setup: you start with two Castorias, using all the buffs from one and the NP gain buff from the other, along with Taisui’s battery (as it gives more damage than the other Castoria’s attack buff). Turn 2 you use the remaining Castoria attack buff and Oberon’s NP damage buff. Turn 3 you use Oberon’s 50% battery to close out the loop. Easy and reliable, but a bit slow.

For a somewhat faster setup, you can sacrifice Taisui’s CE slot for a Kaleid. In this case, you still want double Castoria, and you use both of their Arts buffs turn 1. Turn 2 you use the Castoria NP gain buffs and Taisui’s battery. Turn 3 you use both Castorias’ attack buffs, and you’ve secured the loop. Note here that we aren’t using a Mystic Code at all—this means Taisui can actually handle 3/1/x or 1/3/x nodes with the help of a mystic code for some extra charge or extra NP gain, depending on the node. This not requiring plug means it takes less time, making it more desirable for farming if you aren’t trying to 6CE and don’t need the extra damage from Oberon and Black Grail.

The third option is simultaneously the best and worst of both worlds. With Kaleid, two Castorias, and Oberon, Taisui can tri-loop with batteries alone: Kaleid turn 1, Castoria and Taisui batteries turn 2, and Castoria and Oberon batteries turn 3. This results in less damage than Black Grail setups and means you’re running at most five event CEs, but it leads to more damage than plugless Kaleid setups and—more importantly—lets Taisui farm any node, regardless of enemy composition, provided he has enough damage. Having more 90+ farming tools is always nice, and not every event will give enough CEs to run six without rolling the gacha anyway, so it’s at least worth noting.

And then you can stick a 50% charge CE on Taisui. There are too many possible variants on how this would work to outline them all here, but the basic principle is the same as the other plug setups: two Castorias, a plug charger, and skills mixed-and-matched as needed. While this isn’t quite as reliable as the Kaleid-plus-plug setup, it should be workable for all but the most restrictive nodes, especially if you use a good Arts CE like Painting Summer or Ocean Flyer—both of which boost both damage and effective NP gain, which is the key advantage of using them over Kaleid.

For CQs, much of the same applies. With access to cards, though, there’s less reason to use Kaleid, especially when Black Grail and company give so much extra damage. For optimal play, run two Castorias and either Tamamo (for extra turn-over-turn damage) or Oberon (for reliable loopage and an emergency burst).

Outside of fully optimal comps, though, Taisui’s utility and passive star gen make him a decent partner for Arts crit units, specifically Lanling and Sherlock. A Lanling/Taisui/Sherlock team will have pretty consistent NP and crit access and will do solid damage with cards. It’s not the best team out there, but it should be at least workable for fights that aren’t maximally hard.

If you level Taisui’s skills, he also works as an alternative Arts support in cases where you need buff removal resistance or debuff immunity. For generic use, servants like Paracelsus and Mozart are generally preferable, but neither has answers to the specific gimmicks Taisui does, which gives Taisui a nice additional use case, particularly if you don’t have Archer Nightingale.

I’ve touched on this above, but Taisui really wants one of Black Grail, a 50% charge CE, or Kaleid, depending on how much starting charge you need. Black Grail can be replaced with Mark on a Smiling Face or Heaven’s Feel in a pinch, but really, Black Grail is what you want.

There aren’t any super obvious CC picks for Taisui. Crit damage CCs fill a gap in his kit, but not a particularly important gap. Utility CCs may be a good pick for occasional support use—Taisui doesn’t have in-kit ways of removing enemy buffs, for example, so putting that on cards can be a nice touch. Curse CCs are also an option, albeit a niche one—if you’re fighting that perfect enemy for Taisui to stack their curse damage up, even a small amount of damage from a Curse command code can add up to substantial additional damage over time.

If you’re not bothered by Taisui not working against half the main classes, he’s a solid grail pick. Taisui is, at the end of the day, a good, standard AoE Arts unit. You can definitely bring him to most AoE fights with Cavalry and expect him to perform well, and more stats will let him do that even better.

Taisui is great, really. It’s hard to go wrong with an AoE Arts unit who has good damage and the specs to loop. Sure, Ranmaru exists to do similar things, but Taisui has better damage against a good chunk of the cast—and much better damage in some cases—on top of some good utility. No complaints. Definitely raise this one.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 4/10
AoE DPS: 8/10
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 5/10
Defensive Utility: 5/10
Farming Usefulness: 9/10
Investiture Accuracy: ?/10