Xu Fu is mostly a CQ unit, but she does have some farming value. She actually brings more loopage than Tamamo does, while also providing a 30% battery. For farming, she’s sort of like a budget Bride—much less damage, but roughly the same level of loop enabling. Especially for anyone without multiple meta supports, Xu Fu is an option for enabling Arts loops in standard nodes.
If you don’t have Castoria natively but you do have an AoE Arts DPS with Mana loading, you can run Xu Fu/DPS/Friend Castoria as your front line. Xu Fu provides less loopage than Castoria does, but depending on the DPS, you may still be able to loop standard nodes. You’ll have the best luck at this with a DPS who has 50% charge, and a backline charger (such as Waver) you can plug in. Even better if you have Oberon, but I suspect there are more players who have Waver and not Castoria than who have Oberon and not Castoria, since Waver is available for free if you choose him.
Generally, though, Xu Fu is most valuable as an alternative support in CQ contexts. While she doesn’t bring a lot of damage, she does offer loopage and batteries, plus a fair bit of utility. There are three main cases in which you’d want her:
1) You don’t have many native support options.
2) You’re running low on cost and you want a cheap support to slot in to your back line.
3) You want a good sacrificial support.
Let’s tackle these one by one.
If you don’t have a lot of meta support options to choose from, Xu Fu is probably the best Arts-oriented free option outside of maybe Mash. The other free support options come with caveats that can make them unappealing in certain situations. Paracelsus has very long cooldowns and is heavily focused on looping specifically. Asclepius has no damage push whatsoever. Hans is somewhat inconsistent and not the best for Arts, Barti is fairly burst-oriented and, again, not really oriented towards Arts, Mozart is bursty and fragile, etc etc. Xu Fu brings lots of generically useful Arts tools and isn’t really missing anything you’d want in a budget support. Her damage push is fairly low, but her direct competition isn’t better, and she brings so much of value that she’s worth bringing anyway.
I mentioned this above, but Xu Fu/Mana Loading DPS/Waver enables an instant NP with any CE, and with batteries, starting charge CEs, and cards, budget Xu Fu teams can probably loop reasonably effectively. Even better if you can grab a support Castoria off your support list. There’s not a lot of complexity here, really—you just pair Xu Fu with a good Arts DPS and whatever other supports you have and you’re off to the races. There are plenty of great free Arts units you can use, too—the likes of Euryale and Mandricardo will love what Xu Fu brings—so anyone should be able to use Xu Fu to good effect, regardless of how developed their box is.
For the second case, Xu Fu is a solid backline support option who can be slotted into a team at relatively low cost. Xu Fu’s battery makes her a better emergency support than Paracelsus, as she can slot in late in a fight and help push a DPS towards a fight-closing NP. If you don’t have enough team cost left for another proper support but don’t want to leave a team slot blank, Xu Fu is a good option.
Finally, Xu Fu is fragile enough that she can potentially give her buffs and then die off if she’s equipped with a taunt CE. If you plan to do this, it might be worth keeping a level 50 Xu Fu handy, as she’s slightly more likely to die to enemy fire than a maxed-out Xu Fu is. A sacrificial Xu Fu doesn’t give much extra damage, but she does provide NP charge and a fair bit of NP gain, making her a nice consistency option for bursty Arts setups that have enough damage but are struggling to secure loops. I don’t know how common of a situation that is—I suspect it will be pretty rare in practice—but it’s there if you need it.
One thing to consider if you’re keeping a level 50 Xu Fu for sacrificial reasons is that you probably want to leave her at NP1. NP levels only increase Xu Fu’s healing, and you want your sacrificial Xu Fu to, well, die. In most cases this won’t matter, but if Xu Fu is taunting on a turn after she’s already taken some damage (say, because of Kriemhild’s taunt or the GudaGuda Poster Girl CE), she may want to use her NP for the stars without healing herself as much. This is a niche case, but there’s basically no reason to give NP levels to your level 50 Xu Fu and there’s some small potential value to not doing so, so… might as well leave her at NP1.
As a budget support, Xu Fu has a few CE options. 2030 is a nice one if you plan to let her NP, as Xu Fu generates a whopping 28 stars per turn with 2030 and one stack of her NP. That’s not enough for reliable crits without other tools in play, but it is enough to complement Arts Servants who have their own in-kit crit tools. You can also give Xu Fu defensive CEs. If you happen to have a good healing up CE, that can make Xu Fu surprisingly durable. With Maid in Halloween, NP5 Xu Fu heals herself nearly to full with each NP. Speaking of her NP, Kaleid is also an option for getting Xu Fu’s star gen rolling asap, though that’s probably not worth it for most teams.
When you’re bringing Xu Fu for cost reasons, you’re probably running her without a CE—if you have the cost capacity to put a good CE on Xu Fu, you also have the cost capacity to bring a higher-rarity support. A sacrificial Xu Fu, meanwhile, wants a taunt CE, which means Outrage or Poster Girl. Poster Girl has sadly not been available for a long time, but Outrage is in the rare prism shop, so you can snag it there if you haven’t already bought its CE exchange.
Xu Fu is not here for damage, so instead she’s better off with utility CCs. CCs that remove buffs are a nice complement to Xu Fu’s in-kit utility, and CCs that boost party damage are also a good pick. Healing CCs and star gen CCs are also options if you plan to actually leverage Xu Fu’s NP, as those CCs will play into the defense- and star-gen-focused playstyle her NP implies.
Introduction
Alter Ego
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