Rabbit’s Reviews #352: Kukulkan (5* Foreigner)

Kukulkan is a great Servant. She’s more-or-less an Arjuna Alter sidegrade, with a bit less neutral damage and much lower crit potential in exchange for an anti-Earth niche, a 50% battery, and a bunch of neat utility. For anyone who hasn’t already heavily invested in one of the high-damager Buster units—AA, Nobu, Morgan, etc—Kukulkan is a fantastic get and a good candidate for NP levels and grails past 100. That said, she doesn’t actually raise the ceiling of what’s possible, and players with favored tools won’t miss much if they skip her.

That is to say, she’s in a similar position to Tezcatlipoca. She’s just below the absolute upper end of her archetype, with a bunch of neat utility and a handful of advantages to situationally put her on top. She’s a nicely balanced top-end unit and a good addition to the game.

Kukulkan has an offense-oriented stat spread, with low HP in exchange for the highest attack of the SSR Foreigners. This is a great starting point for a damage-dealer and sets her up well to hit things hard. Her internals are pretty typical for a single-Arts unit, with a good-but-unremarkable Arts and Quick. With only one Quick card, Star gen is not an innate strength. She also only has two passives, and both are unique. Civilization Creation is an AoE version of Item Construction, giving the whole team a slight increase to debuff success rate while Kukulkan is on the field. This can be nice if you’re running Kukulkan with supports who rely on debuffs, like Waver or Reines, though Kukulkan’s best supports aren’t debuff-reliant, and neither is Kukulkan herself, so the practical value of this passive is limited. Kukulkan’s other passive, though, is one of the best in the game. It gives a whopping 10 stars per turn, along with 3% passive NP charge. The passive charge isn’t as important on Kukulkan as it would be on a Quick or Arts unit, but it’s still nice to have, and the stars are critical to enabling Kukulkan’s unique skill gimmick, as well as to getting more reliable crits. Finally, the passive turns any invulns on Kukulkan into Solemn Defense, which is nifty for letting her survive against enemies with pierce invuln. This can cause some small problems if you’re running a Castoria stall team, as invulns placed on Kukulkan can prevent Castoria’s NP’s invulns from applying properly, but that’s a very small drawback to what is otherwise a very strong passive.

Mana Loading is the only append that does much for Kukulkan. The Extra card buff can help her ST performance a tiny bit, and the Moon Cancer attack buff is way too specific to be valuable.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Dragon Fang x10 Seed of Yggdrasil
3	300,000	x10 Phoenix Feather x10 Spirit Root
4	1,000,000	x10 Serpent Jewel x10 Fruit of Eternity
Max	3,000,000	x10 Dragon's Reverse Scale x10 Sun Leather

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Dragon Fang
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Phoenix Feather
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Serpent Jewel
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Claw of Chaos
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Primordial Lanugo
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Dragon's Reverse Scale
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Mysterious Divine Wine
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Sun Leather
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x10 Seed of Yggdrasil
2 → 3	400000	x10 Spirit Root
3 → 4	1200000	x12 Giant's Ring
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Divine Leyline Spiritron
5 → 6	4000000	x12 Fruit of Eternity
6 → 7	5000000	x15 Ball of Rainbow Thread
7 → 8	10000000	x15 Twilight Ritual Sword
8 → 9	12000000	x15 Fragment of a Twinkling Star
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Each of Kukulkan’s skills has a neat gimmick where you can choose to spend 10 stars in exchange for an additional effect. These effects are quite useful, and Kukulkan has plenty of ways to get stars, which makes this pretty easy to use. That said, there are two drawbacks here: one being that consuming stars for bonus effects makes Kukulkan less likely to crit, reducing her damage in CQ contexts, and the other being that clicking on a skill opens a menu for whether you want to use the extra stars, adding an extra set of button presses to each skill, which can be an annoying bit of extra time when farming. Overall, though, this is a pretty amazing skillset for a DPS, pairing the requisite battery with the highest Koyan-compatible steroids in the game (outside of niche damage boosts). Recommended skill order is 2>3>1.

As a Buster farmer, Kukulkan’s loop setups are quite simple. She needs a starting charge CE and two Koyans, plus a 50%+ charger to plug in for wave three. Kukulkan’s battery lets her NP on turn 1, the Koyans get turn 2 and reduce Kukulkan’s cooldowns, and Kukulkan’s battery plus the other charger secure the loop. Oberon is the best third support for this given the massive damage increase End of the Dream provides, but any 50% charger can suffice—Waver and Reines are both fine if the damage loss isn’t a problem.

For CQs, the same idea applies, though Kukulkan can get away with a CE that gives more damage in exchange for needing some cards to loop. There’s not a lot of complexity here: you press the buttons and Kukulkan hits the things.

In lower-end teams, supports who provide stars and crit tools are helpful to Kukulkan. Hans fits the bill here, of course, for his stars-per-turn, damage buffs, and passive NP charge. Barti is also a good pick here, as his star burst can immediately fuel Kukulkan’s skill gimmicks, and he drops his own star weight to zero to make it easier for Kukulkan to crit. As mentioned above, she can also work as a support, if you don’t have better 50% chargers: she can offer 50% charge, 20% attack up, and some defensive buffs to an ally. She’s inferior as a support to the likes of Waver and Reines, but she’s much better at the job than most off-meta supports are.

For farming, Kukulkan wants one of the good Buster CEs with full attack and 50% charge. CEs like Aerial Drive and Cranking are both solid options. In CQs, Black Grail is better if you can still loop reliably with it. Support Kukulkan can also do well with 2030 for additional stars each turn.

Despite her high steroids, Kukulkan’s crits are a lot less impressive than AA’s. Crit damage CCs can help with this a little bit, so I’d recommend those, especially for her Buster cards.

Kukulkan is one of the best Buster units in the game, and she has high base attack that scales well with additional levels. If you get her to NP2 or higher, I’d strongly recommend taking her to level 100, and if you happen to get lucky and hit NP4 or NP5, she’s a very strong candidate for level 120—she’ll crush most content at that point.

Kukulkan is a very carefully balanced Servant. Her neutral damage, while remarkably high, is a bit behind AA’s, meaning she doesn’t completely power-creep him, but her anti-Earth niche means she competes favorably when swinging against her favored enemies. She also has a bunch of nice utility, and for new players she has the decency of standing in for better supports. She’s not quite unique enough to be worth pulling if you already have a strong Buster omnifarmer—and there are more than a few who do the job well enough with heavy investment—but she definitely suffices as a strong alternative to them, and, as I said in Tez’s review, having more units at the top level of power is, I think, a good thing, especially when they’re not actively pushing the power ceiling. Kukulkan sits nicely right at the top, but no higher.

Overall: 10/10
Single-Target DPS: 7/10
AoE DPS: 10/10
Survivability: 7/10
Offensive Utility: 6/10
Defensive Utility: 6/10
Farming Usefulness: 9/10
Suns: 5/5