Rabbit’s Reviews #392: Alice Kuonji (5* Caster)

After Soujuurou and Aoko, Alice looks positively ordinary. She’s our first AoE SSR Quick Caster, and she has several new mechanics of her own, but in comparison to the two Servants with whom she shares an event, Alice is extremely straightforward: she’s a standard Quick looper with reasonable damage, very good loopage, and some neat utility. She’s a conventionally strong unit who by and large shares the weaknesses of most high-end Quick AoEs—that is to say, she’s mostly stapled to the Skadis, who do less for Quick Servants than Koyan does for Buster and Castoria does for Arts. If you like Quick, though, she’s a good pick, and if you like Alice, she’s more than strong enough to feel good to use—and she’s one of the very best Quick Servants at playing the long game. No objections.

Alice’s stats are pretty average by SSR Caster standards—which, relative to SSRs as a whole, means she has high-ish health and low attack. This isn’t a great start for a damage-dealer, and it does hold her back, especially with Casters’ innate damage reduction factored in. Casters need ridiculous kits in order to make good damage-dealers, and while Alice’s kit is good, it isn’t so strong as to fully overcome that weakness. She’ll be mostly limited to class advantage situations or stall as a result—though she is pretty good in both those cases.

Alice actually has very good internals, though. Her hit counts are quite high, which—especially given her Quick focus—means she’s very good at active star gen. Her Arts cards are also excellent relative to her deck, at 2.55% on a deck type where 1.6-1.7% is standard.

Alice has nice passives, though I do wish she could have passed them off to the Servants who share an event with her. She starts with Territory Creation, which is most notable as a functional NP gain increase for her already-great Arts Cards. She also gets Item Construction, which helps the debuffs on her NP land. Her other two passives are unique to her. Folklore Protection is a weird damage cut. It doesn’t apply to NPs (not that 400 damage off an NP would matter much anyway), but it does apply to damage-over-time debuffs. Some other Servants get proper immunity to DoT debuffs (which is itself a fairly situational benefit), and just reducing their impact by a bit isn’t as impressive, but this can be helpful on occasion. Persistent damage cut, meanwhile, is great, and it amounts to a good chunk of damage resistance against non-crits. Yumina, Alice’s final passive, is a weird one, giving Alice a special 5-time guts effect that triggers against instant-kill effects specifically, along with a second effect that heals Alice for an extra 2000 health when any guts triggers. At first glance, this looks like just a worse version of Instant Death immunity—Instant-Kill effects do proc, they just reduce Alice to 3000 health instead of killing her—but there’s one key difference here: this also applies to sacrifice-type effects. In other words, Chen Gong can’t kill Alice until her Guts is expended. This doesn’t really have any practical value, but it is hilarious and could theoretically enable some weird Chen-specific setups.

Mana Loading is by far Alice’s most important append—she needs it unlocked (though not necessarily maxed) for her CE-less loop setup. Aside from that, the Extra buff is decent due to Alice’s good cards, while Anti-Foreigner damage, while flavorful, is far to situational to be worth the coins, especially on a Servant with lackluster neutral damage.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Caster Piece Open Caster Piece configuration options
3	300,000	x12 Caster Piece Open Caster Piece configuration options x6 Phoenix Feather Open Phoenix Feather configuration options
4	1,000,000	x5 Caster Monument Open Caster Monument configuration options x20 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options x5 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options
Max	3,000,000	x12 Caster Monument Open Caster Monument configuration options x10 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options x5 Egg of Truth Open Egg of Truth configuration options

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Caster Open Gem of Caster configuration options
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Caster Open Gem of Caster configuration options
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Caster Open Magic Gem of Caster configuration options
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Caster Open Magic Gem of Caster configuration options x10 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Caster Open Secret Gem of Caster configuration options x20 Void's Dust Open Void's Dust configuration options
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Caster Open Secret Gem of Caster configuration options x4 Phoenix Feather Open Phoenix Feather configuration options
7 → 8	10,000,000	x8 Phoenix Feather Open Phoenix Feather configuration options x6 Scale of Fantasy Open Scale of Fantasy configuration options
8 → 9	12,000,000	x18 Scale of Fantasy Open Scale of Fantasy configuration options x72 Obsidian Knife Open Obsidian Knife configuration options
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x5 Gem of Caster Open Gem of Caster configuration options
2 → 3	400000	x12 Gem of Caster Open Gem of Caster configuration options
3 → 4	1200000	x5 Magic Gem of Caster Open Magic Gem of Caster configuration options
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Magic Gem of Caster Open Magic Gem of Caster configuration options x5 Eternal Gear Open Eternal Gear configuration options
5 → 6	4000000	x5 Secret Gem of Caster Open Secret Gem of Caster configuration options x10 Eternal Gear Open Eternal Gear configuration options
6 → 7	5000000	x12 Secret Gem of Caster Open Secret Gem of Caster configuration options x15 Mystic Spinal Fluid Open Mystic Spinal Fluid configuration options
7 → 8	10000000	x29 Mystic Spinal Fluid Open Mystic Spinal Fluid configuration options x6 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options
8 → 9	12000000	x18 Giant's Ring Open Giant's Ring configuration options x10 Golden Cauldron Open Golden Cauldron configuration options
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore Open Crystallized Lore configuration options

Alice’s skillset is conventionally strong, with a couple of nice-but-not-super-impactful gimmicks built into it. Recommended skill order is 1>3>2.

Alice is unusual as Quick goes in that she can loop 1/3/x nodes CE-less, provided she has Mana Loading. For this setup, you run Oberon/Alice/Summer Skadi/Summer Skadi. On turn 1, you use Oberon’s 20% charge, Alice’s second and third skills, and all three skills from the first Summer Skadi. You then plug the first Summer Skadi for the second, having her use her damage buffs (though not her battery). Alice NPs, and then on the next turn you use Alice’s first skill and the other Skadi’s 50% battery. On the second turn, Alice refunds a bit over 10% per enemy (enough so that her refund is still sufficient versus Assassins), so against 3 enemies she refunds 30%. Her third skill comes off cooldown, so you can reuse it, along with Oberon’s 50% battery, to secure the loop. A level 90, with class score buffs and an MLB Black Grail, NP2 Alice even breaks a million damage against Man-attribute Assassins, making her 90++ viable for a small subset of nodes at a reasonable level of investment. She also gets nearly a million against out-of-niche Assassins when taken to NP5 and level 120. This isn’t top-end power—an NP2 Tez, for example, has more flexible loop specs and hits 90++ damage numbers against any Rider—but it’s good enough to say Alice is at least minimally viable against top-end content. Not every SSR gets that.

As a stall unit, Alice has a lot more options. In a very broad sense, you can look at her as a Van Gogh alternative who trades crit damage for an offensive NP. She does not have Van Gogh’s partywide defense buffs or her potential 100% battery, but she does have much more selfish bulk along with somewhat better card-based NP gain. With this in mind, Alice should work in similar setups as Van Gogh, biasing towards supports who increase NP damage over supports who buff cards.

Alice/Summer Skadi/Alice, for example, should be able to more or less alternate Alice NPs to keep enemies locked down, with the Alices doing fairly good damage with each NP. The Alices can also protect themselves in a pinch—though Summer Skadi will likely go down as soon as you have an unblocked AoE NP to contend with. Base Skadi, meanwhile, provides slightly weaker party buffs, but her NP can protect against an AoE NP in a pinch. Castoria is even better defensively, though she’ll result in lower overall damage output.

You can also run Alice with Van Gogh, likely in a Van Gogh/Alice/Van Gogh team. Alice appreciates the various buffs Van Gogh provides, and the Van Goghs benefit from Alice’s partywide NP gain buff. With three Servants spamming Terror, enemies should be locked down more or less constantly. This is likely to be weaker than a Van Gogh team backed by a proper support, but VG is self-sufficient enough that having a source of AoE damage may be worth more than the extra defense on occasion.

For a more conventional Quick setup, Alice pairs well with double Caster Skadi. Skadi accelerates Alice herself, and Alice’s NP leads to stuns, which extends your survival. You can toss in Caster Skadi NPs where available to protect against incidental damage, and the end result is a Quick team that’s highly likely to survive to a second buff cycle—or maybe even a third if you’re lucky. You have no healing and aren’t going to be able to prevent all incoming damage, so you’re still on something of a timer, but your survival will be much better than in a typical Quick team. The Skadis will also almost certainly die before Alice does, so you can safely put additional supports in your 4th and 5th slots—Summer Skadi, Castoria, and Reines are all good picks—to keep the team moving even once Servants start going down.

Alice is also self-sufficient enough to work well in lower-end teams. She benefits most from Quick supports who also increase NP gain, of which there are sadly not very many. Your best options for this are going to be Servants like Barti and Hans, who provide both damage and a bit of charge.

Alice has such good NP gain there’s little reason not to run her with a CE that pushes her NP damage as much as possible. The Black Grail is the go-to option for this, though for longer fights the demerit can start to be an issue, in which case Heaven’s Feel is a workable alternative. Holy Maiden of Winter is also an interesting option, especially if you have it maxed out, as its combination of NP damage and passive NP gain works well with Alice’s kit. There’s also the classic Imaginary Around, which provides less damage in practice due to falling into a fuller buff bracket, but which functionally increases Alice’s NP gain on her NP and her Quicks.

For all of her strengths, Alice has no in-kit crit buffs. This is a natural gap to fill with CCs—she should be critting with high consistency, thanks to her naturally strong star gen, so crit damage CCs are pretty much pure benefit.

Casters don’t benefit all that much from grails, and Alice’s damage is sufficient for Man-attribute Assassins even at level 90, provided she’s at least NP2. That said, extra levels can offset missing pieces, like MLB BG or class score, and a level 120 Alice works generically against Assassins provided she can loop. She’s also a strong enough CQ option that I might consider grailing her for that reason alone—given her bulk, she might actually get a bit of value out of having more health, in addition to the typical benefits of dealing more damage.

Alice is really good. She has very strong loop specs by Quick standards, and while her damage isn’t remarkable, it’s good enough for clearing 90++ nodes with class advantage and niche at reasonable levels of investment, which certainly isn’t a given for all SSRs. More importantly, though, she’s great for long fights, and while her kit isn’t all that unique, it comes together in such a way as to make her an interesting Servant with her own game plan. She’s not quite a top-tier unit—her damage is too low, her loop specs not quite good enough, her NP too green—but she’s only a notch below, and if you’re a fan of the character you’ll have a good time letting her loose on things. Hard to complain about that.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 9/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 8/10
Farming Usefulness: 7/10
Ploys: 10/10