Table of Contents
Note: Vidya - Agave has potential buffs coming in the near future. This review does not take that into account and only considers her current state.
Update: lol, lmao even
Having transferred out of Laevatein and promoted to the Heimdall Force, the movie-loving Vidya - Agave joins the active duty roster as an Electric pistol operative. While she aspires to wow the critics with an Oscar-winning performance, she unfortunately finds that reality doesn’t quite match the fantasies in her overactive imagination, even with the help of a strong supporting cast.
Abilities
Agave’s standard skill is what you’ll be using most of the time when playing her. To simplify a lot of word vomit from Seasun, it sends out a projectile that does damage to the targeting enemy that AoEs onto nearby enemies as well, while also restoring U-Energy. This skill has four “phases,” with higher phases doing more damage (duh). Casting the skill increases the phase up to the maximum (again, to be expected), though you can also use support skills to increase the phase instead once you have neuros unlocked, saving some ramp-up time. Being at phase 2 or higher gives Agave CC resistance, and skill hits at phase 4 also knock back the main targeted enemy. If you’re at phase 2 or higher and run out of S-Energy to cast Agave’s standard skill, you use up all your remaining S-Energy to do a final blast dealing extra damage that increases based on how much S-Energy gets chomped (up to double!). In practice, the damage is just… okay. It’s still a decent showing and more than enough for most situations, but it’s nothing to write home about when compared to other recent DPS releases.
This ability does have a special trick up its sleeve, however. Well, one and a half. If the skill hits an enemy with breakable parts, it does break damage to up to two parts on the enemy while also reducing the cost of your next skill cast. This actually makes her quite good for parts breaking on enemies with exactly two targetable parts (eg. Joseph - Hardened) or enemies where the specific parts being broken doesn’t matter (Nightborne Phantom). But on enemies with more parts that you want to specifically focus down, like either of the Ni-Mechs, the random nature of which part gets damaged on each hit makes it considerably less useful. Also if you kill an enemy with a skill cast then the next one is free, but this is basically expected from a skill this spammable. Oh right, did I mention that it basically has no cooldown? Yeah.
Moving on to Stunt Coordination, Agave’s support skill knocks up nearby enemies in front of her, also applying Paralyze with neuronics unlocked. This ability doesn’t have a flat cost, but instead uses 20% of Agave’s S-Energy. For every 1 S-Energy past 10 that’s consumed, Agave also buffs your entire team for 2% ATK. In theory, this sounds pretty cool. But reality tends to disappoint, and we’ll have to look at some numbers to explain why. All operatives have a 50 S-Energy cap by default, which means that any other operative casting this ability at full S-Energy would consume 10 and produce no buff at all. However, both Agave’s event shop and gacha weapon increase her S-Energy cap by 20, while the passive part of her ult increases the cap by another 30 (more on this later) for a total of 100. This brings the maximum amount of S-Energy consumed to 20, which conveniently translates to a 20% ATK buff. Unfortunately, it scales off of Agave’s base ATK stat and is thus completely irrelevant compared to any actual damage-buffing support. You also can’t effectively supplement the buff with Prismatic Igniter as it doesn’t increase Agave’s S-Energy cap, so even Lyfe - Wednesday with Frigatebird and Navigator Squad ends up being quite competitive as a Paralyze support at a fraction of the cost. It’s more Rotten Tomatoes than Certified Fresh, unfortunately.
Reaching the cinematic climax of this B-list action thriller, we have Agave’s ultimate. Its active component is actually quite simple, being just a one-hit nuke with a knock-up and not much else. But rather, it’s the passive effects that make things interesting. For starters, Agave innately has her S-Energy cap increased by 30, but also doesn’t actually regenerate S-Energy passively while active. Instead, you’re apparently intended to shoot enemies to rapidly recover S-Energy via this ability’s second passive. And while it does refill the bar quite quickly, shooting also completely resets the phase level of your standard skill, meaning you’ll have to stack it back up from zero. Capping off the trilogy of passives is a separate resource that Agave generates when she casts her standard skill (up to 100), with casts at higher phases naturally providing more stacks. These get consumed when Agave ults to increase the damage multiplier from 410% up to a respectable 4,410% of her attack stat. Needless to say, you generally want to ult with as many stacks as possible.
The post-credits scene of Agave’s kit features her Deiwos passive, which is just a straightforward skill damage boost as long as she’s using an Electric weapon. Simple and straightforward, more damage for free is always good.
Overall, Agave’s kit is very much reminiscent of other modern skill DPS operatives, featuring a high-uptime standard ability that generates stacks to roid up an otherwise low-resource-cost instance of big burst damage. And in that sense, she works for the most part. But it seems that in an attempt to put her own spin on the formula, Agave unfortunately loses the plot and suffers from several truly baffling design decisions. Being forced to reset the power of your main DPS tool in order to maintain its uptime is a caveat you’d expect from a character in Snowbreak’s original launch roster (and not an SSR, either), and the fact that there’s no built-in method of restoring S-Energy without having to rely on her shooting passive (enemy kills and parts hits only give Agave a discount on her skill casts, and don’t refund S-Energy) results in a clunky gameplay loop for even trash mobbing. Furthermore, the resource that her ultimate ability relies on to achieve its big burst numbers is painfully slow to accumulate, taking far longer than both Cherno - Enigma and Siris - Ksana, her closest points of skill burst comparison, while also doing noticeably less damage.
That’s not to say that Agave doesn’t have her uses, however. Being able to trivially deal with parts-equipped elite mooks does go a long way towards mobbing quality of life, and the S-Energy discount when damaging breakable parts gives Agave surprisingly decent skill uptime against bosses where this kind of thing is relevant. But with worse (or at least less convenient) mobbing than Haru - Absconditus and unimpressive burst damage locked behind a considerable time delay, Agave finds herself as a far cry from the summer blockbuster she had in mind and leaves players wanting a buffed up extended cut that hopefully fixes her shortcomings.
Manifests
While Agave doesn’t earn herself rave reviews, her manifests sure do their best to try and change that. Manifest 1 decreases her standard skill’s S-Energy cost and reloads bullets into her gun on cast, which goes a long way towards improving her skill uptime. Meanwhile, Manifest 2 applies a chunky Final Damage buff to her standard skill casts, providing a new and undiluted buff ensured to have maximum effectiveness. Further releases in the series don’t disappoint, with Manifest 3 boosting her shooting S-Energy regen and giving her standard ability even more party tricks, this time a defence debuff that applies on direct skill hit. Rounding things off is the usual M4 skill ratio boost, applying to Agave’s standard skill in this case, and the closing scene at Manifest 5 provides another Final Damage buff that this time applies to both her standard skill and ultimate.
No really, they’re actually all pretty good. I’d go for M2 at least, but pushing further only really comes with downsides of the extra fragment cost and the fact that you’re investing into a DPS that’s “just” above-average in performance.
Logistics
Agave’s supporting actresses in Chaya Squad put on an admirable performance, providing up to a 64% skill damage boost to both her standard and ultimate abilities. It’s good. Use it. Ideal logistics stats are just as straightforward, with attack and Alignment Index being the ones to get. Much like Agave’s playstyle, it’s pretty simple.
See the supplementary material for a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.
Weapons
So before we get into actual weapon comparisons, I’m just going to cover all the options that aren’t Agave’s shop or gacha gun. To make a long story short, none of them are worth using because they don’t boost Agave’s S-Energy cap. As well, they’re all off-element which locks you out of Agave’s ultimate ability neuronics, Deiwos passive, and the Final Damage boost from M2. I’ve included them on the damage comparison graphic anyways in the interest of completeness but seriously, don’t bother.
Now, weapons you should actually be using. Both her event weapon Pure Verdure and Snapshot Ace in the gacha do similar things. Both increase Agave’s S-Energy cap by 20 and provide a stacking %DMG boost when using her standard ability (skill damage and elemental damage are actually the same thing as far as damage calculations are concerned). That stacking boost also happens to instantly dip the second you fire a bullet out of either gun. When you then remember how you’re supposed to deal with Agave’s S-Energy issues, you can see why I’m not the biggest fan of her kit.
But while that’s all that’s included with the shop gun’s general admission ticket, upgrading to a VIP seat also gets you a drink, popcorn, and some extra functionality from Snapshot Ace. For starters, you get a permanent skill damage buff which helps bring the value of that category of buff closer to parity with the shop gun, even surpassing it at T2. However, the real magic comes in the form of a damage taken debuff that gets applied to enemies when the weapon’s buff is fully stacked. It doesn’t actually display the debuff on enemy status bars the last time I checked, but I assure you it’s there. But visible or not, it’s a pretty rare modifier that won’t have its value too diluted in most situations, giving Snapshot Ace a substantial boost in performance.
Conclusion
So is our resident film fanatic worth the trouble to get?
Not really. For a character with such an unengaging and simple gameplay loop, she ironically finds most of her value in high-level sweaty Neural Sim gameplay breaking parts on Joseph - Hardened and fighting her designated character-pandering boss Nightborne Phantom. It’s niche value, but it’s there.
And to be clear, Agave’s main problem isn’t even her overall strength. Not every character has to raise the bar for DPS output or be a broken support. In fact, it’s actually better for the meta and the game in general if that isn't the case. But they should at least be fun to play, and in most if not all content, players will find that her one-button playstyle and arbitrary gameplay restrictions create a clunky and often frustrating experience.
Hopefully the sequel is better.
Supplementary Material
Includes:
- Logistics optimization calculator
- Weapon comparison calculations at both M0 and M2
