Our favorite wandering poet and exile- Kaedehara Kazuha wasn’t well-received upon his first release. As an Anemo character, he was called an inferior Venti or a 5-star Sucrose and people said he had nothing original in his kit. Cut to a year later and everybody’s been begging for a Kazuha rerun banner for his meta-defining role in the current game. Read on as we discuss what makes this character such a gem to play.
How Kazuha Still Blows the Competition
While it’s true that parts of his kit seem like a collage of various other Anemo characters, Kazuha not only makes these his own but improves on them. Below are two ways Kazuha borrows the kit of other Anemo units and improves on them-
Crowd Control
While it’s still true that both Venti and Sucrose have better crowd control abilities than Kazuha, both of their crowd control skills still rely on auto-aiming on the battlefield to an extent. While this problem can be solved by backing enemies into a corner, in a heated battle it’s still difficult to arrange enemies like that and even more annoying when their skills miss the intended targets.
With Kazuha, your Elemental Skill- Chiyaraburu accurately only pulls in enemies towards Kazuha. Aiming Kazuha’s crowd control skill is much easier as you only have to position him where you want all the intended enemies to be pulled. With the vacuum that his elemental skill leaves behind you can have all the intended targets right where you want them as you prepare for your plunge attack which further knockbacks smaller enemies away. Rinse and repeat until you finally deploy your Elemental Burst.
Elemental Mastery & Elemental Damage
While it’s true Sucrose buffs her teammates with tons of Elemental Mastery through her skills and passives, more often than not it only makes things more complicated. Elemental Mastery only matters upon elemental reactions and every character has their own internal elemental application cooldowns. Additionally Frozen doesn’t cause any damage and Hydro doesn’t Swirl properly. Both Venti and Sucrose also facilitate Absorption of elements in their bursts thus dealing additional elemental damage of the absorbed element.
Kazuha goes a step further. Not only does he Swirl and absorb elements in his burst, but he also rewards all his teammates with an additional elemental damage bonus of the absorbed element scaling off of his Elemental Mastery- 0.04% per unit of Elemental Mastery he has to be exact. His strongest build is thus an Elemental Mastery build.
Kazuha is also Easy to Build
Kazuha is one of the easiest to build 5-star characters in the game. All he needs is Elemental Mastery to perform. While Attack, Crit Rate and Crit Damage are still desirable stats, Kazuha’s best build relies on Elemental Mastery and Energy Recharge- both of which strengthen his burst and allow it to be used frequently. Some of his best-in-slot weapons are also free-to-play and craftable. If one had to nitpick, the only difficult thing about his build is farming for his best artifact set- The Viridescent Venerer from the Valley of Remembrance which is infamous for its bad artifact rolls.
At the end of the day, his various uses and buffs aside- who doesn’t want to jump mid-air and climb that edge of the cliff or fly a little longer? His elemental skill is a really fun gimmick that, like Venti, makes exploration easy and fun. He’s also fun to use and has beautiful animations for his skills and talents. That alone makes him worthy for our saved up Primogems – and so good luck on your Kazuha pulls!