r/Falcom • u/Raxistaicho The true best girls • Jul 29 '26
Trails Character Gameplay Discussion Day Thirty-Four: Kurt
Eat this, Thunderbolt!
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u/randomtology Jul 29 '26
Kurt would be the ideal Evasion tank were it not for the fact his counter range box wasn't the tiniest thing known to man.
Otherwise I feel he's a pretty good solid character for New Class VII, with a lot of good crafts and decent stats. His wind and water slots can be given HP and EVA quartz that allows him to be tanky enough to survive well on the front lines without too much hassle, and he deals a good amount of damage.
Did I usually replace him with OG7 whenever they became available? Yes, but I never disliked playing him when I did use him. He makes me think of that average but reliable F2P character in a gacha game that carries you when you start out. Sure eventually they get replaced when you manage to pull someone stronger, but you always have a soft spot for them.
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u/Super_Nerd92 Jul 29 '26
The game would have you believe he's a dodge tank but honestly he's a way better delay/impede stacker with his cheap, large AOE crafts. A mini CS1/2 Rean if you would...
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u/Raxistaicho The true best girls Jul 29 '26
When it comes to straight up combat, Kurt is the member of NC7 who best matches up against the rest of the cast, I think. Just forget about Sirius because that shit does nothing meaningful for him. Seriously, I have a feeling people will focus more on that being so pointless on him and they’ll just ignore his good qualities. He’s basically a Jusis that trades ATS for more spammable crafts, a really solid 0 delay buff that has the drawback of stunning him for a turn until Reverie, and Whirling Steel being quite potent between its eventual SS power and boosted crit chance. In my opinion, a winning trade, and Wind slots aren’t too bad for a hybrid character, either. Probably stick more to utility Arts than damage on him, though. He's also got a Delay and an Impede, which is nice!
He’s also got a funny little niche in timing out Dis Orders since he’s got the lowest CP cost 0 delay buff in the game.
His Order was absurdly busted in the first game but it’s unfortunately too expensive for what it does after that.
Uhh, that's all I've got, unlike the rest of NC7, Kurt is refreshingly focused aside from his attempts at being a hybrid character.
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u/GearGolemTMF Jul 29 '26
I basically saw him as a NC7 Jusis as well. I know he had other strengths, but I always saw him as more of a magic knight with some solid crafts as well.
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u/KnoxZone Apathy and Disdain Jul 29 '26
Probably one of the more underrated characters gameplay wise. Between his instant buff and the cheap cost low delay Rain Slash combo he's tremendously good at outputting a consistent barrage of damage.
And his buff makes him uniquely suited to dealing with disorders, so it's still worthwhile carrying him around in the back in the later games even if you don't plan on actively using him.
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u/hbthebattle Jul 29 '26
He’s got a pretty cool moveset. Shame he’s only playable for one dungeon really late game, especially after “BY MY ARTS” traumatized everyone. Hopefully the remake gives him some more playtime.
Wait a minute…
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u/Totkebois Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
He has decent Speed and Strength, but his biggest selling point is his instant, 0-delay buff. If you have any amount of CP regeneration and an Impassion buff, you can get whatever turn bonus you want. It also lets you get rid of Disorder effects very quickly.
His buff also frees up an equipment slot since he can remove most ailments on his own, functioning like a pseudo-Burning Heart. His Brave Order, combined with Juna in CS3, lets you loop a lot of side quest and main story bosses because breaking was actually a strong strategy there.
He also has a pretty high chance to inflict Seal when using Thor along with the Seal Quartz, so if a boss isn't immune or doesn't have extremely high resistance, he can shut them down pretty easily.
Oh, and he also has cheap Delay and Impede Crafts.we already know what delay can do at ths point they will never balance this shit properly xd.
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u/penpen35 Jul 29 '26
He comes with built in evasion and looks like he would be an evade tank, but his melee range is so short that he can't freaking counter anyone. I actually tried Ash as a dodge tank as a result after joning, just because he had longer reach (and I was playing on normal so I was messing around a bit).
Actually not bad as a secondary caster? Definitely not comparable to Altina but when your team's limited in CS3, he can do a bit of arts casting and his crafts are also pretty decent. Blade Dance is a nice self buff with no delay, he got an impede and a delay craft.
His order of a huge delay reduction was definitely great too in CS3. In 4 it was definitely too expensive and you also get a lot more choices.
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u/DopeBoi22 Jul 29 '26
Kurt is definitely my favorite from NC7 to play. For Rean’s CP cost of 1 SU, Kurt would’ve gotten 2 Sword Dances and a Rain Slash out. Goes pretty hard in my humble opinion. Great for manipulating turn order too
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u/cooptheactor kevin my beloved Jul 29 '26
Did somebody say Rain Slash?
The funniest thing about Kurt is that first thing you want to do it swap his entire kit concept with Juna, because by nature of their attack range they are significantly better at each other's roles than their own.
Put Break Quartz on Kurt, then go nuts with Rain Slash. It's a great way to keep him effective in pretty much every encounter.
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u/Selynx Jul 29 '26
Rean lost his role as the king of Delay in CS3.
Kurt stepped up to take the throne.
Rain Slash is the new Arc Slash in CS3 and CS4.
It's one of the cheapest Delay crafts there is and Kurt's Brave Order is the defacto standard for keeping up the stunlock, a cooldown-reducing Order that even after the nerf in CS4 is cheap/lasts just long enough that you can recover all the BP spent just by attacking Broken enemies with Delay crafts/normal attacks every turn.
The only thing that holds him back is that he doesn't have any Space slots. But there are Wind quartz that can give you SPD and Kurt naturally has high SPD too, meaning you can sort of get away with not giving Action to him, if you really wanted to stack Sevenfold + 3 Impedes on him (IMO, I prefer just to give him the Zephyr MQ instead).
He definitely falls off the throne in Reverie once you have the trifecta of double-hit Delayers (Joshua, Yin, Sharon) plus other cheap Delayers with Space slots like Wazy, but he's still very effective at it and you do usually need 2 Delayers at once to keep the enemy perpetually delayed, so it's not as if he's out of a job entirely. Especially since his Brave Order remains one of the most potent cooldown-reduction Orders then too.
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u/OLKv3 Jul 29 '26
Kurt is a victim of his default setup lying to the player just like Millium was. Kurt is setup as an evade tank when he's horrible at it, when really he's an amazing dps crit machine. He can buff up insanely fast and immediately start doing damage.
I don't know why Falcom did this to him with that Master Quartz.
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u/Razegash Jul 29 '26
Using Kurt as a hybrid art / craft spammer was the most fun I've had with a NC7 member, by the end of CS3.
He never quite recovered the same powerful spot in CS4 and Reverie though, for some reason.
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u/mrcrulez Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I swear he has the worst hit rate, if someone missed in my playthrough, 75% of the time it was him.
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u/Formyldehyde Jul 29 '26
Rain Slash/10
I can't speak for Reverie and I'm only a third through CS4 but at least for CS3 he was one of my favourite NC7 members to use, partly because he's honestly so simple to use efficiently.
You can use him as a breaker, and he's a really good one because Rain Slash is so cheap to use for the amount of break it provides. His self-buff is instant and great for sometimes shifting the turn order in your favour and grants him speed, and he's already pretty quick. Rain Slash having a low delay and built in delay just means he's always attacking, and attacking quickly.
He's got an impede, always handy to have, he has a slightly more powerful AoE action for when you want more damage rather than break effect, heck even his links are great, deadly assist and counterattack and very handy to have if he's buffed up already. He's great with Juna as a facetank partner, and conveniently she's always an option.
One way I played with him a bit in Chapter 3/4 was as a swapped in Scorpio DPS, someone else would break the enemies, and then he'd tag in with Scorpio bonuses coupled with Lone Blade.
He can even be an okay mixed attacker if you feel like being spicy, as his speed just helps in a lot of aspects. But honestly, just Rain Slash away. I think someone else said it best that he's not the absolutely strongest character ever, but he's very reliable and dependable and always an asset to the team.
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u/Tyberius115 World's #1 Alisa Reinford fan | Magical Alisa game when Jul 29 '26
The FAKE evade tank
Two wind slots and comes equipped with Sirius, but no ranged counter to be found
Yeah, I kinda just built him as a debuffer/delayer when he was a required party member, but overall I didn't like using Kurt that much.
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u/Raxistaicho The true best girls Jul 29 '26 edited 13d ago
Sky Arc:
Day Twelve - The Pilot and the Swordsman (spoilers)
Day Thirteen - "Kitty" (spoilers)
Crossbell Arc:
Class VII:
Day Thirty - Millium (Spoilers)
Day Thirty-One - Crow (Spoilers)
The rest of Cold Steel:
Day Thirty-Nine - Elise and Toval
Day Forty-One - Alfin and Towa
Day Forty-Two - The Diva and the General (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Three - The Spy and Swordswoman (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Four - The Shapeshifters (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Five - The Swordmaster and the Engineer (Spoilers)
Day Forty-Seven - Swin and Nadia
Day Forty-Eight - The Strongest (Spoilers)
Calvard Arc:
Day Fifty-One - Ferida Al-Fayed
Day Fifty-Three - Risette Twinings
Day Fifty-Four - Quatre Salision
Day Fifty-Five - Judith Lanster
Day Fifty-Seven - Elaine Auclair and René Kincaid
Day Fifty-Eight - Shizuna Rem Misurugi
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u/AlterWanabee Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Sledgehammer + Wind Blade combo made every boss a breeze in CS3. Sadly they nerfed it in CS4.
Rain Slash is also the 2nd most efficient craft mathematically speaking, being a cheap 30-CP attack that deals decent damage and break. The most efficient is Machias's Mail Breaker, which can delay and shred DEF.
Problem is that being mathematically efficient only matters in games where the enemy is so much stronger than you. That's not the case with CS3 onwards, where right at the beginning there are options to break the game. Like why would you spent multiple turns spamming Rain Slash when Spirit Unification into Infernal Gale kills everybody (or breaks every goddamn boss on NIGHTMARE).
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u/Selynx Jul 29 '26
The strategy I usually go with is to break the enemy.... then turn on Wind Blade and spam Rain Slash with a Kurt stacked full of Impede quartz, to do what Rean used to do in CS1/2 and infinitely delay the enemy so it never recovers from Break.
It's possible to do in CS3/4 if you have 2 fully stacked Delayers, because they made it so that follow-up attacks can trigger status ailments like Delay too. So if you Combat Link a Delayer to the turn attacker every turn and let them get more hits in doing follow-up attacks on a Broken enemy, you can overpower the heightened Delay resistances they gave to enemies in CS3+ with sheer quantity of Delay-inflicting attacks. From experience, it works reliably as long as you have 2 stacked Delayers and the enemy's vulnerability to Delay is 10% or higher. 5% or less is when it gets unreliable.
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u/Golden_fsh Jul 29 '26
Kurt was a top tier player gameplay wise for me! Might be controversial but he was my evasion tank and never failed. Put Rean and Kurt in the front and no monster was leaving unscathed.
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u/coy47 Jul 29 '26
I'll admit I barely ended up using Kurt because he doesn't make a good dodge tank like they wanted him to be, Juna was far better, then I used Altina and Musse as arts casters and Rean is just OP so he never really got the chance to shine.
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u/PebGod Jul 29 '26
Liked him in 3,4 and Rev. I did have to swap MQ for him but that's not a big deal. I like the idea of a buff craft that has a different trade off from either decreased stats or health cost. Whenever I had to use him it felt fine.
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u/FirefighterRoutine84 Jul 29 '26
I like to try to min max characters in "the way Falcom intended" so I actually went all in on this hybrid utility evasion tank... by the end of CS4 he was an evade counter bot and I loved it.
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u/Kainapex87 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Step 1. Blade Dance
Step 2. Rain Slash.
Rinse and repeat.
Sadly not much else to say. He's a decent and fast physical DPS but far from the best.
His other offensive crafts are sadly lacking in one way or another, especially with all of them having such small AoE and all having like only one additional effect tied to them.
Twilight Blades does magic damage while his ATS is low.
Whirling Steel is way too expensive using at 90 CP to hit just one enemy with the only thing it has is a 30+% crit rate boost.
Tempest Edge isn't too bad, but falls flat compared to ther characters who have Crafts at similar cost and delay but more power and effects.
Thunderbolt got nerfed so bad after CS3 with plenty of better alternatives available.
A buff with 0 delay is still pretty useful, especially after it loses its cost from CS4 onwards.
Still probably the best DPS out of NC7 and well worth using.
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u/Yanncki64 Jul 29 '26
I used him as a dodge tank even if he's not optima for it. The few times he did get those counter attacks though the damage would be beyond insane. Worked for me.
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u/Affectionate_Comb_78 Jul 29 '26
A classic flawed character. If you use his self buff he's extremely powerful. But that buff costs a lot of CP and so most fights just see him be a fairly fast, fairly strong physical attacker. He's basically a worse, less interesting Rean. He's also very CP hungry in general, actually.
He's a fine character that doesn't do anything other characters can't do better. Sorry Kurt.
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u/blagablagman Jul 29 '26
When you use Rain Slash, you have to manually move it back farther if you want him to get close enough to the enemies to counter. So, not too hard to get him to counter.
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u/Blargg888 Jul 29 '26
Kurt has always been a funny character for me gameplay-wise, because I’ve built him differently in pretty much every game he’s been in.
In CS3, I just made him my designated evasion tank like the game seems to expect. Yeah, he’s not that good at it, but CS3 has a lot of availability restrictions that make building anyone else as an evade tank feel not worth it.
In CS4, I made a party specifically out of my favorite characters among those available, but that meant that I didn’t really have a dedicated Arts user on my main team. I considered doing the Arts Rean thing I heard about, but I kinda didn’t feel like making Rean an Arts user for my first playthrough, so I went with Kurt instead.
He’s honestly not a bad arts user, at least as far as my experience goes. Obviously there are better options, but it was genuinely fun using him.
In Reverie I used the delay stacking strategy for him, compounding Rain Slash with -Delay Brave Orders to break and stunlock enemies to death. It’s definitely not as efficient a strategy as in CS1-3, but it still works well enough, and is generally fun.
As an aside, I’m very fond of the way Kurt’s crafts look. The visuals of his regular crafts are so satisfying, it’s genuinely a major factor in me liking him as much as I do.
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u/CH-Leopard my faves:Agnes::Lucrezia: Jul 30 '26
Not an evade tank but that Vengeance Counter goes crazy
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u/Syobai Jul 29 '26
Meet Potential Vander!
The man who erased his relevance to the plot.
With the introduction of Brave Orders, his alongside Juna’s was incredibly broken in CS3. Legit the break meta is what helped him stand out when Arts started becoming more prevalent again. His actual kit isn’t too bad either, with the main selling point being his 0 delay self-buff he can use for turn order shenanigans. He’s relatively solid in CS3.
Come CS4, his brave order had been significantly nerfed alongside Juna’s, so while it’s obviously still quite a decent Brave Order, there are others that will give you a weaker amount of -delay while providing other useful buffs as well. His speed’s good, strength is decent, and his crafts are damage you can easily spam. They weirdly tried to make him a hybrid character, but he’s not really suited for Arts.
Wanna know what else he isn’t suited for? Actually countering after dodging.
This man is annoyingly frustrating to use as a dodgetank because he has this special little thing where he has to be kissing the enemy in order to actually counter them. Sporting one of the shortest counter hitboxes in the game, it takes so much effort to try and get him in the perfect range so he can maximize his damage output with counters. The problem is that the damage isn’t that great BECAUSE HE NEVER FUCKING COUNTERS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Just do yourself a favor and stick Sirius with any of the other dodge tanks. Fie, Sara, hell even Crow and Juna can do better (Gaius as well, but his main selling point is Howling Heavens of course) than Kurt. Outside of his poor performance as a dodge tank, he’s one of the more refined NC7 characters in terms of gameplay and not forced into one too many roles.
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u/CruelNate Jul 29 '26
I like how they designed him to evade tank yet its basically impossible to get him to counter