Kairos (Hag In White)
Kairos joins you in chapter 1 of Hag in White at the start of turn 2, from the church. He automatically has a conversation with Soter, who is near his starting position.
Soter protests that the good priest is joining them in combat, for it would be a sin to allow harm to come to a man of god. Kairos insists that it’s his own sin to bear. He could not be dissuaded. He joins you.
Typically, you’d expect the priest to be a healer. This is Hag in White, however, and that’d be against the premise. Perhaps, a mage?
Well, not quite.
Nah, a Myrmidon.
Well, ok, that’s not exactly accurate, they’re rebranded as “Magic Blade” in this game and are often hybrid attackers, but, at this stage, he’ll be using only swords.
Here’s his bases, and they’re distributed fairly close to how he grows–fast as hell, solid magic, and quite a bit better res than def. With these bases, he immediately ORKOs the enemies close to his start on Hard Mode for a fantastic first showing.
In the following chapter, Kyra expresses her surprise at Kairos fighting and Kairos’s perfectly happy to see more action. For a priest, he sure is fight happy–but that isn’t all there is to his character. Kairos is a man who subverts many expectations and has a wide range of interactions with various members of the cast. On occasion, he’d refer to himself as a ‘bad priest’, though not particularly seriously, given his tendencies to behave in ways priest often are not meant to, but his actions prove that he’s the best kind of priest. I won’t get into too much detail, because I want you to read his dialogue for yourself but, everything from him is a gem.
Combat-wise, Kairos’s offense is absolute top notch in Hag, and has incredible staying power even when he lowrolls his stats. Mine turned out really well, but many others during playtesting who got below-average Kairoses, or even on 0%, Kairos had remarkable staying power with little to no stat ups on his Fire Brand combat. You don’t have to be too stingy with it either–another one drops pretty soon after his join time.
While his offense is undisputedly stellar, he’s not a unit without drawbacks–or I wouldn’t be here talking about his combat nuances if he’s just as simple as hold forward and win. He does make you win! But he’s quite physically squishy. You do have to be careful with some of his matchups early on–it’s not common for him to get oneshot, but it can sometimes happen. Fortunately, things that can oneshot him are all melee-only weapons, so check your positioning and it should be no real issue. Magic swords also don’t build sword rank at ranged, so to reach enough rank for the higher tier magic swords and Lancesplitter later on, he should attack at melee range or with physical swords when appropriate. This gives a layer of complexity in optimizing his positioning and weapon choice for each given combat, rather than spam Fire Brand at ranged as the solution to everything. Fire Brand isn’t terribly expensive at 950 a pop, but 950 isn’t trivial earlier on, so he really appreciates an investment into $LOPEZ outlined by RandomWizard’s post above.
Kairos promotes into Spellsword or Swordmaster.
Spellsword is a nobrainer good option–since Kairos is mag > str, it gives him access to tomes and ends his dependence on magic swords. He still has access to swords anyway, and if you did build his sword rank, he’ll have access to the fun higher level swords. Opportunist gives him additional damage if the enemy can’t hit back, and with tome access, this is pretty common.
But, I do think Kairos is one of the cases where both promo options have value and it’s less skewed than it may first appear.
Because I went Swordmaster myself.
Part of the reason is that I think Kairos would have wanted to be promoted to Swordmaster, from his characterization PoV. The stars did align, and I rolled well on his strength, so that made SM quite a bit more enticing than if I had lowrolled, since it wasn’t painful to use physical swords with him. As I used him more in SM, however, I did notice a pattern of play I tend to do with him.
So Hag uses a reduced avoid formula, and player avo numbers on aggregate aren’t super high, but swordmaster on terrain against a berserker is still reasonably reliable. Between higher con, promo bonuses, and cap, Kairos reaches more reliable avo numbers as SM than as Spellblade, especially since he does need to use a sword for the weapon triangle advantage.
Now Kairos gets pretty solid Res. Pure waters are an excellent item to have in this game in general due to limited healing, and Magic pods are not uncommon. A strat I often did in Hag was have Kairos sit in a forest and pop a pure water in the range of a berserker and some other spellswords, and with one robe he can tank them all because the spellblades do little to no damage to him in this configuration. He doesn’t always dodge the Zerk, but he won’t die if the zerk does connect, and in most cases he’ll dodge, and that means Apate’s healing can go to someone else instead of him. So despite how frail he looks, I’ve successfully used him in a lot of enemy phase strats.
So anyway, endgame Kairos. This is with 2 robes, but one of the robes is so lategame I just gave it to him as a flex more than anything. He also ate a dracoshield but mine is notably horrendously def-screwed. His defense isn’t good on average but mine is actually “levelled once the entire 17/20 I’ve used him for” and despite that, I could use this to strategically push lines based on enemy composition.
Extremely fun unit, wonderfully written character.
Anyway I drew fanart I think that’s pretty effort
something something using fire brand must get hot, right