New tier list
The new tier list is finally here! And it's not just one tier list, but 6 of them - not only we prepared a more detailed tier list, but also reworked the design by splitting the tier list into Burst Types. Now at a first glance, you can quickly compare characters within the same burst type. You can see what this looks like on the cover image used in this blog post.
But that's not all! The mobile design was also reworked, so it's now more mobile-friendly and easier to read. Here's what it looks like:
Now let's talk about the new ratings.
At first, we planned to split the ratings per mode, but then we realized a lot of the modes consist of both non-boss and boss battles - for example, Campaign, Simulation Room, and even Tower. So the ratings, in that case, would be flawed as we would have to do what we did in the old list - try to balance the two 'faces' of each character.
The new 6 categories are:
Story (chapters 14-18) - this shows how the character performs in the current 'endgame' chapters. Still, keep in mind that this rating mainly shows the performance in non-boss stages,
Story (chapters 8-13) - same as above, just for the mid-game this time,
Story (chapters 1-7) - same as above, just for the early game this time,
Boss (solo) - this rating shows how good the character is against bosses that fight alone,
Boss (adds) - again a boss rating, but this time it's for boss fights that have monsters appearing from time to time during the battle,
PVP - an experimental rating that tries to rate characters and how well they perform in the recently released Arena mode.
By default when you open the tier list page, the Story (chapters 14-18) tier list will be visible, but you can quickly change it to another using the dropdown above the tier list. We've picked that particular tier list to be the default one as this is where most of the players will strive to be one day, and it will help them find the characters that shine there.
Also, to make it easier to quickly check what are the ratings of each character, we updated the popover window that appears when you hover over a character to show all 6 ratings:
Methodology
Okay, now that we have both the new categories and the design out of the way, let's talk about how the new tier list was created and what criteria were used during the process.
The process was different this time, as on top of doing our own tests, we reached out to some community members who are in the process of conquering the endgame (Chapters 15+) to learn from their experiences. We discussed their teams, their approaches, the characters they used, and what they struggled the most at. On top of that, we participated in the ongoing research discussions on both the official and community Discord servers to gather as much information as we could.
So we can say that this tier list would not exist without the help of the community. Thank you all for the help!
Let's move to the criteria:
Story ratings and PVP are based on auto-play - our tier list is made for players that use a more casual approach and only try hard from time to play, so the story ratings for characters are based on auto-play. For PVP there's no choice, as the mode can only be played on auto.
Both Boss ratings are based on manual play - let's not kid ourselves. A lot of the bosses have gimmick mechanics and if you play them on auto, you will most likely fail unless your team's power is way higher than the stage requires - also some modes force you to play manually, like Coop,
Team-based approach - by deciding the new ratings we already included the optimal teams that allow the characters to shine. The solo-based approach was only good on the release, where people were rerolling, but now, a month later, it was time to move on,
Investment reliance - we treated each character as if they were MLB, not Cored. Only whales can afford to max Core a character and for a casual player, this is not possible to achieve,
Bugs - while the majority of the bugs were fixed, some characters are still bugged or they work in a way that we think they might be bugged. We again marked all bugged characters with the purple bug icon and listed them in the Known bug tab on the tier list page.
While the Snow White bug doesn't have an impact on her rating, in the case of Noise who is a monster in late-game PVE and PVP, things can change massively if the devs confirm she is bugged - still, for now, we rated her according to the current performance,
Damage formula - while the last patch fixed the Crit issues when fighting enemies below power, ATK buffs are still superior to Crit buffs and the new tier list reflects that - since no other changes were made, we're assuming that that's how the developers want things to work.
Reviews
We also rewrote some of the reviews to make them in line with the new ratings.
Next steps
This week we will update the following guides to make them up to date with the current state of the game:
reroll guide
meta teams guide
wishlist list
We wanted to do it together with the new tier list, but we ran out of time.
Also, we are currently working on preparing guides for each boss that appears in the rotation within the Special Interception - what teams to use, what to focus on, etc. The guides will basically contain a mini-tier list for each boss too!
Feedback
If you have any feedback about the tier list we're open to discussion - join us on our Discord or catch me (Antillar) on either the official Nikke Discord or the Community one, and let's talk.
Thank you and enjoy!
