Nicole Build and Guide

Nicole is a 5-star Pyro Catalyst user who is most commonly played as a support and sustain. She provides immensely strong shields and a large teamwide ATK buff with her Skill, which allows her to contribute some damage using her teammates’ stats. As a Hexerei unit, she also features important synergies with other characters in the faction.

Nicole is an exceedingly simple character, with her Elemental Skill serving as her main ability. Using it generates an extremely sturdy shield and applies “Grace of Kenosis” to the team, increasing ally ATK by a portion of her own. At Talent Level 10, this provides up to 600 ATK, based on up to 4000 of Nicole’s own ATK. Buffs from allies and artifacts sets present on Nicole when casting her Skill also count towards this, with the exception of most flat ATK buffs – such as Nicole’s own Grace of Kenosis.

Both her Ascension Passives are also tied to this: her first Ascension Passive allows her to upgrade an on-field ally’s buff to “Guidance of Kenosis” until they switch out, providing another flat 300 ATK; this occurs after 3 seconds by default, but is applied automatically to Hexerei characters. Her Ascension Passive 4 allows Nicole to more or less permanently upgrade her own buff - while this does not affect her Skill buff, it is nonetheless helpful considering how many aspects of Nicole’s kit scale off of her ATK.

Her Burst meanwhile introduces the concept of coordinated attacks by allowing her to cast four “Arcane Projections”, which deal damage with the multiplier listed on the ability but using all of the on-field character’s stats and element. Unfortunately, Nicole’s coordinated attacks from her Burst are extremely weak by default. Her Hexerei Passive improves this, giving them an additional multiplier which uses Nicole’s own ATK with the other stats still used for damage calculation remaining the same. This is similar to effects like Shenhe’s Skill, commonly referred to as “quills” by the community; since Nicole tends to build much higher ATK than her teammates, this is typically beneficial and allows her to Burst to contribute meaningful damage, though it still can occasionally prove not worth its cast time. 

Finally, Nicole’s Normal Attacks are unremarkable and rarely ever used; still, as a Catalyst, their ability to natively apply Pyro can be useful to trigger reactions or pass element checks.