K Guide & Review

Who is K?

K is a Nikke who, at Sync lvl 400 (base stats), has 4,700,000 HP, 32900 Def, basically permanent Crit rate buffs, a great butt, an Attack Damage buff, and an ammo reduction debuff. K is someone who shoots faster than any SG during her own burst. But with all of this, is she good enough for today’s ruthless meta?

Spoilers: Her event story is interesting, her strength is not lol. We do wonder why Shift Up made her lose her crit buff every Full Burst.

Can you give a brief summary about this unit?

K is a decent damage dealer but only for Electric-weak Solo Raids. Her lack of strength is not enough to make her a reliable Electric DPS, and when someone is not among the best, they are often relegated to no more than raid slaves. She is also picky and wants to be paired only with certain other units for maximum performance.

K is not good outside Raids and falters against enemies who are far away. Her lack of personal ATK buff makes her unsuitable for clearing Campaign content or bosses like Mirror Container. In terms of impact, we feel that she is worse and less useful than the Arcana-Isabel combo we talked about two weeks ago. She's just a filler unit, and that's good... for our wallet.

In terms of kit, K possesses a special ability that reduces the Max Ammo count of all units nearly permanently. However, to prevent stacking, this will not activate when another Max Ammo reduction ability is already present (such as Summer Anis's). When this ability is active, the ATK DMG of all affected allies will be increased. This remains active even if the ammo reduction is nullified.

While we believe that both the ammo reduction and ATK Damage can be powerful supportive effects, there aren't many units that can utilize them besides Summer Anis and perhaps Dorothy. As a matter of fact, the lack of Reload Speed makes this skill a bad pairing for other units reliant on uptime. The bonus ATK DMG just does not cut it.

K is therefore just your regular ATK-and-CRT-scaling DPS (with semi-support potential) whose performance is dependent on skill levels, support pairing, as well as OL.

Should I get this unit?

For the vast majority of players, no. She's an easy skip. K does not provide much value for spending your hard-earned gems. She might have a place in Electric-weak Solo Raids and definitely raises the bar slightly higher, but the idea of investing in a niche unit may not be attractive to most players. Therefore, we recommend skipping and directing your attention to the next unit instead, which coincides with the release of the Stellar Blade collab.

For players who are competitive over Electric-weak Solo Raids, MAYBE., Pulling her may be needed to squeeze as much score as possible out of your runs. She is likely to be paired with Summer Anis because Summer Anis wants Max Ammo reduction and provides the Reload Speed and ATK buff that K lacks. Together, they are a usable pair. However, since Solo Raid is not here yet, we cannot confidently say whether K will make it. There are other alternatives too that may come very close to help you achieve the same score as you would get with K. Hence, only pull copies of K if you are very serious about Electric Weak Raids, otherwise she is an easy skip.

Finally, K is not worth dupes nor Golden Mileage. If you are lacking gems, it's better not to pull her at all.

With the end of this section, we would also like to express our apology that, even after 2 grueling years of being in NPC jail, K will end up being a gray in most players' Nikkepedia. Another wasted insanely hot design...

Before going into kits, you must know that

• K is a dual SMG wielder, that’s why her modifier is x2 of what is written. (4.55% ---> 9.1%).
• Dual wielder doesn’t make her consume ammo twice as fast.
• Dual wielder means she shoots twice as fast, around 48 instance of damage per sec (this is very important)
• Her burst also changes her into a dual SG wielder.

Skill 1 - Her Crit is Fleetly Fading

■ Activates when firing the last bullet. Affects self.

Tilted Scale : Critical rate ▲ 0.75% continuously, stacks up to 100 time(s).

Stack count of Tilted Scale ▲ 29.

■ Activates when pellets land critical hit 4 time(s). Affects the target.

Deals 23.9% of final ATK as additional damage.

■ Activates when Full Burst ends. Affects self.

Removes Tilted Scale.

Everytime K shoots her last bullet in her magazine, she will gain stacks of Tilted Scale (scales up to 30 stacks at lv 10). These stacks increase her Crit Rate (which scales by skill level too), up to 100 stacks. So at max, she will have 75% crit rate + 15% crit chance base = 90% crit rate.

• Crit in Nikke is underwhelming usually, mostly because it’s diluted hard and the base crit rate/damage are too small to be meaningful. However, due to high values of Crit Rate, it might be worth it to have Crit Damage on OL gear to buff K’s damage.
• K won’t gain any stacks of this crit rate buff during her own burst, because it has 999 ammo.
• Even during other bursts, she only has a tiny window of when she has max stacks, and you must have a very fast reload in order to do that.

Practically, she tends to have ~60 stacks during the non-Full Burst phase, and the remaining 40 stacks she will have to gain during burst, making this skill worse than its real potential.

Her second part of this skill is more interesting. Basically, as long as you shoot, she will deal some extra damage. This damage is triggered

• Every 4 crit shots of SMG phase (which is 2 ammo, as we state from the very start)
• Every 1 crit shots of SG phase (each shot triggers max 2 instance of this damage)

This damage may look small, but due to the high Rate of Fire, K can deal a very high amount of damage with this skill. At 100% crit chance, this extra damage should equal ammo damage unless you can core hit.

Oh, just for the record, all of your crit rate will disappear when Full Burst ends, doesn’t matter who bursts. This makes skill 1 relatively terrible, because you take forever to ramp up, and have to ramp up again and again. It is an inherent flaw in K’s kit.

Skill 2

■ Activates when gaining Tilted Scale. Affects all allies.

Fulfillment of Righteousness

Function : Reduces max ammunition capacity but increases attack damage.

Effect 1 : Max ammunition capacity ▼ 51.13% for 10 sec.(Similar effects cannot be stacked.)

Effect 2 : Attack damage ▲ 10.62% for 10 sec.

■ Activates when Full Burst ends. Affects all allies.

Removes Fulfillment of Righteousness.

Just like Privaty, K also reduces team’s ammo by half, but does not provide any compensation (e.g. Reload Speed)! At least Privaty provides a high reload speed buff. K gives a meh Attack Damage. In most situations, this skill does more harm than help, because you need another unit to compensate for this shooting time loss. This restricts teambuilding with K.

This ammo reduction won’t stack with Privaty’s and SAnis’ skills, so we can’t expect Privaty deal insane last bullet damage sadly. And just like Skill 1, when Full Burst ends, this buff is removed, leaving K at 60 ammo instead of 120. This is a good thing for K herself, since she wants to proc her last bullet at least twice before getting into the next Full Burst.

Burst Skill - Shotgun time

■ Affects self

Changes the weapon in use:

Damage : 92.5% of the final ATK

Pellet count : 10

Attack speed: ▼ 90%

Duration : 10 sec

Additional effects

ATK ▲ 63.36% of caster's ATK for IO sec.

Attack damage ▲ 21.12% far 10 sec.

K changes her Dual SMGs into Dual SGs. Each SG has 5 pellets only, so together they shoot 10 pellets at 185% Modifier (~92.5% ×2 for each SG). She shoots faster, way faster than any normal SG (2.4 hits /s but will hit 25 shots during FB for some reason). During this SG phase, K will buff herself with a decent amount of ATK and Attack Damage.

During K’s burst, her DPS compared to any other base SG is higher. However, just like any other ‘weapon change’ Nikke, K is still treated as SMG, so Tove’s ATK and Attack Speed buffs won’t affect her at all. Bonus range (30% damage up) will also be applied on SMG effective range, not SG effective range. Hence, this reduces her viability in SG comps, even though her SG is dealing quite some damage.

Campaign (LD) - D | Campaign (HD) - D

K is an SMG DPS unit who deals damage through dealing crits. Her burst turns her into a Shotgun unit. SMGs and SGs perform poorly in Campaign and Tower stages, and reduce team effectiveness in mob stages overall. They barely hit anything, and K especially deals mediocre damage. She is a single target damage dealer, who does not have potent ATK buffs to make her relevant in stages with CP Penalty. Try to avoid using K in campaigns.

Bossing - A

K is an electric DPS unit meant to be used for Raids - specifically Solo Raids. Her performance can be compared to and related to Anis: Sparkling Summer, who is a limited unit but performs exceptionally well. Keep in mind that this comparison will be a victory for Summer Anis, but nevertheless, this should be a good baseline for comparison.

When both are optimally built for solo raids, K deals roughly 85-105% of Summer Anis damage depending on team comps and investments, which means she deals roughly the same damage. The key differences between both of them are in team buffs and team compatibility.

K buffs the team damage with a mere 10.62% Attack Damage buff, however she cuts down team ammo count without providing any compensatory Reload buffs or high enough damage buffs to offset the damage lost from reduction of ammo count. Meanwhile, Summer Anis, while dealing the same damage, buffs the team’s reload speed substantially without loss of ammo, and provides a potent 55% ATK buff.

This key difference further opens up a problem that K may only work with a select few units, where one of them happens to be Summer Anis herself since she fills multiple roles. She is a last bullet Nikke that benefits from ammo reduction, and she ensures that any electric Nikkes in the team are compensated from this ammo loss by providing appropriate reload speed. While K’s ammo reduction is not stackable, she reduces Anis’ ammo when Anis is not in her own full burst, improving her damage.

If paired with any other unit, prominent electric raid units being xMaiden, Cinderella, Isabel, Scarlet, Maid Privaty etc., K’s ammo reduction is a detriment since these units lose damage if their ammo count is reduced.

One last train of thought is that Summer Anis is a 2023 unit. With the rate of powercreep SU has been releasing the past 2 years, she is not a great unit to compare to anymore since she is not a top DPS, but instead more of a support for Cinderella or Ein in most cases. Hence, K inherently is not a good DPS, but just a barely passable DPS in today’s meta. She is extremely replaceable even in Electric Solo Raids since units like SBS, Fire Mihara, and WAsuka are able to deal immense neutral damage which can bring them close to an optimal K’s performance, removing the need for K completely since those units allow an account to cover more raid elements. K is possibly a dead-on-arrival unit for the majority of the playerbase, but is usable by electric-weak raid enjoyers. She is likely demoted to B tier in the near future.

PVP - E

She offers nothing in PvP as an SMG unit. Don’t bring her to PVP.

Gear Investments

Just like other DPS, you want to OL her and level them as high as you can. Be careful of Ammo, since K’s skills have last bullet effects!

• Essential: MUST NOT HAVE MAX AMMO
• Ideal: 4x Ele, 4x ATK
• Passable: 4x Crit Damage
• Priority: Low

Skill Investments

• Skill 1: 10
• You need to upgrade this skill as high as possible because it helps you reach 100 stacks faster, and will help K deal 100% extra damage on the right teams.
• Skill 2: 7~10
• This skill is a lower priority to upgrade. But if you want to seriously use K, upgrade this skill to match Skill 1’s level because it lowers ammo for K to reach S1 faster, leading to higher overall damage.
• Burst Skill:4/7/10
• If you run her as an off Burst DPS, then leave it at 1, otherwise upgrade it as high as you can since it buffs K’s damage decently.

Suggested Progression Path

 

PVE Investment

PVP Investment

Priority

K

PVE investment

4/4/4 → 7/7/4 → 10/10/7 (→ 10/10/10)

PVP investment

4/4/4

Priority

Low

Cube Investments

You want her to reload fast, not shoot longer, so don’t bring anything that makes her reach the last bullet longer.

Doll Investments

You can completely skip doll investments on K without regret. However, if you plan to use her, we recommend slapping an R0 doll and maxing it out to R15, converting it to an SR5 doll. We do not recommend wasting Purple and Gold mats on this unit.

Check out Teams Tab on her Profile for teams for various PVE and PVP content.