Meta teams (Story)

This guide is dedicated for modes that uses Stage Penalty system (or deficit). Currently, the Deficit system is applied in Campaign, Event, Tribe Tower, Lost Sector. You can learn more about stage penalty here:

This guide is served for new players, so they can understand the cards in their hand, and prepare for later stages of the game. If you are a veteran, chances are you have already known what is best for you.

Now if you just roll a (bunch) of character(s), and you want to know whether you can form a good hand of 5 Nikkes, follow me down the rabbit’s hole. The deeper it is, the less teams will be available to push through, mind you!

If you are new players, chances are you won’t have all of these characters to fill in your roster, even at low deficit. Just remember those rules:

• If you don’t have any Burst I listed below, use
  
  N102
• If you don’t have any Burst II listed below, use
  
  Anis
• If you need another Burst III to form at least 2 Burst III team, use
  
  Rapi

To understand the terms: Burst I, Burst II, Burst III, we highly recommend you to take a look at this Team Building Guide first:

This is the “easy mode”, and mostly only new players, whale or veteran can enjoy. All of your Nikke will have stat reduction which ranges from 0 ~ 25% based on the deficit. Most, if not all teams work in this deficit. As long as you can put a proper team with at least 1 Burst I, 1 Burst II and one Burst III, you are good to go. Because there are too many teams that can be used here, let's dig further.

This is when it starts getting a little bit hot, but if you have the right setup, sometimes even ONE character, you can still push through them easily.

1. One-Nikke-army

These teams only require 1 CORE Nikke, and you can fill the 4 rest slots with your strongest characters in the tier list. The structure will be X - X - Core Nikke - X - X, for example:

Rapi: Red Hood

The SSR version of our female protagonist brings shame to all current Nikkes ingame. She excels in both single target and AoE wiping, just like SBS (below) without the distributing damage fallback. She can even help you as a decent B1 CDR when you lack a proper team and just have her + another One Nikke Army below. Disadvantage? Require your device to run at 60 FPS consistently.

Modernia

If you can run your device (phone/PC) at 60 FPS consistently, Modernia is one of the best Story pushers for you. At this level of penalty, you can pretty much use any B1, B2 and Modernia carries everything with her sheer power alone.

Red Hood

Same as Modernia, Red Hood is also one-Nikke-army on her own. The best part? She doesn’t even require 60 FPS. Throw whatever B1/B2 in this team and you are good at this level of penalty.

Scarlet: Black Shadow

SBS is one of the best screen wipers + single target DPS in the game at a low level of penalty like this. Best part? She can hit a target and everyone else on the screen just dies. Completely automatically, perfect!

Cinderella

A Defender who is both tanky and dealing huge damage on her own. She is literally, a tank. Her only disadvantage is Cindy’s damage drops really quick when she’s not in full burst.

2. Tia + Naga

The famous school girls of Missilis, known for their absurd “power” (whatever meaning you want). They are so strong that you can use any DPS with them and it still works wonderfully. Problem with them is, you need another Burst I here: Tia - Burst I - Naga - Burst III - Burst III.

Example team:

3. Blanc + Noir

If Missilis has their duo, so does Tetra! In fact, Bunnies are the first duo introduced in Nikke. They heal more than Tia-Naga but provide less offensive potential. You may need to swap around these 2 duo a lot later on, so if you have both pairs, raise them four!

Example team:

4. Crown

Crown is the better Tia. Overall, her team looks exactly like the Tia-Naga team.

Example team:

If you are a new player, you can still play Nikke automatically till around chapter 7 with this much deficit. Once you pass that point, you will find yourself losing A LOT by playing auto at this level of penalty (35 ~ 47% stat reduction).

At this point, you won’t be able to use the “one-Nikke-army” teams anymore but need to draft proper ones. We will go through each of them.

1. Auto team

At this level, this team brings a lot to the table, and unless it’s a very nasty stage where a lot of oneshot mobs are spawned, you can use this team to play automatically. It’s balanced and well-rounded with heal, offensive, buffs.

There are a few replacements for

Red Hood and

Rapi: Red Hood here:

• 
  Modernia is clapped hard by Rapi, both in single target and AoE, but if you don’t have Rapi, Modernia is still very good.
• 
  Cinderella is the better Scarlet. Huge wipe, strong DPS, and Blanc gives her everything she wants too (HP + Damage increase)
• 
  Scarlet: Black Shadow is a great choice, but when the penalty starts breathing on her neck, her clearing power is not as impressive as at lower penalty.

Liter can also be replaced if you don’t have her, of course:

• 
  Pepper is a decent healer with high offensive power. She doesn’t reduce cooldown, but she heals a lot with her burst.
• 
  D: Killer Wife /
  
  Rouge also provide Cooldown Reduction (CDR) just like Liter, except their other buffs feel pale compared to Liter.
• 
  Dorothy brings both CDR and offensive power on her own. Definitely a good alternative even if Noir holds her back a bit. Note that Dorothy is a Pilgrim so it’s not easy to roll her.
• 
  N102 is your go-to when you don’t have any of the above Nikke, go N102.

2. Crown Naga team

This team is less comfy than Bunnies team above, but they can deal way more damage. By using this team, you may want to turn off “Auto Burst” and control burst time yourself, because these Nikkes have very impactful bursts that need to be used at proper time to make the most out of them.

Same as above,

Red Hood,

Rapi: Red Hood and

Liter can be replaced with above listed Nikkes. And if you don’t have Crown, there’s always a Tia, waiting behind…

3. Old “God team”

They used to be the most braindead team in Nikke until Blanc-Noir were released. This team has wipe, strong DPS, CDR, a shield that blocks most instant death attacks once in a while, and a nice passive heal from

Rapunzel that doesn’t even require her bursting. Rapunzel can even come in clutch with her revival burst, saving your run from a disaster. Heavily out-classed by the Bunnies team, but if your Bunnies are not completely, you can go this route.

4. Manual play with lots of clicking

This is the traditional team pushing story. They have semi wipe with

Privaty (mostly, just stun), boss killing with

Alice (requires extremely high investment but she’s worth), and damage buffers with

Maxwell +

Liter +

Privaty. Problem is, they require you to “aim” manually, and it’s not a good experience aiming those small flying Raptures from afar. Highly NOT recommended, just putting them here as a tribute to the past.

This is where most auto players have to stop. Enemies feel so tanky, enemies hit so hard, if you don’t cover and learn more advanced techniques, you are done for. Only a few teams can make their way to this deep, and they are:

1. Bunnies team

It all depends on the absolute number of Combat Power requirements. On low requirements like below 100k, you can still replace

Liter with a Good B1, but after that, Liter is very essential for the team unless you can somewhat lower the deficit.

For

Red Hood and

Rapi: Red Hood, they are also set in stone. You only swap

Scarlet /

Scarlet: Black Shadow in certain stages where you need to wipe enemies very fast.

Red Hood can be replaced with

Alice. At this point, you need to work on

Alice (10/4/10). She is not as versatile as

Red Hood but she is still one of the best DPSs on fully invested.

2. School Girls team

Same as above with more offensive power. School girls team is pretty much meta in all Story stages later on, with a few exceptions on the high healing demand stages, like against Bronchus. This team has a high risk variation, which will be mentioned later on.

3. Alice Maxwell team

At this point, you will feel suffocated with this team. They tolerate no mistake because you can’t even wipe anything with

Privaty. You only have a small window to use

Alice to shoot everything down, or they chew you alive. Most of the try hard veterans will have to retry a lot here for a good run.

Everything kills you. You take forever to kill enemies. Yes, welcome to the malicious level of penalty!

1. School Girls team

Surprisingly, this is where you start relying heavily on

Tia or

Crown and

Naga instead. Their offensive capabilities allow you to “cheese” through a lot of stages by killing enemies before they can kill you. And Crown even has a cheese mechanic that allows her to soak a lot of damage during a certain window (When she taunts, she’s immortal. Time the taunt well will reward you nicely)

Notice how he timed the Crown’s taunt to avoid the instant wipe phase

2. Improvised Alice Maxwell team

It’s pretty much the old Alice Maxwell team, but this time, we replaced Centi with a stronger B2 buffer which is Crown or Grave. You will still have to aim one by one the same, so take care of your wrist.

At 35% deficit, you start questioning yourself, why do you keep doing this? What’s the reward for torturing yourself like this? If you still want to push, then there’s technically only 1 team left to use. It has a lot of variations so be sure to stick around for all of them.

1. No more Tia team - God Comp #1

To push at this level, not only you have to fully invest in these Nikkes, but also you have to rely on good Overload roll, and Elemental advantage.

And of course, your own SKILLS! This is where you can brag among all other commanders how good you are, because you are pushing under a penalty that feels impossible.

This Team is the best replacement (yes, replacement) for the Not-So-Normal Crown Team, and outperforms it (sometimes) on Defense and Base Defense Stages, or some particular stages where it feels necessary to need more than 2-3 Bursts, or it feels necessary to get the 3rd Burst faster. This team might also come into play when you want to use Red Hood as Burst 3 in Iron Element Weak Stages.

Notice that we introduce D:Killer Wife here. It’s because after Chapter 23, you will notice using Liter will leave you with some odd 4s cool-down after first burst to second burst. These 4s will, most of the time, force you to restart the fight because the game leaves you literally no room to wait between first and second burst.

Example gameplay

2. Not-So-Normal Crown Team - God Comp #2

Key Point to Note:

• Red Hood is the Solo Burst I Unit, and DO NOT USE RAPI: The Hood here because she will be B1 version

This team can deal with stages by relying on 2, or at maximum 3 full bursts to pass a stage.

When you use

Red Hood as burst 1 only, you have an insanely high amount of attack buffs over 10s, and you can even do it twice before she goes on cooldown. It allows you to bring 2 DPS, which will a lot of times be

Modernia + Nikke that matches the “Weak Element” of the Stage. Ideally, the B3 choices depend on the stage, and aren’t as easy as - this stage is Wind Weak, so I will pick

Scarlet: Black Shadow

You want to study the stage step by step and see what best helps you progress from one wave to the other wave, and what the next wave requires. At times, you might need to i-frame to dodge Remnant Raptures, or hold your burst while your Modernia kills off Raptures outside of Burst.

How to Use

In a 2-Burst Win, you shouldn’t feel much different from using your usual teams. You might need to be more patient between your 2 bursts, and may need to kill raptures outside of Burst. In this, you use the first burst to clear waves, and the 2nd burst to focus the stage boss and kill it fast. A 2-burst may be used when the player wants the same Nikke to burst 2 times, while the other Nikkes provide support damage.

In a 3-Burst Clear, you use the first 2 Bursts for wave clearing, and then the 3rd burst to rush down and kill the boss. You should easily be able to do 2 bursts without any major hindrance. But after that, if you want to burst a 3rd time, you’ll face the trouble of

Red Hood cooldown. This is something most people should be unfamiliar with if they’ve been using

Liter or other B1-CDR units as B1. TTo reach your 3rd burst, you will have to save one rapture from a wave by killing all enemies but one, and then covering all your Nikkes.

Ideally, this should be a harmless rapture like a healer, buffer or elite that doesn’t do high damage, so that you can wait out 30 seconds after full burst ends, to have your burst ready again. Now we can uncover our Nikkes and kill the one rapture we left alive, and when the boss drops, we burst again and focus on the boss!

Point to note

Make sure that your

Red Hood does not have super high ATK on her overload gear! Otherwise she might steal

Naga skill 2 from your main DPS when they need that extra 40% core hit bonus! If your

Red Hood happens to have too many ATK rolls, you might need to use specific Nikkes that boost their own ATK during burst so that they are able to benefit from

Naga CCore Hit buffs to the fullest! Just make sure that she doesn’t steal that core bonus from our beloved

Modernia!

Example of 3 Burst Stage Clear

Example of how to use Crown’s Taunt effectively:

3. B3 choices for both God Comps

B3 Spotlight: Modernia

Crown and

Naga are core hit buffers, and

Modernia is one of the biggest benefitter of Naga's Core Hit Buffs out of Burst. Since she is a Machine Gun, she can hit the core of enemies with pin-point accuracy. Not only is her Burst getting

Red Hood ATK buff for 10s compared to

Liter 5s, her constant AoE during Burst targets the cores of all raptures it auto-locks on, hence benefitting from Tia and Naga to its fullest!

When the boss drops, you will often notice that players do not burst with Modernia, and use the other Nikke’s Burst. This is because Modernia will provide the absolute best support damage to finish off a boss! This does not mean that Modernia will have a permanent spot as B3, but you will definitely see her being used 99% of the time!

General B3 Choices

• 
  Scarlet : AoE wipe is a unique utility, the quality of which no other Nikke can match. Additionally, she has amazing DPS output, notably outside of Burst due to her constant self ATK Buff.
• 
  Alice : Alice provides high value to the squad, as her high DPS output Burst can be used for Boss Killing, as well as taking care of mob waves that are clumped together since she has pierce.
• 
  Asuka Shikinami Langley : Asuka is a weaker Alice but she has an extremely big pierce AoE. We can even say that on cleaning mobs, Asuka should do better than Alice. And she also gives core damage to Fire DPS too, so at one point, you may remove Naga for Asuka instead. Collab Limited.
• 
  Rei Ayanami : The Scarlet version of Fire Element. She deals pretty good damage, sometimes matching with Modernia if Rei can burst. She acts both as DPS and buffer for Alice + Modernia, just like Asuka above. Also Collab Limited.
• 
  Scarlet: Black Shadow works well as a support screen-wipe, but her main focus will be to focus on nuking the stage boss “target”, after someone clears the mobs for her. The lower your penalty, the better she will perform for you. This does not mean, however, that she is incapable of wiping waves. If the waves come in numbers, but they drop slow enough and in smaller groups, SBS can perform majestically well.
• 
  A2 Her constant wave clearing ability is not to be underestimated. A2 is a unique unit that will also keep her buffs outside of Full Burst, and will be able to hit each rapture with her full strength, clearing the screen due to her huge splash radius. Collab Limited.

Situational Use B3's

• 
  Snow White is used to either nuke the boss instantly when it drops, or used to nuke a group of high HP elites that would otherwise do too much damage in a small amount of time.
• 
  Privaty is used for her unique Stun mechanic, while she also buffs ally ATK.
• 
  Maxwell is mostly used for her Buffs, but her high damage nuke can also take care of elites, or can even be used to nuke the boss.
• 
  Ludmilla: Winter Owner being an MG, can constantly hit the core of raptures, allowing her to enjoy Naga’s core benefits to the fullest.
• 
  Cinderella use case is very niche here, because as you can see from all the videos, players stalled a lot after 2nd Full Burst to wait for the 3rd one. During that window, Cinderella won’t have her S1 ẠTK Buff, which makes her deal 1 damage to enemies most of the time.
• 
  Red Hood may also be used as a Burst 3! But in very specific situations. This confirms the limit of your Bursts in the stage to 2. The use of this depends on the stage. You will sometimes find this useful in iron weak stages. Due to the nature of this suggestion, the following video reference should help understand how it works:

Elemental Based Choices

Against Iron weak stage:

Against Fire weak stage:

Against Electric weak stage:

Against Water weak stage:

Against Wind weak stage::

Anything beyond 45% is currently thought to be impossible, and at 50%, all of your stats are reduced by 99%, preventing you from going further. Congratulations, you have reached the bottom pit of hell! Give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it.