Table of Contents
- Positioning and Burst Order
- Targeting
- CP Deficit
- Arena-Specific Environment
- Burst Generation – “Speed”
- Rocket Whiffing
- Bugs
In Goddess of Victory: Nikke, you can PvP battle with other Commanders via the Arena mode, located in the Ark. This guide contains information on all the Arena mechanics, plus some bugs that players need to be aware of.
For more, check out our series of PvP Arena guides by top player scyv4x:
- For an overview on the different Arena modes and rewards Click here.
- For an explanation on Arena meta Click here.
- For Rookie Arena teambuilding recommendations Click here.
- For SP Arena teambuilding recommendations Click here.
Positioning and Burst Order
For the preview, left to right on your screen: Position 1 to Position 5 for your team, same for your opponent, during combat opponent Nikkes flip so their P1 is at the rightmost position (as shown in the screenshots below).
Burst order is automatic, so the priority will be the Nikke with the lowest position number (this also means you need to be wary of Red Hood positioning, since she could “steal” other bursts you may want to use if she’s to the left of the unit you wanted to burst with).
Targeting
For where the Nikkes will start targeting when a match starts, MGs, SMGs and ARs will shoot 1 bullet to P5, then focus on P1, while RLs will start with P1.
For SGs and SRs the targeting is a bit odd, if SGs are on the Defence team they’ll target the Attack team’s P5, and if the SRs are on the Attack team they’ll target the Defence team’s P5, otherwise they target P1 as well.
Targeting will prioritize P1 > P2 > P3 > P4 > P5, or if they start on P5 they’ll go P5 > P4 > P3 > P2 > P1.
Targeting is reset/changed whenever:
- The unit reloads
- The target goes into cover (which can be triggered by any of the following events):
- The target reloads
- The target is a charge shot type (RL, SR), between each charge shot
- The target is stunned (Privaty, Rapunzel)
- A Nikke other than the target taunts the unit
- The target’s taunt ends
- The target is killed
Note that since RLs and SRs are going into cover after every shot, they can shift targeting to units in the center, which may prove dangerous if you need to protect certain Nikkes.
There are a few exceptions to this rule however:
- If there’s a stat penalty due to a big enough CP difference, conventional targeting rules can get disrupted and inconsistent.
- There’s also residual targeting and “rogue targeting” (more on that on the “Bugs” section).
CP Deficit
If the team with the lower CP of the two has less than 84.6% of the higher CP team, the lower team will get a stat penalty depending on how big the difference is. This mechanic also exists in other PvE modes, but the scaling for this penalty in PvP is different, it starts at 20% and caps at 90%:
Arena-Specific Environment
Arena also has some peculiarities:
- SGs always hit their 10 bullets and there is no spread, making the Hit Rate stat completely worthless in Arena.
- Arena runs internally at 30 fps regardless of your settings. This affects certain weapons’ attack speeds:
- Dual-wielders like Noah, Soline, Quency or Crow only use 1 weapon in PvP, effectively halving their burst gen and damage when compared to PvE, but they are still comparable to other Nikkes with their same weapon type.
- There’s basically no delay on Burst skills, so things like Scarlet‘s burst will deal damage the second the burst is activated, instead of having to wait for the animation.
Burst Generation – “Speed”
Burst generation is one of the most important parameters when building a team. The importance of speed will be discussed more in-depth in the “Meta” section, here I’ll explain how burst generation works and a bit about the lexicon used for PvP.
Essentially, Nikkes generate burst whenever they hit an enemy, either with a skill or through firing their weapon (+ Jackal’s S1, which is a bit of an oddball in here). Usually, when talking about how fast a team bursts in Arena, we use RLs or SGs as reference since they’re the 2 best weapons for filling your burst gauge, and we attach a number depending on how many shots from that weapon type it takes to fill the burst gauge (for example, a 3RL team would be a team that fills the burst gauge within the time it takes for their RLs to fire 3 times).
Burst generation in-depth explanation
Basically, every Nikke has a “Base burst gen” number associated to them. This number is almost entirely dictated by the type of weapon they are (lower fire rate weapons will have higher base burst gen numbers, you can check each Nikke’s burst gen in the “Database“), with some variance within weapon types and magazine types. A Nikke will generate burst equal to their base burst gen number when:
- The Nikke deals damage to an enemy or cover, be it through her weapon attacks or through skills.
- Jackal‘s Skill 1 activates (the reason why this generates burst is unknown, since it doesn’t deal damage, but it just generates burst)
Rocket launchers (and Nihilister) can also hit multiple times per attack due to the AoE/pierce + extra range, so if a RL attacks a Nikke in P1, the rocket will hit (if they’re all alive): The Nikkes in P1 and P2 + their respective covers, for a total of 4 hits and 4 times their base burst gen.
Nihilister works similarly, due to her Skill 1, her second shot onward will hit Nikke and cover, and since cover counts as a separate entity in Arena, it will trigger extra damage from her Skill 1, dealing damage 4 times per shot and getting 4x her base burst gen, which makes these units very good at charging your burst gauge.
SGs (mostly clip SGs) are also very good at charging the burst gauge, since all 10 pellets hit and they have pretty high base burst gen.
Rocket Whiffing
Rocket whiffing is a phenomenon where your RL shoots can miss an enemy, which can screw over a team’s burst timings. The likelihood of this happening is affected by various factors, like charge speed, distance between Nikkes and even daily randomness.
In-depth explanation
Essentially, there is a very brief period when a Nikke is moving in and out of cover where they can “dodge” attacks, so if a rocket is unfortunate enough, the shot can miss the Nikke completely, losing a bullet, dealing no damage and generating no burst whatsoever.
There are a few factors that contribute to whiffs occurring:
- Charge speed on RLs, this can be a double-edged sword, it could make your opponent whiff against your Nikke but if your Nikke has a much higher charge speed than your opponent it could backfire.
- Distance between both Nikkes, you may whiff a shot from say, P1, but in P4 it could not whiff since the distance the rocket would have to travel would change, which can affect the whiff.
- The speed of the projectile, some RLs like Laplace have much faster projectile speeds.
- Randomness. Yes, there seems to be an element of randomness, sometimes you fight a team, exact same Nikkes, no charge speed or position changes, one day you may not whiff and another you may whiff, for no apparent reason.
Bugs
- There is a bug known as “residual targeting”, which can sometimes happen in matches 2 and 3 on SP Arena, where the game will take the targeting from the previous match and use it on the following match, ignoring targeting rules (for example, match 1 the enemy team was hitting your P4 when the match ended, in match 2 all of the opponent’s Nikkes start focusing P4), trigger not fully known but it seems that longer matches have a higher likelihood of triggering residual targeting for the next match.
- Biscuit randomly giving invulnerability to Nikkes from the opposing team, pretty rare, trigger unknown.
- Pascal always misses his first shot in PvP, reducing his burst gen and damage.
- Alice can suffer from “rogue targeting”, so she may sometimes ignore taunts from other Nikkes (Noah burst, Makima taunt). Trigger unknown, and also inconsistent (Red Hood seems to also have this, but it’s consistent).
- (Potential bug) Some shields are behaving in a weird way against Scarlet‘s burst (Scarlet ignoring Folkwang‘s burst shield), however at this stage it’s unclear if it’s intended or a bug, since it didn’t use to work that way.
