Bay Arena Review | Nikke: Goddess of Victory (2024)

Before Shift Up blesses us with the half anniversary content, we have yet another PvP unit to keep the theorycrafters busy: Bay! Let’s see what she does and how she works in the current meta.

Skills Overview

First off, let’s talk about her skills and clarify some mistranslations:

• Her S1 shares damage proportionally to the whole team after Bay uses her Burst skill, alongside a very minor Def increase.
• Her S2 also shares damage proportionally, but it’s very poorly worded in EN. What it actually does is sharing damage between Bay and Bay’s cover, plus healing her cover a bit after FB ends.
• Her Burst increases her cover’s max HP a bit and gives the whole team a bit of damage reduction, and while the amount isn’t that high it’s always nice to get some damage reduction.

Few things to point out: the “proportionally” is important, since it’s not like Jackal, who distributes damage evenly. Bay gets a bigger hit of damage than the other Nikkes (Bay takes about 40% of the damage, while other Nikkes take 15% each), but her cover absorbs almost all of the damage if it’s alive (cover will take around 93% of the damage).

Role and Utility in the current Meta

If the above cover numbers seem to you a bit crazy and strong, that’s because they are: Bay mostly functions as a much easier to access Noah, with a few extra drawbacks but also interesting synergies. Her damage share if her cover is alive will be easily able to tank a lot of AOE nukes, and while it’s not that good at blocking damage against the likes of Red Hood, Alice or SAnis, she can help soften up the hits due to the team-wide damage share, which can buy some extra time for your own damage dealers or healing to kick in. She also works at very low investments, which is great for people that don’t want to spend a lot of resources on PvP-specific units.

There is one notable exception: attacks that can both directly hit her cover and the Nikkes can break cover first and hit Nikkes second, which will effectively “ignore” the cover’s damage share and still deal massive damage, like Emilia’s burst (Snow White and Maxwell should also be able to do it, but they need to shoot at Bay with their bursts, which can be mostly avoided with proper positioning since Bay doesn’t taunt). AOE nukes that deal damage more than once can also cause problems, breaking cover on the first hit and hitting hard the second hit, like 2B or Maiden.

She can also find use in true stall comps, and while those are for now more of a meme build that takes a huge amount of investment and needs a built Quiry (which almost no one has), she does work pretty well since she mitigates AOE nukes and helps with distributing damage. She can also work well with Biscuit due to Biscuit granting temporal invulnerability (no taunt can be an issue though), and also due to Biscuit’s cover repair, if you’re going the true stall route.

Sample Team Comps

She can be run as a substitute to Noah in a lot of cases due to having similar utility and burst gen, or as a second Noah when you’ve already used her in a different team.

You can play around with the DPS and the battery depending on which units you have available. Moran can also work instead of Noise as long as the team still bursts in 3RL.

If you really really want to try a true stall comp with her… You’d probably be looking for a Noise-Bay-Quiry core, with the remaining 2 slots covering speed and more survivability or damage, depending on how “stally” you want your team to look. You could run Biscuit or Rapunzel for more survivability, one attacker like Red Hood or SAnis… Just be warned, this is more of a meme and wants a pretty stacked Quiry. Trying to hit 3RL is mandatory if you’re even thinking on running this on Defence, but for Attack you may be able to forego the speed slot for more survivability if you can afford to burst slower.

Strange Interactions/Potential Bugs

• She seems to interact a bit weird when run alongside Jackal, Jackal links seem to take damage that doesn’t correlate with the 15% each from Bay’s damage share, reason is unknown.

TLDR and Closing Thoughts

Bay is a very good defensive unit that performs a similar role to Noah and also helps with a few unconventional team archetypes. She works best against Scarlet and AOE nukes that only hit once, but struggles with DPS that hit hard multiple times. She’s also much easier to get than Noah, so even if you plan on saving your gems for the upcoming half anniversary, you may benefit from wish-listing her to get a copy when she joins the standard pool.