Arena (PvP) Mechanics

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:

• 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).

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.

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.
• 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.