The idea of a sub-DPS is something that Seasun has been trying to (unsuccessfully) push for as far back as an entire year at this point. Enya - Exuvia ended up being relegated to pure support duties, while Marian - Riptide’s shot-by-shot damage delivery more often than not left her on the bench as a hands-off buff bot. So then enter stage left, Nerida - Styx Envoy, a much more heavy-handed attempt to force a character-swapping playstyle into relevance. In reality, you could say the team building options that Nerida opens up don’t end up being more than the sum of their parts, but this isn’t quite accurate - and not for the reasons you might initially think.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Nerida’s standard skill has her going ghost, consuming S-Energy as she dashes forward to spawn Phantoms that deal damage to enemies before vanishing. This is your main trash mobbing tool, and in easier content, it’s a pretty hands-off experience once you toggle it on. You can even let Nerida run against a wall while the phantoms automatically deal with any enemies nearby. Admittedly, it’s not quite Danny Phantom levels of action. 

While you’ve been dispensing phantoms all over the battlefield, you’ve also been building up Wail Charge. With neuronics, you get two per hit, and with each phantom hitting five times, this means you need to spawn eight to hit the cap of 80 Wail Charge. In practice, the slow projectile speed means that you can get out ten phantoms before you activate the second part of Nerida’s standard skill. Holding the skill consumes all Wail Charge to send out a barrage of Wailing Ribbons, firing six at base and one more for every five Wail Charge consumed, hitting 22 times with 80 Wail Charge consumed. This deals a respectable burst of damage and is your main burst tool (sort of, you’ll see), though the projectiles frustratingly don’t travel any faster than Nerida’s phantoms. It also refunds your S-Energy, so you can do it all over again.

Support Skill

This is the second appearance of the “ambush” support skill, which keeps your operative on-field instead of peacing out after the cast. In Nerida’s case, she just deals a burst of damage. This is nothing too special, but unlike most DPS support skills, this actually has a use, as you’ll see.

Deiwos Passive

A quick pit stop to talk about Nerida’s Deiwos passive before we get to her ult. When Nerida is equipped with a Chaos weapon, any skill damage she does also inflicts Wraith Haunt to the enemy equal to the damage dealt. This is consumed over time to deal non-elemental, unboostable damage, and affected enemies are also marked as “Haunted” while this is happening. If you manage to stack enough Wraith Haunt on an enemy so that it would consume all of their remaining health (or reduce an enemy’s HP enough so that this is the case), the damage conversion rapidly speeds up for a pseudo-execute.

Also, Nerida gets extra ATK based on her Alignment Index stat.

Ultimate Skill

All of Nerida’s various skills and gimmicks come together here to the big payoff. On cast, she deploys a weird jellyfish thing called a Truth-Seer. This increases the Wraith Haunt stacks of all enemies in range by a factor of 1.8 and boosts the Wraith Haunt applied by Nerida by the same amount while it’s active. As well, other operatives that deal Chaos skill damage will have 25% of their damage dealt applied as Wraith Haunt as well. After five seconds, the Truth-Seer expires, dealing Chaos damage. More importantly though, all of the Wraith Haunt you’ve racked up until now had stopped converting to damage while the Truth-Seer was active, because seeing it convert to damage all at once when the Truth-Seer expires is a bigger dopamine hit. It does that, by the way. It’s this burst of damage that really gives Nerida her offensive bite, as it more than doubles your damage output, at the cost of it being very backloaded. Like the Wraith Haunt damage conversion, this damage is also non-elemental and unboostable, which makes damage calculations a bit easier - what you see is what you get.

…Do jellyfish have eyes? Can they even see things?

Assessment

Nerida’s playstyle is straightforward enough - sit in ghost form and spawn phantoms to generate Wail Charge, and release it for a big burst of damage, which you can further amplify with her ultimate. Of course, the hang time between her ult’s activation and detonation gives you some time to swap in one of your backline units to contribute to the Wraith Haunt stacking effort, provided that they can deal Chaos skill damage of their own. Once they finish their rotation, hit Nerida’s support skill to bring her back on-field as her ult detonates, and do it all again.

Overall, Nerida is a competent enough operative, and does enough damage for you to toggle on her standard skill and take a quick power nap while her phantoms do the heavy lifting in most content. However, those looking for more engaging gameplay might not find this to be the most interesting experience. Similarly, Nerida’s endgame strength requires her to be paired with a competent sub-DPS. This is the first time that I’ve ever said that about any operative, which is certainly an accomplishment. But in a meta full of self-sufficient powerhouses, this does make her own individual capabilities a lot less impressive by comparison.

Weapons

As you might expect, Nerida’s premium gacha weapon, Shadow Surge, is a pretty big upgrade over the free Web Snare. It provides all the usual goodies - ATK, %DMG, and the exclusive %DMG Taken buff. It’s good for a 38% bump at T1 and 74% at T2, pretty high numbers compared to other operatives. However, there’s a catch to this, and not one that’s good for sig skippers.

Those who read Web Snare’s skill description carefully will note that its 25% ATK buff is only applied after Nerida’s ultimate skill ends. This isn’t an issue in extended gameplay, but it does mean that your first rotation comparatively suffers in damage even more heavily, furthering the power disparity to levels not seen since Cherno - Enigma an entire year ago.

Manifests

Nerida follows the usual line-goes-up investment ethos that you all should be used to by now. The same smattering of buffs and perks that you see in previous operatives like Enya - Tempest and Chenxing - Jade Arc make their return in a lightly rearranged order, just enough that I have to redo all the buff tables when doing calculations. Thanks, Seasun.

The one interesting point to note is that Nerida’s Manifest 5 is a flat ATK buff to the entire team, doubling down on her sub-DPS-reliant playstyle. As such, the real-world utility of it will be higher than seen in the chart above. It’s still as expensive as though, so do keep that in mind.

Logistics

Sidhe Squad, Nerida’s logistics set, might not seem all that interesting at first glance, only boosting one part of her skill rotation. However, the attack that it buffs, Wailing Ribbons, is the main “normal” part of Nerida’s rotation, and the part that deals the most damage. Furthermore, this damage will typically be further boosted by Nerida’s ult when you need the extra offensive power, and will be more than overkill when you don’t. And like, have you seen those buff numbers? Even with buff dilution and diminishing returns, a 130% damage amp when in Nerida’s ult is nothing to sneeze at.

As far as stats go, Nerida has no issues with skill cooldowns, S-Energy, or U-Energy. In addition, she basically never wants to be shooting, so neither crit rate nor damage serve any use. I don’t think it needs to be stated that defensive stats have no use unless an offensive ability scales its damage off of it, so we’re left with just ATK and Alignment Index (which converts to more ATK) as the only stats that Nerida can get any meaningful use from.

See the supplementary material for more in-depth weapons and logistics set comparisons, as well as a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Team Building

Nerida, being a skill DPS, naturally benefits from supports that buff that kind of damage. To that end, Enya - Exuvia’s raw skill buffing power works as well as ever, though her extended utility will suffer pre-M3 due to Nerida’s gun-averse playstyle's inability to charge her pod. You can still use her just fine, but the spotlight this time goes to the usual runner-up, Marian - Riptide.

As you may recall, Nerida really wants a strong Chaos sub-DPS to complete her gameplay loop. However, the already-thin pool of operatives that fit those criteria is further pinched when the tight timeframe of Nerida’s ult in which they have to dump their damage is considered. Cherno - Enigma can pop real hard, but the setup needed is often either too time-consuming or too convoluted to be worth the hassle. This leaves the sole remaining candidate, Riptide, as the winner by default. Her special bullets charge fast due to each of Nerida’s phantom spawns counting as a skill cast, and her quick sub-DPS mag dump gets an artificial value boost due to it being skill damage and thus contributing to Nerida’s ult pop. Add in the fact that Riptide passively buffs standard skill damage as well (where the vast majority of Nerida’s elemental damage is), and you have a tailor-made pairing strong enough that she might as well be Nerida’s second standard skill.

Being an otherwise-normal DPS, Nerida still benefits from the generic support pool of Acacia - Kaguya, Eatchel - The Cub, and the budget offerings of Acacia - Redacted and Chenxing - The Observer.

Should You Pull?

I thought about this for a while, because Nerida really is a bit of a mixed bag.

In endgame content, Nerida’s heavily backloaded damage often comes too late to be competitively viable. However, the pseudo-execution mechanic does come in handy when dealing with bosses with hard HP gates, which gives her a defined if small niche. And yes, her pandering boss, Abyss Watcher, panders real hard to her. But even within said niche, the value is questionable as other DPS options opt to simply push between triggers faster to comparatively offset any invulnerability downtime. In sustained-DPS content like Supreme Battlegrounds though, this weakness is alleviated, elevating her to a solid “maybe” for more competitively-minded players. This is of course operating under the assumption that you have Riptide in your roster already - don’t even think about trying to get results out of her otherwise.

And for everyone else, we’re presented with another conundrum. It’s true that Nerida’s standard skill is extremely good at brain-off mobbing, but it’s also… really boring. Nerida also feels frustratingly slow to play - the phantoms take an eon to deploy, Wailing Ribbons fly towards their targets at a glacial pace, and even her ult’s delayed burst feels like unnecessary theater when its effects could be passively active and the cast an instant detonation. I personally found her gameplay to be even more unsatisfying than Vidya - Agave in any content that doesn’t push her to put in effort beyond turning on the phantom factory, but low-effort mission-clearing capabilities admittedly do appeal to a certain subset of the playerbase. However, when you consider that almost every new DPS these days is about as good if not better at waveclearing while arguably being a bit more fun to play, my recommendation for casual players ends up slipping from “maybe” to a very generous “probably not.”

Nerida - Styx Envoy ultimately is an operative that feels like someone designed for the wrong game. In a game with more emphasis on character-swapping like Wuthering Waves, her sub-DPS reliance turns into a mechanic that capitalizes on game systems that reward this kind of gameplay. But Snowbreak is not that kind of game. In this game, where DPS and support kits have long become hyper-optimized to do their jobs as efficiently as possible, having to dedicate power budget to creating the façade of character-swapping gameplay only serves to eat into your overall output. The fact of the matter is that in most meaningful gameplay scenarios (you could argue all scenarios not specifically designed for her to succeed in), Nerida’s swap-reliant rotations can be substituted with a more conventional DPS for equal if not better performance.

Credit does have to be given to Seasun for trying something new and attempting to introduce a new kind of gameplay style - arguably one that’s healthier for the state of the game. But new metas have to at least be as good as the old one to be worth anything, and after a year of accelerated powercreep and high-power solo DPS releases, Nerida largely fails to clear that bar. You also have to note the excessively restrictive nature of her kit, specifically only functioning with Chaos skill damage characters. This more or less pigeonholes you into using Marian - Riptide with her, in the end not moving the needle that much when it comes to player agency in team building and theorycrafting.

Perhaps with further development in this direction and the introduction of new general gameplay mechanics to reward this type of playstyle, Nerida can truly shine. As it stands right now, however, she’s paying the price that comes with being a pioneer, and the cost ultimately leaves her as less than the sum of her parts.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

Includes weapon and logistics set calculations, manifest growth calculations, and a logistics optimization calculator.

Cheat Sheet