Nita represents a lot of firsts for Snowbreak, but also not really. She’s the first free SSR DPS, but also far from the first free SSR operative to be released. She’s the first “melee” operative as well, but that’s also if you don’t count Haru - Absconditus’ Bluetooth sword slashes. Similarly, taking her out into combat provides a unique, fun gameplay loop - but at the same time, it also reveals some perennial Seasun-isms, for better or for worse.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Starting off with Nita’s standard skill gets us right into the action via the flying fist delivery service. Nita jumps towards the targeted direction and follows up the initial hit with five more punches, dealing damage based on her maximum HP. You do this by tapping your standard skill button again, while also making sure to time it well - hitting the sweet spot on a perfect timing maximizes your damage, but swinging too late or too early sees your damage suffer while also racking up Cinder Chimes. Collect too many of those, and you get kicked out of the skill early and eat some damage. Not fun. This is especially important because after your five punches, you time one final hit (the “Searing Smash”) that deals significantly more damage and, when equipped with Nita’s signature weapon, also resets this skill’s cooldown.

With neuronics, the Searing Smash does even more damage and also reduces the cooldown of Nita’s ult when equipped with a Thermal weapon. This is useful on both counts for obvious reasons. Less useful is the other neuronic, which increases the amount of Cinder Chimes you can collect before you self-KO, and reduces the cooldown of your standard skill when shooting enemies. The former isn’t particularly useful since you should be aiming for perfect timings anyways, and the latter doesn’t do much since this skill can already reset its cooldown. A bit of a head scratcher. You still want to unlock it though, as it does increase the skill's HP ratios.

There is one issue that you might be quick to notice when you go up against anything that’s not a punching bag, however. After your initial jumping hit, you’re effectively stuck in place, which can make hitting other enemies further away a bit awkward, especially since you really want to go through the entire attack string for the cooldown reset. Fortunately, you can dodge while the skill is active to dash forward a bit, also resetting the skill timing bar in the process. It’s better than nothing, but it’s also not as good as it could be.

Support Skill

This is the usual DPS filler support skill, though it is a bit more interesting than usual as it does have a fun counterattack mechanic if you time it with an enemy’s attack. But at the end of the day, there’s no reason to swap Nita off the field, so you probably won’t be getting much use out of this.

Ultimate Skill

Nita’s ultimate doesn’t cost U-Energy, but instead has her going full Rackam as she self-punches herself for 99% of her current health and inflicts an equal amount of hurt to all nearby enemies. With neuronics, this does more damage and also thankfully gives you a shield for most of the HP you consumed, making it practical to actually use this ability and saving Nita from the sacrificial role that poor Rackam endures more often than not.

Deiwos Passive

So remember how hitting perfect timings on the punches in Nita’s standard skill is important? Well it’s even more so than you might think, as her Deiwos passive directly rewards you for being on rhythm. The important one is at the first five-perfect-hit breakpoint, which grants you a damage boost; the following two at 10 and 15 provide damage reduction and a healing boost, which are also still nice, of course. Meanwhile, stacking Alignment Index boosts Nita’s healing effectiveness, which actually ends up being useful - because Nita’s ult deals damage based on the HP consumed, which is based on her current (not max) HP, the more health you heal back up, the more you can consume on your next ult, which means more damage.

Assessment

When Nita works, the gameplay experience is smooth and dare I say it, quite fun. Time your punches well to dish out the damage, burn off your HP bar for a big nuke, and rinse repeat for as many rounds in the ring as needed until your opponent is TKO’d.

However, there are a few complications that can pop up in the process of becoming The Greatest. Consider her standard skill. For everything that it does, it still manages to not do enough. While your resistance to crowd control effects is apparently boosted while the skill is active, you can still be staggered or knocked out of it, which leaves you waiting on the cooldown before you can do anything meaningful. Similarly, the timing window (and the skill itself consequently) expires once the indicator reaches the end of the bar - I hope you didn’t plan on casting any support skills after you gapclose with the initial cast. On the topic of gapclosers, The lack of mobility in Nita’s kit really shows when you try to bring her to fight mobile enemies, especially slippery bosses like pi or Shadow Predator, and it can make the experience incredibly frustrating.

Looking towards her weapons, logistics, and special Auctus Drive upgrades, you’ll unfortunately see more of the same - solid concepts with baffling flaws in the implementation itself. Cue the Rocky training montage music.

Weapons

As it stands, there is absolutely zero reason to use anything other than Nita’s signature weapon, Timeless Rhythm. This is as much for its own merits as it is the fact that nothing else really works. Fellow Thermal shotgunner and HP-scaler Siris - Ksana’s signature weapon, Crowned Flail, doesn’t actually have any of its weapon skills work (besides the HP boost), as Nita’s standard skill duration doesn’t count as a continuous cast. As a result, it actually manages to be worse than Siris’ welfare option Scarabaei, a rare win for the little guy.

But overall, neither of these are very good weapon options, so it’s a pretty good thing that you get Timeless Rhythm for free. No seriously, there really is no point to using anything else because of that, so I’m not even going to bother with a comparison chart.

Timeless Rhythm itself provides a healthy amount of buffs - a chunky HP boost and when your max HP is over 40,000, also passively boosts your skill damage and tosses in a %DMG Taken buff for good measure. And yes, it’s max HP, not your current health value. It would be pretty silly if you lost your buffs as soon as you ulted, after all (though this is Seasun, so you can’t be too sure). On its own, this already puts it in line with other premium gacha weapons. However, that’s only half of it.

As mentioned before, having this weapon equipped will reset Nita’s standard skill cooldown after its final hit, Searing Smash, activates. This is very useful for obvious reasons, and it goes even further than that, completely nullifying Cinder Chime generation when you get perfect timings, meaning that you can go an entire battle without ever seeing a single stack. The sheer amount of  extra functionality that this weapon unlocks in Nita’s kit might as well make it a hidden extra manifest. Or uh, Auctus Drive, I should say.

If there’s one bone I do have to pick with this otherwise-outstanding weapon, it’s that it specifically only works with Nita. The majority of its buffs are locked to Nita by name, effectively shutting out the previously-mentioned Siris - Ksana. And it’s a shame, because it would be an amazing pickup for her, even beating out her own signature by a healthy margin.

Siris has lost a lot of ground in the meta since her release, so this could have been a much-needed shot in the arm while still not pushing her right to the forefront. And really, what’s the harm in letting her have a new toy? I don’t even like Ksana as an operative, and I think that she got absolutely robbed. It’s one thing for Siris’ signature weapon to not work with Nita due to how it works mechanically, but there’s no reason for Nita’s to not work with Siris except for the fact that Seasun decided that it should be that way. It’s frustrating to see, but if the continual release of character-locked logistics sets didn’t tip you off, it seems that Seasun is still as stubborn as ever about players interacting with the game only in the way that Seasun deems acceptable. See the supplementary material for a comparison of what could have been.

Auctus Drives

Unlike other operatives, Nita does not have manifestation levels. Instead, she has four Auctus Drives that serve more or less the same purpose. Not sure why, because it’s not like they actually explain the difference or why she uses them. At any rate, you can get all of them for free so there’s no real reason not to, but let’s go over what they do anyways.

Auctus Drive 1: This increases the damage of Searing Smash based on how few Cinder Chimes you have, up to 150% if you have none (which remember, is possible thanks to Timeless Rhythm). This damage increase is not implemented as a %DMG buff, a %DMG Taken buff, or any buff at all actually, because that would make too much sense for how it’s described in-game. Instead, it increases the HP scaling of the hit from its base ratio of 85% up to 150% despite not mentioning damage ratios at all. But regardless of how it does it, it nearly doubles the damage of that hit and improves her per-rotation damage by about one fifth.

I think I’m going to call my therapist after I finish writing this article.

Auctus Drive 2: Unlocking this allows Nita to heal for up to 4% of her max HP on each punch she throws in her standard skill as long as she’s equipping a Thermal weapon. That doesn’t sound very useful initially, as it’s not a damage boost, but recall that Nita’s ult damage is based on how much health she consumes. If you have no health to burn through, it can’t do damage. This makes healing back up after you ult important to being able to continue doing damage on followup ult casts. The amount healed varies with how well you time your punch, up to 4% of Nita’s max HP on a perfect. Not to get into super advanced mathematics here, but 4 is more than 3, which will be important later.

Auctus Drive 3: This upgrade reduces the amount of Cinder Chimes you get on a non-perfect timing. You still want to be hitting perfect timings because of Auctus Drive 1 though, so this doesn’t end up being that useful in practice. Also, the Cinder Chime gain is reduced to 3, not by 3. Thank you again, Seasun, for the wonderful skill text translation. You still have to get this though, because the Auctus Drive after this is actually good. Sorry.

Auctus Drive 4: So remember that healing from Auctus Drive 2? Well, this upgrade provides Nita with a skill damage buff for a short period of time whenever her health changes by more than 3% of her maximum HP. And recall that her AD2 healing is good for up to 4% of her max HP, and 4 is a bigger number than 3. This means that each perfect hit you land provides you a (non-stacking, unfortunately) skill damage buff with very high uptime. Do note that if you’re at or close to full health, healing for less than 3% of Nita’s max HP in practice won’t trigger the buff even if the amount healed would on paper.

This leaves you with a bit of a dilemma. Nita’s ult drops her HP by 99%, and 99 is also bigger than 3, which means it triggers the buff while providing you with more than enough room on Nita’s health bar to trigger it again with healing. However, you want to be close to any potential enemies first so that your ult will be in range. Nita’s limited mobility means that you’d have to commit your standard skill to close the distance, where you’d either have to go through an entire standard skill sequence without this buff or end it early to ult (and then wait for your cooldowns to come back). You can also just airball your ult before starting combat proper, but that sucks for other, obvious reasons. Lastly, you can interrupt Nita right as she's about to land from her jump with a support skill cast, mostly resetting her standard skill cooldown enough to be available right after an ult cast. This comes the closest to being a functional solution in theory, but it has a very tight window where this will work; casting it too early makes the support skill you used do nothing, which is again, not ideal. There really isn’t a perfect solution to this issue, but for most people I would suggest just opening with Nita’s standard skill and initially missing out on the buff to keep your rotation flowing.

Logistics

Nita’s logistics set, Sorbus Squad, has two effects, and both of them are very useful. The first is that it boosts her ult damage whenever her HP decreases. Conveniently enough, Nita’s ult consumes HP to activate. The buff only lasts for one second, but it applies before the ult damage is calculated, so you do in fact benefit from it. The second effect is that whenever Nita is healed, she gets a short buff to her standard skill damage. Oh hey, that’s Auctus Drive 2 being useful again. Funny how that works. Unlike her Auctus Drive 4 buff, however, you don’t actually have to heal any HP for the buff to activate, which means it’ll still trigger even if Nita is healed at full HP.

I don’t think you need me to tell you to use this logistics set, but just in case: yes, you should.

Now as for substats. The obvious first choice is HP, as all of Nita’s damage scales off of it. More health means more damage, it’s as simple as that.

As for the second stat you want, Alignment Index actually ends up being a lot better than you think. I mean, part of it is that there aren’t a lot of options - Nita doesn’t shoot, doesn’t have S- or U-Energy issues, and has no real use for more Defense (HP is only useful specifically because Nita’s damage scales off of it!). Attack also ends up not being very useful, as all of Nita’s damage comes from her abilities, which… well, I think you know by now. But aside from this, Alignment Index also sustains Nita’s ult damage for reasons that I’ve already explained when I covered her Deiwos Passive. Click here to jump back to that.

When you’re actually playing Nita, you may have noticed that her ult cooldown doesn’t perfectly line up with the duration of her standard skill. This means you either go into another standard skill and put off the ult, or you stand around awkwardly waiting for that cooldown to come back up. So then the question becomes, is it possible to reduce Nita’s ult cooldown enough to line up with her standard skill?

As it turns out, you can. Getting around 50 skill haste is enough to speed up Nita’s ult cooldown enough to make standard skill → ult → standard skill chains possible. However, this will require three skill haste rolls, meaning that you have no room for Alignment Index to boost Nita’s healing, and subsequently, her ult damage. This means that you ult more often, but they’ll be weaker ults, which makes the whole endeavour pretty questionable, especially when you consider that Nita actually does more damage with her standard skill, so you can instead just opt to go through two standard skills before tossing out your ult. You do squeeze out very slightly more DPS with the skill haste build, as cycling 1:1 between standard skill and ult casts lets you skip a few frames with animation cancelling, but I’d still recommend sticking to Alignment Index for most people.

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

Nita, while mostly a normal skill DPS at her core, does come with a unique restriction thanks to the strict timing window of her standard skill’s punches. This means that you have to get all of your support skill casts out before you start up Nita’s standard skill, or else the support skill animation will prevent you from timing your punch and ending the skill early. This is a suboptimal outcome, obviously. The result of this quirk is that Nita works best with supports that are hands-off or can cast their skills from range. Whether intentional or not, this means that Nita’s support preferences end up looking a lot like the other operative that released in the same patch as her, Nerida - Styx Envoy.

Starting off with Enya - Exuvia, you’ll have to cast her support skill early and then recast it after Nita jumps with her initial standard skill cast to reposition it to where you now are. It’s a little awkward, but it works. Nita also doesn’t shoot, so don’t expect to see any attacks from Enya's support skill pod or any of the goodies that come along with that unless you’ve got her at M3 or higher. Because of this, Marian - Riptide once again finds some room to push out her more conventional rival as her passive damage buffs stay out of Nita’s way while her fists are flying. In addition, each of Nita’s standard skill punches counts as a cast to speed up Riptide’s ammo generation. You can even swap her in to dump her sub-DPS rotation between Nita’s standard skill and the remainder of her ult cooldown if you’re not using the skill haste build.

The usual generic supports will mostly still work well, with Acacia - Kaguya and Mauxir - Shadow Ka being their usual useful selves. Shadow Ka in particular can do a lot to cover for Nita’s lack of mobility, but you don’t get any of the extended benefits that ballistic DPS operatives enjoy, and enemy invulnerability will still be an annoyance. Given Nita’s easy access to her ult, Tess - The Magician can also be used for big one-time damage buffs. Notably though, Eatchel - The Cub, being an attack buffer, provides no offensive buffing utility to Nita (remember, HP scaling) and is thus only useful for her healing and access to Stun.

As for budget options, Acacia - Redacted’s ranged slow can buy extra time to lay down some pain before an enemy can get away, while Cherno - Those Two can taxi Nita right into the action instead. Chenxing - The Observer gets some extra value on top of her skill damage buffs, as the healing she provides actually manages to contribute to Nita’s DPS thanks to how her ult works. And finally, Mauxir - Meow’s support skill can let Nita double dip on each punch, multiplying the damage she deals by virtue of hitting the enemy twice with each fist.

Once again, keep in mind when team building for Nita that all of her abilities scale with HP, which means that support weapons and other effects that buff Attack will do a whole lot of nothing. Try to stick to options that buff damage directly or provide other forms of offensive utility.

Should You Pull?

Well, no. If you can find a way to spend gacha pulls on Nita, I would be genuinely impressed, because everything you’d ever need to kit her out can be obtained for free.

Jokes aside - while Nita herself is directly free to obtain, you will have to grind the Nita’s Invitation game mode to unlock her signature weapon and Auctus Drives, as well as a set of her logistics squad with pre-defined HP/AI rolls. It’s a board game where you collect currency that you can spend to improve your gathering abilities, and ultimately cash in what you get after one lap to progress through the rewards ladder. It’s a solidly inoffensive if not pretty boring experience, which ends up putting it surprisingly above-average for a Snowbreak minigame. It does have an “auto” mode, but the amount of popups and prompts you have to manually interact with ends up defeating the purpose for the most part. A for effort, I guess.

If you have the means, I’d recommend running it on a second monitor or device while you watch Youtube and deal with whatever popup the game asks you to deal with every twenty seconds. There are strategies you can use to make this process faster, but you can also just not think about it too hard and do a few extra runs; I got through the whole thing pretty absentmindedly in about two hours and change while catching up on my Perun backlog. As far as grind goes, it could be worse, I guess.

So with Nita’s full potential just being a Netflix and chill session away, it’s hard not to recommend putting in the "effort" unless you really don’t like her gameplay. She likely won’t be competing with the Neural Sim heavyweights anytime soon, but Nita’s accessibility makes her enough for even a beginner to set a respectable time as long as they’ve got the chops to pilot her effectively.

Overall, Nita is one of the better operatives that Seasun has released in a long time. She manages to be unique and viable, but also doesn’t break the game in half as she deals a Nitillion damage in the blink of an eye. She gives me hope that Seasun still has what it takes to keep gameplay fun and engaging after multiple underwhelming or problematic releases in the game’s relatively recent history. But she’s not perfect.

Nita might sting like a bee, but she doesn’t quite float like a butterfly. For a character with such limited range, Nita is incredibly immobile, being entirely dependent on her standard skill’s initial jump as well as the handful of dodges you can weave between her punches. This makes her frustrating to play against mobile enemies and creates that order-of-operations conflict with her fourth Auctus Drive. I don’t see a reason why Nita’s melee moveset can’t get more mobility baked into it. Why not give her ult a dash before she deals her damage? Why not give every punch of her standard skill a dash too? It wouldn’t fundamentally break her unless you mean to tell me that Nita is intentionally balanced around not actually being able to do damage half of the time (which would be stupid). What it would do, though, is fix just about all of Nita’s gameplay problems, and - equally as important - make her even more fun to play.

Oh yeah, and just a reminder that you can also occasionally be staggered or knocked out of your standard skill. It doesn’t happen super often, but it sure does suck when it does. Seasun, please fix.

Nita feels like a solid concept that was designed and implemented without considering the realities of actual gameplay. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t actually playtested before being released, and if that were the case, it’s quite incredible that she turned out as well as she did. And in that sense, Nita is the quintessential Seasun product - a great idea that unfortunately stumbles on the execution. Make no mistake though: I genuinely do like Nita’s new,SSR form. She’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time testing an operative for a review. I really hope Seasun gives her the extra bit of love and attention she needs to truly shine, because it’s frustrating to see her so close to being a genuinely amazing operative, and yet so far - too far for Nita, in her current state, to reach.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

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

Cheat Sheet