If you think about it, it’s a little strange that Yao decided to switch out her sniper for an SMG, considering that she’s known to prefer taking high-up vantage points far from the action. However, it seems that she wants to take a more active role now. This impulsive change of heart has resulted in a very strong Ballistic support that’s much-needed in Snowbreak’s current state. But if you ask me, I’d say that she thought that taking this more supportive role is just a ploy to still let her avoid the bulk of front-line action. Some things never change.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Yao summons two glowy balls and has them do the hard work of taking out enemies for her, launching them at the location of your choice where they then explode to do AoE damage. Continuing a proud Snowbreak tradition of pretending that the auxiliary unit mechanic doesn’t exist, they’re not counted as auxiliary units despite apparently being robots, but the damage dealt does scale with her Defense stat (and only her Defense stat. This will be a common theme.)

As with all supports released these days, the damage is enough to make her not an active liability if you wish to use her on-field in general content, but she’s also not going to be breaking DPS records anytime soon.

Support Skill

Yao continues slacking off in her support skill, as she conjures another robot to mark up to three enemies with electric sparks to take damage over time and generate U-Energy when Yao is off-field. Marked enemies also take extra crit damage, which is the main appeal here. This is implemented as an extra boost to your crit damage multiplier and not as a crit damage taken buff, in case you were wondering. And the crossbow operative singular (hi Katya) need not miss out either - Seasun actually remembered she exists and gave an alternate Ballistic Damage buff to her since you know, crossbows can’t crit.

This skill lasts for up to 15 seconds, but also eats 1.5 S-Energy for every second it’s active and will shut itself off early if you can’t feed it. Thankfully, your S-Energy cap is 50 so you probably won’t have to worry about that, especially considering that you have to have at least 20 S-Energy to be able to cast this skill despite the cast technically costing 0 S-Energy.

Ultimate Skill

Now that you know what Yao’s standard skill is, you’re all set to understand what her ult does… because it’s basically the same thing. The funny lightning marks are back, replacing any that were deployed by her support skill and now automatically retargeting if a marked enemy dies. The same crit damage and crossbow Ballistic Damage buffs return too, but with increased specs for extra number-go-up goodness. Yao also makes good on her love of elevated vantage points by hopping in a giant floating ball in the sky and onto an exercise bike, getting a great view of the battlefield while also pedalling out a chunky flat Attack buff for your team that scales with her Defense stat. Apparently it’s Planet Fitness’ newest membership perk or something.

Much like her support skill, Yao’s ult also costs resources over time to maintain, this time being 2 U-Energy per second, up to 30 seconds. Make sure you have enough juice to sustain it though, because having the ball deployed prevents you from generating more U-Energy while it’s there.

Normally, using Yao’s ult will lock you out of switching her on-field, but in co-op content where you only bring one operative, you get to keep control and play orbital strike simulator. Her standard skill is now free and deploys four times the robo balls (to eight in total), while also halving its cooldown for maximum skill spam. Why aren’t you allowed to do this in single-player content? Your guess is as good as mine.

Deiwos Passive

Nothing interesting here. Yao’s Deiwos passive gives her a 30% Defense boost while equipping an Electric weapon, which is further increased based on her Alignment Index stat. But considering that all of her skills scale off of her Defense, it’s pretty useful.

Assessment

At the time of writing, the Ballistic support pool is sparse enough that any new half-decent option would be greatly appreciated.

It’s a good thing then, that Yao is much, much better than just half-decent.

The Ballistic Damage meta still very much revolves around critting, which makes Yao - Nightglow perfectly suited to become a staple pick. With both her support and ultimate skills being strong buffing tools, Yao also provides excellent uptime on her support utility. Start off with her support skill and when it’s about to end, swap over to her ult for an even bigger boost to finish off your foes. Once you become more familiar with using Yao and the level of damage output you can get using her in various teams, you can also start changing it over earlier to get quicker access to the enhanced buffs at the cost of shorter uptime. Life’s too short to play it safe sometimes, so absolutely try out pushing the limits to see how much support skill cutting you can get away with. Experiment and be a little impulsive. What’s the worst that can happen?

Weapons

Well, the comparison here between Yao’s event shop weapon Divine Justice and her premium gacha weapon Starfall is pretty cut and dry. In exchange for a slightly lower Defense boost and Ballistic Damage buff (that ends up being higher in almost all gameplay scenarios), you get an additional Ballistic Damage Taken buff to multiplicatively stack on top. Exactly how much better this is will vary depending on who you pair Yao with, as this is the fickle nature of comparing buff strength, but you can expect around a 17-20% improvement at Tier 1. Tier 2 of Starfall naturally outshines Divine Justice in all numerical aspects and ups the gap to 37-45%. These are decidedly pretty bad figures when compared to DPS weapon upgrades, but you also have to remember the versatility of support weapons, getting much more mileage than their DPS counterparts. At any rate, it’s more than Fenny - Starshine’s premium weapon offerings, which I don’t think anyone is too disappointed in.

The actually interesting part of this analysis comes when you extend the list of weapons in consideration to the existing support SMG options, Frigatebird and Alloy Truth. And well, they don’t hold up amazingly. Because Yao’s support playstyle is as much support skill as it is ult, you end up having to choose which part you want your support weapon buff to add to. Yao’s intended weapon options mentioned earlier provide their buffs during her ultimate, which is arguably the more useful time period as it provides the biggest buff amount possible. In short fights, you’ll want to end Yao’s support skill early to move onto her ult as soon as you have enough U-Energy to finish the fight, while longer combat scenarios naturally end in more ult uptime considering that its max duration is twice that of her support skill.

Unfortunately, both Frigatebird and Alloy truth activate on support skill cast, which leaves little if any buff uptime left by the time you get to her ult. Even ignoring this fact, their performance still doesn’t hold up to even Divine Justice, as Alloy Truth scales off of HP while Frigatebird uses ATK, both stats that Yao does not optimize for in favour of DEF instead.

Manifests

You know, for a character that was given out for free, you’d think that Seasun would try harder to sell her manifests to get people to roll for dupes. Their current attempt really isn’t it, as you can see.

…Yeah.

Manifest 1 is actually a pretty decent boost, providing a Ballistic Damage buff during her ult that scales with her Defense stat, capping at 3000 Defense for a 15% Ballistic Damage buff. This is ridiculously easy to max out by the way, as using even just Divine Justice with her designated logistics set Zephyr Squad (more on this later) is enough to hit the buff cap, regardless of how awful your logistics stat rolls are. If you cap the buff, you also get a CC resistance buff, which is always nice quality of life. For most people, you’ll be just fine stopping here, making Yao a quick (manifest) one-and-done.

Manifests 2 and 3 sound great on paper as they increase her ult’s Attack buff ratio, crit damage buff, and crossbow Ballistic Damage buff by 20%, but it quickly loses its shine once you realize how they’re applied. That is to say, these upgrades are multiplicative, not additive. This means that the 20% increase to the 30% DEF→ATK conversion is actually 6% in practice, boosting it to 36%. The 50% crit damage buff and 30% crossbow Ballistic Damage buff are much the same, only actually being increased to 60% and 36% respectively - only a 10% and 6% bump. Add in losses from diminishing returns, and the real-world performance improvement ends up being around 4% for M3, while M2’s impact can be as low as just 1%!

Manifest 4 increases the base values of the Attack buff ratio, crit damage buff, and crossbow Ballistic Damage buff, and thankfully additively this time. Unfortunately, this increase isn’t very large. With the M2/3 multiplicative boosts, you get increases of 6% to the crit damage buff, and 3.6% to the Attack buff ratio and crossbow Ballistic Damage buff. It actually ends up being a smaller performance gain than M3, despite costing 50% longer to obtain.

And then we get to Manifest 5. The good news? Its damage buff is actually quite chunky, being almost as big of a performance gain as Manifests 2-4 combined. The bad news? It’s only when you’re attacking a shielded enemy. At the time of writing, only nine of the thirty Neural Simulation bosses have shields. Even in general content, there are entire enemy factions like Coyotes that don’t have a single shielded enemy, which makes actually getting the damage buff difficult at times. It’s also really expensive, but you probably knew that already. Not exactly the best value proposition.

So yeah, stopping at Manifest 1 sounds pretty good to me.

Logistics

Just use Zephyr Squad. Amarna doesn’t work during Yao’s ultimate as it’s no longer her support skill doing the damage over time to enemies, and even the niche use case that Twilight might have is nullified by Zephyr’s Defense boost and other Yao-exclusive utility being too much numberwang to compete against.

It’s all so tiring.

Logistics stats are just as boring: Yao scales with nothing but Defense, doesn’t have issues with skill cooldowns, and any potential problems she might have with S and U-Energy are neatly taken care of by her kit already. So if you couldn’t guess, you want Defense and Alignment Index (which converts into more Defense).

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

For reasons that are beyond my comprehension, Seasun calls Yao a “skill support.” Assuming you’ve read what she does and know that almost all skill damage in the game is unable to crit, it should be pretty obvious that Yao is in actuality a Ballistic support (the few instances of critting skill damage are on Ballistic-oriented operatives, anyways).

Every ballistic operative in the game not named Katya relies on critting as part of their damage output, making Yao an easy plug-and-play addition. She’s even considerate enough to give the non-critting Katya - Blue Bolt a crossbow Ballistic Damage buff. How nice of her.

Hybrid DPS operatives like Chenxing (of both the Ethereal Cloud and Jade Arc variety) and Lyfe - Infinite Sight can pair nicely with Yao, too. While any pure skill damage that they output won’t be boosted as much, this didn’t stop people from using Fenny - Starshine with any of these operatives so I don’t see it being a problem here, either.

For more advanced players, here’s an interesting proposition: Tess. At Manifest 2 and beyond, Tess instantly generates a sum of U-Energy when casting her ult. For quick fights, this can mean that Yao gets to skip her support skill windup entirely and go straight to her more-powerful ult instead. This also increases Tess’ buff strengths due to how they work, which sets you up with a massive amount of short-term damage buffs before the timer has even had a chance to tick down.

Should You Pull?

As an operative, Yao - Nightglow is amazing. She’s a must-have staple support for the entire Ballistic DPS archetype, going toe-to-toe with Fenny - Starshine for the support crown. If you were playing during the Hearts in Harmony patch, be very grateful that you got her for free.

Now, should you pull for her Manifests though? Oh god no, did you see how much of a scam they are past the first one? Just farm out M1 with Personal Files and never touch it again. Her weapon is a different matter, however. While Starfall isn’t the biggest upgrade, it’s probably still worth the asking price with Yao looking to be a constant presence in the meta for quite some time. So if there’s nothing else urgent on your wishlist, it certainly wouldn’t be the worst idea to take a page from Yao's book and ball out a little.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

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

Cheat Sheet