Genshin Impact’s new five-star character, the dancer from Hydro Nilou, has caused a rare, possibly never-before-seen rift in the gaming community. One camp is convinced that he is one of the strongest characters in a long time, and the other thinks that he may be the worst of all.
Genshin fans have debated the merits of virtually every character added to the game, but Nilou has been especially divisive due to how her abilities work. Nilou basically unlocks an exclusive, upgraded version of a reaction elemental called Bloom that spawns explosive seed pods, but only if you put her on a team that only contains Dendro and Hydro characters. you do not to have to build their teams this way, and some people still play Nilou with Pyro characters just to trigger the Vaporize reaction for bigger Hydro hits, but any other build will sacrifice a lot of Nilou’s built-in power.
The restrictions on the Nilou team are the main source of division in the community. Some players argue that Hoyoverse’s decision to explicitly limit her to two of the seven in-game items is unnecessarily limiting and that her kit could have been handled more elegantly, perhaps with staggered bonus effects rather than all-or-one triggers. any. The trick is that Nilou’s special flowers also damage your own characters, not much, but enough to kill you if you’re not careful, forcing you to use one of the two hydro healers available, since we don’t have a Dendro healer. . even.
“Nilou is great. The design philosophy behind the Nilou kit is not great,” says the Reddit user. LV999 Middle Boss (opens in a new tab) in a highly voted post. “She’s very restrictive of team building in a way we haven’t really seen before. Of course, you can ignore her kit and just play with her anyway. Genshin isn’t that hard, so it’ll work,” they add.
For one, teams built around Nilou can deal exceptionally high damage in the right setting, ideally when fighting multiple enemies that aren’t too far apart. The current Spiral Abyss dungeon setup was clearly tailor-made to show Nilou’s full potential, and sure enough, she absolutely chews it up even with low-investment gear. To really hammer this house, a Chinese player managed (opens in a new tab) to fly through the Spiral Abyss, the most difficult content in the game, with a deliberately weakened team using unleveled gear, all thanks to Nilou.
reddit user _D1N4148 (opens in a new tab) shared a video of his Nilou team competing with the Abyss clear time of a team built around Raiden Shogun, an Archon who, with his first two or three Constellations unlocked, as they are here, is considered a powerful game-warping unit. There is no doubt that Nilou can work, and work well, but how funny or interesting he is has aroused most heated discussion (opens in a new tab).
Nilou’s implications for future characters have also been extensively scrutinized, with known theory-makers like Ten Ten (opens in a new tab) Y zajef77 (opens in a new tab) weighing in among the western gaming community. Some Genshin players hope to see more characters like Nilou have their own special elemental reactions, but the issue of specificity is a recurring sticking point. Others believe that more characters like Nilou would actually limit future experimentation by reducing team building, while the game’s most popular characters can be added to almost any team or combination of items.
People are still learning how to play Nilou optimally, and Dendro’s archon Nahida’s upcoming release will no doubt change the way they play once again. In the few days since its release, it’s already sparked some of the most intense debate in Genshin history, which I guess is a sign of success in some way, and that will likely continue as the game’s Sumeru patches roll out. . For now, we’re putting her in the middle of the pack in our Genshin Impact character tier list, just know what she’s getting into when you want her.
The Spiral Abyss may be the hardest content in Genshin for some time, if not forever, with devs apparently avoiding end game content because “it could end up creating excessive anxiety.”
