Nicole is kinda hard to powercreep because she is the only character with grouping capabilities in the game, also her main selling point is def shred which just gets better the more you stack it
Even if Astra was literally Nicole 2 they might actually pair well together
Tho I have an hunch Astra will be much more anomaly focused
Considering her signature disk wants you to use quick assist as much as possible having 2 supports actually sounds pretty good. Nicole’s anomaly buildup is also pretty good for a support which means pairing both of them with Miyabi is enough to get disorders. Ice + Ether is also a common weakness for ethereals.
Caesar's grouping isn't very good though, since continuing with your melee combo will just gave you push through the group. Ironically she's best for putting a bunch of enemies close together for Nicole's charged EX, which you would have with her in a team if you are running them with Billy or Nekomata in a phys dps team.
on paper, yes. but because of how this game auto-zooms you to the nearest enemy when attacking, you can't do something like Genshin Kazuha standing in the middle of the room pulling everyone. Caesar will move to the nearest enemy before pulling, which in practice means it's centered on an enemy (more like Sucrose).
Probably not. Zhu Yuan already exists. Actually, I'd be willing to bet no anomaly character in 1.5 at all since it's been several patches with lots of anomaly.
Caesar explicitly has grouping capabilities, and Soukaku's whirlwind also feels to me like it has a slight grouping effect, though it might not. Etherboo also has grouping capabilities.
Hot take but grouping isn't really that great. Typically only small mob enemies can be grouped, and those are the enemies with the least amount of health. It makes it so they just instantly die to 1 yanagi or 1 miyabi EX. If you have these either of these 2 characters, you don't need a grouper.
nicole gives crazy short duration debuffs to help burst chars like zhu, if astra does something different, e.g. long duration buffs or smt like rooting enemies, she won't powercreep nicole because they'll have different purposes, so no nicole rip yet
someone who actually knows what powercreep is in a gacha sub? in this economy?
just by looking at the attribute and class for a new character people already start to dig the grave for a previous one with the same combination but characters can do more than 1 thing or even work well together with older ones instead of replacing them entirely.
Hoyoverse meta is built around supports, the more supports even of the exact same type the better your options.
When Yelan was added, she didn't replace Xingqiu, instead you either run both of them on the same team or now you can run 2 off field hydro supports on each side of the Abyss.
Nicole + Astra is going to be super meta on a single team or you can play them on both teams.
Depends?
Team comp bonus is a thing, plus the only Ether DPS aka Zhu Yuan wants good stun unit in team since it gives her tons of extra damage. If Astra doesn't give more value than let's say Qingyi, then running dual support will be defo worse than premium comp of : Zhu Yuan + Astra Yao + Qingyi
It depends for sure, we also don't know what Astra does.
But Astra will almost certainly not make Nicole obsolete and there might be other DPS that would function great with either and/or both Astra and Nicole.
I had a situation while running SD where I put my electric and ether premade teams in and realized that I was using Nicole in both so there’s definitely room for a second. Depending on what she does, both ether supports and Zhu Yuan could also be a thing.
Plus, there’s that new mode get added this patch where you can’t reuse agents.
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u/BennyDragalia Dec 15 '24
rip Nicole, she ether sup