Champion Arena

Finally we have the promising feature that costs Shift Up 2.5 years developing with probably a lot of resources too. Let’s see what kind of gameplay it will bring us (spoiler: There’s no gameplay)

Champion Arena (CA) is the latest mode in Nikke, which features 4 champions in each bracket and throws them together to find out who is the best PVP player (and luckiest too).

To be qualified in this tournament, you MUST be top 4 or higher in your Special Arena bracket. The final position is from your accumulated points over 13 days of Special Arena, not the final moment when SA ends (so don’t waste your effort sniping people at the last second hoping to join CA)

Other 2 conditions are

• Must be sync lv 200+
• Must own more than 25 Nikkes

Also, it’s because every 200 active players are grouped into 1 SP bracket, and only top 4 are qualified for CA, which means this mode is designed for top 2% player base only. If you are not there, I guess the rest of this guide will be irrelevant tee hee.

Assuming you have your invitation to this feast. First you will have to build your 5 teams (the first time system will auto arrange other 2 teams for you since they copy your 3 teams from Special Arena). Teams will be explained later with examples, right now we focus solely on the mechanics of CA.

When you finish creating your teams, make sure to save your team. It’s because the server will snapshot your teams with gears, OL, Cube, Skills, Recycling room, Cube. The snapshot is only viable before the countdown above ends, because after that you won’t be able to save your teams anymore, so no snapshot either. This can be hilarious if you roll a god tier OL option AFTER the countdown ends, but well, better luck next time!

In CA, Penalty (when your CP is over/under 15.4% of your enemy, weaker side will be reduced in stat) doesn’t exist, so DO NOT PUT YOUR PVE TEAMS HERE.

And all Nikkes are sync locked at 400. These 2 combinations will force a lot of whale players to think and update their PVP teams to be meta, else they will taste the loss they never feel on Special Arena where they gap opponents by 100 sync levels.

Info #1

Once the preparation phase ends, qualifiers will be locked in an oddly long 22h waiting for servers to simulate battles. Yes, there is no gameplay. You just buy your lottery and wait to see if you win or not.

Before we explain how battle works, let’s explain some interactions you can do here first.

• Group: You can click the group button to explore other 63 groups. You can press Confirm here to even find out your opponents in other groups.

• Icon of player: Clicking the icon will allow you to see enemy’s teams and order (these are important factors)

The fight in CA goes like this:

• Your team 1 will fight their team 1, with 50-50 chance you are Attacker/Defender. This will change Shotgun priority (Attack side SG will target P1, while Defend side SG will target P5)
• Then move to team 2 vs team 2, team 3 vs team 3…
• Whoever wins more than 3 / 5 matches will be the winner.

After another weird 22h delay (because they push all the calculations to servers), you will receive this screen.

Only 1 among 4 will be able to qualify for the top 64. As you can see, writer is the winner here so he lands in top 1 (with the random korean title which is translated: promoted to next match)

Clicking the replay will show you this

Now you understand why teams and orders are important? Problem is, you can’t change your team anymore, so you will have to live with your teams and orders till you win/lose. Maybe in the future Shift Up can change this part to allow more strategy here, right now it feels like a lottery lol.

The replay button will feature a brand new type of battleground with an over dramatic dying scene. Write highly recommends watching them for the ENTERTANTMENTTTTTT

After you are qualified for the top 64 aka Promotion phase, you will see this interface.

64 promoted top 1 will be divided into 8 groups, with each group containing 8 players. Those players will still fight in a Bo5 (Best of five) single elimination to find out who will be ready in Champion’s Duel (top 8 players).

The difference between this phase and previous phase is you can now Cheer for a match

• Qualifier can only cheer their own match
• Audience can cheer certain matches assigned directly to them. (Yeah you can’t cheer all matches)
• Once the audience cheers a match, the audience won’t be able to change to other matches anymore.
• In both cases, the audience can change who they will cheer for freely before the countdown ends.
• Max cheer is always 12h credit of your Outpost. Remember this number.

Because other fights will be like this and kinda repetitive so we won’t cover them anymore. Let’s go to the reward section for participating in this game mode.

There are 3 types of reward:

• For participation: Click Reward Info for more details. It’s a bunch of cosmetic frames but they are indeed pretty and rare.

• For union members: If your union has someone participating in CA, other members will receive useless Arena Exchange Vouchers.
• For the audience who cheers: You can receive up to 12 h of credit x 7 times = 84h of credit or 3.5 days worth of credit for cheering correctly on all the matches. You can also receive a special frame for guess correctly/wrongly all the matches

• Peak Idle gameplay. There’s no gameplay at all.
• 2.5 years for this.
• Hilarious replay
• Mostly cosmetic rewards.
• Serve 2% player base
• No CP Penalty
• Sync Lock Level 400
• Rewards are mostly cosmetics, useless and 3.5 days worth of credit from Outpost.
• Predict your opponent’s order and counter it

Now we wait for Surface Exploration too.