Tove guide & review

If you want someone who is not afraid to sacrifice herself to help others, but has extremely poor sled making skills, Tove is the nikke for you! The Survivor who wouldn't survive Alone in the cold at all, has come to nikke in order to help you buff your Shotguns better than anyone else can! Her skills are a bit unique, as she has an RNG dependant skill 1 activation, but the buffs themselves are very much everything your shotgun needs! Her skill 2 will be mainly buffing the Attack Speed of your shotguns, and her Burst is a chonky Attack Buff that will make your Shotguns hit hard against anyone they're up against! However be wary, these buffs rely on her skill 1 to be stacked to give the best output!

Tove is the currently best unit for supporting SG teams. Not only does she provide SG units a higher ATK buff compared to Liter, she also increases max ammo and overall damage dealt via ATK SPD. Her kit is designed to support SGs and only SGs (her buff is still usable outside SG, but it's very cope).

Tove possesses an intriguing skillset that is somewhat reliant on RNG, which means to achieve the highest damage with her, you may need to repeat your runs. This is because most of her supportive skills are locked behind 3 Stacks of Temporary Modification, whose uptime can vary sharply between runs. If Snow White drives you insane, Tove will too. Thankfully, this RNG can be attenuated slightly with the help of OL. However, before we delve into the technicalities of it, let's briefly go through her skills one by one.

Skill 1

This skill grants her the ability to randomly trigger Emergency Bullets at a 5% chance. When triggered, she reloads a certain amount of ammo and increases/refreshes the stack of Temporary Modification (abbreviated as TM in this guide), which grants increased Max Ammo to all allies for 5s. The reload helps her stack accumulation become more consistent, whereas the Max Ammo is like every other Max Ammo buff—extremely useful for units who have a low base ammo count like SG (except SAnis), SR, and RL. She also boosts the team's CRIT DMG, but the value is low.

Tove wields an Assault Rifle, which shoots at a firerate of 12/s (60 FPS; not FPS-friendly, by the way). Therefore, within 5s and without reloading, she blasts a maximum of 60 shots. When firing a shot, her chance of not gaining a stack is 95%. Using those variables, we can calculate that the chance of Tove not increasing/refreshing Temporary Modification when continuously shooting for 5s to be ±4.6%. If she reloads within this 5s window, it will drop to around ~7-9%, depending if she uses Resilience or Bastion.

If Tove fails to accrue 1 stack of TM within 5s of the previous trigger, it will reset back to zero! This will result in a heavy DPS loss as it will deactivate or weaken her buffs, especially the ATK SPD in her S2 and the ATK in her Burst. She will need to trigger it again 3 times in a row. If you want to know how common this is, the estimated uptime of a base Tove is (7.7%, 7.7%, 7.7%, 77%) and an infinite ammo Tove is (5%, 5%, 5%, 85%), denoting (Stack 0, 1, 2, 3) respectively. Thank you to Titan for the simulation; here is the original post in Nikke Community Discord.

Skill 2

When TM is fully stacked, Tove passively grants all allies bonus critical rate. She also grants additional ATK SPD to all allied SG. As you can see, the ATK SPD is what makes this skill worth upgrading. It functions as a separate total damage multiplier unlike most buffs in this game. According to the frame calculation formula, some levels don't actually provide a real attack speed increase. Visit Skill Investments for more detail.

Burst

Her Burst Skill grants an ATK buff whose effectiveness scales up with the possessed stacks of TM. The ATK buff stack mirrors TM's stack and is determined on activation; it does not dynamically update. It is guaranteed to have 1 stack on activation, even if TM has 0 stack. Therefore, you will always want to wait until Tove has 3 stacks of TM before activating her burst. Whether she loses TM stacks later on, it will not impact the given ATK buff. It still deactivates her Skill 2, regardless.

Thanks to its big numbers, this skill is what makes Tove simply irreplaceable when it comes to supporting SG units. It grants nearly 80% caster's ATK buff to all SG units in the team for 10s. If we convert this into Attacker stats, it would still amount to around 66.67%, which is superior to Liter's Burst in multiple ways. The only drawback is that, for this to be optimal, you are forced to invest in her copies and gear as her base ATK stat matters.

Tove and the SGs are unlikely to be used in Campaign or Tower due to range restrictions. That said, below are some game modes they might excel in:

UNION RAID

If you have no better units for Union Raid, then Tove and the SGs can be deployed. Their damage is by no means outstanding, but it is still better than assembling a random team and praying that it will work. Avoid picking bosses that are too thin as SG requires hitting most if not all pellets to be remotely usable.

SOLO RAID

Tove and the SGs will most likely make it to the Top 5 Teams in Solo Raid, but as Team 4/5. This might change in the future if stronger SG-related units are released. Even then, this team is still terrible at dealing with thin bosses. They will be of higher value against close-range bosses, no-core bosses, or bosses with a large hitbox. Examples include Gravedigger, Modernia (when not teleporting), and so on.

PVP

Tove will probably never see the light of day in PvP meta, but if you have no one else to fill for the B1 spot, you can use Tove to help empower your SG units. However, she is handicapped in PvP. The 30 FPS limit lowers her fire rate to just 10/s, resulting in an around 50% probability of her accruing 3 stacks of TM within 5s. This means RNG may affect the outcome of a round. In the worst case, Tove does not gain any stack and becomes a sitting duck. On a totally different note, you can also pair Tove with RL and SR units, but in this case you only want to benefit from the Max Ammo buff that she provides. It's quite minuscule, but it can be the decider of the match (especially if you use Alice with a low base ammo count).

Gear Investments

Like Naga, Tove's ATK buffs scale up with her base stats. Therefore, you should definitely OL and raise her gear to level 5, especially Head and Gloves. Body gives less stats, so you can OL and leave it at 0~3 to save materials. Her Boots do not provide ATK stat increase, but Tove benefits from Max Ammo OL, so you decide whether that would be a good investment for you. It is obviously the least cost-effective but is required for minmaxing.

As stated before, only aim for Max Ammo OL. You will need more than ~250%+ Max Ammo buff in total, alongside Bastion level 7+, to allow Tove to continually firing for 180 seconds straight. You still need some luck to achieve this, as it is also dependent on triggering Emergency Bullet (Skill 1). You might ask: what if I didn't have that much Max Ammo? It's fine. Every little bit helps Tove maintain her stacks easier. You will definitely feel the QoL improvements.

Skill Investments

• Skill 1: Minimum 9
• The justification is that level 9 is the breakpoint for the highest probability of activating Emergency Bullet, which is vital to sustaining Temporary Modification stacks.
• Skill 2: 4/7/10
• You can expect a real attack speed increase at level 2/4/7/10, each milestone taking 1 less frame per attack overall.
• Burst: Recommended 10
• There are no breakpoints. Like for Liter's and Naga's Burst, we recommend raising it to 10 because it offers a generous amount of ATK buff. ATK buff is just too precious. However, you can still use her even if her Burst Skill is below 10.

Cube Investments

Base Tove (no Max Ammo) reloads every 6s. This means she will be hitting minimum probability in almost every 5s window. Because of this, we recommend Resilience, but Bastion 7+ is also not a bad pick as it will make accruing 3 stacks within 1 clip easier. If she has high base ammo, you should get Bastion instead, as maintaining stacks is much easier if Tove keeps firing. It also synergizes well with her Emergency Bullet (Skill 1).

Specialized in buffing SG units, Tove's teams revolve around pairing her with the strongest SG characters (excluding SAnis due to their anti-synergy). Note that, for the team examples, we do not include Noir as she most likely stands by Blanc. If you have an unused Noir, however, feel free to use her in place of Drake, Sugar, or Guilty. See if she helps improve your damage!

Her rotation is as follows: Wait till Temporary Modification reaches stack 3 (indicated by a number next to the blue bullet), then activate her burst. Cycle through B2 and B3 normally, then repeat. To restate, the strength of ATK buff is determined when Burst Skill is activated and does not dynamically update.

Team #1

Burst 1

Burst 2

Burst 3

Burst 3

Flex

Tove's most universal team that may prove useful in various content where SG is usable. This includes close-range bosses, bosses with no core, and bosses with a giant hitbox. This team is easy to use and may be her best team so far until new SG units are released. Among the healers, Helm and Marciana are the best because they synergize with Tove and SG units well. Folkwang can be used in Solo Raid as a cope unit, and Poli may boost overall damage. However, she is more of shielding (and damage sharing) rather than healing.

Team #2

Burst 1

Burst 2

Burst 3

Burst 2

Burst 3

The Guilty variant requires a B3 healer to complete the burst rotation, but if the stage does not need one (like Gravedigger), feel free to swap it out for another DPS! Drake is a good start or, if you feel fancy, pick other SG that has elemental advantage (still need investments to back it up).

Team #3

Burst 1

Burst 3

Burst 2

Burst 3

Flex

Flex

No CDR? No worries. Bring as many SG units as possible to benefit from Tove's buffs! The FLEX unit can be a healer or another DPS; it's up to you. This team is a bit of a meme, but a base Tove may reset her stacks too often that you might wait for too long between every rotation, devaluing the benefits of CDR. Nevertheless, in an ideal world, you want to run a CDR and RNG her stacks.

Why Sugar, Drake, and Guilty? Because they are just superior. For example, Sugar and Drake are versatile choices who offer great damage potential and teamwide buffs. Guilty is also fantastic at delivering constant damage without much reliance on support units.

That being said, sometimes, you don't need Sugar, Guilty, or Drake if you can abuse elemental damage. Other SG units like Maiden, Neve, Isabel, or Viper can be used as alternatives and may outdamage the favorite picks if they have elemental damage. To achieve this, however, you will need tons of luck and be willing to invest in non-meta units. For instance, against a Water boss, bringing Maiden and/or Isabel with elemental damage OL may provide more damage than bringing Drake. Even Limit Breaks may shift the ranks. Monitor your resources, allocate them smartly, and decide how you want your Tove's team to be built. This will vary between players.

Tove may be a sleeper unit. She is not particularly valuable right now but may enter the meta in the future, like Mast when she was first released. For futureproofing, consider getting 1 copy. Otherwise, you will have to gamble for her in Standard Banner by wishlisting her.