Nightingale

A prisoner of her own mind and a victim of a dark past, Nightingale is an expert on the functions of the human body and excels in healing through the Arts. She is a 6★ Multi-target Medic that stands out as the game’s best defensive answer to Arts damage.

Nightingale’s Talent 1, White Fiend’s Protection, is the defining aspect of her kit. Simply by having allies within her healing range, Nightingale is able to significantly mitigate any Arts damage that may come their way through her ability to grant them a large amount of RES. The ability to provide RES is extremely unique among the game’s many operators, with the only other way to do so, as of writing, being through Bassline’s module-boosted Talent, which has more restrictive range and provides only up to a third of what Nightingale can provide with just White Fiend’s Protection alone! Through five years of the game, and among immense amounts of recent powercreep, Nightingale is still by far the best option for Arts mitigation. Nightingale’s Talent 2, Fleeting Phantom, complements her kit by providing generic utility through the deployable namesake Phantoms, which draw enemy fire to give your team some breathing room.

While Nightingale has three skills, it is her S3, Sanctuary, which keeps her relevant as a powerful endgame option in extreme scenarios that feature overwhelming Arts damage. Sanctuary is a near-helidrop, high uptime skill that provides a set of effects dedicated to keeping entire teams alive through what would otherwise be lethal Arts. For starters, the ATK boost helps Nightingale’s ability to keep allies topped up by boosting her healing numbers. More importantly, Sanctuary expands Nightingale’s range and boosts the RES of her allies even further, both of which synergize exceptionally with her talent White Fiend’s Protection—the range expansion not only also increases her healing zone but also the area her Talent covers, and the +150% increase to RES is applied on top of the RES her talent grants, which lets even Operators with zero base RES accumulate a significant amount that lets them take on strong Arts with ease. As a cherry on top, Sanctuary even grants 25% Arts Dodge, an unreliable yet nevertheless welcome buff that hammers home the idea that, indeed, your Operators are virtually invincible to Arts damage while the skill is active.

Still, Sanctuary does also have a massively long downtime. In the hardest kinds of content where the uptime of her S3 matters, it can be necessary to retreat and redeploy her purely to circumvent the otherwise 2-minute long wait (though it helps that deploying her again also gives you another set of Phantoms on top of any that were saved). A much bigger weakness of Nightingale, however, is that she falls off relative to other Medics in content where Arts damage isn’t overwhelming enough to necessitate her. Medics such as Lumen, Eyjafjalla the Hvit Aska, Ptilopsis, and even Perfumer tend to be better investments in the early stages of a Doctor’s career due to their more generalist utility and / or better healing numbers. Relative to these alternatives, Nightingale’s utility is more situational and typically shines more in specific boss fights and endgame scenarios.

Her Module, RIN-X: Closed Hope, attempts to bridge the gap a bit with a small boost to her healing numbers, but the Module’s higher levels are generally not a good investment relative to the gains. However, the module’s base effect of increasing Nightingale’s range is quite powerful as it gives White Fiend’s Protection one more beneficiary, and the +5 RES is generally well-utilized in Nightingale’s kit and the situations she’d see use in. Nightingale also does have a serviceable secondary skill in her S2, Arts Shield, which grants a barrier that blocks only Arts damage and increases their RES. However, while this skill can be used in situations where her S3 is outright excessive, its use case also tends to overlap with situations where a different Medic would shine instead, especially considering Arts Shield only provides damage mitigation without any boost to Nightingale’s healing—in situations where the excessive Arts damage mitigation of Sanctuary is unnecessary, Arts damage is generally manageable enough to not require Nightingale at all, which renders her S2 only truly usable in hyper-specific situations or when no similarly leveled Medic alternative is available. Overall, the combination of Nightingale and her Sanctuary is a powerful tool that makes dealing with difficult Arts-heavy stages much easier, yet Nightingale is also so specialized that she tends to be better off relegated as a down-the-line investment for more developed rosters.

• 3rd Skill - Sanctuary - Provides a ton of healing output to a very large range and pretty much negates Arts damage by providing a huge boost to Arts Resistance and a sizable Arts Evade.  The bane of enemy Casters, this Skill alone can trivialize difficult Arts Damage based content. It also has a very long 60 second duration and first use is available rather quickly after deployment, making it a great “extended burst healing” Skill.   The downsides are pretty obvious, though: an incredibly long cooldown and no physical damage mitigation. If you want to get physical with your Operators, best to look elsewhere.

• Talent 2 - Fleeting Phantom - A really interesting strategic option is added to her kit: the ability to place “Phantoms” to aggro enemy ranged damage.  The Phantoms have high resistance, decent physical evade, and are super scary, making them great for use to redirect annoying enemy Caster or Sniper fire and give your healers some breathing room.

• Talent 1 upgrade - White Fiend’s Protection - A decent boost to her Resistance buff, useful when she is being used for her niche strength.