It’s somewhat unexpected that Yao chose to trade her sniper for an SMG given her affinity for high vantage points and avoiding direct combat. However, it appears she wants to engage more proactively this time around. This sudden shift in strategy has led to a powerful Ballistic support character that’s crucial for Snowbreak’s current situation. Personally, I suspect she’s using this supportive role as a way to minimize her exposure to front-line action. After all, some things remain constant.

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Abilities

Standard Skill

Yao calls forth two radiant orbs and directs them to handle combat duties, attacking enemies while also causing area-of-effect damage upon detonation at your desired location. Mimicking the tactical approach of Snowbreak’s legacy, these orbs are not categorized as auxiliary units, though they appear to be robotic in nature. Interestingly, the damage inflicted scales with Yao’s Defense stat, a pattern that will recur frequently.

In current game scenarios, her damage output isn’t high enough to set new DPS records or consistently outperform other characters, but she can still contribute effectively and won’t be a significant hindrance if you decide to use her in general gameplay.

Support Skill

Yao persists in being lackadaisical with her support abilities, summoning a robot that brands up to three opponents with electric jolts, causing ongoing damage and producing U-Energy when Yao is out of play. Enemies branded in this way also receive increased critical hit damage, which is the primary attraction. This enhancement is added as an additional boost to your critical damage multiplier rather than increasing the damage taken as a crit. Additionally, Katya, the crossbow operator, won’t be left behind – Seasun thoughtfully provided an alternate Ballistic Damage buff for her since, as you know, crossbows can’t deal critical hits.

As a fan, I’d put it this way: This ability lasts for up to 15 seconds, but it drains 1.5 units of your energy per second while active. If you can’t maintain enough energy flow, it might shut off prematurely. Luckily, your energy reservoir can hold up to 50 units, so running out of juice shouldn’t be a major concern, especially since you need at least 20 units just to activate this skill, even though technically it doesn’t require any energy for casting.

Ultimate Skill

After learning about Yao’s primary ability, you’re now ready to grasp the workings of her ultimate move. Essentially, they function similarly, as the lightning symbols reappear, overwriting those placed by her support skill and adjusting their targets if an enemy marked earlier dies. The critical damage and crossbow Ballistic Damage bonuses resurface too, but with improved specifications for more numerical growth. Yao further showcases her fondness for high vantage points by ascending onto a colossal floating ball in the sky, transitioning to an exercise bike. This provides her with a panoramic view of the battlefield and simultaneously grants your team a flat Attack boost that escalates based on her Defense stat. It seems like Planet Fitness has added this as a new member benefit or something.

Similar to how Yao’s supportive ability requires resources over a period, her ultimate ability also drains resources at a rate of 2 U-Energy per second, for up to 30 seconds. Be mindful that while the ball is active, you won’t be able to generate additional U-Energy.

Typically, employing Yao’s ultimate ability prevents you from swapping her on the field, but in cooperative gameplay where only one operative is involved, you retain control and can engage in orbital strike simulator. Her standard skill now functions for free and deploys double the number of robot balls (from four to eight), while also reducing its cooldown significantly for excessive skill usage. It’s a mystery as to why this isn’t allowed in solo player content; your assumption is equally valid as mine.

Deiwos Passive

Here’s nothing particularly captivating. However, when Yao equips an Electric weapon, Deiwos’ passive triggers a 30% defense enhancement. This bonus strengthens depending on her Alignment Index stat. Given that all her abilities are tied to her defense, it proves quite beneficial.

Assessment

Currently, there are not many viable choices available in the Ballistic support pool. Any decent addition would be warmly welcomed at this point.

It’s a good thing then, that Yao is much, much better than just half-decent.

The Ballistic Damage meta continues to emphasize critical hits, making Yao – Nightglow an ideal choice for regular use due to her strong supportive and ultimate abilities. Her skills are great for boosting teammates, and she offers consistent access to her support features. Initially, utilize her support skill and switch to her ult when it’s about to expire for a more significant enhancement to defeat your opponents. As you grow accustomed to using Yao and the damage output she provides in different teams, consider switching earlier to gain quicker access to enhanced buffs at the expense of shorter duration. Life is short, so sometimes it’s worth taking risks to discover how much you can get away with when cutting down on support skill usage. Be adventurous and a little daring. What’s the worst that could happen?

Weapons

In essence, when looking at Yao’s shop weapon Divine Justice versus her premium gacha weapon Starfall, the difference isn’t complicated. While Divine Justice offers a slightly lower Defense increase and Ballistic Damage buff (which tends to be greater in most game situations), it also adds a Ballistic Damage Taken buff that multiplicatively stacks on top. The advantage of this will depend on who Yao is partnered with, as the effectiveness of different buffs can fluctuate. However, you can anticipate around a 17-20% improvement at its base level. At tier 2, Starfall surpasses Divine Justice in all numerical aspects and boosts the advantage to 37-45%. These figures may not seem impressive when compared to DPS weapon enhancements, but it’s essential to keep in mind the versatility of support weapons, which often prove more valuable than their DPS counterparts. In comparison, Fenny’s Starshine premium weapon offerings are less impactful, and few would be dissatisfied with them.

The truly intriguing aspect of this analysis lies in expanding the selection of weapons under scrutiny to include the current support SMG options, Frigatebird and Alloy Truth. However, it should be noted that these weapons don’t perform exceptionally well. Given Yao’s unique support playstyle, her skillset relies equally on support abilities as it does on her ultimate. This means you often have to decide which aspect you want your support weapon buff to prioritize.

The intended weapon options for Yao, as previously mentioned, provide their buffs during her ultimate, a timeframe that is arguably more beneficial due to the largest possible buff being provided. In brief skirmishes, it’s advantageous to finish Yao’s support skill early to transition into her ult as soon as you have accumulated sufficient U-Energy to end the fight. Conversely, in extended combat scenarios, there is typically more ult uptime because its maximum duration is twice that of her support skill.

As a gamer, I’ve found myself in a bit of a pickle with Yao. The skills on Frigatebird and Alloy Truth activate upon support skill cast, which means there’s barely any buff time left by the time I reach her ultimate. Even setting that aside, neither of these skills seem to measure up to Divine Justice, given Alloy Truth scales based on HP while Frigatebird relies on ATK – stats that Yao doesn’t prioritize, favoring DEF instead.

Manifests

It seems odd that a character initially given away for free, like Seasun, wouldn’t put more effort into marketing her manifest to encourage players to roll for duplicates. The current approach, as you can observe, appears to be falling short of the mark.

…Yeah.

Manifest 1 significantly enhances Yao’s abilities. During her ultimate skill, it grants a Ballistic Damage boost that increases according to her Defense stat, reaching a maximum of 3000 Defense for a 15% Ballistic Damage increase. Remarkably, achieving this maximum is quite straightforward; even with poor logistics stat rolls, using Divine Justice in conjunction with the Zephyr Squad logistics set will activate the buff cap. This setup also provides a CC resistance boost, which is beneficial for overall gameplay. Most players can stop here, as Yao becomes a highly effective character once this manifest is activated.

The enhancements in Manifests 2 and 3 seem impressive at first glance, boosting her ultimate’s Attack buff ratio, crit damage, and crossbow Ballistic Damage by 20%. However, it becomes less appealing when you understand how these upgrades are applied. In essence, these improvements are multiplicative rather than additive. This means that the 20% increase to the existing 30% DEF→ATK conversion results in a practical boost of only 6%, raising it to 36%. Similarly, the 50% crit damage buff and 30% crossbow Ballistic Damage buff translate into actual increases of just 60% and 36% respectively – that’s only a 10% and 6% rise. When you factor in losses from diminishing returns, the real-world performance improvement is roughly 4% for M3, while M2’s effect could be as minimal as just 1%!

The upgrade, or Manifest 4, amplifies the foundational ratios of the Attack bonus, crit damage bonus, and crossbow Ballistic Damage bonus. Fortunately, these enhancements are now additive. Unfortunately, the augmentation isn’t substantial. Incorporating the M2/3 multiplicative boosts, you secure a 6% boost to the crit damage bonus, and 3.6% to both the Attack ratio and crossbow Ballistic Damage bonuses. Surprisingly, this results in a performance improvement smaller than that of M3, despite requiring 50% more time for acquisition.

Later on, we reach Manifest 5. The positive aspect? Its damage boost is quite substantial, nearly matching the combined performance increase of Manifests 2-4. However, there’s a catch: it only activates when attacking an enemy with a shield. At the moment, only nine out of the thirty Neural Simulation bosses have shields. In regular content, factions like the Coyotes don’t have a single shielded enemy, making it challenging to activate the damage boost sometimes. Plus, it’s quite costly, which is something you may already be aware of. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make for an appealing investment.

So yeah, stopping at Manifest 1 sounds pretty good to me.

Logistics

As a gamer, I’ve found that using Zephyr Squad is a better choice than Amarna during Yao’s ultimate. Amarna’s support skill, which usually deals damage over time to enemies, doesn’t seem effective in this situation. Moreover, even the rare case where Twilight might be useful is completely overshadowed by Zephyr’s defensive boost and Yao’s excessive number-crunching abilities that are too powerful to compete against.

It’s all so tiring.

The statistics for logistics in this game may appear dull, but Yao is an exception as she primarily focuses on defense with no issues related to skill cooldowns. Moreover, any potential challenges regarding S and U-Energy are effectively addressed by her kit. In other words, if you haven’t already figured it out, prioritize defense and Alignment Index (which increases defense) for Yao.

Check out the additional resources for comprehensive weapon and supply kit comparison, along with a tool that can assist you in fine-tuning your equipment setup.

Team Building

It seems there’s a term Seasun uses to refer to Yao as a “skill support,” but given that almost all skill damage in the game can’t be critical hits, it’s clear from what we know about Yao that she’s more accurately described as a Ballistic support. After all, the rare instances of skill damage critically hitting are typically associated with operatives focused on ballistics.

In this game, every operative not called Katya primarily relies on dealing critical hits for their damage. This makes Yao an effortless replacement choice due to this trait. Remarkably, she also enhances the non-critical Katya with a crossbow Damage boost for Ballistics. What a thoughtful move!

As a fan, I’d like to share some thoughts on pairing hybrid DPS operatives such as Chenxing (from both Ethereal Cloud and Jade Arc) and Lyfe – Infinite Sight with Yao. Although the pure skill damage they produce won’t receive significant boosts, this hasn’t deterred players from using Fenny – Starshine effectively with these characters. Consequently, I don’t foresee any issues when pairing them with Yao either.

For experienced gamers, here’s an engaging idea: Character named Tess. In Manifest 2 and higher levels, Tess produces a quantity of U-Energy instantly upon using her ultimate ability. This can enable character Yao to bypass the support skill warm-up entirely and immediately use her stronger ultimate instead, which is beneficial for swift battles. Additionally, this enhancement boosts Tess’ buff potency, providing a substantial burst of short-term damage bonuses before the timer has even started counting down.

Should You Pull?

Yao, also known as Nightglow, is simply fantastic when it comes to her role as an operative. She’s essential for any team within the Ballistic DPS category, matching Fenny – Starshine step for step in terms of superiority as a support. If you were playing during the Hearts in Harmony update, consider yourself fortunate for receiving her complimentary.

Are you thinking about supporting her Manifests? Oh dear no, have you noticed how they turn into a scam after the initial one? I’d recommend focusing on farming M1 with Personal Files and leaving it at that. Her weapon is another story though. Although Starfall may not be the most significant upgrade, given Yao’s likelihood of remaining relevant in the meta for an extended period, it might still be a reasonable investment. If there are no other pressing items on your wishlist, it wouldn’t be unwise to follow Yao’s lead and splurge a bit.

Supplementary Material

Link to spreadsheet

Features include weapon and supply calculations, growth estimates for manifests, and an optimizer for logistics, all designed to streamline your operations.

Cheat Sheet

2025-02-20 20:30

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Yao – Nightglow: F*ck It, We Ball