Nahida (纳西妲) is a mysterious little girl. In 3.0, she is revealed to be the dendro archon (小吉祥草王 Xiao Jixiang Caowang) and youngest of the archons after the previous dendro archon perished.
The previous dendro archon goes by the name Rukkhadevata (रुक्खदेवता), which means 'tree goddess' (rukkha is tree, devata is goddess, similar to the root divine or devas in English). In Hinduism, Rukkhadevata is worshipped as a Yakshini, goddess of wealth, and guardian deity. Yakshinis are the female counterparts of the Yakshas (Xiao is a yaksha). It would be interesting if Xiao has any interactions with the lore of Sumeru and yakshas given his background.
Story spoiler: Nahida is actually born from a branch of the previous dendro archon Rukkhadevata. After defeating Scaramouche, in order to purify the polluted Irminsul the traveler and Nahida had to erase the world's memory of Rukkhadevata ('world forget me'). During the archon war 500 years ago, the dendro archon Rukkhadevata was tasked with looking after the Irminsul, which controls Teyvat's ley lines.
While everyone in Sumeru did forget Rukkhadevata after Nahida and the traveler cleansed the Irminsul, the traveler still remembers Rukkhadevata (but Nahida does not). Now, people think that Nahida had been with them this whole time (forgetting that Rukkhadevata even existed or perished 500 years ago in the archon war).
Voice actors:
The name Nahida is derived from Anahita, an Iranian goddess of wisdom. In the Persian epic Shahnameh, Nahid is the mother of Alexander the Great.
Nahida is a unique character as she can be played as a support, sub-dps, and main-dps. The only other characters that can be played like this are probably Dehya and Yelan.
One of her passives gives 25% of the highest EM as EM to other teammates, for a max of 250 EM. So one teammate needs 1k EM to give the full buff. This passive powercreeps c2 kazuha, and Nahida can do this at c0. This speaks of the power difference between the two.
Nahida has cubic EM scaling. Her E scales with EM, her damage bonus scales with EM, and her crit rate (part of another multiplier) scales with EM. This alone makes Nahida quite unique and broken and shows that she really wants EM, making an EM sands not just viable but even optimal.
Some people were saying that the DMC is like an iphone4 whereas Nahida is like an iphone14. If that's the case then kazuha is a blackberry, and zhongli is like a telegram.
Nahida's name in Chinese is 纳西妲 and 纳西 is also the name of a Chinese ethnic group called the Nakhi who live around south to southwest China, similar to how India and Sumeru are in the southwest direction of China.
Just to talk about Nahida's design: Nahida's E can also be used to collect materials from afar. It has a pretty large range, with its marking ability being quite broken. Her E can be used on certain npcs to reveal special hidden dialogue. When Nahida sprints a faint nursery rhyme can be heard as bgm.
When she uses her NA or CA, she creates squares or cubes. This square (方 fang) design features a lot in her kit. When she uses her E she creates a square on the screen too. A square has four sides, similar to how Sumeru is the 4th nation the traveler visits on their journey. Her Q has gigantic aoe.
It is clear the genshin team put a ton of effort into designing Nahida.
There are two main artifact sets: 4p gilded and 4p deepwood. If using Nahida as a dps with another team member using deepwood, then gilded is always better. Moreover, gilded gives more EM and makes it easier to reach 1k em.
But the funny thing is that even if you only use gilded not deepwood, it can do as much damage as if not more than using deepwood due to Nahida's cubic EM scaling. This is quite sad for deepwood actually, given that it is a res shred artifact that can be easily beaten by Gilded.
As for main stats there are a number of options: atk-dendro-crit, em-dendro-crit, full em, atk-em-crit, em-em-crit, atk-atk-em, atk-em-em.
We will only consider the first five.
As for substats: crit, EM, ATK.
Nahida has many good options. Her bis has a gilded kind of effect and looks like a genie's lamp. Other good weapons include: widsith, kagura, lost prayer, solar, sac frags, even the ttds (though it is recommended to build more dmg into Nahida).
Nahida does not really need ER since her burst is quite cheap at 50 energy cost.
We assume 1k EM and 1k ATK. It is hard to have both 1k EM and 2k ATK (unless you use Gilded). You usually have to choose btw an EM and ATK sands. If you add Bennett, while other atk scaling characters can reach 3k atk, with 1k atk that will become 2k atk. Actually the only real way to reach 1k EM is to use full EM set with EM weapon.
If you want to use Nahida as a support for national type teams, then Gilded is her bis as it will make her reach 1k em. If you use deepwood, that would only really buff her own damage not others, whereas Gilded buffs her own damage and others' damage. Besides, you can even put deepwood on other characters (like even Xiangling) and save Gilded for Nahida. You would only put deepwood on Nahida to support other dendro dps (e.g. full em deepwood), but that is almost a waste since Nahida herself can do a lot more damage with other artifact combos.
A lv10 E has scaling of 185.8% ATK+371.5% EM. Assume a national team (one pyro, hydro, electro). Honestly the hydro buff from the q is almost useless: the duration extension is not that needed since her q will have 100% uptime anyways. If hydro increased the aoe of Nahida's E attack (or made it do aoe damage like riptide), then god that would be something else. To buff Nahida's E damage the most with her Q, you would probably want 2 pyro + electro or 2 electro + pyro. Examples include Raiden-Bennett-XL-Nahida and Cyno/Raiden-Yae-Bennett-Nahida. However, you usually want hydro on national teams to enable vaporize. So we will take Raiden-Yelan-XL-Nahida as a canonical example of a Nahida team (a control to compare other calculations with).
Assume 61.6% dendro dmg bonus (4p deepwood). We get 26.8% dmg bonus and .45s reduction from Q. The E karma usually procs once every 2.5s, but now it is 2.05s. We also have 88.4% dmg bonus on the E.
Assume 1k em and 1k atk. The base damage is $$b_0 = 1858 + 3715 = 5573$$ With Bennett it becomes $$b_1 = 2*1858 + 3715 = 7431$$ But if you play Nahida off-field she will not benefit from Bennett's buff. Normalizing wrt 3k atk, the effective scaling (without Bennett) is 186%.
The dps is then $$x_e = 186*1.884/2.05 = 170.9385365854$$ But considering this can spread the damage can be higher.
But Nahida has a passive that converts em to dmg bonus. Each em point above 200 gives .1% dmg bonus and .03% cr. With 1k em she can reach the max of 80% dmg bonus and 24% cr. This gives 168.4% dmg bonus on the E. The dps is then $$x_e = 186*2.684/2.05 = 243.523902439$$
We now calculate spread dps. The additive bonus damage from spread at lv90 with 1k em is $$b_s = 1446.85*1.25*(1+5000/2200) = 5918.9318181818$$ which is quite a lot. The total base damage (without Bennett) is then $$b = b_0 + b_s = 11491.9318181818$$ The renormalized scaling is \(100b/3000 = 383.1\) which is more than twice the original scaling. The dps is now $$x_e = 383*2.684/2.05 = 501.4497560976$$ But if this spreads on every other hit we take an average with the non-spread dps: $$x_e = (243.5 + 501.5)/2 = 372.5$$ Considering that this is a full em build, this mv is quite high.
However, in reality her icd is 1s (not the standard 2.5s icd). That means she will apply dendro on each hit, meaning she can spread on each hit. So her dps is $$x_e = 501.4497560976$$ This makes her one of the best sub-dps in the game and one of the best dps. Moreover it is multitarget and has 100% uptime.
And this is just a support build. A support build kazuha (full em) will not even do half the damage.
And there are crazier builds with 3000 em Nahida paired with Diona and other EM giving abilities.
Above we assumed the damage is off field (as she may usually be played). But if we assume she is on field and benefits from Bennett's buff, the spread base damage is $$b = b_1 + b_s = 13349.9$$ The renormalized scaling is 445%. The dps is $$x_e = 445*2.684/2.05 = 582.6$$
For a max dps build suppose you have 2k atk and 1k em. Off field damage (without Bennett) with spread is what is computed above (around 582.6 mv). The base damage with Bennett (on-field Nahida) is $$b_1 = 3*1858 + 3715 = 9289$$ The total spread base damage is $$b = b_1 + b_s = 15207.9$$ The renormalized scaling is 506.931. The dps is $$x_e = 506.931*2.684/2.05 = 663.7$$ which is very high.
Even then we still have not optimized completely. Technically, to get the most dps, we can drop the hydro buff and replace it with the pyro buff (more dmg bonus) or electro buff (more frequent E procs).
After using her Q, Nahida can unleash 6 instances of Karmic Oblivion with her NA/CA. Karmic Oblivion is considered E damage and will damage all targets connected by her E skill. Karmic Oblivion scales with 200% atk + 400% em. The effect lasts 10s and can proc once every .2s. Her Q has 13.5s cd.
Can Nahida work with Xiao, Itto, or cryo? Dendro does not react with anemo, geo, cryo, so in order for Nahida's E to proc in those kinds of teams, they would need another element to proc reactions.
Nahida has found some uses on cryo melt teams where she and pyro are used for burning, allowing cryo units to melt.
If you choose to build more atk rather than em, then you will lose out on the dmg bonus from em (and lose some of the support em buff ability). For example, you could also have 2k atk and 500 em (atk-dendro-crit with gilded+weapon). Ultimately we need to optimize the product of base damage, dmg bonus, crit.
Given she can use the widsith for crit dmg (and gets crit rate from her passive), using full em is acceptable. Since she has more access to crit stats, it makes her much better than kazuha. If she uses thousand floating dreams, she can probably get away with not using full em (e.g. em-em-crit 4p gilded).
You can do autoattacks with Nahida, but they won't be buffed by her dmg bonus/crit rate passive (which only applies to her E). Note her c6 passive is considered E damage and will be buffed though.
First, Raiden + Nahida is a broken combo in overworld, one-shotting most things with use of E.
Use Raiden E. Then use Nahida E on enemy. and will also proc Raiden E which will damage the enemy and proc quicken. The reaction will then proc Nahida's E which will spread on the enemy.
Suppose it is raining and the enemy is marked with Nahida's E. Suppose there is a dendro core from the rain. Use electro on the core to proc hyperbloom. The hyperbloom shot will hit the enemy and proc Raiden E to damage the enemy, triggering a reaction. This will then proc Nahida's E on the enemy, creating more dendro cores. And the cycle can repeat.
The point is the damage from bloom, hyperbloom, and burgeon can also proc Raiden E. And this can lead to some interesting loops when paired with Nahida's E and rain.