Nilou, the star of the Zubayr theater, has higher base hp than zhongli. Zubayr is the name of an Arabic commander who served Muhammad in the early Arab conquests during the expansion of Islam. Zubayr reached as far east as Iraq, and his descendants would become influential in Iraq and Iran. For differences between Arabs and Persians see Sumeru Iran.
Nilou's name looks similar to Nile which is written 尼罗 (niluo) in Chinese. Coincidentally, Nilou is also hydro.
Part of Nilou's design seems to point to victims of the li family, including Cai who was murdered by Li Hao as well as Pan You who was killed by Li Yu via hanging during the Tang-Song transition. Neil Heywood was also murdered by a certain clique of people in 2011.
When the translators say that Nilou is 'innocent' like that 3.0 event, that sounds like a political attack on the li family given the above information. They have their own dirty laundry and crimes they committed.
There are some who think about Nilou in the context of the Ming dynasty. Nilou's story quest invokes such thoughts. For Nilou's ascension, she has to defeat the Blightdrake (zhaozai yongjie) boss.
It is one thing to have one or three people die. It is another thing to have the deaths of hundreds of people close to Fang Xiaoru or hundreds of thousands of people executed by Zhu Yuanzhang. One of the most basic things learned in math is that 800 > 1 and 100,000 > 1. This is why when looking at what happened to Fang Xiaoru compared to the fates of these others, it appears that these others are weaponized as political tools to attack political opponents.
But back to the Middle East, in 2016, Nimr Baqir was executed and beheaded for inciting terrorism in Saudi Arabia. This event also had a profound effect in Iran.
The USA invaded Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, interfering in numerous proxy wars in the region, inciting color revolutions such as the Arab Spring, overthrowing governments, causing chaos and instability for the sake of asserting its petrodollar hegemony. The real enemy here is the USA hegemon.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 overthrew the USA puppet Pahlavi and purged USA interference in Iran. This is heralded as a significant milestone in overthrowing American hegemony and imperialism in the Middle East.
A lot of other things begin with the Ni sound, including Nepal, Nixon, Niagara, etc. also the idea of the Nicaragua canal to compete with another canal in Central America.
Nilou is limited to dendro-hydro bloom teams given her passive, which activates when there are only dendro and hydro units on the team (and at least one of each, so not mono). If Kokomi was restricted due to her -100% cr, then Nilou is restricted by this passive and her possible teams. But at least Nilou can crit.
Similar to Yelan, much of Nilou's damage scales with her HP. Yelan can often be used on Nilou teams given both scale with HP, and the new hydro resonance (3.0) buffs HP. Any other hydro character can be paired with Nilou too: Mona, Childe, Barbara, Kokomi, etc. However, Nilou's E does not work with Candace's Q.
Bloom is a transformative reaction which usually does not benefit from crit or atk, but depends on level, EM, and res.
Nilou's E does a stance change and gives a hydro infusion. Like Ayato, Nilou cannot charge attack in this stance. Her E does not proc Candace's Q. Either two things can happen during her E. If you use a NA in the third step, she will gain an infusion for 8s and can unleash water wheels/waves with her NA (will do luminous illusion/water wheel damage in lunar prayer mode).
If you use an E in the third step, her E will end and she will create a water ring that applies wet to surroundings (similar to Barbara's E). This water ring has a 12s duration and 1.9s ICD (applies hydro every 1.9s). The E has a 18s cooldown.
With her passive, during her E she can activate the Golden Chalice, which increases EM and modifies the bloom reaction. With Golden Chalice, bloom reactions create bountiful cores that explode immediately (usually dendro cores explode after a few seconds).
Nilou's other passive (Dreamy Dance of Aeons) increases the bloom damage based on her HP (HP needs to be above 30k for effect to kick in). Nilou ascends with HP and has a pretty high base hp, so it is possible to reach over 30k hp. Nilou has lower base hp than Hu Tao.
Nilou's Q is a nuke that scales with her HP. It is split in two parts (the second being the Aeon damage).
The E is called the Dance of Haftkarsvar. Here Haftkarsvar refers to the seven realms in Persian culture.
Her NA is called Dance of Samser. Here Samser may refer to Shamshir (شمشیر), or curved Persian swords. These swords have an origin from the Eurasian steppe and Central Asia (think Turkic, Mongol nomads). In Chinese the NA name is written as 弦月舞步 which sort of means 'curved moon dance' where the curved moon can refer to the shape of the curved Shamshir sword.
They say that Nilou practices the arts, something that is hard to quantify for the scholars of the Akademiya, but for Nilou the arts is one of the simplest and purest things.
Overall Nilou has an interesting artistic design, but her major drawback and Achilles heel is that her kit severely restricts her to a very niche and specific kind of team. It does not help that Nilou suffered from several major nerfs during the beta.
C1 buffs E dmg and extends duration of the water ring.
C2 (Starry Skies Their Flowers Rain 星天的花雨) can shred dendro and hydro res by 35% by doing hydro and bloom dmg through the passive. This is a pretty good C2. It shreds more dendro res than deepwood while also shredding some hydro res. The C2 hydro res shred can also compensate for how many Nilou bloom comps may not have an anemo vv unit.
C4 gives energy and buffs dmg of Q.
C6 (断霜的弦歌) gives cr and cd that scales with her HP, up to 30 cr and 60 cd (120 cv). This is pretty good as a stat buff.
The way to think about Nilou's constellations is if you build her full HP. In full HP build she will not have a hydro goblet, so her C1 and C4 dmg bonus buffs compensate a bit for that. Moreover in full HP build she will not have a crit circlet, and she will likely have more than 30k hp to activate the bloom buff. Her C6 compensates for this by giving free 30 cr and 60 cd if she has 30k hp (or more). So at C6, she can do regular (standard crit build) C0 damage (on E, Q) while also buffing bloom damage, meaning she can do decent regular damage and reaction damage at the same time. There are few characters that can do both high regular damage and high transformative reaction damage simultaneously (usually one has to choose between one or the other and make a tradeoff). Cyno (at C0) is perhaps one of those characters (with EM buff in hyperbloom team and high nuke scaling per E within Q).
Her C1 also gives 100% uptime on her water ring (12s to 18s). This would make her one of the only (if not the only) character who can apply hydro with 100% uptime on E (without using Q). The tradeoff is that it does no damage and requires C1. Other E abilities that apply a vaporizing element include: Kokomi's E which does damage (but does not crit) and Dehya's E which does damage, can crit, and has near 100% uptime at C2.
See subdps for more details. It appears that the game is fine giving us a plethora of good dendro/electro E applicators (Nahida, Raiden, etc.), but is more stingy in giving free pyro/hydro/cryo applicators (vaporizing/melt elements). Units like Dehya C2, Nilou C1, Kokomi (with Q to reset E) are few and far in between in that regard.
Full HP for bloom build. HP sands, hydro dmg goblet, crit circlet for nuke build. Can also mix and match EM sands, HP goblet, crit circlet or full EM or double EM + HP or double HP + EM according to specific needs.
She has a number of options for artifact sets: 2p gilded/WT for EM and bloom buff, 2p or 4p heart of depth, 2p tenacity, 2p noblesse for burst dmg, and combinations thereof. Echoes is the worst set to use as she does not scale much off ATK.
In her 3.1 trial, Nilou was wearing 2p Gilded + 2p Tenacity. And to be honest, Paradise Lost is not even worth it when 4p Gilded exists. Paradise still suffers from the fact that only Nilou's blooms are buffed, rather than buffing the whole team's blooms.
The 3.6 Vourukasha set is not that good for her since most of Nilou's damage is from bloom rather than her E or Q.
Nilou's signature weapon Khaj-Nisut has a good effect (沉入沙海的史诗): it gives HP and then gives EM to her and the whole team based on her HP. The effect is much better than that of Kokomi's extremely niche signature weapon.
The Xiphos, Jingjin sword, jade cutter, iron sting, dongfang, alley, favonius are also good options. Apparently, sac sword can also work. Big shout out to Xiphos for having one of the most broken effects in the game.
Nilou's teams want both hydro and dendro characters. Any will do. For hydro: Mona, Yelan, Barbara, Kokomi, Furina all work. Even on fielders such as Childe, Noctis, Ayato work to varying degrees with Nilou. For dendro: Nahida, Alhaitham, Yaoyao, DMC work.
Nilou's best team for damage (and spamming as many seeds as possible) is probably something like Alhaitham-Nahida/Yaoyao-Furina-Nilou. Why Alhaitham? Because his dendro app rate is very fast and can spam nuke bloom cores. Yaoyao, baizhu have a bit slower dendro app. So one can have either this team or replace Furina with Yelan/XQ, though one may prefer Furina because of 100% uptime (more efficient). One can run Yaoyao with Furina since such teams usually need a healer.
Another example team (with 2nd hydro dps): Nahida-Yaoyao-Nilou-Childe/Noctis/Ayato.
There are some vape teams that involve nuke burst Nilou such as Nilou-XL-Bennett-Kazuha, but as shown below Nilou's nuke dps is not much. She is better played as a bloom spammer.
Anti-synergy with baizhu: at first one would think Nilou would work ok with baizhu given the history of the Ming dynasty. But the way baizhu is designed actually makes him NOT work well with Nilou. Baizhu gives a shield, but Nilou's passive requires that the character get hit by dendro attacks in order to receive the 100 EM buff. RIP.
At this point, perhaps the only Sumeru dps that can be supported by baizhu are Alhaitham and Cyno, but even they would prefer Nahida as the vastly superior support. Even Yaoyao would be better as a dendro healer.
Similarly, there is some anti-synergy between Kirara and Nilou as the shield prevents being damage which is needed to activate Nilou's passive. But perhaps this makes some sense... However, even then Kirara works better with Nilou as Kirara's shield is stronger than baizhu's, has 100% uptime, and does not cost energy.
The base bloom damage at lv90 is 2893.70 (same as overloaded, note this factors in LM and RM, see elements). The EM bonus is $$m = 16EM/(EM+2000)$$ The EM used is the one who procced the bloom reaction. For an enemy with 10% dendro res, the res multiplier is .9. With the Golden Chalice effect, all party members get 100 EM. If you use Nilou's signature Khaj weapon, she can give more EM to other party members.
It may not be the case that Nilou herself procs bloom all the time. Her teammates could be the ones proccing bloom, in which case their EM is factored in. To be conservative, let's assume that we have just 100 EM above. Then the EM bonus is $$m = 0.7619047619$$ or nearly doubling the damage. Note if everyone has 300 EM then the em bonus is 2.0869565217 (or nearly tripling the damage).
Also from dendro resonance (which Nilou teams will usually have), the team gets an extra 50 EM plus 30 EM (for 6s at a time) from triggering bloom reactions. So this means an extra 80 EM for a total of around 180 EM (as a conservative lower bound). The EM bonus is then $$m = 1.3211009174$$
In general, if you want to base team damage on a 'symmetric' or 'bidirectional' transformative reaction like electro-charged, overloaded, superconduct, burning, or bloom, it is better to give EM to the whole team since you do not necessarily know who is going to proc the reaction. By contrast for 'asymmetric' reactions like swirl, vape, melt, spread, aggravate, it is clearer who is the one proccing the reaction (clearer what is the forward direction).
The Golden Chalice effect starts after the 3rd step of her E and lasts for 30s. During this time, bloom will produce bountiful cores that explode immediately and have larger aoe. This basically allows Nilou's team to spam bloom more frequently. Note bountiful cores and dendro cores both have a finite limit of 5 so it is not quadratic (only 5 cores can exist at a time). Normal dendro cores explode after 6s. Cores deal dendro damage but will not proc bloom themselves (so no infinite cycle of blooms if it is raining on a target for example).
Suppose Nilou has 50k hp (if you do full hp build you can even reach 70-80k), so that she is 20k over 30k hp. From her other passive, the conversion rate is 9% dmg bonus per 1k points above 30k. So bloom gets 180% dmg bonus (the max dmg bonus is 400% which is achieved at around 74-75k hp). Thus the bountiful core will do $$d = 2893.70*(1 + m + 1.8)*.9 = 10732.7067522936$$ in (true) damage. To convert this to mv we divide by 4050, so the above is around $$x_t = 265$$ That is assuming Nilou herself creates one core every second. In practice, say Nilou can create two cores per second. Then the dps is 265*2 = 530%, which is actually decent (better than Ganyu).
Note due to damage sequence, bloom has a limit of how many times it can damage an enemy within a second: two instances of damage per 0.5s (or 4 instances per second). If we blindly follow this then the team dps can become 229*4=916%, which is viable. But more importantly, this is team dps since in practice it could be any one of Nilou's teammates proccing the bloom reaction. This raises the question of how to attribute the portion of team dps to Nilou herself. A naive computation will assume the team dps is spread evenly between the 4 team members, so Nilou's own dps becomes 229. But we need to examine this in more detail.
Above we assumed that Nilou can create one or two cores herself every second. This is quite generous. Think about how Nilou applies hydro to create a core: she can either create the water ring that lasts 12s (with 6s downtime) and apply hydro once every 1.9s or she can gain an infusion for 8s (with 10s downtime) and more actively apply hydro. In either mode, it can become hard to apply hydro to create one or two cores every second, nevermind four, in a single-target situation. (Note the water ring applies wet in a 2.5m radius every .5s, but due to icd on opponent, it applies wet to a single opponent once per ~2s.)
For example, if we just use the water ring, that is one core every 1.9s attributed to Nilou (or around half a core per second). And moreover there is a 6s downtime of not applying any hydro, so in reality it is less. The point is that since bloom is a symmetric reaction, it becomes harder to attribute dps to individual members, and it becomes more important to look at the overall team dps, but for Nilou 229 is reasonable for an estimate (leaning on the more generous side as per the above analysis).
The above is for single targets. The way around this is if you have multiple enemies. Then Nilou can apply hydro to multiple enemies simultaneously with her water ring or hydro infusion. It then becomes easier to create more cores. For example, if there are 4 enemies affected by dendro, and her aoe water ring applies hydro to all 4 every 1.9s (to create 4 cores), that is how Nilou can create 2 cores per second to reach 458% dps. So similar to Xiao, Childe, and other aoe units, Nilou and bloom become much better the more enemies there are.
With these types of calculations, one needs to keep in mind the downtime on her E as well as the upper limit of 5 cores that can exist in the world (so it is not like Nilou's water ring can create 6 or 8 cores simultaneously when there are more enemies). Also note her C1 gives the water ring 100% uptime.
In general, characters that apply their element more frequently can proc more reactions (and get their EM factored in). For example, EM Childe (with riptide, stringless), when paired in Nilou teams, can apply hydro more frequently and thus proc bloom more frequently than the off-field water ring. Alhaitham (with his E mirror hits) can apply dendro very frequently and proc a lot of blooms.
On a separate note, Cyno attacks very frequently with his NA and buffed E dustbolts (at c6 he gets more dustbolts), so he can potentially proc more hyperblooms than off-field Kuki E or Raiden E. In fact it seems one purpose of Cyno's c6 is to proc more reactions (aggravate or hyperbloom), thereby increasing damage.
To play Nilou as a bloom dps, you only need to build hp and em on her. It is that simple. Her E and Q scale with her hp and can crit, but much of her dps will come from her bloom.
The Q has 33.18+40.55=73.73% hp scaling at lv10. This is roughly equivalent to 737.3% atk scaling. The cd is 18s and energy cost 70. In bloom teams with only hydro or dendro, this will usually not vape. If you are not building any hydro dmg on Nilou the dps is then $$x_q = 737.3/18 = 40.96$$ which is not much, even for a nuke.
As such, you only need to ascend her to lv90 to maximize the bloom damage and activate the Golden Chalice passive. Whether her E or Q are lv1 or lv9, the bountiful core dmg will be the same.
It is harder for bloom to reach hyperbloom level of dps because bloom has less EM scaling and bloom teams require the whole team to have a lot of EM (whereas hyperbloom only really needs one electro character with full EM). The EM and bloom reaction bonus buffs that Nilou gives to the team help make bloom teams more viable, but how do Nilou bloom teams compare with hyperbloom?
Assume 100 EM for the electro driver in a hyperbloom team. Hyperbloom has a RM of 3 (compared to bloom's RM of 2). The hyperbloom damage is $$d_h = (3/2)*2893.70*(1 + m)*.9 = 6882.9$$ which has scaling of around \(d_h/4050 = 170\% \). So Nilou's bloom buff can actually bypass hyperbloom for similar level of EM. The difference is that 100 EM is quite low, and it is much easier for the hyperbloom electro driver to reach 1k EM than it is for Nilou's entire team to get more EM (due to absence of party-wide EM buffs, unless every team member is built full EM). The mv for 1k EM hyperbloom is around 600% for a single target, 300% for two targets, etc. (see elements; also hyperbloom is sublinear).
So it is easier for hyperbloom teams to achieve higher dps than Nilou bloom teams, but the above calculation shows that Nilou bloom teams are able to achieve hyperbloom level of dps with more investment into team EM (e.g. make all team members have 1k full em build). And the advantage of bloom is that it is aoe (whereas hyperbloom is single-target).
This sword really helps buff Nilou bloom teams by giving party-wide EM buffs. Khaj Nisut is from Egyptian (𓇓𓏏𓈖𓈍), referring to the pharoah's coronation and king's appearance. It is translated in Chinese as 圣显 meaning heirophany or the physical manifestation of the sacred.
With this sword, after using Nilou's skill (the 3 steps with final hit), she will gain 3 stacks, each giving .12% of her hp as EM (total .36% hp as EM). Moreover, with 3 stacks, it will give the rest of her team .2% of her hp as EM. This lasts 20s.
The sword also increases hp by 20% with the passive, and gives a further 66.2% hp with its ascension, meaning it is the ultimate hp stat sword (there are few hp buffing swords in the game). For most characters, having such an excess of hp is useless, which is why it is highly tailored to Nilou. This sword makes it easier for Nilou to hit 70k hp and saturate the Aeon bloom buff.
But let's assume Nilou has 50k hp as above. Then the passive will give 180 EM to herself and 100 EM to her teammates (with 3 stacks). Combined with the Golden Chalice passive, her teammamtes can then start with a base of 200 EM for reactions.
At 200 EM the bonus is $$m_2 = 1.45$$ which is around 70% more than 100 EM. The bloom damage is then $$d_2 = 2893.70*(1 + m_2 + 1.8)*.9 = 11068.4$$ which has scaling 273%. So the weapon can increase bloom damage by 20% (compared to 229% without this weapon). In practice, the buff is probably more when factoring the extra 86% hp it gives to Nilou (which she converts into further bloom reaction bonus). Such a buff to team dps makes Khaj-Nisut a bis for Nilou.
Using the terminology of HSR, is Nilou a dps or harmony character? She fulfills both types of roles, but leans a bit more on the harmony side. While she can do damage herself, what makes her unique is how she modifies the bloom reaction and buffs her entire team's damage via bloom. In a sense, she enables her teammates to do more damge via bloom. All this makes her a unique kind of dps and harmony/buffer character.
Among the dps classes in HSR (erudition, destruction, hunt), Nilou probably fits erudition or destruction most. The dps of bloom is aoe and for Nilou teams actually performs much better in aoe situations (where one can apply elements on multiple enemies and generate more cores), so Nilou could fit the erudition archetype.
As for destruction, Nilou is designed to scale off hp and is usually built with a lot of hp (full hp), giving her some survivability in combat too. Moreover, her passive is reliant on taking damage from the bloom core to activate the buff, so she has this trademark self-sacrifice mechanism characteristic of many destruction characters. However, compared to other destruction-type characters (like Itto, Xiao) who work in general situations and are self-sufficient (can deal damage / function by themselves and even solo spiral abyss floors), Nilou is a bit more niche and much more reliant on having a team built around her to do damage given her passive forcing her to be played in specific teams.