So I played some Nearl, and here's what I thought. Broadly speaking, Nearl is INCREDIBLY weak. Her cards focus on adding effects that happen later instead of the turn you play them. They cost too much for their effects, even if they were immediate, and she doesn't have powerful enough options to keep her alive reliably even when against regular Spire enemies.

Her Friends mechanic is similar to Defect's orbs. But the problem with Friends is the cards that summon them are often 2 energy AND don't immediately affect the game. The one Friend summoning card that does, Whislash, only does so when upgraded. Even with Whislash's immediacy, it's analogous to Ironclad's Flex card. Flex is regarded as one of Ironclad's worst cards.

How the mechanic works right now, you spend almost your whole turn doing nothing, then have to spend MORE energy later to get an effect analogous to a base character's common cards. The Friends cards are all too expensive for their effects and many are underpowered, even if they all costed 1 less energy. Some just don't work properly, like Sanctuary I think is supposed to give you block multiple times, or grant DP or something. It just gives 10 block.

The cards aren't always something you'd want to use, which is fine. But they need to be more powerful because of that. We've already invested energy to get these cards. They should be more powerful than normal, not equal to, or even in some cases weaker than, base character cards. This is especially true considering the cards aren't added to the deck and instead are created randomly. What cards are available to the player on a given turn is completely up to chance, and there's every possibility that the cards we're given don't give an effect we want.

(Also, just from a definition standpoint, add Ethereal and Exhaust to all the Friend cards, [just Ethereal to the powers] since that's how they interact when played.)

The Friends need more immediacy. All of them should do SOMETHING beneficial the turn they're played. And that effect has to be good enough to justify their cost. You're spending most of your turn playing this summon card, in a game where fights are designed to be either stabilized or over with in around 4 turns.

One way to fix this would be to offer the Unique Friend Cards to be played for 0 energy as soon as you play the summon card. That would add immediacy to the effect while still keeping the unique cards interesting. It would also allow for interactions with effects like Time Eater's or Violet Choker's, where the number of cards you play matters.

Generally speaking, I'd also decrease the cost of most of the Friend Cards, since they're a reward for investing energy earlier in the fight and again, fights are functionally over in around 4 turns or even less. Some of them also need to have their numbers tweaked so they're stronger than base characters' cards because again, their availability is entirely up to chance. They also don't scale off of your strength and dex, which is an issue of its own because it clashes with the Stance mechanic. But that's a separate thing.

The promotion idea would make sense in a game where fights go on for awhile, but again we're investing energy to invest energy to invest energy in a game where energy is incredibly precious and fights are quick. But again, it scales too slowly to make sense.

Trust levels could be made cumulative for the run, but I think that's a bad place to take the mechanic. You could either make Trust a stat like Focus, where it affects ALL your friends, or you could just remove the concept altogether and make the friend cards scale off your strength and dexterity. Either one works, but I'd recommend they scale off strength and dexterity.

Nearl already has a lot of things going on. Having additional things to juggle makes her clunkier. Duplicate Friend Summoning cards could maybe be transformed into a Friend card of the relevant character if you got rid of trust as a mechanic.

It would also be nice to see the friends do something passively like Defect's orbs do, but I don't know enough about Arknights to give suggestions on who does what. Making Trust a stat like Focus would work well if you did end up giving them passives, as the Trust would affect the intensity of the passive.

On the subject of Stances, we have the problem of immediacy again. The mechanic gives benefits when you change stances, so the player is incentivized to change stances as quickly and as much as possible. But there isn't enough support for that to happen. There aren't cheap cards that reliably change your stance. So it's likely that you'll maybe generate 1 strength from the mechanic for a few turns and hit 2 later on. But again, fights are over within around 4 turns. So the mechanic won't affect the game that much before the fight is over.

Even with cheap stance changing cards, unlike Watcher, the effects for being in a stance are very, VERY small unless you've swapped many times. I'd fix this by rebalancing the cards that change stance so they can be used more often, and have the bonus for changing stances not go away. So every time you switch, you permanently gain 1 strength or 1 dexterity. If you like the concept of growing stances, have the stance also grant its bonus EVERY turn, not only when you switch.

So if you start in Guardian stance, you start with +1 dexterity, and then at the start of your turn you gain another dexterity. If you switch, you immediately gain +1 strength, and at the start of your turn, you gain another strength. But you KEEP the 2 dexterity from before.

Now there's a benefit to staying in a stance over time in addition to an advantage to switching. Switching stances also gains much more immediacy because you're not losing out on half your benefits when you switch. Combine this with a cost reduction for stance changing cards, and you end up with a foundation for a decent deck that can still perform OK in the few turns fights last.

An example of how this is done well is The Champ (I think he's part of the Downfall mod last I checked.) His stances dramatically affect how his cards work instead of giving him stat buffs. But the point is that his stances have a great deal of cheap and reliable support that can be added to your deck so you can be in the stance you want to be in, when you want to be in it.

On the subject of Light, I think Light is an interesting but ultimately shortsighted mechanic. Because Light is the definition of a lack of immediacy. Either it's "add + block to a later card" or "add + damage to a later card". Again, in a game where fights should be over in around 4 turns, doing things "later" is a really, really bad idea. Cards that interact with Light generally want you to stockpile it instead of using it. So you want to push all your effects later and later and later and look! The fight was over with 3 turns ago!

Light needs to do something while you're holding it for this kind of stockpiling effect to make sense in a fast game. Light needs to do something other than just being "extra damage or extra block". Maybe instead of spending it, it's a buff that you stockpile infinitely and the amount you have at the end of the fight determines what it does. For example, if you gain 10 or more, you get +1 max HP. 20 or more and you upgrade a random card. ETC. You could even have it start the next fight with extra temporary HP or start with Vigor or something. (Permanent buffs should be considered better than 'next battle' buffs though). This is the immediacy problem again, so cards that generate Light need to be good enough that the Light they make is NOT considered for balancing purposes.

Alternatively, you gather Light throughout the fight and the amount you have permanently buffs cards that interact with it for the fight. So your cards have "levels" that change based on how much light you have. Again, immediacy is still a problem, so they'd need to be buffed to do something significant without the Light part. Cost reductions and number tweaks would fix them most of the time.

I personally like the idea of Light as something that grants buffs to your run, because it makes Nearl more powerful the longer the run goes on. You could even take it a third direction and have Light be cumulative between fights, where the benefits you get accumulate on a second Starter Relic. That way, you can do things like start fights with extra strength or dexterity, or draw extra cards, etc.

The reason these proposed solutions all still have the immediacy problem is because the Light is acting to add something different to Nearl's gameplay. She begins to scale. She literally becomes more powerful the longer the run goes on. So Light becomes this meta resource that she generates as she goes. It adds a bit more spice to her gameplay, in addition for helping her meet the problem I'm addressing next.

The last thing to talk about is Nearl's Arena fights, which are a problem because of how weak Nearl herself is. Said fights are far more dangerous than Elite and Boss fights of the regular Spire are for where they are in the run. The base characters are all more powerful than Nearl right now, and I couldn't see the base characters handling the arena fights. They're almost universally lethal because of how early they show up in the run and how much more powerful they are than anything around them.

Imagine fighting the Slavers from the Act 2 Elite fight on your third room of the run, and you'll start to see the problem. I built a custom made upgraded deck to face them (courtesy of a different mod) and I STILL lost to the fights post-championship. And I'm not new or bad at this game. I can make runs at the Heart of the Spire on Ascension 20. My ability to pilot a deck is quite high. (Mods should NOT be balanced to my ability to pilot. That is, a mod shouldn't be balanced so that a player at my skill level has a hard time beating most of its challenges on low Ascensions. It should be beatable by people who have a hard time beating Ascension 2.)

I'm not saying the arena fights need to be nerfed. But Nearl needs to be made significantly more powerful to match their challenge. General cost reductions, number tweaks, and the change in design concept that I was talking about (make cards do things then and there instead of waiting for later turns, and increase your scaling so it affects fights in a reasonable timeframe) would get Nearl to the point that she may be able to take on the arena fights. She can be stronger overall than the base characters. She'd have to be because the arena fights are more difficult than the Heart is.

Oh and one specific effect should be tweaked. Exsanguination should set Strength to 0 if it's positive and prevent the character from gaining strength instead of limiting it to 0 or less. That would give it synergy with cards like Lance Charge that temporarily reduce strength. Maybe it also causes them to lose 1 strength every turn. Because as it stands, there aren't many enemies that gain a ton of strength where Exsanguination would make a difference. It takes so much effort to get the card that grants it that it should be able to be more powerful.

Interestingly, it DOES work the way I described if it's used against Nearl, because Dreadnought stance's strength gain will get nullified, and when you swap back to Guardian, you lose strength. So if you have +5 from Dreadnought and get hit with Exsanguination, swapping to Guardian reduces your strength to -5. (The suggestions I made for the stance mechanic would fix this though)

Overall, I like the mod. But I feel like there's a misstep in design that made Nearl a lot weaker than she should be. Some of my suggestions would fix a lot of her problems.