Genshin Impact Spiral Abyss Guide

This guide is aimed to give practical and concise advice, and help you prepare for the current end-game content, the spiral abyss.

The Spiral Abyss:

The Spiral Abyss is repeatable content that can be cleared bimonthly for primogems. First time clears offer a one-time reward of various other resources and equipment. There are 12 floors in total, with each floor divided into 3 chambers.

You begin on floor 1 chamber 1, and must clear 3 chambers in order to advance to the next floor. From floors 6 onwards, the floors are also divided into halves, requiring two separate teams of different characters.

During your attempt to clear the 3 chambers, you cannot use food, change equipment or re-arrange your party.

Each floor will also provide a specific buff/debuff to your party. For example, Floor 9 will increase your pyro damage by 75% and increase your Overload damage by 200%. Using these buffs is crucial to take on the floors effectively, especially since floors that buff a certain type of damage usually contain monsters weak to it.

There are also a set of buffs you can choose from when entering each chamber. Some of these will carry onto the next floor, while some will only be active for that chamber.

Finally, there is a set of buffs that apply to every floor, that are rotated out every two weeks. These range from extra energy generation to AoE damage after sprinting.

Which units should I use?

Typically, the best results will come from using characters and elements that are buffed by the floor. However, being able to swap out a team for every floor is not very practical since most players will have limited resources to upgrade their characters.

Instead of giving you an ‘ideal’ team for every floor, I’ll go over the floors and recommend F2P setups where you can replace units based on the characters you have.

Also, since the earlier floors can mostly be powered through as your AR increases, I’ll mostly be focusing on floors 9-12 which are the repeatable ones.

Floor 9:

Floor 9 provides a 75% pyro/electro and 200% overload damage buff. It’s important to note that the overload buff is multiplicative with any other bonuses, meaning this essentially triples your overload damage. So if you have +200% from EM, your overload will be dealing 9x the base damage.

Beside the buffed elements, it’s important to consider which enemies you’ll be fighting inside each floor. Floor 9 contains several enemies with shields, and you should consider how you’ll be breaking through them.

In the first half there is a Stonehide Lawachurl so you’ll need either geo or a claymore to deal with that. In the second half there are cryo and electro fatui skirmishers that need pyro and cryo to be dealt with respectively.

I would strongly suggest building EM and focusing on creating overload since the buff is so strong.

First half: Pyro/Electro DPS, claymore/geo for geo shield
Second half: Pyro/Electro DPS, cryo for electro fatui shield

Example F2P team:
Team 1: Xiangling, Noelle, X, X
Team 2: Lisa, Amber, Kaeya, Barbara

Floor 10:

Floor 10 provides a 50% increase to healing, but also applies the ‘Smouldering fire’ debuff which causes you to take a pyro damage DoT until the pyro effect is cleared.

The debuff can be tanked with a decent healer or Geo, but clearing it with Barbara makes the floor much easier (You can only use Barbara on one floor though).

First half: Any DPS, hydro for pyro shields, healer/shield/debuff clearer
Second half: Any DPS, hydro for pyro shields (or electro/cryo if you don’t have 2 hydro), healer/shield/debuff clearer

Example F2P team:
Team 1: Xiangling, Barbara, X, X
Team 2: DPS, Kaeya, Noelle, X

Floor 11:

Floor 11 provides a 75% cryo/electro and 300% superconductor damage buff. It also causes superconductor to reduce enemy Phys RES by another 20% (60% total).

As with the overload buff from Floor 9, the reaction buff is multiplicative, meaning your superconductor will do 4x damage.

Funnily enough, despite the buffs to cryo/electro, pyro is still a good choice for the first half. Chamber 1 contains electro/cryo slimes, both of which are relatively weak to pyro and not really easily dealt with by cryo or electro.

You could also opt to use a physical damage dealer if you plan on going the superconductor route.

First half: Pyro to clear cryo slimes/fatui, Electro/Cryo/Phys DPS, Claymore/Geo for geo shields
Second half: Cryo/Electro/Phys DPS, Cryo to clear fatui shield, Geo/claymore to clear geo shields, Pyro for cryo shield

Example F2P team:
Team 1: Xiangling, Noelle, X, X
Team 2: Lisa, Kaeya, Geo MC, Amber

Floor 12:

Floor 12 provides a 75% increase to pyro damage, but also applies the ‘Condensed ice’ debuff which causes your stamina usage to greatly increase until the cryo effect is cleared. Afaik, the only way to self-clear cryo would be Bennett’s Q.

Pyro units can deal with almost every enemy themselves, with only cryo needed to clear skirmisher shields on both halves, and a geo/claymore to clear a skirmisher shield on the second half.

Example F2P team:
Team 1: Xiangling, Kaeya, X, X
Team 2: Amber, Geo MC, X, X

Overall:

You can definitely get by with the base F2P team assuming they are built properly and you are level 90. You likely won’t be able to complete it at a lower AR like many whales on the CN server have, but that’s the cost to being F2P I guess.

If you have other units, replacements can be made where possible, i.e. Chongyun for Kaeya or Bennett/Diluc for Amber.

Since you need two healers, if you’re F2P you’ll have to invest in both Noelle and Barbara to be able to clear everything smoothly. Noelle has the added benefit of being able to clear geo shields and provide shields herself so she’s not too bad.

Shield info: