Genshin Impact Advanced Game Mechanics Guide

by Majesty

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for his lifetime.”(Aside from the fact that this game has no fishing), rather than telling you exactly what to do and how to play the game aside from the basics which I already covered in another guide, I’m going to give you some information so you can evaluate yourself.  Most of this information isn’t going to be relevant for some time in your gameplay, so if you have no idea what I’m talking about when you read this don’t be surprised.  If you ever find yourself at a point where you don’t know what to invest in, aren’t sure how to compare, or find yourself confused, this guide might help you out.  Without further ado, let’s dive into it.  

Multipliers and What They Mean

A lot of people are confused at all the different multipliers in the game and I don’t blame them, since they are super unintuitive.  To start off, there’re 5 primary multipliers in the game that affect your damage output: Base ATK%, Critical, DMG%, Resistance, and Defense.  Let’s further our understanding of them in that order.

Base ATK% adds a percentage of your base attack to your total attack, your base attack consisting solely of your character flat attack and your weapon flat attack.  It does not include flat attack from any other sources, including but not limited to your feather artifact, artifact substat flat attack rolls, skill effects etc.  This is important since a 5* feather has 311 flat attack, and the maximum combined character + weapon attack you can achieve using both 5* characters and weapons is <1000 and most combinations will not exceed 933.  This is important since, for example, a 50% base atk relic won’t actually give you 50% atk increase, but rather since it only increases 75% of your attack (933/(933+311)) by 50%, it would be giving you a 37.5% atk increase.  As a general rule of thumb, you can multiply any base atk% values by 75% to get an upper cap of how much extra flat attack the base atk% is actually giving you.  Additionally, any skill or item that says it increases your atk% in its description actually increases your base atk%, such as in weapon descriptions and not your total flat attack.  This is not to be confused with skills that inflict x% of your atk as damage, which will inflict a percentage of your total attack.  (Totally intuitive and not confusing right?  Yeah, no, warning you now that this article is going to be full of counter-intuitive stuff that actually happens in game. 

Critical attacks multiply the damage of your attack by 1+crit dmg%, dealing 150% of the original damage with the base 50% crit dmg.  Your likelihood of dealing a crit is crit% and is capped at ~80% (exact value is unsure but you can never crit 100% of the time, even with above 100% crit% and this might be changed).  Crit% is a flat value, so all of your crit% sources add up to give you your overall crit rate.  Attacks on weak spots are not crits, and fall into dmg%.  Thus, your attacks on weak spots can crit as well.  

Dmg% multipliers multiply the damage of your attack by 1+dmg%.  Different dmg% multipliers include type dmg (physical or elemental), weak spot (50% dmg increase), attack type (such as skills, basic, charged) and so forth.  At this point it’s somewhat unknown how multipliers interact and I don’t have the data to do analysis on whether they’re additive (add up all the dmg% of the categories an attack falls under and uses that as a total dmg% multiplier), multiplicative (multiply damage of attack by every multiplier that applies in order), or a mix (multipliers in same categories add, such as two both amplifying basic attacks, while different categories multiply).  How they work is kinda important and categorization sucks because of the ambiguous and different wording in a lot of effects, but you can always assume the worst efficiency scenario of additives if you want to run conservative damage estimates. 

Resistance reduction’s effect is also difficult to determine since the elemental resistance of enemies isn’t exactly stated anywhere, but the bottom line is that they will always increase that type’s damage by at least the reduction effect.  For example, if you have a 20% anemo resistance application to any enemy, anemo damage against that enemy will increase by 20% at least (granted they are not immune).  That is because enemies can have negative resistance; if they originally had 0% resistance, you do 100% type damage against them.  If their resistance is then reduced to -20% resistance, you do 120% type damage against them, a 20% damage increase.  On the other hand, let’s assume they have 20% anemo resistance.  By reducing their resistance by 20%, you go from doing 80% damage to them to 100% damage to them, which is a 25% increase on your original damage ((100-80)/80=25%).  This might be mathematically confusing for you, so a more extreme example can illustrate this.  If an enemy had 99% resistance and you shredded his resistance by 99%, you go from doing 1% type damage against him to 100% type damage against him, as opposed to going from 100% type damage to 199% type damage if he had 0% resistance.  As you can see the first case is a hundredfold increase in damage, while the second is less than a twofold.  You can assume as the bottom line that resistance decrease will be equal to type dmg% increase numerically, if not better.

Defense down is the weirdest one out of them all, since we don’t know the actual defense formula, just some hypothetical equations people have put out.  What we do know is that damage reduction based on defense is affected by enemy defense (well duh, it’s the defense formula), and at least one of the following: 1) your level, 2) the enemy’s level, or 3) the difference between the enemy’s level and your level.  That’s because it’s been empirically shown that attacking the same level mob with a character with the same parameters except for their level results in different damage values, and that attacking the same enemy mob that are different leveled with an identical character results in different damage values as well.  I coined the term “level suppression” to encapsulate this phenomenon that something related to “level” is “suppressing” your damage.  In any case, what you need to understand is that defense reduction is much more valuable later than it is earlier, as once the enemies are higher level the amount of defense reduced increases.  At end game, you can approximately estimate that defense reduction% = increased dmg% of the same value.  

Optimizing damage based on these values is up to individual scenarios and how different interactions actually work, but as a general rule of thumb you should know that spreading out investment in these values is better than piling all your stats into one of them.  I’m sure in math class you’ve seen that if you can increase x and y by a total of 100% and you want to maximize xy, you put 50% in each of them to get 1.5x*1.5y = 2.25xy rather than investing all 100%in one of them to get 2x*y=x*2y=2xy.  

Numbers and Descriptions aren’t Really what they Say

Now that we’ve covered the convoluted way that your damage is calculated, now let’s go over the convoluted way in which the game presents information.  I feel like I’ve sent miHoYo feedback about this on literally every specific item that might be ambiguous or confusing at this point, but some of them still aren’t changed so we’re going to have to make do.  

To illustrate how this might all be confusing, let’s start with the two 4* craftable spears affix effects.  Crescent Pike resulted in a 24% atk dmg increase on your basic and charged attacks for 5s after gaining energy.  Prototype Grudge increased the dmg on your basic and charged attacks by 12% after using an elemental skill, stacking up to two times.  These two effects look strikingly similar, almost identical right?  Well, they’re actually super different.  The first one caused you to do 24% of your attack as damage on each hit of your basic/charged attack, while the second just increased your damage of each type by 24%.  This is important since depending on the number of attacks and amount of damage of each attack, the effect of the first one drastically varied.  For example, Xiangling’s basic attack string hits 9 times total, with most of those hits being super low damage (such as 20-30% of your total attack).  This meant Crescent Pike ended up being more than a 50% increase in the total damage of her basic attack string.  On the other hand, each of Xiao’s charged attacks hit for something like 500% of his total attack, making the 24% extra attack peanuts for him.  If you were confused by that example, I’m happy to tell you that it is literally the least confusing thing of this nature, so buckle up and get ready to go through some more confusion.  

First off, you need to understand that the skill multiplier% and cooldown of skills/bursts don’t really tell you anything.  For skill cooldown, the only information you’ll get from it is that its value represents the time period from when it goes onto cooldown to when you can cast it again.  It tells you nothing about whether it’s cd is on cast or after use, whether it goes on cd if it’s interrupted or not, cd/use window between charges etc.  You literally have to figure this stuff out yourself.  Skill multiplier% is just as bad.  Some skills will tell you total damage, some will tell you dmg per hit/attack, normally without telling you the number of attacks, and some of them literally don’t tell you either.  For example, Venti’s e skill tells you the single instance of total damage, Ningguang’s burst tells you the dmg per gem without telling you how many gems there are, and Diluc’s burst gives you 3 dmg values without really telling you which is what and how many times they’re applied.  These values are important in dictating how weak or strong a skill is, and many people are likely to see a low number and assume the skill to be weak when in reality it deals a lot of dmg but in separate instances.  Another thing to keep in mind is energy expenditure of the ultimate.  Some ults clear the energy bar the moment they are cast, while others clear it only after the action is performed.  This is important since energy particles have “hang time” i.e. they don’t regenerate your energy the moment a skill is cast, but when you absorb the particle.  This distinction becomes important becomes some bursts allow you to use a skill and then quickly ult and you”ll still gain the energy, while others won’t clear the energy and it’ll be wasted.  

Second off, the skill’s description tells you nothing about how much energy the skill generates.  If you’ve played the game, you’ve probably noticed that when you hit enemies with elemental skills these little particles appear and fly to your character.  The quantity of these particles literally has nothing to do at all with skills damage, cooldown, etc;  it’s literally arbitrary.  For example, Xiangling e and Venti e are both 6s, yet Venti e generates 2-3 of these particles every time while Xiangling e only generates 1.  Xingqiu e is 15s and generates 4 of these, but Barbara e which is 32s only generates 1.  There’s literally no indication of how many of these particles these skills will generate at all and you’re going to have to test to figure that out too.  

If you thought that was bad, then I’m going to now inform you that Constellations/Passives are literally the same as above but even worse.  The largest offender you’ll run into for these is most likely going to be the percentage but no duration offender.  The best example of these would be Venti/Anemo MC C6.  To put this into perspective, originally Lisa A2 passive and these two had the same language, which was that enemies hit by X suffer Y effect.  In one of the betas, Lisa’s A2 language was changed to when enemies “hit by Lightning Rose have their DEF decreased by 15% for 10s.”  However, Venti/MC C6 still don’t have a duration value, and their language is “enemies who take DMG from X.”  Do we apply the same reasoning?  Are both C6’s 10s from the last hit like Lisa A2?  Does the nuance in language make them different?  What if it means only during the duration where they are sustaining damage from the skill?  This is super important since these questions determine whether or not they’re useful or not.  MC C6 in particular would vary from pretty good to literally unusable depending on what’s the actual application, since if it was just when they were taking damage from it, it would either never apply (going straight through large mobs and thus having an almost 0 resistance reduction window) or be hard to use (difficult to deal damage to mobs when they’re being dragged).  Xingqiu C6 is literally the worst offender you can find, stating that activating two of his burst’s sword rain attacks “greatly increases” the DMG of the 3rd and that he regenerates 3 energy when sword rain attacks hit an enemy.  What in the world does  “greatly increases” mean?  By sword rain attacks is that the volley or the separate single rain swords in each volley?  Does the 3 energy occur for each enemy hit by a sword or can it only be 1 enemy?  You can see the level of ambiguity in this makes it almost impossible to identify how the constellation actually works.  

The moral of the story here is that when you look at something, don’t just make assumptions about it, go test it out first if you can or otherwise try to find information from others about how it actually works if it impacts your investment or other important decisions.  

Unconditionals are better than conditionals, unless they’re not really conditionals

This one should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how things are thrown around as busted/weak based solely on numbers.  An true unconditional ability is something like Xingqiu’s A2 passive, which gave him 20% hydro dmg increase active all the time.  A true conditional ability is Diluc’s C1 passive, which is a 15% dmg increase against all enemies above 50% hp.  It’s a true conditional because you literally can’t get around that restriction, there’s no way you can ever get the damage increase on enemies below that hp threshold.  

So what do I mean unconditionals are better, unless they’re not really conditionals?  To give you an example, let’s compare Diluc and Razor’s C1s.  Diluc’s C1 is a 15% dmg increase against enemies above 50% hp, a true conditional.  Razor’s C1 on the other hand is a 10% dmg increase for 8s every time he gains an elemental orb or particle, which is really not a conditional.  Why do I say this?  Well, Razor’s e cd is literally 5s, so he’ll be gaining energy orbs or particles every 5s under almost every condition, since the only time he uses his long cd hold e is when he is then able to cast his burst, which resets his e cd so he can gain energy again.  Basically, in 90%+ of situations, that 10% dmg increase is always active.  On the other hand, Diluc’s passive is literally only up for 50% of the enemies hp, which means on average it’s only a 7.5% increase.  He doesn’t have any single instance burst damage to really take advantage of the higher than 50% hp requirement (such as using it when the enemy is at 51% to burst them to death), since his highest single multiplier is literally the 400% on his first hit of ult.  Thus, even though Diluc’s C1 has a higher dmg% multiplier compared to Razor C1, Razor’s C1 is in almost all situations the better passive ability.  

In between Xingqiu A2 and Diluc C1 is a spectrum of conditionality of abilities.  Razor’s C1 falls close to Xingqiu A2, while something like Berserker 4pc set effect falls closer to Diluc C1 (you can keep your character hp below 70% hp if you wanted to, but it’s difficult in most situations and with many team compositions).  Thus, when you’re looking at conditional abilities, you need to look at theoretical uptime (such as does the ability provide a buff that’s shorter than the ability cd so that it can’t get 100% uptime) and difficulty of application (does activating the buff require a condition that’s difficult to do in combat or random etc.).  On top of this, you can’t look at this in a vacuum either; you’re going to need to look at your character as well.  For example, in general a 10% dmg increase with 100% uptime is better than a 20% dmg increase with 50% uptime consistency wise, but you might have a character than does 80% of their dmg in a 10s window, and then has 10s downtime with 20% of their dmg.  Some characters like consistent effects, some characters like burst effects, so you’ll need to look at their gameplay loop to determine what is better for them. 

Less is Actually More

And by this I don’t mean that something with a 100% multiplier is better than something with a 200% multiplier or anything; that’s just silly.  What I mean is that for things such as trigger effects, energy gains, dmg etc, you generally want it all at once rather than over time.  Which seems counterintuitive since it seems to be the opposite of conditionality, but there’s reasoning for this.  

To illustrate this, if you have a skill that regenerates 1 energy on attack every 2s and a skill that regenerates 5 energy on attack every 10s, the second skill is generally better.  Of course there are situations where the first one might be better (such as when you need 1 or 2 energy to activate your burst), but there’s 2 major factors that favor the second.  The first that there’s less efficiency loss due to margin of error.  You know and I know that nobody is so precise that they’re going to be able to activate that stuff exactly off cooldown.  The difference is that if you’re half a second off for the first skill, it’s really 5 energy every 12.5s while if you’re half a second off for the second skill it’s 5 energy every 10.5s.  Thus, skills that give bigger chunks with longer downtime have the benefit of lower margin of error issues.  The second is the activation requirements.  To effectively use the first skill, your character has to be on the field all the time; you’re basically hard locked to committing that character and the moment they go off the field that skill is suffering huge efficiency loss.  On the hand, you can easily swap in a char for the second skill just to use it, so you have 0 efficiency loss using it.  In general, the second type of skill is better due to lower usage requirements and lower punishment on errors.

An example of this in the game would be Beidou and Xiangling ultimates.  Aside from their support abilities, from a pure damage perspective Beidou ultimate can hit once every 1s and lasts 15s, whereas Xiangling ultimate will always hit ~11 times.  Xiangling’s ultimate has a slightly higher multiplier, but Beidou’s ultimate hitting 15 times will result in a higher total damage amount.  If you’re using them purely as off field damage, then you’d prefer Xiangling ultimate.  Why is that?  Well, Beidou’s ultimate only works on normal and charged attacks, so if you’re using elemental skills/other bursts in between you’re losing out on its damage, while Xiangling’s will hit as long as you’re next to the enemy.  Additionally, Beidou ult’s damage instances are every second, which means you’re likely going to have insane error on actually getting them out.  While I’ve found it considerably doable to get 10 instances of damage, it’s basically impossible to get 15 and you’ll probably only get the same amount as Xiangling’s ult in most cases.  Thus, while Beidou’s ultimate looks like the clear winner on paper, in actual use it has issues.  

In general, if two things have the same expected value, the one that gives it all at once is better than the one that gives it over time.  Of course, an important distinction is “same expected value.”  If you have a Jean that heals 400 per auto with a 50% chance, compared to a Barbara that”s healing 100 per auto with a 100% chance, the first one is obviously going to be superior to the second since the consistency is not worth the 50% expected value loss.  

DPS Type and Affix Skills

In Genshin Impact, there are no pure physical damage dealers, and the only pure elemental damage dealers are catalyst users.  Character basic attacks will always be physical and their elemental skill/burst will always be elemental.  Thus, when deciding what to build, you”ll always have to look at a character’s damage distribution.

Aside from catalyst users that are 100/0 elemental physical and thus really easy to build, every other character will have a distribution from 100/0 to x/100-x, x being greater than 0.  In this game, the closer you are to 100/0 or 0/100, the better you are for building as a character.  If you’re 50/50, you’re actually the worst character to build b/c you get the worst piece efficiency from your artifacts/ other sources.  In general, you don’t want mixed damage characters but instead characters that lean heavily to one side or the other.  Most almost equal mixed damage characters in this are normally build purely elemental as supports such as Beidou or Xingqiu, since they’re way more effective that way.  For reference, for artifact pieces that can have type damage, the damage is always base atk% = elemental dmg% = 0.8 physical dmg%.  That is, for a 5* piece you’ll have ~50% base atk%, ~50% elemental dmg%, and ~62.5% physical dmg%.  To see why mixed characters suck in this regard, consider a 50/50 split character with no other sources of any of these 3 stats.  Since we’ve previously established that base atk% only gives you 75% of its stated amount to your character, the base atk% artifact is a 37.5% dmg increase.  On the other hand, the elemental dmg% is only a 25% dmg increase, and the physical dmg is a 31.25% dmg increase.  Of course, you’ll most definitely always have base atk% from another source meaning its dmg% increase will always be lower by stat dilution, but you can see how a 50/50 character has poor dmg efficiency increase compared to like a 20/80 character who would have a 50% dmg increase form the physical dmg% artifact.  Also, the reason physical dmg% artifacts are higher is b/c characters with even terrible elemental skills/bursts probably won’t exceed 20/80, so to make them comparable to a 100/0 distribution character they’re scaled 25% higher.  

This is where affixes play a major role.  Affixes convert certain damage types to others.  As of right now, affixes only modify basic/charged attacks at this point, converting physical damage to elemental damage.  Affixes are super strong because they can at best convert your entire distribution to 100/0, allowing you to get 100% efficiency from elemental dmg% sources.  If you haven’t noticed, catalyst users have lower ratio and higher stamina costs as compensation for their 100% elemental damage, so affixes allow you to have the same distribution with better ratios.  There’s two types of affixes: self-affixes and given affixes.  Self-affixes are like Diluc’s Pyro enchantment after casting his ult; it converts all of his basic and charged attacks to pyro after casting it.  Given affixes are like Chongyun’s e and Bennett ult, which convert all basic/charged attacks from melee characters in the field to a certain element.  Self-affixes always override given affixes, and Bennett’s affix overrides Chongyun’s.  We don’t know if that’s b/c it’s an ult compared to an e, pyro over cryo, Bennett over Chongyun, but that’s just how it works at this point.  Self-affixes at this point are more easily used than given affixes, but both can change characters from poor dmg efficiency to viable DPS, so keep that in mind when building for characters.  

All Elements are not Made Equal

And neither are elemental reactions and debuffs.  To just give you a big list of examples: geo can’t proc any offensive reactions, cryo/pyro/hydro all have straight dmg buffs from melt/vaporize, but cryo only has access to 50% while pyro/dro have 100%, but hydro doesn’t have an artifact set while the others do, anemo can only proc swirl so yes dmg no supplemental effects, dendro literally doesn’t exist right now etc.  There’s a lot more nuances but you get the point.  You have to keep this stuff in mind when building.  For example, if you’re building a geo character, you’ll need to understand that with no offensive reactions, you better have good ratios to compensate, though as a tradeoff you might not need to run any healer since you’ll have infinite shields.  A character’s element defines at least a third of their evaluation I’d say, since having a specific element might reinforce or detract from the rest of their kit.  

The reasoning behind this is due to the elemental reactions.  These reactions are better or worse depending on the stage of the game.  Let’s go over some stuff quickly.  Crystallization =  geo + 4 primary (cryo, hydro, pyro, electro) makes a shield, purely defensive, scales by level, not much else to say but it makes geo a defensive element by nature.  Anemo + 4 primary = swirl, which is primary element dmg in AoE, seems to scale off the anemo damage dealt, which means it scales well as damage into the late game, lacks supplemental effects (though Anemo has access to Viridescent Venerer the most broken support set in the game as of writing so they don’t really need it).  Overload = pyro + electro is like base atk% in that it’s super good in the early game but is terrible in the late game, with fixed damage scaling by your level.  At lvl 1, it might do 4 times the dmg of the attack the procs it; late game it’s only doing 1/4th of it so you can see how bad it falls off.  Superconduct = cryo + electro does literally no damage, instead reducing enemy defense.  Terrible early, ends up being something like a 30% damage increase late game against high level mobs so is literally the opposite of overload.  Melt = pyro + cryo, vaporize = pyro + hydro, both are % dmg increases on the attack that causes.  Melt is 50% stronger when procced by pyro, vaporize is 50% stronger when procced by hydro, base increase is 50%.  Frozen = hydro + cryo has utility value, but it’s only offensive value is with shatter when they’re broken out of ice by physical attacks and at this point I still can’t tell how it scales and what weapons can do it but from what I’ve seen it does less dmg than overload so.  Electro-charged = electro + hydro, inflicts DoT to enemies and flinches them, number of hits and dmg related to number of mobs affected and it can spread.  Aside from electro-charged, all reactions suffer from reapplication delay and dmg reduction from repeated reactions in a short time frame.  As you can see, due to what reactions they can proc, some elements are better for some roles compared to others. 

Aside from your elements, enemies can also hit you with elemental debuffs.  The 4 in the game right now are Smoldering Flames, Condensed Ice, Slowing Water, and Engulfing Storm.  Smoldering Flames hit you with constant DoT, Engulfing Storm saps your entire party’s energy, Slowing Water increases your entire party’s cooldowns, and Condensed Ice increases your stamina consumption and decreases your stamina regeneration.  Out of these 4 debuffs, Condensed Ice is by far the most dangerous since you literally run out of stamina in like 2 dashes and are left sitting for maybe 5-10s before you regen any at all.  Slowing water also screws you over hard for most characters, since unless you’re a physical damage dealer your damage falls off a cliff due to the 250% increased cd.  Engulfing storm is annoying but workable since you can just ult when it’s available so the energy drain isn’t relevant.  Smoldering flame is by far the easiest to deal with since you mitigate or heal it relatively easily, and you can also cancel it with hydro like Barbara e super easily.  The first two debuffs mentioned in annoyance almost necessitate you alter your team composition/playstyle to deal with them, compared to the last two so if a leyline has them included, you better pay attention.

Team Compositions

On a related note to elements, you should know that all team compositions are not made equal either.  Aside from exploration, you’ll almost never want to run a fully mixed 1/1/1/1 party.  The reasons for this are twofold.  First off, your party’s composition affects your “elemental resonance.” Elemental resonance is just the terminology for the buffs you get from your party composition.  A 1/1/1/1 party gets a resistance increase.  Aside from two hydros which get an incoming healing increase, the remainder of the two of a type get an offensive effect.  Most of the time you’re not worried about dying, you’re worried about being able to kill something in time so you’ll need the offensive boost.  The second reasoning is due to your energy charging capability.  You should notice that you get energy through smaller particles and bigger orbs.  How much energy you get is dependent on their color.  Particles give you different amounts of energy depending on your element and the particles element.  If your element matches the particle’s element, you get 100%.  If the particle is colorless, you get 66%.  If the elements do not match, then you only get 33%.  Orbs generate 3 times as much energy as particles.  The particles produced by elemental skills match the element of character, and off field characters suffer a 10-20% energy absorption loss compared to on field characters.  Thus, when you have two characters of the same element, their cross elemental efficiency charging is 3 times as high compared to different characters.  Of course, if the character has bad energy charging from their skill in the first place, what element they are doesn’t matter but all other things equal, parties of the same element charge faster than those that are mixed. 

 So, now that we’ve established that normally you’d like 2 of 1 type at least, how else should you set up your party?  It really depends on the characters and what enemies you’re fighting.  For example, if you’re fighting all cryo enemies, then I’d say a party with only pyro and electro is sufficient since you can apply super conduct and melt with just those party elements.  On the other hand, if you’re fighting only elementless enemies, then having 3 elements enables 3 times the reactions as 2 elements.  Whether you go 2/2 or 3/1 for 2 elements also depends on charging efficiency.  I’ve normally found that having 2 of each character results in pretty much permanent burst uptime, though depending on what you’re fighting you might not be able to do so.  However, if you go 3/1 that 1 element char is screwed out of their burst most likely, so keep that in mind.  Also very rarely will you want to run a 4/0 party.  The only parties that have enough support abilities to do are the pure Pyro and Pure Anemo parties, and arguably then I’d say running a 2nd element against elemental enemies would be more effective.  In general, run 2 of a type at least and then determine the rest of your setup depending on the situation.  

Tentative Character Roles

Below I’m going to put a list of characters and the role they’re best at doing, as well as secondary roles they can do.  I’ll need to emphasize this is my personal opinion after playing, reading, and analyzing these characters.  It’s hard to even synthesize something like this, so don’t expect anything remotely close along the lines to a tier list or power ranking.  Also, just because one character might have a role as their main and another as their sub, doesn’t mean the one who has it as a sub is worse at that role than one who has it as their main.  This is just a list of what each character does best and what else they can do; it has nothing about their relative strengths compared among each other.  A * after any role indicates constellations required for this role, and I’ll put subcategories/notes in parentheses.

5* Main|Sub

Diluc: Pyro DPS*| Mobber (High Gear Necessary)

Jean: Burst + All-rounder Support (Anemo+)*| Healer

Venti: Offensive Grouping Support (Anemo+*) | Anemo DPS*

Klee: Pyro Large/Boss Killer | Offensive Support (Pyro+)*

MC (Anemo): Offensive Grouping Support (Anemo+*)| Anemo DPS

MC (Geo): Geo DPS*| General Support

4* Main|Sub

Barbara: Healer | Utility Support (Hydro+)*

Fischl: Physical DPS | Offensive Support (Electro+)*

Bennett: Offensive Support | Pyro DPS*

Razor: Mixed DPS | Offensive Support (Barely)*

Noelle: Defensive Support | Geo DPS

Amber: General Support* | Lure, Pyro DPS*

Kaeya: Cryo Support| Physical DPS, Cryo DPS (Requires Chongyun)

Lisa: Offensive Support| Mobber*

Xingqiu: General Support (Hydro+*)| Healer, Mixed DPS

Beidou: Offensive Support (Electro+*)| Mixed DPS

Chongyun: Offensive Support (Cryo+)| Cryo DPS

Xiangling: Physical DPS| Offensive Support (Pryo+*)

Ningguang: General Support| Geo DPS*

If there’s any other confusing stuff that I might’ve missed or you’d like to see covered, you can comment here or reach out in the discord, though I’m probably going to miss what you say in the second case if I’m not online. Since this is all, I’ll see you next time (hopefully never someone please take over and let me retire okay).