Genshin Impact Artifacts Advanced Strategy Guide

by SsoundLeague

Hey guys, I’m currently AR41 playing on the NA Server at the moment and as I’ve been browsing around looking for artifact guides I found that most of them are too simplistic or clearly wrong and do not take into consideration a few very important factors in min-maxing your characters stats & your resources. I plan to outline some essential guidelines throughout this guide in order to help you efficiently and effectively gear up. If the community requests it I wouldn’t mind going through some of the meta builds for each character. As you know, you can build your character anyway you would like to. In this guide I plan to only focus on the most efficient setups and less of the niche builds. (Sorry DPS Barbara friends).

If you guys would like to follow along with a video (it’s a long wall of text incoming). Then take a look on Advanced Artifacts Guide Part 1 (Choosing your artifact)

Let’s start,

• DO NOT run artifact domains until you are at least AR40.This has been a golden rule for any player that plans to play this game for a long time and are really looking to be efficient with their limited Resin resources. This is especially crucial for F2P players. The main reason for this is that once you hit AR40, the domains will start dropping legendary artifacts. I would guesstimate the drop rate to be approximately 25~30% per legendary. AR40+ Domains also drop 2 purple 4* items 90%+ of the times, very rarely would it be a single 4*.

“Hidden Palace of Zhou” Rewards @ AR40

• In the interim until you hit AR40, use whatever pieces are available to you. The content should not be that difficult yet and any moderately upgraded 4* purple artifact, with offensive stats such as ATK, CRIT, CDMG will be completely fine. Focus on strong set bonuses such as Berserkers, Sojourners, Gladiator for your DPS and Exile/Maiden set for your supports (3 of these 5 sets will not be used late game except for Gladiator and Maidens)
• Be aware that just because your artifact rolls a favorable MAIN stat, the substats are just as important. The substats are also not able to roll your items main stat, for example if your hat rolls ATK%, then you are not able to get ATK% as a substat. Take this Gladiator’s Longing as an example; the best possible roll for the substats would probably be Crit %, CDMG, and then either between Energy recharge, Ele Mastery or %DEF/HP depending on the character. Ideally flat stats will scale poorly as your character becomes stronger. Also being that you would prefer this on a DPS character the HP is not that great, although the defense % may be useful.

5* Artifact +0, 3 natural substat lines

• THIS IS WHERE IT GETS IMPORTANT! As you can tell from the item above, it’s +0 and has 3 natural substat lines on it. Legendary 5* artifacts can roll with natural 3 or 4 substat lines. Epic 4* artifacts can roll with natural 2 or 3 substat lines. Take these as an example below.

4* Artifact +0, 3 natural substat lines

5* Artifact +0, 4 natural substat lines

• Now as you may know, every time you upgrade an artifact, every 4 LEVELS you will have an improvement on a substat. Let’s say you have a 4* Artifact and it came with 3 great substat lines (ATK %, Crit %, Crit DMG%). The first 4 levels it will add an extra random substat (Flat DEF/HP, Flat ATK, Elemental Mastery or Energy recharge %). Now your 4* Artifact has a total of 4 substat lines. Every 4 levels after that until max, it will upgrade a random substat attribute. This means that on top of getting the main stat you needed, and the substats, you need to also upgrade the artifact and hope that RNG favors you to roll into the wanted substat. Let’s take this Royal Masque as an example below:

This item came with 3 natural substat lines. After leveling it to +4 Ele Mastery was the additional 4th line.

Now lets say you get an item that comes with only 2 substats, but they are both great lines such as the feather below.

4* Artifact +0, 2 natural substat lines

• Most people may be quick to jump onto this item and upgrade it. Beware though, being that this item only has 2 natural substat lines, as you upgrade it, the first 8 levels will add 2 random substat lines first before even upgrading the ATK or CRIT %. This means that you need to level this to at least +12 before even having a chance to upgrade the ATK % or CRIT % line!

Ideally, with any 4* purple artifact, it isn’t really even worth upgrading unless it drops with 3 natural substats. You are losing a potential upgrade into a favorable stat by using an artifact that only starts with 2 substats.

As far as legendary 5* artifacts are concerned, I would argue that as long as 2 of the 3 lines are favorable, it is always worth getting the item to at least +4 to see what the extra substat line becomes. If it ends up being a good substat line, then level it up to +8 and hope it upgrades one of the better substats.

Take this feather. It dropped with 3 natural substat lines. After leveling it to +4, the additional line was DEF %. After continuing to level it (+8, +12, +16, +20) the substats all rolled into offensive stats which is excellent. I would say that even if one or two of the rolls had gone into DEF % this would still be a decent item due to all the stats being % scaling.

Although this is most likely applicable to players who intend to play for a long time since it makes efficient use of resources, this is also important for any casual players as if there truly is any stat wall or damage wall in the future, being efficient with your stat allocation and artifact stats will be useful in breaking this wall. Content in AR40-45+ has become increasingly difficult compared to the earlier levels and this may be useful for many of you.

A good rule of thumb as far as artifacts go would be to be wary of upgrading 4* artifacts with only 2 base lines, and 5* artifacts with 3 baselines and 1 being a unfavorable line. The moment you roll an extra substat line that is unfavorable, I would recommend to continue farming until you find something better. Go for at LEAST 3 out of 4 favorable lines before continuing to upgrade. Also once you hit AR40 I would not recommend using any 4* purple artifact that comes with 2 substat lines, even if they are 2 great lines, you are losing a potential roll into another substat level.

Know that there will be diminishing returns for your stats after a certain percentage, for EM it’s approximately between the ranges of 250-300 EM. At EM amounts lower than 100, 1 point of EM is approximately 0.19% more DMG for vaporize/melt reactions. This is reduced to about 0.16% more DMG @ nearly 300~ EM. For Crit %, it’s difficult to determine what the exact optimal crit rate would be. This would vary substantially between characters and would be tough to know for sure without a well-tested DPS SIM or in-game DPS meter (wink wink).

I will be releasing the second part the guide in the future for specific characters and looking into different artifact sets once we get some more testing done and I feel confident in the information being provided. There is a DPS SIM currently but factoring in constellations, talent levels, weapons/character levels has been shown to be difficult.

TL;DR:

• Go for 3 natural substat lines on purple artifacts.
• 3 natural substat lines on a legendary with 2 out of 3 favorable lines is good. Level to +4 to see if the 4th additional line is favorable. If it is not, then use the item as a fodder in the future, or for a secondary character
• RNG bless you all