Team building is one of the first things you need to learn in Genshin Impact if you want to have a smooth experience. A great team can make the difference between failing and clearing domains, events, or the spiral abyss, so understanding how team building works will help you a great deal. This guide aims to help you understand the basics of team building from proper team composition to energy management, we got you covered!
Roles
Character roles are one of the determining factors in team building. In this section, we’re going to define the variety of roles characters fall into in Genshin Impact:
Main DPS
If you didn’t already know, DPS stands for “damage per second”. So it makes sense that in Genshin Impact, the main DPS character is primarily responsible for dealing damage while on the field. This character usually has great consistent damage output compared to the other characters on the team. Make sure to check out our Genshin Impact tier list to see which characters we highly recommend.
Examples of main DPS characters in Genshin Impact are:
- Eula
- Hu Tao
- Xiao
- Ganyu
Sub DPS
Sub DPS is an interesting role and a very important one, too. Sub DPS characters do damage off-field. They have elemental skills or bursts that persist even if they aren’t the character currently being used. The rule of thumb is that the sub DPS character on your team must be a different element than the main DPS character as you want to utilize elemental reactions in combat as much as possible.
Examples of sub DPS characters in Genshin Impact are:
Support
The support role is assigned to characters that provide utility to the party. Interestingly, some sub DPS characters can fall into a support role depending on how you use them, and vice versa. Support characters can be utilized in battle in a variety of ways and this includes healing, shielding, and even crowd control.
Examples of support characters in Genshin Impact are:
Team Composition
Generally, a team in Genshin Impact is composed of a main DPS character, one or two sub DPS characters, and one or two support characters. The number of sub DPS and support characters is interchangeable which means you can have two support characters and a sub DPS character or two sub DPS characters and a support character on the team. You should never have two main DPS characters on a team as this will hinder the overall damage output. Consider this team composition:
- Mona
- Eula
- Fischl
- Diona
This team composition features Eula in the main DPS role while Mona and Fischl act as sub DPS characters, leaving Diona to play the sole support role of the group.
Elemental Reactions
As mentioned above, you want your main and sub DPS characters to be of different elements to utilize elemental reactions as much as possible. Elemental reactions are free additional damage for the taking. Who doesn’t like free damage, right?
There are team compositions revolving around specific elemental reactions such as melt and vaporize. For details on how this works, please check out our elemental weakness chart which covers how elemental reactions work. An example of a team composition that focuses on vaporize would be a Hu Tao-Xingqiu team composition:
- Hu Tao
- Xingqiu
- Bennett
- Zhongli
In this team composition, Hu Tao plays the main DPS role while Xingqiu plays the sub DPS role. Bennett and Zhongli support Hu Tao with their main utility, namely healing, with additional support via damage boost from Bennett and shielding from Zhongli.
Keeping elemental reactions in mind while team building improves your team’s overall damage output. However, there are a few teams that can survive without elemental reactions, such as a full Geo team or a double Anemo, double Geo team. Keep in mind, these team compositions are very specific. They’re not as flexible as teams with elemental reactions built in them but they’re still really good teams.
Elemental Resonance
Elemental Resonance is a passive buff that applies to the team. Having an elemental resonance in your team can be quite beneficial depending on the resonance. Let’s take this team composition for a ride once more:
- Mona
- Eula
- Fischl
- Diona
This team composition features Eula and Diona who both hold a cryo vision, meaning cryo resonance would be activated, giving everyone a +15% crit rate against frozen enemies or enemies affected by cryo. This elemental resonance gives Eula a huge boost as it improves her damage as a main DPS.
Energy Management
Energy cost is another important factor to consider with your team composition. You’d want to have your character’s elemental burst be available as much as possible, which means you should avoid putting characters with high energy cost elemental bursts together in a team. This is due to the fact that you’d spend more of your time gathering energy for that elemental burst rather than casting it, therefore diminishing your total DPS.
However, if you have a main DPS character with an elemental burst that has an energy cost of 70 or 80, it can be alleviated by using a battery. No, not that kind of battery. In Genshin Impact, a battery is a sub-category of the support role played by characters who produce a large number of energy particles using their elemental skills. Let’s take this team composition again as an example:
- Mona
- Eula
- Fischl
- Diona
Eula’s elemental burst has an energy cost of 80. She will need a battery so she can cast her elemental burst more frequently. That’s why Diona is there. She is a support character who can also act as a battery for Eula.
You usually want your battery to be the same element as the character you’re trying to battery because characters with a different element will give your team less energy than those who have the same element.
A Short Dive into Team Composition
To show you an example of how team building usually goes in Genshin Impact, I’ll explain the reasoning behind the Eula team comp I always use, as an example. My current team composition has gone through quite a bit of revision. The first iteration of my team looked something like this:
- Mona (Sub DPS)
- Eula (Main DPS
- Beidou (Sub DPS)
- Qiqi (Support)
This composition did not work as there’s no one to battery Eula, a character with an elemental burst that has a high energy cost. Qiqi does not produce her own elemental particles which means we had to rely on Mona. However, this also didn’t work as Mona struggled to keep up with particle generation due to the elemental difference between her and Eula.
Beidou as a sub DPS character didn’t work as we couldn’t consistently apply superconduct (an elemental reaction) with her. She also had an elemental burst with an energy cost of 80, so without a battery, it meant that we couldn’t use her elemental burst as much. That’s how the latest version of our team came to be:
- Mona (Sub DPS)
- Eula (Main DPS)
- Fischl (Sub DPS)
- Diona (Support)
Fischl provides a much better electro application than Beidou, not only that, but her damage off-field is incomparable. Diona replacing Qiqi provides me with a support character that heals, shields, and acts as an efficient battery for Eula. Mona also provides a damage boost with her elemental burst and quite a bit of crowd control with the taunt on her elemental skill.
By assigning characters to roles that work well together and keeping energy management, elemental reactions, and elemental resonance in mind, it makes for a better team composition and an overall boost in damage. All this to say, team building can be a complicated process that takes time to figure out. But experimenting and finding a team composition that works is what makes team building fun. If you want to test your team building skills, we highly recommend going to the spiral abyss blindly and trying to clear it!
There are advanced strategies that go into team building in Genshin Impact that we didn’t get to cover in this guide. If you’d like another team building guide that dives into that, let us know in the comments!
Cedric Pabriga is a freelance writer for IGN. He spends most of his day listening to music or playing video games. He also writes short stories in his spare time. You can follow him on Twitter @IchikaRika.