Genshin Impact Guide - How to Build a Quality Team

We're still trucking along with Genshin Impact and having a great time. In case you're still on the fence about playing it, check out this piece that should be helpful in making your decision.

Otherwise, let's assume you've been playing the game for a bit and have unlocked a few characters via wishes. Now what? Your next step is to try and figure out who among your heroes belongs on your team to make you as capable as possible. Check out some tips on how to do exactly that below.

Don't look at tier lists

In gacha games, there's always the temptation to chase the "best characters" to dump your resources into to min/max the game and also prevent feeling the need to spend money. This is exactly what gacha games want you to do, though, and the feeling of disappointment that can hang over your head knowing you have a "suboptimal" team is the quickest route to joyless grinding and/or overspending.

Instead, enjoy the cast you have, figure out who you like, and build around them. You'll have more fun this way. After all, gacha games are appealing because of the potential variety and differentiation between players, and it would just be boring if everyone was rolling the same crew. If you really feel the need to peek at a tier list, go here, but consider yourself warned.

Find your star

Genshin Impact's team system makes for neat combat options, but at the end of the day you need to focus on a single character to pump resources into to carry your team through encounters most of the time. When choosing this character, it's wise to pick someone that can deal a lot of damage, preferably quickly, from normal attacks.

This is a smart move for a few reasons, but the most obvious is that you spend a lot of time hitting enemies with normal attacks in this game. If the number that pops off an enemy is big and happens quickly, they die faster, right? This isn't a hard concept, but an important one to internalize nonetheless.

Add utility around your star

Once you have your primary character established, you want to surround them with other heroes that can help them be the best they can be. Whether it's including a healer, a character that can attack airborne enemies, or someone that can grant elemental resonance (more on what this means below), you want to provide some utility to your damage dealer so that you can take on just about any challenge that comes your way.

For my personal team setup, I have a damage dealer in Xiangling, and support her with Barbara for healing, Amber for elemental resonance, and Ningguang because she can do decent burst damage and is great at taking down tough rock shields (not to mention mining minerals when our scavenging). 90% of the time I'm playing Genshin Impact I am controlling Xiangling, but she's only as formidable as she is because of the team I have backing her up.

Take advantage of elemental resonance

Elemental resonance is definitely something you want to incorporate into your team whenever possible. The most obvious benefits from establishing elemental resonance are tucked away in top right corner of the Party Setup menu. By having characters of the same element (or four characters of unique elements) on a team, you can unlock powerful stat bonuses. In the case of my team, having both Xiangling and Amber on a team grants the fire elemental resonance boost, which increases their attack by 25% while reduces the degree to which they are affected by Cryo abilities.

There's another important reason to use elemental resonance on your team though: Energy generation. To use your character's special abilities, you have to build up enough energy, and non-active characters gather energy faster if it's being gathered by a character of the same element. This is to say that my attacks from Xiangling and Amber allow their respective special abilities to charge more quickly than the other characters in my party since they are both fire characters. Little edges like this are what make the difference between teams that can take down bosses with ease and those that may otherwise struggle, and you don't need to look at a tier list to take advantage of them.