Genshin Impact: Team building and best Units by role
This guide explains the rules to follow when building a team for the early-mid and late game, and the best units by role in Genshin Impact: main, secondary, reaction DPS and support.
Team building
Prioritize skills over auto-attacks
Across your party, you will have access to four sets of skills and bursts. In general, your skills should be prioritised over auto-attacking as these deal higher DPS and help to create energy. Auto-attack damage may have more buffs, but even then, skills provide more value.
As an example, Xiangling’s auto attack chain deals 296% over ~2.85s, while her E (Guoba Attack) deals 440% and only takes a fraction of the time to cast (1.12s if you’re swapping in to her just to use it).
Main DPS
When you have no abilities ready, you will need a unit to fill in the gaps in your rotation. This unit is your Main DPS.
Ideally, your Main DPS should be built towards auto-attacks and/or have spammable skills like Bennett’s E (Passion Overload). 2s CD in his Q (Fantastic Voyage).
For the early-game/exploration phase, I suggest picking a Main DPS that you enjoy playing as they will be the core of your team.
Later on, your teams will vary depending on the content you’re doing, and you’ll likely have to use a different Main DPS based on that.
There is no objectively “best team” nor should you focus on building one team in specific.
There are subjectively “better units” that you could invest in to help build solid teams for the content ahead.
Once you’ve chosen your Main DPS, you’ll have 3 slots left to fill. Who you choose depends on what you’re doing and who your main carry is.
For example, if you’re in the Spiral Abyss, you’ll likely need a healer. You may also want a unit that can take care of any monsters that are immune to your main DPS’ element.
If you’re in the early-game or exploring, you might want units to cover your weaknesses. For example, if your main DPS can only deal hydro damage, you may want an electro unit to take care of hydro enemies.
You could also bring a second unit of the same element to help build energy, or a different element unit to create specific reactions.
Like I’ve mentioned above though, it is all very dependent on what you’re doing.
In general, these support units should be able to help the team without using up a lot of time. Units like Fischl, Xiangling, or Mona are especially useful since their skills can create multiple reactions with low use-time.
Unit roles and rankings
In the table below, I have ranked each unit based on their capacity to fulfill several roles.
Secondary DPS: Units valuable for their skills and bursts, and that can deal damage with low use-time. Usually, they have the same element as your main carry, and they help to create elemental resonance, build energy for your main carry, and deal DPS while sharing RES down effects with your main carry.
Reaction DPS: Units who help to boost the team DPS by creating reactions. Units with low use-time that can help to create lots of reactions are ranked higher. Reaction damage is especially strong in the early-game (and in the late-game depending on the unit) so using these characters at that point of the game is very helpful.
Support: These units support the rest of the team with shields, heals, gathering enemies, buffing the team and debuffing or reducing enemy RES (anemo units with Viridescent Venerer).
Abyss: How useful a unit is inside the Abyss. Healing, element, and weapon type are taken into consideration. Based on late game Spiral Abyss content (Floors 9-12).
The individual unit rankings is based on 0 constellations and talent level 6.
The table is responsive. If you are using a phone, turn it sideways for a full view. Otherwise, zoom in or click the grey area to sort it.
| Unit | Stars | Main DPS | Secondary DPS | Reaction DPS | Support | Abyss | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venti | 5* | - | S | - | S+ | S | S |
| Fischl | 4* | - | S | S | - | S | S |
| Diluc | 5* | S | - | - | - | S | S |
| Klee | 5* | S | - | - | S | S | |
| Qiqi | 5* | - | - | B | S | S | A+ |
| Keqing | 5* | S | - | - | - | A+ | A+ |
| Xiangling | 4* | A+ | A+ | A+ | - | A+ | A+ |
| Bennett | 4* | B | - | - | A+ | S | A+ |
| Mona | 5* | - | - | B | A | A+ | A |
| Xingqiu | 4* | - | - | A | A | A+ | A |
| Jean | 5* | - | - | - | A | A+ | A |
| Razor | 4* | A | - | - | - | A | A |
| Chongyun | 4* | B | - | - | - | A | A |
| Barbara | 4* | - | B | A | A+ | A | |
| Traveler (Anemo) | 4* | - | B | - | A | B | B |
| Traveler (Geo) | 4* | - | B | - | - | B | B |
| Kaeya | 4* | - | B | C | - | B | B |
| Beidou | 4* | B | B | B | - | A | B |
| Ningguang | 4* | B | - | - | C | C | B |
| Noelle | 4* | C | - | - | B | B | C |
| Lisa | 4* | - | C | D | - | B | C |
| Sucrose | 4* | - | - | - | B | C | C |
| Amber | 4* | - | D | - | - | C | D |
Which units you use depends on the part of the game you’re at. In the next sections, I will explain how you may want to set up your party depending on that.
Early-Mid game teams (exploring)
Early on, your characters are relatively weak. You don’t have many good artifacts, and your talent levels are low. This means the relative strength of transformation reactions will be high.
First, I suggest stacking most of your resources onto your Main DPS. This way you won’t spread your resources too thin, and will have a reliable unit for early-game Abyss.
Also, upgrade your Feather artifact as soon as possible, as this will give you an enormous boost to damage in the early levels, especially if it’s a 4* Feather.
Second, I suggest having other “Reaction DPS” units on your team and trying to focus on reaction damage. Reactions are relatively easy to strengthen compared to ability/auto damage since you’ll only need to level up the unit and build an elemental mastery artifact on them.
Since Electro-charged and Overload deal the most damage, you should try to incorporate them first.
Reaction DPS units that can help to create multiple reactions with low use-time are especially good here.
Secondary DPS may help to boost DPS by generating more energy for your main carry. This is especially useful is your main carry is dependent on their burst (i.e. Razor)
Support units may be useful, particularly healers. Anemo supports will not be as effective since you won’t have access to the Viridescent Venerer set yet.
Don’t worry about min-maxing as you will likely get new characters or gear: just equip them with at least an elemental mastery artifact if they’re there for reactions.
Stack all the atk/crit/dmg% artifacts on your main carry and use them to DPS between your other characters’ E/Qs.
More importantly, as you explore the map, you should make sure you can deal with all the different monster types. As a general guideline:
Pyro vs Cryo/Electro slimes and other Cryo enemies.
Electro vs Hydro enemies.
Claymore/geo vs Geo slimes and other Geo shields.
Hydro vs Pyro enemies.
Cryo vs Electro skirmishers.
Example setup: Xiangling, Fischl, Barbara, Noelle.
With this team composition you’d have both Overload and Electro-Charged, be able to deal with most enemy types, and have reliable healing.
If you aren’t able to cover everything, do not worry as some elements/shields have “secondary” weaknesses. For example, if you don’t have a hydro unit to deal with pyro shields, you can still use cryo or electro, but they are less effective.
As for which units to invest in, I recommend reading the late game section because you’ll want those units to be useful later on.
Late game / Spiral Abyss
As you progress into the game and begin upgrading your units, you’ll eventually come to a point where Overworld content becomes trivial. The Spiral Abyss will likely become your main focus, and you should be tailoring your teams to that.
Your teams should mostly be based on the buffs provided by the floors, and will vary a lot. For example, if you’re using Chongyun as your main DPS for exploring, but the floor gives electro/pyro damage%, there is no reason for you to be using Chongyun on that floor.
As a general setup for the Abyss, you will want to have the following all ticked off:
A way to heal inside the floor.
A way to deal with all the different enemy shields, especially for the Fatui Skirmishers.
Strong DPS, likely based on the floor buffs.
Being able to optimize DPS is second to being able to survive and deal with the enemy shields/mechanics, especially since clearing these quickly will increase your overall DPS.
For example, floor 9 buffs pyro/electro/overload damage, and the first half has an enemy with a geo shield, so a potential team for that could be composed by Xiangling, Bennett, Fischl, Noelle.
To “optimize” DPS, you could replace Noelle with Venti, with the Viridescent Venerer artifact set to decrease pyro RES, but you’d waste a lot of time breaking through the geo shield which would only end up slowing you down.
Only once you’ve ticked all the boxes should you think about adding a unit like Venti/Anemo to help increase your DPS with the Viridescent Venerer set.
Don’t forget that you will need two teams per floor after floor 5, so consider how you will distribute your power.
Useful units
As for which units are strong for Abyss, any unit that has multiple uses to help free up slots in your team is very valuable.
For example, claymore users can both deal DPS/clear shields for their respective elements, but also clear geo shields, meaning you don’t need to bring another geo/claymore character. They can also stagger enemies, making them especially useful if you’re fighting certain opponents.
Characters like Bennett or Xingqiu that can deal damage and heal at the same time are very good as well.
I’ve tried to rank units based on their usefulness within the Abyss. However, each unit usually fills a specific role and you’ll need to make sure that you have every role covered.
Also, it’s important to know that certain elements have more floor buffs. For late-game Abyss (Floors 9-12), Pyro is buffed on both floors 9 and 12, whereas Geo/Anemo/Hydro aren’t buffed on any.
This doesn’t mean that these elements don’t have their uses, but that certain elements are just generally more useful, and that you may want to prioritise them. Even Amber could outDPS Keqing if you’re on a floor with pyro buffs versus enemies weak to pyro.
Overall, I’d say you should have at least two pyro DPS units (for floor 9/12), two healing units, and either an electro or cryo DPS.
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Credit to robin who provided information for this article. - Images: miHoYo
