Genshin Impact: 15 tips and tricks to help you master the game

Continuous Sprint isn't the fastest means of travel

One of the most easy-to-miss tip for more advanced players is the fact that a continuous Sprint isn't exactly the fastest way to move in the game. Tapping Sprint to trigger the quick burst animation for dashing is the second-fastest, and you should prefer doing this over a press-and-hold as it not only uses less stamina overall, but also is quicker for traveling overall.

On some characters, you can even bunny hop! Sprint and jump, and do it in quick succession, and you'll find yourself reaching places even quicker. You can also do it infinitely, as the stamina bar glitches out when it reaches zero but you don't actually return back to your normal pace -- so you can keep bunny hopping indefinitely (as long as you do not mind button mashing the jump button for eternity).

Bunny hopping is best executed on PC and is limited to certain characters only, but dashing can be done on mobile too across all characters.

Platform matters

Genshin Impact is available on Windows, Android, and iOS with cross-platform playability, and also on the PlayStation 4 without cross-platform saves. The game has managed to retain all of its gameplay elements across this entire suite, which is absolutely impressive, meaning that you can experience the game in a practically identical fashion irrespective of which platform you are playing the game on.

However, this isn't completely true. While yes, the gameplay is very largely identical, gaming on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse has its own advantages. It's easier to use Bow-based characters when you have a mouse to precision aim. On mobile devices, Bow-based characters are at a significant disability as panning around and aiming is a less than ideal experience, especially since you'd be swapping between different weapon types and constantly have to refresh your muscle memory.

On desktop, swapping between characters is significantly easier when you have a hotkey. In fact, the desktop version even has a dedicated button (Left Alt + the swap key) that you can set for swapping into a character and immediately executing their elemental burst. This makes Enablers (roles are discussed further on in this guide) easier to execute and synergize with the rest of the team. [Edit: As pointed out, you can swap and execute an elemental burst in one button by tapping directly on the glowing Elemental Burst button present besides characters that have an Ult available. Just tap it directly and you'll swap in and execute a Burst.]

Au contraire, farming out hordes of enemies is easier when you have the convenience of mobile with you. Gaming on a desktop means that you are quite limited when and where you can play the game. On mobile, this limitation does not exist -- so if you just have a few minutes to kill while you wait in the queue at the grocery store, just pull out your phone and complete your Daily Commission Quests or farm up any materials you are missing. The leveling curve on the game is pretty steep in the latter parts of the game, so this convenience comes in handy.

Thankfully, with cross-platform saves and sync, you can enjoy a combined desktop plus mobile experience too, as long as you have powerful-enough hardware. Too bad if you are playing the game on console though.

Repeat Character pulls give you Constellations and great passives!

For the large part outside of a few pre-determined free handouts (Main Character aka "Traveller", Amber, Kaeya, Lisa, and Xiangling), Characters have to be unlocked through the gacha system/loot box mechanics. If you draw a character, you unlock it forever -- but the character still stays within the pool of possible rewards. This is because all characters can be drawn/pulled a total of seven meaningful times! The first draw unlocks the character, and every subsequent draw unlocks a Constellation that buffs the character in some way. So don't be disheartened if you don't get a new character with every wish and land a few repeats along the way -- it's actually for the good.

Some characters are decent right from their first pull. Some characters become viable after reaching certain Constellation levels, like Ninguang, who gets an AoE effect on her basic attack at Constellation 1.

Some characters get a big power spike on certain Constellation levels, to the point that you should absolutely look forward to those unlocks. For example, Barbara gets an auto Instant Revive plus Full Heal at Constellation 6, which is an insane kit addition to help out your Carry, possibly eliminating the need for a Sub-Carry.

It thus becomes a good idea to reassess every character once you unlock their Constellation. A character you may have written off earlier may have just become viable for you, carving out a better spot in your team than you may be rolling with. Read the descriptions and try out the buff before you make a choice.

What happens after you reach the maximum constellation for a character? The character still remains in the pool, so you can still draw them. When you do draw them then, you will get enough of the currency you just spent to make another wish and draw again.

Use Invincibility Frames (iFrames) to dodge all attacks and never take damage!

Some players may have noticed that dashing in Genshin Impact allows players to dodge some attacks. And they are right. The dashing animation activates what gamers often refer to as an iFrame (Invincibility Frame / Immunity Frame / Invulnerability Frame). Whether intentional or not, this iFrame within the dashing animation is a small window within which your character becomes entirely invincible and ignores any and all damage.

You need to activate the dash animation at just the right time before the attack hits. It's difficult to describe, but you can practice this out with smaller enemies. The Dashing iFrame can be mastered with fair ease, and once you figure out the ideal timing for it, you can literally fight every single battle in Genshin Impact without taking a single drop of damage.

There are other iFrames present within the game too. The next most commonly activated iFrame is from Character Swapping, but the window for invincibility is very small on this. A bunch of characters, usually in the 5-star tier, also have very grand animations on their Elemental Burst and Elemental Skill, and these also contain iFrame windows. So activating an Ult might just save your character from having half its health wiped off.

Getting the timing right on these iFrames will be crucial when dealing with some annoying bosses. For instance, Andrius the Dominator of Wolves is quite an annoying boss to fight if you have a melee character, as the boss frequently damages in its near vicinity. With a perfect dash every few seconds, you can really defeat this boss without needing a healer on your team or needing a ranged unit.

Understand Combat Roles: Carry, Sub-Carry/Burst, Element Enabler, and Support/Healer

Combat is one of the central progress pillars of the game, so it makes sense to get a full team completely cracked and buffed up to deliver the maximum damage for all four characters, right? Well, no, not really.

Characters within Genshin Impact are not equal in the slightest, and they were never meant to be either. Some characters are intended to be tanky and defensive, while others are more fragile but dish out more DPS (damage-per-second). Some characters have active and passive abilities that have team-healing properties more so than damaging properties, while other characters excel at frequently triggering elemental reactions. And some characters even find their place in the team simply because of the adventuring support they bring along. Then there are different elements and different weapon types, making the entire situation a surprisingly complex yet entertaining web to work through.

Building a good team requires synergy across these different roles, and an ideal team will include one each of Carry, Sub-Carry/Burst, Element Enabler, and Support/Healer. Most characters in Genshin Impact can fit across a couple of different roles with good overlap. But some characters, such as Barbara, fit in very well in one single role to the point that you're wasting them on other roles.

Carry

A "carry" is a character that deals the most damage in your team. It's the character with the maximum DPS output, either by way of hard-hitting normal attacks or through a combination of attacks and elemental skills and bursts. Usually, in genres like MOBA, a carry is not intended to be a tanky unit or have any sort of healing to self-sustain, but those games usually have multiple characters on the field simultaneously as is their genre. In Genshin Impact, you need to swap between characters on your own (or play Co-Op if you don't want to), so a bit of sustained damage or tankiness is the desired quality, especially if your Healer may not be max leveled.

The team's carry will get most of the attention in mid-game as the character will essentially "carry" your game, and we'll expand more on this. Because of how the end-game is shaped and tied into clearing the Spiral Abyss within a limited time, the carry becomes the most important role in the team.

Sub-Carry/Burst

The next character on your team will be a sub-carry or a burst. A "sub-carry" is the next highest DPS dealer, and a secondary damage dealer option, while "burst" refers to a role that brings in very high damage output in a short period of time. Sub-Carry and Burst roles can overlap, or they can be swapped one in favor of the other, depending on how your team is composed.

The idea with this role is to swap it in when its kit (comprised of Elemental Skill and Elemental Burst) is available to use, dish out the damage, and swap it out; or use it to finish things off when your Carry has died in battle.

Element Enabler

This is a character whose purpose is to trigger its Elemental Skill and Elemental Burst that has effects on the field even if the character is switched out. This allows your Carry and Sub-Carry to make use of the effects on the field to trigger Elemental Reactions, which then further increase the total damage output of your team or help you chew through shields and other enemy buffs.

The Main Character in their Anemo avatar is serving as a filler for Enabler in my team, as I do not want two Electro users in my team (so Lisa and Fischl are out as options), and I didn't really like Chongyun. Thankfully, Enablers do not always need to be maxed out for levels and talents (though obviously, you'd do better with those), so I am hoping to swap in a better Enabler later on.

Support/Healer

Characters in this role are known for the team utility they present. This utility can range from cleansing status effects, healing the team, providing shields, leveraging crowd control, applying buffs, and more. This utility is really necessary for the later parts of the game, as it could be the difference between defeating a boss or losing your whole team to it.

We advise players in the mid-game to create a team that fits into these broad roles. These are general guidelines, of course, and you are free to deviate from them. But this is what will provide you with a good balance in enjoying the game and completing its grind without feeling stuck or overwhelmed at any stage. If you do not have a perfect character to fit into a role, you can improvise with a view to eventually fill in the role once you roll in some good character pulls through the gacha (loot box) mechanics, as a free-to-play player or otherwise.

Focus on your Carry first, and max it out

The leveling curve in Genshin Impact for characters gets pretty steep and grindy in the later parts of the game. This makes it difficult to have an evenly-leveled 4-character party at all times, especially when you keep an eye on your Adventure Rank and consequent World Level (which dictates how enemies scale in level to keep up with you). And because of how Genshin Impact treats combat throughout the game and how the Spiral Abyss is treated as the end-game, the Carry becomes the most important vehicle for your game progression.

With all of this said, it makes sense to focus the entirety of your resources towards maxing out your Carry at every step possible. Choose a character that does good DPS, fits the carry role, and that you enjoy playing, and absolutely crack it out all the way till your Adventure Rank allows. In my case with Adventure Rank 40, I have focused most of my resources towards Razor as my main DPS character, maxing it out and ascending it as far as feasible as soon as those levels are unlocked.

You also want to keep an eye on leveling up the Talents for the character, as that makes those attacks, skills, and bursts hit even harder. This then makes it easier to farm out to level up the rest of your team.

If this order was breached, you'd find yourself surrounded with insanely difficult monsters and no viable means to farm them, and perhaps even get stuck in a powerless loop that will make the game difficult to enjoy and progress through. You do want to eventually level up the rest of your team too, but the priority becomes secondary to that of your Carry.

If you max your Carry for the World Level, and need a specific Adeventure Rank level before you can Ascend your Carry again, it is also a good idea to farm everything required for the Ascension even before the Ascension becomes available. Word Level bumps makes monsters difficult, and just having everything pre-farmed for your Carry's next power spike will make your game experience easier. So that when the Ascension becomes available, you can just breeze through to the next cap.

Level up your Talents, Weapons, and Artifacts too

The same advice from above applies to Talents, Weapons, and Artifacts too. Choose the right weapon and Artifact combination for your DPS character, and ascend, refine, and max them out as far as you can. You don't necessarily need to have five-star weapons and artifacts before you give it a thought to level them up. Do it as you go along, to make it easier to go along further.

As for Talents, it's easy to max all of them out in mid-game, but you have to choose your priority for late game, so choose upgrade paths that make sense to you instead of maxing all of them out at once. For characters that you use for auto-attack, it may make sense to prioritize the basic attack talent. While for characters like Enablers, you may want to focus on their Elemental Skill first, Elemental Burst later, and perhaps entirely ignore investing into their basic attack talent. The grind does get grindy later on, so pick and choose your battles.

You actually need two teams for Spiral Abyss

The Spiral Abyss is what is considered an end-game for Genshin Impact, as it currently stands. While Floors 1 - 8 pose an increasing difficulty, the later levels like Floor 9 - 12 are even more difficult. These three Floors have Divergence, which requires 2x 4-character teams to clear the different monsters, one team at a time.

You can't repeat characters across these teams, which means both of your teams need to be maxed out for best performance in order to have a chance at clearing these Floors. This means that you do need two of each of the roles, and have both teams work in synergy within themselves.

What am I getting at with this? This means that you don't need to hold off your investment in characters that you consider second-best while you keep trying to land a character that would be your top choice. Investing in second choices is alright, as long as you have your single Carry maxed out to help farm the rest of the team. So in my case, I do have Bennett as a second-choice for the Healer role, even though my focus is on Barbara as the primary healer. Similarly, Xiangling can swap in to become the primary DPS for the second team if and when I get better synergy options for my main team. It's okay to invest in second choices (though this shouldn't be your priority -- just a by-product), you'll need them later down the road anyway.

Choose the right Artifact

This is something that a lot of players figure out on their own, but it's also worth mentioning again simply because of how important it can be. Artifacts can have different attributes, decided by chance. And you already know that there a fair few different sets of Artifacts, leading to different passive bonuses. And now you also know that teams should comprise of different characters at different roles. It becomes important in this situation that you choose the right Artifact to fit the right character in the right role.

For example, characters like Razor are intended to be DPS units focusing on physical attacks. So ideal artifacts for Razor will focus on granting him more Attack Damage as a base or as Attack Percentage or help him build up Crit Damage or Crit Rate. An Artifact that boosts defense isn't going to be doing all that much for Razor in the intended role, but there may still be other reasons why you'd want to keep the Artifact on (such as its other attributes, its synergy with the whole Set, or just simply because it is much more leveled up and can provide better bonuses). A character like Barbara, whose healing scales off her maximum HP, needs to have Artifacts that boost her maximum health, as that in turn will affect how much and how quickly the rest of your team can heal up -- an Artifact that boosts her Attack stat will be of no help in such an instance. A healer like Qiqi uses the Attack stat to scale the team healing, so now the Attack stat makes a difference.

Read the Character Description and the Talent Descriptions to see how your character is shaped up, figure out which stats you need to prioritize, and then choose the right Artifacts from the pool available to you, and then level the Artifacts up to become even better. If you do not have the right artifacts with the desired traits, improvise until you can find the right roll. In the screenshot above, the Artifact set is not the best fit for Barbara, but it works out with HP and HP Percentage within the pool of Artifacts available in my inventory.

4-piece Artifact Sets aren't always the best passives

Most Artifact Sets offer a bonus passive effect as a 2-piece set and then another extra bonus passive effect as a 4-piece set (while some select Artifacts offer 1-piece bonus only). On the face of it, equipping all artifacts from just one single great set to let you achieve the extra bonus from the 4-piece combination might sound like a great idea. But you may not want to do that actually, as most 4-piece passives are quite underwhelming.

Instead, players in the mid-game will be better served by mixing and matching artifacts that focus on their stat of choice first and then taking up any bonuses as, well, a bonus. This lets you bulk up characters in the stat direction you want them to go, instead of heaping on useless stats just to reach the 4-piece bonus. Further on, you may want to mix and match the bonuses from 2x 2-piece sets, as a few sets like Brave Heart and Resolution of Sojourner offer good DPS stats on 2-piece, but may taper off for their 4-piece bonus. Landing artifacts with the desired stat combination is a game of sheer luck, so just know that you don't need a god roll across a full set to achieve your goals.