Genshin Impact is a surprisingly in-depth action game and one that doesn’t do a particularly good job of explaining some really important systems within it. If you’re just getting started in Genshin Impact, you might be wondering what on Teyvat roles are, and how they impact trying to build a team in the game.
It can be tough to know how to put your teams together, but before you even start to figure out which characters go where, it’s worth understanding the different roles that characters can fill in any given team. So, to help you help yourself, we’ve gone ahead and written down what there is to know about roles in Genshin Impact.
What are roles in Genshin Impact?
Roles are basically things that each character can be slotted into. There are lots of different ways to build a team in Genshin Impact, and you can 100% just smush your favourite characters together and hope for the best, but it definitely helps if you understand what the different building blocks should be.
It’s worth noting that a lot of characters can fit into different roles depending on how you use them along with both the weapons and artifacts you’re using on them. We’ll be naming some characters for each role here to help give you an idea, but because Genshin Impact isn’t normally that hard, everything’s pretty flexible here.
What is a Main DPS in Genshin Impact?
Example characters: Wanderer, Hu Tao, Eula, Cyno
A Main DPS is a character that you’ll be relying on for most of your damage in any given team. This is usually going to be a character who can deal big damage either without support, like Eula, or thanks to elemental reactions, like Hu Tao. These characters tend to have good multipliers on their attack talents, and are usually easy to build with no dual-scaling to worry about. That means you just need to pump up their attacks and make sure they have a decent crit rate (60+) and crit damage (as high as you can manage) split.
Main DPS also sort of covers characters who are considered drivers for elemental reactions. Characters fit into this role in teams that rely heavily on having a lot of elemental reactions like the combination of Electro and Hydro. Heizou, Sucrose, and even Tartaglia can fit into this role well because, along with doing solid damage on their own, they also have elementally-infused basic attacks that help reaction constantly go off.
What is a Sub DPS in Genshin Impact?
Example characters: Nahida, Xingqiu, Xiangling, Fischl
A Sub DPS is generally a little trickier, but the easiest way to think about it is as a character that doesn’t have to be on-field to deal their damage. A Main DPS is a character you’ll be controlling the most, most of the time, while a Sub DPS tends to be a character you change into just to use their elemental skill and elemental burst, and then go back to your Main DPS again. The greatest examples of this role are both completely free in Xiangling and Xingqiu, both of whom deal exceptional damage with their bursts and require very little time on field to do so.
What is a Support in Genshin Impact?
Example characters: Bennet, Zhongli, Barbara, Kokomi, Kuki
Finally we have support characters, which is probably the largest category, and also the murkiest. Generally speaking, you can split supports into offensive, like Bennet and Yun Jin who boost your attacks, and defensive, like Zhongli and Kokomi, who either shield you or heal you. Supports are possibly the most important characters in the game because they’ll allow you to unleash monstrous damage and also keep you alive.
It’s generally a lot easier to think of supports in their different categories to keep things simpler though. Shielders and healers do largely the same thing, namely keeping you alive, while offensive supports do something specific that helps your Main DPS improve their damage output. The latter includes general supports who might give attack buffs, along with more specific characters who buff a single element like Sara or Faruzan.
You’ll generally want to have at least one defensive support on any given team, but a lot of teams will also have an offensive support or two, depending on the style of Main DPS you have. For example, a character like Wanderer, who has a somewhat selfish playstyle, can be played with three support characters to maximise his own damage.
