3 BEST WAYS TO USE NEW GEO BUFFS AND ZHONGLI | GENSHIN IMPACT GUIDE

3 BEST WAYS TO USE NEW GEO BUFFS AND ZHONGLI | GENSHIN IMPACT GUIDE

The massive changes to Geo element and Zhongli are like no other and these are the 3 tips on how to take advantage of them. The most anxious waiting period is over and Zhongli has received a massive facelift to all of his abilities that surprisingly don’t require you to adapt if you already have him and everything that he has to offer can either be used immediately or can be enhanced even further. And probably the most important thing that completely elevates his playstyle is the overhaul to his elemental skill which now produces a pillar when you hold down the skill and after testing him out, there’s almost no need to use the press version of the skill since the most important thing is the Jade Shield while the pillar itself is more or less just a nice damage bonus. 

And the thing that makes Jade Shield completely insane is that you can reduce all of enemy’s resistances by 20% if you stand close to them, essentially upping your damage without too much effort that persists for a pretty longtime since the shield can absorb a lot of damage. And to make things even better, Zhongli becomes more resistant to interruptions while he is casting the shield and the pillar appears right in front of him which can stop some of the attacks coming directly at him. So his playstyle right now demands you to keep up the Jade Shield as often as possible and take advantage of it by using characters which are excellent at close combat. 

Then there’s a chunky upgrade to Zhongli’s damage output which now adds additional damage to everything he does based on a percentage of his maximum health. And after using him with several builds, one of which involved going heavy on HP while the other one in the more traditional route of a damage support, both of them performed really well and while it’s hard to say without very extensive testing which build performs better, it’s clear that even using a dedicated health build works well and on the bright side it also makes the Jade Shield absorb even more damage. 

But one perspective that’s important to take in would be the fact that Zhongli has the best use of artifact substats out of all characters and that’s because besides defense and elemental mastery, everything else only makes him stronger which means if you have artifact with health substats, you’re actually increasing his damage output and absorption rate of his shield and you don’t necessarily need to focus on obtaining health substat but the importance here is that it’s not as useless as having health on someone like Xiao or Razor, when speaking purely in terms of damage output. 

And it’s actually pretty insane how much he has skyrocketed as a support damage dealer while previously he was definitely good at keeping the team alive and spamming his burst was the main damage output strategy, right now, anything he does will deal significant damage and there’s barely any characters who can reduce enemy resistance’s without constellations not to mention he reduces every single element’s resistance and this can be done by only having a single copy of him. 

Now obviously, because he is from the Geo element, the same drawbacks haven’t gone away and you won’t cause any offensive elemental reactions when using him nor has anything changed in terms of shield breaking but because you can easily reduce whole enemy’s resistance by having his Jade Shield on this would mean for any of your team mates, he provides an indirect way of boosting their damage by reducing whole enemy’s resistance with his Jade Shield. 

And what’s even better, using him with any elemental damage dealer while he has Archaic Petra equipped is an even bigger increase in team’s overall damage output. Also, if you want to see damage comparison between several Zhongli builds, we are currently running tests and sharing them on Twitter, so make sure to go and follow us there as well. So it goes without saying that Zhongli has become pretty ridiculous and by taking all of these changes and adapting them into his new playstyle is surely going to make your next runs in the Abyss a lot easier.

 But Zhongli doesn’t stop there and instead of just buffing himself he has also ascended the whole Geo element with this next change. Taking an element and putting it on steroids is definitely not something we have seen done by miHoYo and while the defensive nature of Geo mostly stems from the crystallization reaction, the way they have changed things up definitely makes you question if they are trying to prove the adage that the best defense is good offense. 

This of course, refers to the massive changes to Geo’s resonance bonus which now not only increases the strength of all shields but while under their effect, characters deal 15% increased damage and what’s even more crazy – your attacks now reduce the enemy’s GEO resistance by 20%. Which means if you have Zhongli, putting on a Jade shield fires off all the beneficial bonuses you would get from this resonance and this only cements the fact that Zhongli is now the undisputed character that you would want to include in any of your team compositions to activate the geo resonance bonus. 

And let’s not forget that geo shields themselves have been improved and they now absorb every single element and physical damage at an improved efficiency of 150% so you can have an easier time with all that damage without worrying about knockout. So with all this power at your disposal, building a geo team for content that doesn’t involve shield breaking is almost a no-brainer at this point since the damage output can be increased very easily without investing into your actual characters thanks to so many bonuses you get when you have a shield. 

However, the key point here is that you still need to have a shield on your character in order to take advantage of all the awesome things this resonance bonus offers Obviously, the damage will be slightly lower because without a shield you lose out on the damage bonus the resonance provides but at least in all of the chaos during the battle, you can count on the resonance de buff working pretty consistently. 

So in short – the resonance bonus changes to Geo are definitely a welcome addition to the game and you can start taking advantage of them by following the simple routine of putting on a shield, damaging every enemy in sight and then unloading your strongest Geo attacks while they have their resistance reduced. The only question remains – what else is there left for Geo in this brave new world of 1.3 update? After introducing so many changes to Geo, it’s important to take a look at the current state of team building in Genshin Impact and decide what actions need to be taken into the matter. And the good news is that for the most part– you can just sit back and enjoy the benefits of the geo resonance or Zhongli himself, since in a vacuum, taking any other character that’s not the Geo Archon himself or doesn’t have the resonance bonus active, is no different than before. 

And technically, the other one that comes to mind is Noelle since she is the 2nd character that can produce a natural geo shield which has improved absorption for all elements after the update. So building a team with just a single geo character is not going to be any different experience than before, unless of course, it’s Zhongli who has surpassed everyone’s expectations with his improved abilities and he is now an extremely powerful support character that boosts the whole team’s damage. 

But when the matters come to building a team with a geo resonance, then it’s important to consider as always who will you be going up against and luckily, for most domains it’s enough to bring 1 or 2 elements that are good at breaking shields so you can pretty much crush those domains thanks to the new geo resonance bonus while in places like the Spiral Abyss, it will always vary from floor to floor but as long as miHoYo has at least one of these floors that do not contain any elemental shields that need to be broken, it’s going to be a no-brainer choice to bring a Geo resonance team unless of course they boost some other element’s damage significantly for that specific challenge. 

But to quickly summarize, the newest buffs to Zhongli has made him into a powerhouse of a unit that now is able to produce a pillar when using his elemental skill via holding the button, which essentially has made the placement of the actual pillar with his press skill almost obsolete and that’s thanks to the fact his Jade Shield now reduces all enemy resistances by 20% as long as you stay near them. 

And while his damage was already amazing when he was using his burst, miHoYo have decided to inject some healthy steroids into every single of his talents and now the HP stat directly provides a percentage of itself as additional damage, so even getting artifacts with health substats is going to be a good win for him, although things like critical rating, damage and energy recharge are still important to consider as always. Then there’s the geo resonance bonus that only requires you to have a shield, deal some damage and apply 20% reduced geo resistance to enemies which gives more flexibility to let you take damage and even then, you can get more damage output increased by retaining the shield. 

Finally, the team building options haven’t changed much but it’s now a pretty good idea to start bringing teams with geo resonance to places that don’t require too much shield breaking since it’s very hard to ignore such a strong boost in damage just from having an active resonance, not to mention nearly every Geo character can produce consistent and powerful damage without too much effort. 

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