UNLEASH SCARY DAMAGE WITH THIS HU TAO BUILD | GENSHIN IMPACT GUIDE
Friday, March 5, 2021
UNLEASH SCARY DAMAGE WITH THIS HU TAO BUILD | GENSHIN IMPACT GUIDE
Things just got a lot more scary thanks to Hu Tao’s deadly damage and the only question remains – how will you build her? The first thing you should understand in order to take full advantage of Hu Tao’s power would be her playstyle. And unlike any other character, her full potentia llies within a very specific objective and that is by keeping her health below 50% as long as possible which is heavily influenced by several different factors with the most important one being her passive talent that provides Hu Tao with sizeable pyro DMG bonus.
And this is a very crucial thing you will need to manage because her elemental skill will infuse her attacks with pyro and getting that bonus from the mentioned passive on top of every attack is something you should strive for all the time. Speaking of which – her elemental skill also gives her a unique ability that’s similar to Childe’s that allows you to mark enemies with a Blood Blossom if they get hit with one of her charged attack during the skill’s duration.
This is best used when you have a group of enemies in front of you because the animation of the charged attack is a forward lunge while her normal attacks cover a wider area so striking a balance between the two is important if you want to maintain a good damage output. But the thing that truly elevates her playstyle is her burst that has two different activation modes and as previously mentioned, it will depend on whether she is at 50% or below heath.
And the default version is already pretty amazing which will take away a big chunk of health from surrounding enemies. However, the damage and healing will significantly increase if she is below the specified health threshold but the trick here is to understand the more enemies she is facing, the less likely she is going to maintain the damage bonus from her passive because you will most likely heal past the 50% mark so it’s going to require some time in order to master this balance between living and dying with her, which possibly involves letting enemies damage you and then applying a shield from one of your team mates.
Still, her biggest damage source will be coming from her elemental skill and getting used to her normal and charged attacks animations will be important in order to manage the pyro damage and Blood Blossoms while at the same time, you will also need to keep an eye on her health if you want to maximize her pyro damage bonus and the stronger version of her burst. But mastering this tricky playstyle is only half the battle and taking a look at our funeral director’s equipment is going to be the
next step.
Besides the oversized hat she’s wearing, her choice in equipment for the most part is pretty straightforward at least when it comes to selecting a weapon for her. And the best choices would be any weapon that has critical damage or rate as their sub stat, so polearms like Deathmatch from the Battle Pass or Back cliff Pole are going to be the 4-stars you want to get your hands on and while they do have their own passives you could compare based on refinements, the more simple approach would be to manage the 2:1 ratio of critical damage to rate or at least raise the critical rate to 70% before focusing on critical damage.
Now for the gacha weapons, Dragon’s Bane and Lithic Spear are decent choices but they both have their own limits and draw most of their power from passives, and going for raw stat optimization is better, although harder thing to do, especially when you’re not even at end-game, so these are definitely the weapons you can take advantage of in the mean time.
But when we take a look at her F2P options, it definitely feels like a letdown since two of the polearms have physical damage bonus as their substats which is not something you want for this trickster and you’re basically left with the best of the worst option of going with Prototype Starg litter which actually is pretty decent for her since it will help with recharging her burst faster and it has good Base ATK while the passive will only be utilized 1 out of 2 times but at least you're getting something out of it.
Finally, for the 5-star weapons without any doubt, the Staff of Homa is the most strongest pick for her with Primordial Jade Winged-Spearas the second in lead and Vortex Vanquisher along with Skyward Spine at the end. But in reality, any of these 5-stars are going to be awesome for her.
And if you’re just starting out or havere-rolled for Hu Tao, the max refined 3-star weapon choices like White Tassel or Halberd are great for her until you find an upgrade. Now when it comes to her artifacts, threesome extremely important thing you need to understand when building her and that is themassive ATK bonus she gains from her elemental skill, that’s based on her max health.
So even before covering which artifact set you should strive for, first, make sure to go for these main stats which is health on Sands, Pyro DMG bonus on Goblet and Critical Rate or Damage on circlet. Additionally, when looking for good substats, the biggest focus should be Critical Rate or Damage, followed by health % and then Energy Recharge. But just make sure you understand this health bonus is otherwise useless until you activate her elemental skill, so if you’re going to be using her primarily for burst, it’s better to aim for the usual critical damage and rate instead.
And as for the artifact sets, the recommended one to go with would be The Crimson Witch even if it means you’re not going to befully utilizing the 4-set bonus since you can only trigger the 2-set bonus multiplier once due to how her elemental skill works but even then what you’re really after is to get those Vaporize and Melt damage bonuses. But for the alternatives, you could also go for Lava walker 4-set but it does have its own limitations like fighting slimes who have their own elemental statuses or the fact that you need to perform a single pyro attack in order to trigger the bonus after wards.
You could also go for Retracting Bolide 4-set bonus but this will heavily depend if you have reliable shield generators like Diona, Xinyan, Zhongli, or any geo character for this matter. Now it’s not always easy to obtain good artifacts for the 4-set bonus, so you could go for a 2-set of Witch’s and Noblesse Oblige which actually works out pretty well especially if you’re going to use her more as just support damage dealer for her burst damage.
Finally, for the talent priority you will want to focus on both normal attacks and her elemental skill because unlike Childe, who gets his own separate damage multipliers when he activates his hydro blades, all you're doing with her elemental skill is boosting her ATK and infusing damage with Pyro which means it still heavily relies on you to have leveled up normal attacks so the recommended route would be to get them both to level 6 and then first go for level 8 elemental skill followed by normal attacks.
However, if you will use her mainly just for for burst, then obviously go for leveling this talent instead. So in essence, Hu Tao’s elemental skill has a lot of influence on how you should build her with the biggest priority being the obvious critical damage and rate followed by health which will boost her attack significantly so getting substats and even main stat of health on sands will help her generate more damage efficiently.
When you ask about Hu Tao, Zhongli will tell you she’s an intolerant child while someone like Xinyan gets spooked by her remark that people who like to play with fire are good for funeral business. But despite what her peers think of her you still can’t ignore the fact that she’s going to be an insanely good addition to nearly any team composition. And part of this comes from what’s surprisingly her own passive talent that provides team mates with 12% increased critical rate, right after her elemental skill ends, so unlike some other main damage dealers,
she encourages you to swap between team mates to take advantage of the bonus she provides and because there is a cooldown you need to wait for until she can start dealing her godlike pyro damage again, this works out great for everyone in the end. And when you’re building a team with HuTao it’s always a good approach to first start by deciding on a tag partner for her and then working onwards so in this case, some of the core members that will maximize her damage output will be any of the Cryo characters with Kaeya being one of the better choices and then Xingqiu for additional attacks, since they will let you take advantage of the Melt and Vaporize reactions respectively.
And you can’t go wrong without your usual suspects like Venti or Zhongli who will boost your damage regardless of what you’re trying to achieve and even better, because Hu Tao’s power comes from elemental damage, you will definitely want to have an Anemo team mate with Viridescent and or Geo team mate with archaic Petra. And in those situations where you can not trigger amplifying reactions effectively, you could go for double pyro and geo resonance team, so this is where retracing bolide and archaic petra would come into play. In fact, because of her unique nature that pushes her towards a riskier playstyle, it’s going to be very beneficial to have at least one character that can generate shields instead of healing, so you can maintain that 50% or below the health threshold.
All in all, treating Hu Tao from the perspective of an elemental damage dealer that dominates with Melt or Vaporize is the most important takeaway here, so building upon this foundation is what will get you the best team. For someone who works in the business of death, it’s quite ironic that Hu Tao prefers to live on the edge constantly. But you can’t deny this is going to be an exhilarating experience for those who enjoy a bit more complicated playstyle than usual.
Overall, the biggest advantage Hu Tao has is her pyro element which is currently dominating every other element in the game, and having access to Melt and Vaporise for someone like her is no joking matter even if that’s what our dear Walnut prefers to do. It also helps that most of her attacks cover a wide area so you will have no problem with taking out large groups of enemies and combining this together with some of the team mates who will amplify her damage, you will easily gain new customers for her funeral business.
However, you are basically missing out on a lot of damage if you don’t manage the 50% health threshold which puts you into a high-risk/high reward playstyle that might not be something you could appreciate or want to bother with. Also, it doesn’t help that there are no decent options when it comes to F2P weapons which is hopefully something that miHoYo will address in the future.
Still, she has a massive potential when it comes to the swap-in and swap-out team play and things become even better when she appliesa critical boost to her team mates that let’s you experiment with more compositions than you would usually do when building around a dedicated damage dealer.
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