So if you’ve explored the earlier cancel in Genshin Impact, you’re probably familiar with the fact there’s actually a few things you can do with it. For the most part, it really makes it easy to follow up on different combos and keep damaging a specific enemy, besides looking cool, that is.
But, that costs stamina, which I can tell you just from attempting to record everything for the previous post, makes things awfully difficult. It’s a limiter on fun, and, if you’ve been having to dodge, there might not even be anything left in your stamina gauge to begin with.
An unfortunate caveat, but, there are other options to cancel out of regular and heavy attacks. Namely, by switching characters. Now, before I continue I should say there appears to be a few rules set in motion which govern the general design of characters and their movesets and how those moves interact with each other:
- Light attacks can be canceled a character swap
- Heavy attacks mostly can be canceled by a character swap
- Certain heavy attacks, namely those like Lisa or Xiangling cannot be canceled with a character swap
- Elemental skills can cancel at least recovery on light attacks but cannot cancel heavy attacks
First off, let’s look at a demonstration of light attacks being canceled into a character swap:
Take note of the multi-hit spear attack, and how it can come out at the same time as attacking with another character. In other games, fiction, and even reality, this is known as the Tsubame Gaeshi: reverse swallow-tail cut. It’s tough to say exactly what the real-life equivalent would be, but in video games and fiction, this is the term for this simultaneous attack.
Moving on, most heavy attacks as you see can be canceled into a character swap – and once you have swapped, you are in a neutral state, allowing you to perform any move available to you. Since Elemental Skills are normally blocked during the performance of a heavy attack, it does offer immediate opportunities to perform certain attacks in an unexpected fashion.
That said, Elemental Skills either cancel light attacks outright or cancel their recovery. Ergo, it is not necessarily efficient or effective to swap to another character at the end of your light attack chain to follow up with an Elemental Skill. For example:
The Traveler’s Elemental Skill will hit more and draw in enemies more effectively if it’s used to punctuate the Traveler’s light attack string. You obviously can use it as per the above, but in this case the use is more the elemental interaction between Xiangling’s second Constellation and the wind element’s Swirl effect.
For casual players, I don’t think character swap canceling will be extremely useful. The timing to get used to it isn’t too tight, but there’s something about Genshin Impact which makes the experience feel slightly clumsy when performing these types of advanced maneuvers, however, for continuing a regular attack string on an enemy they do not want to knock away, the player can swap characters.
That’s just slightly problematic given that usually the first or second Constellation for a few of the most readily available characters provides a buff to the final light attack adding an elemental effect to them aside from the fact that the final move in these light attack combos also inherently does more damage. However, after thinking about that, there are times where you do not want to apply an elemental effect in Genshin Impact, or more specifically, you do not want to apply the wrong one.
All in all, though, it’s a useful tactic to add to any player’s toolkit when it comes to this game, and depending on what different characters come out and what different moves are available, this can become an extremely useful piece of tech. Unfortunately, it’s worth noting that characters like Xiangling are barred from swapping even after evade canceling a heavy attack.
