Character Overview: Beidou

Beidou’s the first four star character to be focused on here, but she hardly feels like it. Her moves have more in common with Diluc than they do most of the other claymore users. Now, with the fact she’s a four star character, these overviews are handled slightly different in that context: instead of looking at a constellation 0 character, for four star characters I’m going to focus on constellation 6.

For some characters like Bennett, that can have a fairly huge impact, but for Beidou it doesn’t change her core moveset significantly and instead really just adds effects on top of it.

Basic Attack String

Beidou’s basic attack string is a five input, five hit combo and there’s a few things that’re worth talking about with it. The first is that the opening two attacks in this string are largely more vertical strikes, and these attacks actually do hit in a way that aligns with their animations – which is remarkably useful and notable when it comes to combos, so make sure to jot that one down.

The second important thing to take note of is that unlike the majority of other claymore users, Beidou has more attacks in her string and overall this plays into her similarities with Diluc or Eula, the five-star claymore using characters.

And, yes, if you listen closely, that little clink is her kicking over her sword from the armor plating on her thigh.

Charged Attack

As with the above, Beidou uses a charged attack animation she shares with Diluc. Instead of spinning around in a circle with the sword, she swings back and forth with effectively the same hitbox as the spinning attacks, again, the same as Diluc.

For the sake of filler content for the word count conjecture, because I’ll be honest, these charged attacks are not that useful outside of dealing with Geo constructs, I can’t help but wonder if alongside sharing this animation with Diluc and Eula that perhaps at one point Beidou was intended to be a five-star claymore user.

…Or perhaps much more likely it’s simply a matter of it being the generic adult claymore charged attack that we’ll probably see more of in the future and Beidou’s slightly longer basic attack string isn’t anything that special, either.

Elemental Skill Press & Hold:

The real bread and butter with Beidou is her elemental skill, and it ties in with the rest of her toolkit in multiple ways. When pressed once, Beidou will immediately perform a counter-attack, protected by a barrier at a % of her total HP depending on the talent level. If instead it’s held, she will enter a defensive posture, again protected by the barrier.

There are three levels of sorts to Tidecaller which coincide to how much damage it does: if you do not get hit at all with the barrier up, the attack that would be level zero and has minimal damage. Level one requires getting hit once and significantly increases the damage dealt with the counter-attack. Level three requires getting hit twice and takes up the increased damage from level 2 and adds it again.

At maximum damage, the passive talent Lightning Storm is triggered. This speeds up Beidou’s normal and charged attacks, removing a significant chunk of windup from the latter.

Now, at this point, I feel the need to point out there’s some inconsistencies which come up on the topic of getting hit once or twice for the max damage. I’d take the time to demonstrate these, but quite frankly, I feel any player who uses Beidou for a length of time will know what I’m talking about without needing it to be shown to them: not every single attack, that is, a singular attack, will hit Beidou only once. Some attacks reliably hit multiple times, others will hit multiple times in specific contexts like pushing Beidou back with collision.

The important thing is that you can know when you’ve hit max damage by checking for the aura provided by the Lightning Storm buff if you’re not sure in certain circumstances after the attack has gone off.

If you’re looking for an indicator while you still are holding the elemental skill button, note Beidou’s stance which changes once she’s at max damage.

If you perform Tidecaller with a press as an attack is coming in, you can trigger a perfect counter. The perfect counter guarantees max damage off of singular hits to Beidou’s barrier and can be seen above.

Elemental Burst:

Beidou’s elemental burst creates an Electro barrier and simultaneously adds an Electro effect which deals damage to the targets struck by the player character’s normal attack. As with other characters who have bursts which have more lasting effects, these remain even if Beidou leaves the field and is swapped for another character.

Besides that, to take full advantage of the damage this can put out, there needs to be three enemies close to one another for the electro damage to jump in ways which will deal the most damage. There are, admittedly, plenty of ways to deal a lot of damage to groups in Genshin, and plenty of them are better – but Beidou being a four-star character is easy to obtain and, frankly, this compliments her other abilities more. As with some moves in Genshin, or frankly, any other game, it’s just there.

Conclusion:

Coming up with a concluding set of observations for Beidou is rather difficult as given that she is really good, the main problem is that there’s no real weapon which truly offers amazing synergy with her.

Yeah, sure, as far as artifacts go, as I’ve mentioned with Keqing I very much like the Thundering Fury for speeding up cooldowns ever so slightly when the opportunity presents itself to trigger Overloaded, Electro-Charged, or Super-Conduct . While there’s not a lot situations, or rather, not a lot of enemies that really let you take full advantage of Tidecaller with a lower cooldown, those times where you need it in that moment really kind of send home its worth even with the majority of the time it being unnecessary as it’s a pretty massive spike in damage.

But then we go back to weapons and the question of using something like the Sacrificial Greatsword or something else comes up and it gets more complicated. I think, hands down, Wolf’s Gravestone is the best claymore available in Genshin as of this writing but all it really does is more damage. More damage is good, but frankly in general when it comes to Beidou I’m not feeling synergy worth commenting on with most of the available weapons. Perhaps that will change in the future, but for now, I will say that even though Prototype Archaic is a very excellent claymore if you don’t have any other choices, Beidou should probably be focused more on her lightning/elemental damage as well as attack rather than just raw physical.

Fortunately, while it’s harder to put a good weapon in her hands, it’s not so hard to put her into a good team: Beidou compliments most compositions exceedingly well. With her burst’s ability to do damage while she’s off the field, she synergizes very strongly with characters like Xiao and Childe, but her elemental skill makes her overall compliment to your team’s survivability one of the biggest factors while also dealing quite respectable AoE damage in a very large area around Beidou. Besides that, Beidou works well with any character which can ignite grass, as once an area is on fire, she can immediately go into her full-damge Tidecaller.

In fact, more to the point, if team composition matters less in terms of raw synergy but more in terms of how team members deal with certain problems, I would say that Beidou tackles most of the problems presented by the game except those that are immune to electro or where ranged damage is crucial. In those two areas, she falters, but being a claymore using character, it’s completely possible for her raw physical damage and the heavy-hitting trait of claymores to make up for that somewhat. Typically, as Beidou really needs to have her attack speed buffed by the passive Lightning Storm to fully take advantage of her burst, all she really needs a character who can put out basic attacks a little faster in those situations where Tidecaller can’t be used immediately before or after her burst for full effect.

Combo-wise, given that enemies aren’t really aggressive enough and the opportunities you’ll have to perform a counter while you say have an enemy in the air are fairly scarce, Beidou’s initial two basic attacks are exceedingly important given their more vertical hitbox. This does make Beidou ‘weaker’ overall in terms of crowd control, but frankly, her primary crowd control asset is her elemental skill, not her basic attacks. Unfortunately, given that she is a claymore using character, her heavy attack isn’t that useful and there’s not many things you could do with Beidou that you couldn’t do with virtually any other character.

And if all that gushing isn’t enough, I’ll just close simply with this: Beidou is bae. That is all.