I wrote my two tip guides for Genshin Impact’s combat a very long time ago, and as a result, they are fairly old, and quite frankly, at this point could be combined along with a few other techniques, and overall observations in order to create a fairly in-depth combat guide for combos – if most of the real tricks didn’t more pertain to specific character.
I’ll work on expanding this a little bit more over a period of time, so expect this specific post to grow with edits. This article may not look the same when you see it next!
Somewhere later I’ll have to work out some things about using elemental reactions for combos, but the problem is that in my experience they’re… Really inconsistent to work with, so for now we’re going to focus on four things: evade canceling, switch canceling, elemental skill canceling, and footstools.
Evade Cancel
At any point during either an Elemental Skill or a character’s normal attacks, they can cancel their current animation with an evade. When chasing an enemy, this is fundamental, as any recovery from the final attack in the normal attack chain can be replaced with closing the distance that an enemy has traveled.
It’s possible to using evasions to cancel charged attacks as well. Usually at windows that you can’t cancel them with options like the Switch cancel we’ll talk about here later.
The only things an evasion doesn’t cancel is an Elemental Burst and at certain points, the windup on claymore wielding characters’ charged attacks.
Switch Cancel
Switch cancels work during normal attacks, but not certain charged attacks. In most cases, heavy attacks can be switch canceled once their recovery begins. You can actually buffer into a switch, which is most evident with characters like Zhongli.
Switch canceling also works on some elemental skills. For example, with Beidou, it’s entirely unnecessary to allow Tidecaller’s animation to complete: you can simple swap characters at any point in time to cancel the animation while the hitbox is still active. As long as you’ve connected with your target, this will allow you to cleanly cancel all of Beidou’s recovery.
Elemental Skill Cancel
Elemental skills can cancel normal attacks at any point during their animations. This is particularly useful with Zhongli as his pillars can be created immediately after knocking an enemy away – or during the part of his combo where he kicks his spear.
Footstool
When dodging/sprinting into some enemies out of an attack, it can be possible to gain enough altitude to be able to do a plunging attack. This is particularly useful when fighting Tartaglia as seen above, but can also be applied to enemies such as Abyss Mages, allowing you to perform a plunging attack consistently on level ground.
While it is mostly for show, it can be effectively used to dodge attacks, as seen above. Once your current character is pretty much hugging the enemy, use sprint and then immediately thereafter jump. You should see your character rise significantly higher than they would during a normal jump, presenting you an easy opportunity to perform your plunge.
