'Genshin Impact': Has Electro Finally Found Its Niche?

The 1.6 update for “Genshin Impact” has added plenty of new content to the game, including the much-teased summer skins, the new archipelago map and the re-run of Klee’s banner. The patch also introduced a big buff to major elemental reactions involving Swirl and Electro, which might be much bigger than what players initially thought.

Elemental reactions such as Overloaded, Electro-Charged, Superconduct and Swirl have received significant buffs to their damage values if characters are above level 60. This is meant to help them keep up with the game’s Pyro/Cryo-dominant meta. Elemental Mastery was also buffed to make reactions in general stronger.

Electro has been in a weird place up until this patch. Characters wielding this element were often overshadowed by other units who had access to stronger elemental reactions like Vaporize and Melt. The buffs to Electro reactions will certainly encourage players to try this element out more, but the recent leaks regarding Inazuma’s weapons and artifacts might end up changing the game completely.

According to leaks, much of Inazuma’s new equipment will revolve around Elemental DMG and Energy Recharge. One example is the possibly new “Shimenawa of Memories” artifact set that will boost Normal, Charged and Plunge attack damage in exchange for energy.

This artifact set, together with the Electro buffs, can lead to some very powerful dual-Electro team compositions. For the uninitiated, the Electro Resonance buff “High Voltage” greatly increases energy regeneration by spawning elemental particles every time an Electro-based reaction is triggered.

Not only will enemies take more damage from the buffed Electro reactions and Elemental Mastery, players will also be able maintain near-permanent uptime on the artifact set. Xingqiu with Razor or Keqing can make excellent use of this combo.

The artifact set alone is enough to give Electro its own niche as a particle generator with heavy reaction-based damage and Burst spam.

The “Mist-Cutting Gleam,” a leaked 5-star sword, synergizes very well with this niche in mind; this new sword allegedly increases a character’s Elemental DMG every time they deal Elemental DMG.

Electro reactions themselves will still be situational, however. Players will still need to be mindful about whether they want Overload or Electro-Charged as their primary reaction due to the former’s tendency to blow targets away and the latter’s tendency to cause self-damage. Regardless, Electro will be much stronger than before from here on out.