Pro tips for playing as Hu Tao in Genshin Impact

Most Genshin Impact characters are fairly easy to play. Xiao needs immersion, Raiden gives out energy, and Bennett makes any content a walk in the park. However, every once in a while a character is released that requires entire papers worth of calculations and theoretical work to fully play.

Hu Tao is one such character. Her HP can change to ATK, but low HP will give you ATK as well. Your charged attacks do tons of damage, but you'll run out of stamina if you try to cancel them. If you really want to bury your opponents alive, here's how to play as Hu Tao.

10

Don't waste your burst

One of the most overlooked things about Hu Tao is how her Burst changes. You might think that using Burst at the start of a turn or after your skill ends might do better damage by taking full advantage of the duration of her Elemental Skill, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Hu Tao's E Skill doesn't just affect her normal and charged attacks. It also gives her an ATK buff, increasing damage from all sources, including her Burst. If you want to deal proper damage with it, use it during the skill's duration.

9

Spam your charged attacks

The core of Hu Tao's set may be her Elemental Skill, but the hidden trait is what makes her shine brighter and more fiery than any other Pyro DPS. Hu Tao's Charged Attacks have no ICD at all, allowing her to trigger reactions on every single hit.

ICD, or Internal Cooldown, is a system in Genshin Impact that prevents characters from causing too many reactions. For most characters, you can only use a new element once every three hits.

So instead of using normal attacks it's better to spam charged ones. You'll already do a normal attack while holding the skill before your CA auto-triggers, so you don't have to worry about not getting through Yelan or Xingqiu's Bursts.

8

Cancel animation

We've already established that Hu Tao's Charged Attacks are some of the strongest in the game. However, they still have some drawbacks. First, Hu Tao rushes too far when executing them, moving out of position and sometimes even changing targets. The entire animation also takes a long time, making it vulnerable to damage and also reducing DPS.

To fix this, you can use various animation cancels. Right after Hu Tao starts her CA animation, you can either dash or jump to cancel the rest of her moves. The damage still goes through, but it cuts the time in half and makes Hu Tao stay where she was originally.

7

Solving stamina issues

Hu Tao runs into stamina issues very easily. Since her main damage is locked behind the stamina-draining mechanic of her charged attacks, Hu Tao can often run out before she can deal all of her damage. She can also die to powerful attacks due to not having enough stamina to dodge.

To deal with this, you can choose to use a jump cancel instead of a dash. Having a defensive unit can also help get rid of the need to dodge. Another thing you can do is instead of using her elemental blast to deal damage, save it in immunity frames to avoid hard attacks even without stamina.

6

Keep your HP low

Hu Tao and her signature weapon, the Staff of Homa, both grant bonuses below 50 percent HP. These bonuses are significant enough to encourage her to intentionally keep her HP low.

In the Overworld, you can simply jump down and keep her permanently an inch away from death. While this can be a problem in scenes like the Spiral Abyss or the Imaginum Theater, letting enemies get a few hits in before starting your spins is still worthwhile.

5

Choose any healer wisely

Healers that don't provide other buffs are generally not recommended for meta teams, as giving them a slot over buffer or sub-DPS results in a huge overall DPS loss. This is even more true for Hu Tao, where every character that heals her becomes a significant amount of her damage.

However, there are certain instances where a healer might be fine. If you play Hu Tao with C6 Bennett, the added Pyro DMG Bonus and Bennett's personal ATK buff can make up for the lost damage. Similarly, if you're playing Hu Tao on a Furina team, having an Anemo healer like Jean or Xianyun can increase Furina's damage while increasing her buff on Hu Tao.

4

Explore other defense options

Since healers are (usually) out of the question, shields are the next best thing. Characters like Zhongli and Layla give Hu Tao much-needed survivability while also bringing in more buffs. The shield can also help give Hu Tao interrupt resistance, preventing enemies from knocking her away and disrupting her combos.

Similarly, characters that can help with interrupt resistance and DMG RES like Xingqiu and Dehya are also great choices for defense slots.

3

Collecting Artifacts

Hu Tao is one of the most powerful characters to build in Genshin Impact. Where other characters really only need CRIT Rate, CRIT DMG, and the occasional ATK stat, almost every stat is useful for Hu Tao. However, there is still a need for balance, as exceeding the cap on a particular stat results in lower overall damage.

While Hu Tao still benefits from ATK, her HP to ATK ratio on her Elemental Skill makes HP a better stat overall. It's always better to get the main HP stat or Elemental Mastery for your sands.

Because of this, it's important to keep stat priority in mind. If you have a healthy amount of CRIT stats, you should aim for at least 60/120 first. After that, try to get your Elemental Mastery (EM) up to around 300. Then you can focus on getting as much extra CRIT and HP as possible.

2

The optimal combination

Hu Tao's charged attacks are her main sources of damage. However, that doesn't mean her Normals are completely useless. The ICD is not shared between the two, so he can vape some of his normal attacks while making sure to hit all of his charged ones.

If you're comfortable with your ability to combo consistently, intertwining two normal attacks before doing a charged attack will do more damage than just spamming the attack button. The difference in damage isn't huge, but it's not negligible either. However, if you find yourself losing Vapes while trying to do this, going back to spamming Charged Attack will yield better results.

1

Using Viridescent Venerer with Hu Tao

Viridescent Venerer is one of the strongest support artifact sets in Genshin Impact. All the top performing teams have an Anemo unit set up and no transfer can reach its full potential. However, for one reason or another, using VV on Hu Tao's team can be quite difficult since Hu Tao has no way to use Pyro without her skills going on cooldown.

Another thing you can do is use Hu Tao's Burst at the start of the rotation, losing a lot of Burst damage but improving her charged attacks due to VV.

One way to deal with this is to use a second Pyro unit like Bennett or Thoma. The problem then is that applying enough Hydro with a single Hydro unit is quite difficult. To solve this, you can absorb Hydro into Sucrose or Kazuha's Bursts for a second application. You can also just use Xingqiu, which can more or less still have enough elemental application to Vape all of Hu Tao's hits, despite being the only Hydro.