Genshin Impact Shenhe guide — Best weapons, artifacts, and talents

Gameplay tips, character summary, and the Icy Quill damage buff

We’ve already discussed Shenhe’s weapons, artifacts, and talent priorities in Genshin Impact. Should you try to obtain her?

First, think of Shenhe as a Cryo Bennett with more niche applications. As mentioned earlier, Shenhe’s elemental skill/Icy Quill effect grants everyone in the team a buff to Cryo-based normal/charged/plunging attacks, elemental skills, and elemental bursts. For instance, at talent level 6, the damage gets increased based on 63.92% of Shenhe’s current ATK (not base ATK). This means other effects that can continuously increase that stat will also affect the damage buff. This is also why the Calamity Queller becomes the best weapon for Shenhe due to its latent application of the ATK buff even if she’s off-field. Barring this, then we can go with other options, such as the Lithic Spear or Deathmatch.

The problem is the Icy Quill’s trigger quota or limit. Multi-hit abilities will probably reach that limit quickly if you’re fighting too many mobs. With the effect expended, Shenhe is next to useless outside of her resistance shredding debuffs. Moreover, you need to spend extra cash on Shenhe just to make her more flexible with Constellations. At C1, her elemental skill gains two charges, allowing you to (technically) increase the quota or obtain boosts when using different types of abilities (i.e., with the respective buffs from the Spirit Communion Seal talent). At C6, normal and charged attacks ignore the quota completely, but this is unbelievably expensive.

Also, it goes without saying that Shenhe excels when she’s with top-tier Cryo DPS characters (i.e., Ganyu and Ayaka). Unfortunately, you need to consider team compositions as well. If you’re using “Morgana” or a “permafreeze” comp, then you’ll always need that Cryo main DPS, a Hydro character, and an Anemo to Swirl. Shenhe doesn’t really provide a lot of utility here (that would mean dropping Diona). In any case, I’ll do some tests to see how viable she is.

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