Pro tips for playing as Hu Tao in Genshin Impact

Most Genshin Effect characters are relatively straightforward to play. Xiao needs a dive, Raiden energizes, and Bennett makes any material a walk in the park. However, every once in a while, a character is released that requires a whole document of calculations and theory to play to their full potential.

Hu Tao is one such character. Her HP can be converted to ATK, but being low on HP also gives you ATK. Your charged attacks do a lot of damage, but your stamina runs out if you try to dash 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 his burst scales. You might think that using Burst at the start of a rotation or after your skill expires would be good damage, due to her completely capitalizing on the duration of her elemental skills, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Hu Tao's E skill not only affects his normal and charge attacks. It also grants him an ATK buff, increasing damage from all sources, including his burst. If you want to deal reasonable damage with it, use it within the skill duration.

9

Spam your charged attacks

The main part of Hu Tao's kit may be his elemental skill, but a hidden attribute makes him brighter and more fiery than any other Pyro DPS. Hu Tao's charged attacks have no ICD, allowing him to trigger reactions with each hit.

ICD, or internal cooldown, is a system in the Genshin effect that prevents characters from causing too many reactions. For most characters, you can only apply a new element once every three hits.

As such, instead of using your normal attacks, it's better to spam your charged ones. You usually attack beforehand by holding the skill before automatically triggering your CA, so you don't have to worry about not processing Yelan or Xingqiu's Bursts.

8

Canceling the 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 dashes far when doing them, moving out of position and sometimes changing targets. Full animation also takes a lot of time, reducing his damage potential and DPS as well.

To solve these, you can use different animation cancels. After Hu Tao starts his CA animation, you can either dash or jump to cancel the rest of his moves. The damage still mounts, but it cuts the time in half and forces Hu Tao to stay where she was before.

7

Dealing with stamina issues

Hu Tao easily runs into endurance problems. His main damage is locked behind a mechanic that consumes stamina, his charge attacks, Hu Tao can often escape before dealing all of his damage. She can die from hard attacks as she doesn't have enough stamina to dodge.

To deal with this, you can choose to use jump cancels instead of dashing. Having a defensive unit can also help eliminate the need to dodge. Another thing you can do is, instead of using his elemental burst for damage, save it for resistance frames to dodge hard-hit attacks without stamina.

6

Keep your HP low

Hu Tao and his signature weapon, Homa's Staff, both grant bonuses when below 50 percent HP. These bonuses are important enough to encourage deliberately keeping HP low.

In the overworld, you can just jump down and permanently put her an inch away from death. While this can be a problem in stages like Spiral Abyss or Imaginum Theater, it can still be worthwhile to let enemies get a few hits in on you before starting your turn.

5

Choose any healers wisely

Healers that do not provide other buffs are generally not recommended for meta teams, as giving them a buffer or slot in sub-DPS results in a large overall DPS loss. This is even more true for Hu Tao, where any character who heals her is at a significant disadvantage for her damage.

However, there are some cases where a healer can be okay. If you're playing Hu Tao with a C6 Bennett, the added Pyro DMG bonus and Bennett's own personal ATK buff can make up for the lost damage. Similarly, if you are playing Hu Tao on a Furina team, an Anemo healer like Jean or Xianyun can increase Furina's damage and also increase her buff on Hu Tao.

4

Explore other defensive 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 other buffs. A shield can also help give Hu Tao block resistance, preventing enemies from knocking him down and interrupting his combos.

Similarly, characters that can aid in barrier resistance and DMG RES, such as Xingqiu and Dehya, are also excellent choices for the defense slot.

3

Preparing artifacts

Hu Tao is one of the most stat-efficient characters to build in Genshin Impact. While other characters really need CRIT rate, CRIT DMG, and an ATK stat here and there, almost every stat is useful for Hu Tao. However, there is still a need for balance, as overcapping a specific stat reduces overall damage.

Although Hu Tao still benefits from ATK, the HP to ATK ratio in his Elemental Skill makes HP a better position overall. For your sand, it's always good to get an HP or Elemental Mastery main stat.

Because of this, it's important to keep stat preferences in mind. With a healthy amount of CRIT stats, at least 60/120 is what you should aim for first. Then, try to increase your Elemental Mastery (EM) to around 300. Then you can focus on getting as much CRIT and HP as you can.

2

Optimal combos

Hu Tao's charged attacks are his main source of damage. However, this is not to say that his generals are completely worthless. The ICD isn't shared between them, so she can vape some of her normal attacks, making sure to hit all of her charged ones.

If you're comfortable with the ability to consistently perform combos, weaving in two normal attacks before doing a charged attack will do more damage than spamming the attack button. The difference in damage isn't huge, but it isn't small either. However, if you find that you lose to Vapes by trying this, switching back to spamming a charged attack will yield better results.

1

Using Viridescent Veneerer with Hu Tao

Viridescent Venerer is one of the strongest support artifact sets in Genshin Impact. All top performing teams have an Anemo unit set up, and no carry lives up to their full potential. However, for some reason, using VV on a Hu Tao team can be very difficult because Hu Tao has no way to apply pyro as his skills are 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 buffing his charged attack due to VV.

One way to deal with this is to use a second pyro unit, such as Bennett or Thomas. The problem then becomes that it is very difficult to apply enough hydro to a single hydro unit. To fix this, you can use the Hydro a second time in a Burst of Sucrose or Kazuha. You can just use Xingqiu, who despite having the only hydro can have enough elemental application to vape all of Hu Tao's hits.