Barbara is one of the earliest characters that all players receive early in the game after completing the Mondstadt Archon Quests. She’s a dedicated healer, which automatically lowers her overall value since players don’t need that much healing when they can just equip powerful shielders. Like all characters, Barbara has her ICD (Internal Cooldowns), and since her own scalings aren’t that high, her Hydro application and reactions aren’t anything to marvel at either.
At least, that was the case until Sumeru and Dendro dropped in Version 3.0 of Genshin Impact. The introduction of Dendro was game-changing as not only did it have its own mechanics and reactions, but it also had to be integrated with all the previous enemies and characters. Naturally, it’s expected for some bugs to slip through, and one of those would be Barbara’s interactions with the Dendro element.
Broken Barbara Bug in Genshin Impact Version 3.0
To put it simply, Barbara’s simple ICD doesn’t work in Dendro. Instead of giving the usual six reactions when her E skill is up and in contact with an enemy, she instead gives a total of approximately 10 reactions when it comes to Dendro.
With all other elements, she behaves normally and flawlessly, but only when it comes to Dendro, her E skill forces more explosions and thus more Dendro Cores, which ultimately means more reactions. The damage of these Dendro cores depends on the one triggering it, which means you’ll have to treat Barbara as your main driver.
The build for Bloom Barbara is very simple- just stack as much EM as possible. While this will certainly stunt her healing abilities considering she scales off of Max HP, a fun new playstyle is always welcome. Her best artifact set is the 4-piece Gilded Dreams set, and her best weapon is anything with EM main-stat to deal as much damage as possible from her transformative reactions.
This bug may get patched by the next update so we urge players to enjoy and use her kit while she is still broken. If enough people start talking or complaining, this bug may very well be removed by Version 3.1 and we aren’t ready for that yet.