Genshin Impact Update 2.8 ‘Summer Fantasia’ just dropped and players are excited to pull for and finally experience the first male catalyst user in the game- Shikanoin Heizou. His playstyle is fun and fresh- giving off that typical anime protagonist energy with his martial arts of flying fists and kicks and fans can’t get enough. Here are some of his first impressions from the few hours that he’s been out.
Shikanoin Heizou’s First Impressions in Genshin Impact
Heizou is a 4-star male Anemo catalyst user that contrary to the idea of catalyst weapons, actually has a short melee range. His fighting style is him using his bare fists in his own unique martial arts style which is his biggest selling point. Fortunately, he’s not just a good character in design but also in terms of combat and quality.
As a 4-star Anemo unit, Heizou’s normal attacks cause reactions every 2-3 hits which means his internal cooldowns are set to normal. His charge attacks also cause reactions more often than not. It is to be noted, however, that his normal attacks have low scaling and thus low damage- but that doesn’t make them useless. The primary function of his normal attacks is to cause swirl reactions to build up the Declension Stacks for his elemental skill.
The elemental skill is Heizou’s primary and strongest source of damage as it scales up to almost double the base damage of the skill with the full 4 Declension stacks. Manually charging the stacks consumes valuable time so the ideal way to play Heizou is to use his normal attacks to cause Swirl reactions which in turn build up the 4 stacks.
As for Heizou’s elemental burst- it doesn’t reliably help in crowd control scenarios and also has the usual problems with Genshin’s auto-aiming mechanism where a player might find Heizou’s burst shot in a direction with fewer enemies or even completely missing a few surrounding enemies. Since the burst’s grouping abilities aren’t strong or reliable, the burst is mainly used as a secondary source of damage. The best thing about his burst is however the 40 Energy cost which means players don’t have to give him any Energy Recharge and they’ll still have his burst up for the majority of the time.
Heizou is a solid sub-DPS with an elemental skill that easily out-damages Beidou’s full counter mechanism in her elemental skill. As an Anemo unit, he can fit into any team comps as a reliable sub-DPS unit and his playstyle is overall fun, new and snappy.