Best Yelan Build in Genshin Impact – Weapons, Artifacts, Talents

If you’re a lucky (or rich) Yelan-haver, congratulations. The dice-throwing investigator is arguably one of the strongest characters released for Genshin Impact, even if she doesn’t appear to be at first glance. A properly built Yelan is capable of putting out significant DPS, comparable to Ayato in simulations. Yelan is a massively flexible character, able to slot into nearly any and every team, much like the previous Hydro flex pick Xingqiu. We’ve got a breakdown of the best Yelan builds, weapons, artifacts, and talents in Genshin Impact down below.

Weapons

First, we’ll go over your weapon choices for Yelan. While you can spin for Aqua Simulacra, which is her signature weapon, Yelan enjoys massive benefits from a certain cheap 3-Star weapon — the Recurve Bow. This bow has a main stat of HP%, and at max level, provides a whopping 46% HP to Yelan. Yelan is an HP% hungry character — all of her abilities and passive scale off of bonus HP. Aqua Simulacra provides a passive 16 HP% increase as well, but the main draw is the CRIT DMG% bonus. If you have the Primogems to spare, Aqua Simulacra is certainly a wonderful choice, but if you’d rather focus on Constellations for Yelan, the Recurve Bow will do just fine as well.

Artifacts

There aren’t many Artifact choices for Yelan — as she is an HP scaling character reliant on her Elemental Burst and Elemental Skill, you definitely want ways to boost that as much as possible. The arguably best choice would be taking advantage of the four piece Emblem of Severed Fate bonus, which boosts your Burst damage by 25% of your Energy Recharge. You want to prioritize getting a HP% Sands, a Hydro DMG Goblet, and either a HP% or a Crit DMG% Circlet. Substat priority should be HP%, Energy Recharge, Elemental Mastery, and Crit or Crit DMG. If you can’t farm up Emblems of Severed Fate yet, any HP% main-stat piece of gear will work in the meantime.

Talents

Yelan, unfortunately, is one of those characters that really enjoys having all of her talents at equal levels. With characters like Xiangling, for example, you really want to laser in on Pyronado first — but Yelan needs all of her skills to do maximum damage. While Lifeline and Dice are obvious, what may not be is why you want to level her Normal Attack. This is due to the talent also affecting her Breakthrough Barb damage, which is a huge part of Yelan’s kit. You’ll need to farm up quite a few Guides to Prosperity and Fatui Insignias.

If you are aiming for bonus Constellations for Yelan, be aware that her heavy hitters are C2 (Taking All Comers), C4 (Bait-and-Switch), and C6 (Winner Takes All). This converts Yelan into a temporary auto-attacker, as her next five attacks become Breakthrough Barbs. Unfortunately, this means you’ll have to drop some serious cash to get six copies of Yelan.

Playstyle

The optimal way for Yelan to function is as an off-field DPS unit. A normal Yelan starter should work something like this: Depth-Clarion Dice into Lingering Lifeline into Breakthrough Barb, and then switch to another unit. You can, however, keep Yelan on point and take advantage of the massive amounts of damage Depth-Clarion Dice deals. Yelan can apply Hydro with each application of Depth-Clarion Dice, although you will run into issues with Pyro units not receiving the maximum benefit due to slow Pyro application, causing slow Vaporize combinations. Hu Tao is likely the strongest Vaporize combo unit in the game to be paired with Yelan.

Yelan surprisingly functions well in mono-Hydro teams as well — stacking Depth-Clarion Dice with Xingqiu’s Guhua Sword: Raincutter applies a significantly high amount of Hydro damage. Yelan can take advantage of Venti’s Wind’s Grand Ode to apply Hydro to massive amounts of enemies. The sheer versatility of Yelan cannot be overstated — odds are good that if you have a slot in your team for a Hydro user, Yelan can do the job.