Furina is available in Genshin Impact 4.2 Update, which releases on November 8. So, in this guide, I will cover Furina’s best artifacts and weapons, to general playstyle and team compositions.

Elemental Skill

Despite how much of a headache Furina’s skill is read, there’s really only a few important things to note.

Furina’s Arhke alignment defaults to Ousia, and when she’s aligned with Ousia, her skill will summon her 3 oomfies to take the field. These cute little sea creatures act as hydro damage turrets, each with their own hit interval.

When party members are above 50% HP, Furina will constantly consume her teammates’ HP to increase the damage of these turrets.

Furina can also switch her Arkhe alignment with normal and charged attacks to change her skill into a heal. But at C0, you’re always going to want the damage over the healing since it is recommended to run a dedicated healer alongside Furina.

Elemental Burst

As for Furina’s Elemental Burst, this is where the fun begins.

So, imagine a burst that grants damage bonus to your entire party permanently. Imagine if it’s not just for a specific element, such as pyro damage bonus or for a specific damage type, like elemental skill or elemental burst damage bonus. It just straight up buffs any damage you deal.

Hydro charged attack? No problem. Electro burst? Fantastic. That’s exactly what Furina’s burst does.

Once you activate her burst, for the next 18 seconds, each 1% change in your party’s HP, whether that be healing or losing HP, will grant Furina what the game calls a Fanfare stack.

Fanfare Stacks are correspondingly converted into DMG% bonus and healing bonus for the team. At C0, this DMG% buff caps at 69% with 300 Fanfare stacks.

But keep in mind that this does take a while to ramp up, so you most likely will not reach this value until the tail end of your first rotation, or even until the second rotation.

Energy, ICD & More Kit Info

Knowing that Furina’s burst lasts for 18 seconds and only has a 15 second cooldown, it is crucial to know how much energy we need for that juicy permanent uptime on the DMG bonus buffs.

Furina has awkward elemental particle generation very much like Yae Miko does, except Furina has a 60 cost elemental burst as opposed to Yae Miko’s 90 cost.

Players can expect around 1 particle every 2.5 to 3 seconds, which will force you to build around 170-180% energy recharge in most cases, and maybe a little higher without another hydro teammate or Favonius weapon users.

Switching Furina’s Arkhe alignment for healing instead of damage also doesn’t generate any energy at all. So, please just stick to the skill that deals damage.

Given the vastly different turret speeds of each sea creature from her skill, Furina also has an awkward hydro application. She carves her own sweet spot into the roster, being not as good as the golden standards of Xingqiu and Yelan, but does provide better application than a character like Kokomi.

On average, she applies 1 unit of hydro application every 1.25 to 1.5 seconds compared to Kokomi’s 2 seconds. But in practice, there’s a lot of variation.

So, this is a rare case where I prefer the generalization and would simply say she’s somewhere in between Kokomi and Yelan depending on skill timings.

Artifacts

With artifacts, there is a clear-cut winner for the best set on Furina, and it’s not even close.

Golden Troupe, not to be mistaken with Wanderer’s Troupe, is the only artifact set you should ever farm for Furina, bar any future artifact sets that we don’t know about. Because Furina’s goal at C0 is to quickly swap in and out after using her skill and burst, she gets a full benefit from the 2-set and 4-set effects that grant a whopping 70% elemental skill damage bonus.

Remember, all of her damage comes from her skill while her burst is mainly buffing utility similar to Nahida, so this set is basically buffing all of her damage.

2-set combinations, such as the 2-set Golden Troupe with a 2-set Hydro DMG bonus set, or just double 2-sets that provide Hydro DMG bonus are also viable substitutes while you farm the new 4.0 Fontaine artifact domain.

Artifact stats include HP or energy recharge in the sands, HP or hydro damage in the goblet, and crit in the circlet.

The general rule of thumb is to always use HP in the sands with an energy recharge sword, and only consider an energy recharge sands if you have an HP or crit sword and cannot reach the 170-180% recommended energy requirement I talked about earlier.

With how many sources of DMG bonus Furina gets from her burst, ascension talent, and 4-set Golden Troupe. Believe it or not, HP goblet actually performs 1% better than hydro goblet. However, this damage difference is so minimal so use whichever main piece has better substats.

As for what constitutes “good substats,” you’re going to want to focus energy recharge first and foremost, and then crit rate, crit damage, and HP% after you have enough energy recharge.

Weapons

Artifacts for Furina are short and sweet, but weapons are not so much.

Mathematically, her signature weapon gives her the most damage. But remember, that lack of an energy stat or passive does mean you have to balance that out through artifacts.

Although it is very drippy for Furina, who very much does care about her outer appearance. For non-spenders, it is not a make or break signature option that you need to spend your primogems on, given the F2P options we have and the other 5-star on the banner.

The same principles apply to Furina’s second best weapon, which is Primordial Jade Cutter. Tons of crit rate, a nice boost to HP, but yet again zero signs of energy recharge, which you need to make sure your artifacts make up for.

In a very close third place, we have Festering Desire. While technically an F2P option, this sword from patch 1.2 is so ancient that I can count the number of people I personally know that have this weapon on my fingers.

That brings us to our next two options, which are Key of Khaj Nisut and Fleuve Cendre Ferryman in the 4th and 5th spots of the rankings, respectively.

Key is a hard weapon to rate because of its dependency on teams that utilize elemental mastery, but can be seen as the best support-oriented option that deals slightly less damage than Festering Desire.

Fleuve Cendre Ferryman is your true F2P option that can be obtained from the Fontaine fishing association. This weapon is like a Festering Desire Lite that aside from crit rate, provides extra energy recharge instead of elemental skill damage.

Of the remaining swords in Genshin Impact, I’d really only recommend Wolf-Fang and Favonius Sword afterwards. Personally, I’m not a fan of Wolf-Fang as much as I am a fan of the 5-star crit options mentioned higher up in the rankings, but there’s no denying that this weapon does output slightly more damage than the fishing sword even at R1.

I’m more of a fan of Favonius Sword, which single-handedly eliminates Furina’s energy problems. But I know that this is a heavily contested sword on many peoples’ Genshin Impact Accounts.

Given that, there are so many users of Favonius Sword. But not many characters that can use Fleuve Cendre Ferryman as well as Furina can. It may be a better option to use the fishing sword, even if you hate fishing.

Team Essentials & Misconceptions

Now, before I give you some of my favorite example teams for Furina, there are two very important statements that I want you to internalize:

1. Furina is not significantly better with Fontaine characters that consume their HP.
2. You always want to run Furina with a healer to maximize how much HP she can drain from your team.

Essentially, Furina is one of those characters that simply can be slotted into any team. Even with characters like Hu Tao, who normally always stay below 50% HP, the average damage bonus from Fanfare stacks is pretty much equivalent to the 33% pyro damage bonus she gets from her ascension talent, allowing Hu Tao’s current HP status to be irrelevant with Furina in the party.

With that being said, there is no “best” team composition with Furina, like there’s no “best” team composition for common supports, like Bennett or Kazuha.

The only thing that Furina really wants in every team is the entire party heals or very strong single target healing that allows her ascension talent to activate and heal the party when the active character is overhealed.

The biggest winners with Furina’s release are Jean and Baizhu, thanks to their ability to heal the entire party, and maybe also Kokomi. But she was already highly regarded as a pure supportive healer, so to a lesser extent for her.

4-star characters, like Charlotte and Mika have strong upside with similar team wide healing, but that’s only as long as you can reach their demanding energy requirements.

Quickbloom

Moving into example team comps, here are a few teams that I think benefit the most from Furina’s addition to the game.

Up first, we have Quickbloom, which is just a hyperbloom and quicken team mixed together with more emphasis on aggravate or spread damage compared to hyperbloom.

This team will take advantage of Furina as a solo hydro character, paired with either Baizhu or Yaoyao for healing in the second slot, Kuki or Dori in for extra healing in the third slot, and then a flex slot for your Dendro or Electro DPS.

If you feel like your Baizhu or Yaoyao is enough healing for the team, then you can by all means replace Dori or Kuki for someone like Raiden as a hyperbloom trigger, or maybe characters, like Fischl or Beidou for raw off-field electro damage.

Alhaitham and Nahida are the premier dendro characters for spread damage while Cyno, Keqing, and Razor are great for electro damage in quickbloom teams.

The reason why I like Furina so much as a solo hydro character in these teams is because running double hydro puts more emphasis on creating dendro cores and hyperbloom reactions, yet Furina’s Fanfare damage bonus does nothing to buff hyperbloom reactions.

Also Read: Genshin Impact: Huge Updates To Upcoming Version 4.4 To 4.8 Banners

Vaporize

Quite the opposite reasoning takes place with Vaporize.

Combining hydro and pyro together creates a very simple reaction unlike dendro. And the main reason why Vaporize benefits from Furina is because she can replace the ever so popular options of Bennett and Kazuha.

Specifically, in Bennett’s case, he only heals the active character and does not heal your character to full HP. This is less than ideal because Furina will not be able to convert any overheal for the active character into teamwide healing, which puts a hard cap on your Fanfare stacking in the middle of a rotation.

So, a vaporize team with Furina generally looks like Furina, a second hydro applicator, a pyro carry, and a flex slot that usually is a healer.

The second hydro applicator is important because some characters like Hu Tao have too much pyro application for Furina to handle solo. So, the usual Xingqiu, Yelan, Kokomi, and even Mona with Prototype Amber can provide hydro application plus extra utility to the team.

Pyro carries include Hu Tao and Yoimiya as the best options, but also Diluc and Dehya as some non-limited character options.

Healers for the flex slot are most commonly Jean for her ability to wield the 4-set Viridescent, or Charlotte, Mika, or Qiqi as cryo healers that don’t disrupt the vaporize reactions between your other units.

Freeze

And if you couldn’t get enough of cryo healers, once again they shine with Furina in a freeze team.

The stonks of Mika just keep going higher with the release of Wriothesley first then Furina, and even Charlotte, who does have energy problems before getting her constellations has a pretty solid pairing with Furina upon release together.

Freeze is so powerful with Furina because again many players don’t have Kazuha who does most of the heavy lifting for freeze teams.

A setup with Furina as the solo hydro, plus your favorite cryo DPS and either Charlotte, Diona, or Mika for cryo energy and heals works wonderfully as a core.

The last character here would be an anemo healer like Jean or Sayu if you’re using cryo supports, who have either weak healing or no healing such as Diona or Shenhe, or maybe just a standard anemo grouper like Venti, Sucrose, or Kazuha if you’re willing to put him and Furina on the same team.

A lot of people write off freeze because its damage ceiling isn’t as great as something like hyperbloom. But sometimes, with how safe it is against enemies that can be frozen, you can comfortably have Furina consume the team’s HP without feeling too squishy. Not to mention, it’s also my favorite team archetype.