Rover (Aero)Build and Guide

Aero Rover is a free 5-star Aero Support character who primarily serves as an applier of Aero Erosion via debuff conversion and an amplifier of Aero DMG, but who also has access to healing and small amounts of personal damage. They rely on mid-air combat in order to charge up their Forte skill to get their buffs, bulk of damage, and Outro skill off all at once.

The core of their kit lies in their Forte circuit, as it contains 3 important parts of their kit: the Mid-Air attacks we will be using throughout their rotation, their big Forte skill that concentrates the biggest portion of their damage, and the Forte points they’ll need to charge in order to access that skill.

Aero Rover’s Forte points are called “Windstring” and they can stack up to 120 points that are obtained in the following ways:

• By casting their Forte Mid-Air Attacks (25 points per attack);

• By casting their Intro skill (20 points);

• By casting Basic Attack 3, Basic Attack 4 or Dodge Counter (10 points).

The final method will never be used in optimal rotations as they need to charge up 120 Forte points and that will be done via 4 Mid-Air Attacks and an Intro Skill, which perfectly adds up to the required amount.

These special Forte Mid-Air Attacks, called “Cloudburst Dance,” can be cast 2 at a time when accessed and heal your whole party a small amount. This is only done by using Basic Attack in the air through certain means such as:

• Using their default grounded Resonance Skill “Awakening Gale”;

• Using their Intro skill;

• Using their “Razor Wind” Heavy Attack (unused).

We won’t dwell on “Razor Wind” since it’s slow and impractical to perform in optimal rotations, so it’ll never be realistically used on Aero Rover. 

Other than that, “Awakening Gale” is a simple skill that sends Aero Rover in the air with a very short cooldown of 3 seconds so they will never run into any problems when it comes to casting it, and their Intro skill is a small burst of Aero DMG that sends them in the air as well. This means typically, your Mid-Air Attacks will be cast twice after an Intro skill, then twice after an “Awakening Gale” skill.

Another important tool in their arsenal is their Ultimate, which does a solid portion of damage but also provides all of Aero Rover’s healing abilities, concentrated in one big burst of healing for your whole party. It additionally has the property of being able to be cast in mid-air which has the effect of instantly placing them on the ground — this means it’s most practical to use it after you’re done with your Forte Mid-Air Attacks to place yourself on the ground instantaneously (plunges tend to be rather slow, so saving your Ultimate for this purpose is way better).

Their Forte Enhanced Skill, which is Aero Rover’s main action in working towards performance, consists of two parts. Both parts generate 20 Concerto Energy (a huge amount!), deal a big amount of damage (multipliers higher than Danjin’s Ultimate for example), and trigger their signature weapon’s Aero DMG Amplify passive. They also have two properties:

• Both parts can only be cast on the ground;

• Swapping out after the first part instantly causes the second part to happen (with a delayed Concerto gain).

This means the ability has a Swap Cancel window if you want to exploit it, after which you can instantly come back to Aero Rover to get their Outro off for your next character in line. This Outro currently has no effect because it increases the maximum capacity of Aero Erosion stacks by 3 (up to 6 in total), but unfortunately, no character currently makes use of Aero Erosion. With that being said, having an Intro skill at the ready helps the rotation of most characters, so it’s still worth coming back for.

With all of that in mind, to access Aero Rover’s Forte Enhanced Skills as quickly as possible, we first use their Intro Skill or Resonance Skill if an Intro isn’t available, then we use their Mid-Air attacks twice before using their Ultimate to place them on the ground where they can go up in the air again via their Resonance Skill, then we can perform their Mid-Air attacks once more to fully fill our Forte Gauge. We get back to the ground via our plunge to cast our Forte skills, optionally switching out and coming back after the first one, ending the rotation due to the huge Concerto gain they give.

Aero Rover unfortunately has problems, though. The main one being that they seem unfinished. No one currently exploits their Aero Erosion mechanics, there’s no character that can apply debuffs for them to convert other than Phoebe, most effectively in her Confession state which is currently not worth exploiting for team damage, the damage Aero Erosion provides is low by itself comparably to Spectro Frazzle and there’s only one competent DPS for them to support, being Jiyan, who already has Mortefi as the best Amplify option.

Therefore, this means Aero Rover already isn’t an Amplifier-type unit like Mortefi and instead wants to act as a healing Support like the top-tier Verina and Shorekeeper. This sounds good on paper, but unfortunately the buffing potential of these two is so high that Aero Rover can’t compete with them in that niche — especially right now when their signature weapon is locked at R1 which only gives 10% Aero DMG Amplify, a very small amount compared to the 15% all-type DMG amplify all generalist Supports get (Baizhi, Verina, Shorekeeper); not to mention the other buffs these characters get whether it’s DMG Bonus, ATK%, or CRIT Rate/CRIT DMG. This makes it really difficult for Aero Rover to find a use case in the current meta.

Not only that, but their rotation time is lengthy and their damage isn’t as high as you’d expect -this is because their signature weapon doesn’t have big damage stats such as CRIT which you’d see on other 5-star options, their multipliers are good but not insane either so it can’t compensate, they take away the option to use Spectro Rover or Havoc Rover in other teams when those Rover variants are very strong in their best teams, and to top it all off they only have access to their S1 right now when a lot of their damage potential is locked behind the higher Sequence nodes such as S5 and S6.

Finally, their Mid-Air Attacks face some issues against smaller, common targets, and they’ll tend to miss or not activate altogether, preventing you from generating the necessary Forte points and having to extend the rotation further, which severely impacts DPS. While this isn’t much of a problem against most boss enemies, in content like Whimpering Wastes where small enemies are all you get, it’s especially problematic (not to mention Whimpering Wastes is exactly where their best DPS to buff, Jiyan, is best at).

To summarize, Aero Rover is a character who currently looks unfinished. Judging by their kit, it’s close to a guarantee that a future character will be released for them to harness the potential of debuff conversion and Aero Erosion. We can also expect higher ranks for their signature weapon and the rest of their Sequence nodes to be released at a later point, all of which will drastically boost their performance. However, as things stand, they have very few use cases and aren’t a recommended option, so we strongly advise using other Rover elements until Aero Rover’s full potential can be harnessed.