TaoqiBuild and Guide

Taoqi is a 4-star Broadblade Havoc support who acts as a Skill DMG Amplifier and Shielder. Sporting one of the beefiest buffing Outro skills in the game, she is found to be desirable buff-wise for any Resonance Skill DMG-focused characters. But then, why is she bottom tier? Let’s delve into some specifics.

To be completely honest, mainly serving as a Skill DMG Amplifier, her Forte circuit can be disregarded close to entirely. While it does some damage and generates shields, which - to its credit - does contribute to team survivability, it is not only a disregardable meta niche, but it also does not generate Concerto Energy and as a result is completely useless when it comes to working towards her rotation, especially considering the damage does not scale off of Taoqi’s DEF, while her Ultimate does. This split scaling requires you to choose between Timed Counter damage and Ultimate damage, meaning her overall damage output is significantly worse than what it could be. Additionally, not contributing towards her Concerto rotation at all makes this Forte Circuit pretty much irrelevant to what she aims to do: since Forte circuits are what makes characters fundamentally unique and justify a lot of their kits, it being so disregardable in Taoqi’s case is a good chunk of the reason why she is a bottom tier character.

Additionally, parries triggered outside of doing them as any character can serve very little purpose, whether it’s with Jianxin, or herself, as it is exactly what her Heavy Attack does. Either you parry an attack by entering the parry stance holding the basic attack button does to make use of it, or you suffer a really long waiting time, which isn’t optimal for rotation time at all. You can also simply do a dodge for concerto energy generation, which is simply much more efficient to do. Therefore, her counters with her Heavy Attack can, from a meta standpoint, simply be entirely disregarded once again.

So without parries or a Forte circuit to show for, all she has left is her Basic Attacks, her Skill and her Ultimate.

Her Ultimate is not good for a support: it simply does damage based on her DEF. Taoqi is not aiming to do crazy amounts of damage: all that she wants is to amplify the next character in line’s damage and provide survivability to the team. As that works towards neither goal, it is only useful in providing Concerto energy for her - which, thankfully, it does well, so her Ultimate is pretty necessary and very much wanted, but is a lot of wasted potential in its effect. It nonetheless means building some Energy Regen on her is a requirement.

Her Resonance Skill actually holds some support capability: it recovers a huge chunk of Taoqi’s own health and provides 15% all-type damage reduction that can apply to your whole party in the form of 3 consumable shields that expire upon taking a hit, while doing some damage and generating a good chunk of Concerto, all at once almost instantly on a 15 second cooldown. Which might unfortunately be the only not completely flawed part of her kit, beyond the fact that it scales off of ATK and as a result barely does any damage on her, and that it only heals Taoqi herself and she typically won’t be the one tanking hits, as your DPS will most often be the one taking damage. Nevertheless, it isn’t a terrible ability.

However, being a heavy Broadblade user, she suffers from very long Basic Attack animations, which have a lot of wind-up and leave her vulnerable to being interrupted, not to mention in this game the shields she generates do not remedy this issue at all; chances are you’ll have to dodge and interrupt your string - which, all things considered, really isn’t that bad because the basics don’t do damage as they scale off of ATK - or you’ll take a hit, be staggered and have your attack string reset anyways due to the really long animations. Subsequently, this makes her Concerto rotation difficult to finish and her Outro (the most desirable part of her kit) difficult to access.

All in all, as much as this whole review has been practically doomposting Taoqi, she does hold a single niche, which is being able to amplify and contribute to big nukes to any Resonance Skill DMG focused characters, and as of right now that’s mostly Jinhsi. Taoqi is indeed one of the characters that can provide the biggest buffs to your Jinhsi’s insane nuking capabilities and that leads to huge Damage Per Screenshot moments. However, that is not a viable meta niche as Taoqi doesn’t do much damage and takes a while to access her potent buffs, ruining her potential to contribute to an overall team’s DPS. All of these factors explain why Taoqi is a bottom tier character in the meta. But hey, if you like Taoqi, by all means play her! Jinhsi is good enough that you can actually clear all the hardest endgame content with Taoqi on the team, so don’t let this review affect your will to play her because you like her all too much! What matters at the end of the day is that you have fun playing characters you like, and we at Prydwen aren’t here to discourage that at all.

To summarize, while Taoqi is a bottom-tier character due to her kit fundamentally not being viable in the meta, she nevertheless allows for some big Jinhsi nuke numbers - just make sure to run her on Moonlit Clouds, outro into your Jinhsi, and you’re good to go. Maybe Taoqi will find her ideal partner to support in the future, but as of Patch 1.4, that has unfortunately yet to happen.